ArtReview May 2023

Making faces at art since 1949

Frida Orupabo

CELEBRATING THE INAUGURAL WINNERS FILMMAKER & PRODUCER

WANG BING

DANCER & CHOREOGRAPHER

MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS MUSIC COMPOSER & PERFORMER

JUNG JAE-IL ARTIST COLLECTIVE

KEIKEN

GAME DEVELOPER & DESIGNER

LUAL MAYEN FILMMAKER

RUNGANO NYONI ARTIST & POET

PRECIOUS OKOYOMON THEATER DIRECTOR

MARIE SCHLEEF FILMMAKER

EDUARDO WILLIAMS DANCER & CHOREOGRAPHER

BOTIS SEVA

Image: Keiken, 2021

Creating the Conditions for Artists to dare

Mike Lee

Moka Lee

Opening in May 2023

September 2023

73, Seongbuk-ro 31-gil, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea 02879 www.jasonhaam.com | contact@jasonhaam

ArtReview vol 75 no 4 May 2023

The Neverending Burden of a Massive Archive When you’re a magazine that reaches ArtReview’s age (seventy-four – it’s not ashamed of that), you find yourself sitting on quite a sizeable archive. Old magazines, old ideas and old ways of seeing and writing about seeing art. You stuff them into a cupboard and stick a label on the door that reads ‘Research Room’.

Yes, when you’re pretending to deal with contemporary art and its unending and agonising march towards something we call ‘new’, sitting on an archive is a little uncomfortable (some of those 1950s pages can give you nasty papercuts).

But such is the often nonsensical and inconsistent development of contemporary art that, even if you’re surrounded by the yellowing fragments of your past (ArtReview’s past is a room full of old magazines), wallowing in the latest bangers

by Henri Matisse or Henry Moore, and with not an nft in sight, you can still be pretty much on-trend when it comes to the latest curatorial fetishes, where archivism in fact rules.

It’s obvious why, of course – when the present is so completely out of control, people will want to fiddle with or rearrange the past. It’s safer that way. You get a sense of agency. Which is generally something that you’re never going to find in art. Even if you’re spending all your time lecturing people about social injustice, political oppression and economic hardship. Someone still gets kicked, someone else will starve. Ever since the eighteenth century and Immanuel Kant we’ve known that the whole point of art is that it has no point. It’s like a holiday from

Chili

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real life. That’s why it’s mainly rich people who run the artworld. Because they can afford to be on holiday all the time. But that’s not to say that having an archive is like being on holiday! Far from it. ArtReview would like to see you try to drag the legacy of John Berger around everywhere while realising that somehow you’re never quite matching up to it. Back in the 2010s, as a sort of pep talk, ArtReview likes to think, Berger told it that while he had changed over the years since the Second World War, what he called the ‘disastrous relationship between art and property’ hadn’t during that time, and so all his writing about it (the ‘artworld’ in today’s parlance) from the 1950s was still totally valid, worthy of reprinting without any updates or revisions. Maybe it could go on holiday while Berger’s bits went back into print, ArtReview told itself. That way it would, at last, be a proper and dignified ruler of the artworld!

And more importantly, everyone else, receiving the holiday snaps on one of ArtReview’s many incredibly popular social-media channels, would know it. But then it realised that perhaps what Berger was saying was that everything ArtReview had done since the early 1950s was totally redundant and it could have stopped then. That it wasn’t a pep talk, but a wake-up-and-smell-the-roses moment. Then again, if you go through any art-related archive, it’s often hard to work out what anyone is really talking about. That’s why people come back to archives like moths to a flame. Some of them – operating both within broad cultural and visual archives, and the related territory of received wisdom – you’re going to encounter in the pages to come. You might think ArtReview only did this to make it feel better about sitting like the dragon Smaug on its own hoard; but ArtReview couldn’t possibly comment. Oh, and could you shut the door? ArtReview is trying to read… ArtReview

Chilly

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ON V I E W IN MAY

NEW YORK

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

GENEVA

SEOUL

HONG KONG

Nigel Cooke Matthew Day Jackson Grada Kilomba Maysha Mohamedi Trevor Paglen Nina Simone Childhood Home Auction Exhibition Virginia Jaramillo Brent Wadden Keith Coventry Nathalie du Pasquier JR Liu Jianhua Kiki Smith Zhang Xiaogang pacegallery.com

GRACE SCHWINDT April 19 - June 24, 2023

ZENO X GALLERY ANTWERP BORGERHOUT

Art Observed

The Interview Kahlil Robert Irving

by Chris Fite-Wassilak 26

Art & Society

by Uli Sigg 38

Art Market Report

by J.J. Charlesworth 37

page 26 Kahlil Robert Irving, he is a man | Daily Mystery Law and Order – Serenity for us all (detail), 2018. Courtesy the artist

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Art Featured

Frida Orupabo

by Fi Churchman 42

Christina Quarles Interview by Jonathan T.D. Neil 58

Isaac Julien

by Prince Shakur 50

Sarah Pierce

by Judith Wilkinson 64

page 64 Sarah Pierce, Lost Illusions / Illusions perdues, 2014 (installation view, Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth, imma, Dublin, 2023).

Photo: Ros Kavanagh. Courtesy the artist and imma, Dublin

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 72 Signals, by Jenny Wu Cay Bahnmiller, by Martin Herbert Buck Ellison, by Cassie Packard Caroline Lazard, by Maddie Hampton Lee Lozano, by Mariacarla Molè Masaya Chiba, by Fi Churchman Candice Breitz, by Matthew Blackman Exposé-es, by Benoît Loiseau David Hockney, by Louise Benson Poppy Jones, by Yuwen Jiang Michael E. Smith, by David Trigg lakbayan, by Marv Recinto The Accursed Share, by Greg Thomas Milk, by Oliver Basciano Finn Reinbothe, by Nanna Friis Bohemia, by Max L. Feldman Thus Waves Come in Pairs, by Evan Moffitt Julia Maiuri, by Claudia Ross Pilvi Takala, by Chris Hayes The National 4, by Naomi Riddle

Small Worlds, by Caleb Azumah Nelson, reviewed by Precious Adesina Art’s Properties, by David Joselit, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Talk Art, by Robert Diament and Russell Tovey, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Books and Life of Raymond Roussel,

by Michael Sanchez, reviewed by Erik Morse Raving, by McKenzie Wark, reviewed by Louise Benson How to Stand Up to a Dictator,

by Maria Ressa, reviewed by Marv Recinto Monsters, by Claire Dederer, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor, reviewed by Mark Rappolt sally pacifica goes hollywood 110

page 94 Gabriel Orozco, Juego de limones, 2001. © and courtesy the artist (on view in Bohemia, 2023, Kunsthalle Praha)

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OPERA GALLERY MADRID Grand opening

Juan GENOVÉS, Correlativo. 2011 (detail)

12 May 2023

Serrano, 56 – 28001 Madrid, Spain

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T. + 34 810 831 308

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madrid@operagallery.com

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Art Observed

£1.58 25

Photo: Attilio D’Agostino. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

The Interview

by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Kahlil Robert Irving

“I’m not necessarily interested in people always getting what it’s about”

My first encounter with the work of Kahlil Robert Irving was as part of the Social Works ii exhibition at Gagosian, London, in 2021: two pallets sat at the centre of the room, lined with black tiles flecked with hundreds of dots of white. The work, titled Millennia – (through space and street) (2021), poses an easy inversion, in which walking along staring at the ground becomes a gaze into a starlit sky. Alongside these elusive constellations embedded in its cracked surface are occasional scraps and images: a snippet of a headline that reads ‘Whites Only’, an image of the artist’s face as if from a social media site, bits of smashed ceramic vase. It is a vision of outer space littered

with terrestrial politics and prejudices. Such seemingly casual displacements and transformations are of a piece in Irving’s assemblages, prints and sculptures, which gather what might appear as random flotsam and jetsam of life, but with an attentiveness to the import and politics that such gathering represents. Working primarily with ceramics, Irving produces facsimile objects and images, mashing them into concise excavations of the recent past.

One body of work consists of what look like cross-sections from a trash compactor, neat rectangular bases from which sprout mangled tangles of stuff, in which we might discern the outline of a soda can, a cigarette box,

May 2023

a takeaway burger box, their surfaces crawling with superimposed words and patterns. In a project he executed for moma last year, such sculptures sat alongside posters that lined the wall and some of the plinths too, presenting hundreds of overlapping images from news sites, album covers and memes. Both approaches share a sense of grasping all that is ready-to-hand in order to capture an accurate distillation of the present, a voracious portraiture. Shortly after opening his exhibition Archaeology of the Present at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, in February, the St Louisbased artist took time to reflect on ambivalence, the act of collage and loss.

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Sampling Slippage artreview Despite the fact that it is mostly sculptural, the word ‘collage’ seems to be appropriate when describing your work. There’s a strong sense of looking and gathering: images, clippings, found objects that sometimes become surfaces or mashed-together three-dimensional works. How do you decide what becomes part of these? kahlil robert irving The way I started working was to deal with what was right in front of me: the city, the street, things that were around me. I started using items that I had directly around me but then submerging them in clay and burning them away, making these kind of fossils. The material transformation added an extra ten feet of distance from the object, metaphorically, offering a kind of reverence embedded into the work.

In the current Walker Center show is Streetview | Pool & Paper (Underground Starways), a large square work that’s made up of 140something ceramic tiles that have images of newspaper, and fragments of different media and images of things that I’ve scanned into

a computer. There are thin sheets made out of ceramic to look like The New York Times, and different collage information that references documents desiring to be markers in time.

On one sheet is a newspaper article talking about how the Ku Klux Klan burned a ‘K’ onto a Black man’s face; on another is a New York Times headline describing the moment when the United States reached half a million people dead from covid. The desire is for the work to touch on anything I may be thinking about in that moment, collapsing time and threading different things together. It’s almost like making instant poetry.

During the twentieth century, collage was, for many artists, a device for pictorial production and for creating a relationship to the speed of experience of day-to-day life in a very analogue way. For me, collage is also a space in which slippages can exist. Like the way, say, if [the late American artist and songwriter] Romare Bearden’s collage portraits don’t align to form a true-to-life face, then can I collage conceptual interests, physical interests, material interests and just kind of exist in that slippage? Collage

also relates to sampling, to music. It’s like deciphering a code: is it a code? Is it more just a series of sounds? Michael Eric Dyson, talking about his book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, describes the function of language – how Tupac structured communicating information, and the desire to shift and circumnavigate certain constructions. He describes how Tupac creates a new denotation through a different connotation and a lyrical flourish. I’ve been trying to wrestle with this issue of lyrical flourish in images and physical sculpture.

Sculptural Theatrics ar Within all that, there’s a levelling of certain hierarchies: when you treat, say, a Sprite bottle in the same way as a Linked In profile-image and a New York Times article. Do you see that translation to another medium, that kind of flourish, as changing the value of that object? kri The value is more just in its presence than in trying to communicate anything specifically about value. I’m not trying to tell you that a soda

[street & Stars | (Memories < > Matter) fair and freedom] Black ice], 2019.

Photo: Phoebe D’Heurle. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

bottle is valuable. But if I told you that my grandmother, who passed away recently, drank soda, and then the soda bottle was recycled and turned into something else – then it has a sense of an interrelated ecology or system around it that then creates an idea of value. The function of an object is to signify possibility, to signify its existence, not necessarily to put it any one place over another.

Another one of the floor-tile sculptures, [street & Stars | (Memories < > Matter) fair and freedom] Black ice], shown at Callicoon Fine Arts [in New York, in 2019], filled the floor of the room and left only three feet on each side of the gallery. In a lot of ways, it was like turning the gallery into a stage, with the theatrics of pushing people against the wall, making them look down at something that looks like the ground or the street. That pushback of the sculpture, not really being able to see the centre of the piece, was also pushing back against this proprietary relationship that people have with art, where, if you can see it and consume it all, then there’s some kind of sense of walking away with an understanding, with a claim to know what that artwork was about.

I’m not necessarily interested in people always getting what it’s about.

Another issue of the collage that doesn’t necessarily always come to light with this work is that no matter what ceramic object I’m making – the overglaze, the enamel, the decal and the lustre – they all relate to the history of decorative ceramics. When I think about decoration and a decorative object, the pattern covers the whole thing, and there’s a certain register in which information is presented.

I am not necessarily working with any specific registration, but I am interested in what information is seen, what that offers the viewer.

I think of it existing as something and nothing, giving and taking. You can take it as is if you want to, or if you want to inquire more, you can.

What is the space between the work and something that is being implicated into the work?

Is there another way to present it? If people walk away and understand that it’s made up of facsimile objects, that in itself is good. Or, say, someone saying: that one sculpture where I saw that picture of that woman, it looked like an obituary and it gave me solace in relationship

to dealing with loss. That’s also there, because they can connect to my reference to my loss. It can be a more personal or dynamic relationship. ar So, giving people just enough details, while still leaving some space to project themselves into the work? kri Collage was just a starting place for me to relate to the history of ceramic production, but then also a way for personal information to enter the work. My disinterest in claiming it to be communicating that [information] is, in one way, a self-protective measure. Say I am talking about Black space, because a lot of the work is black – but I’m not necessarily specifically identifying Blackness as the topic. And I think often there’s this complication of the Black experience being communicated in a very specific way, where it’s, for example, portraits putting a Black person in the place where a white person had been; or talking about some kind of trauma or violence; or hypersexualisation of the body, or opening up the psyche, and like the problematics of having to cut yourself open and give your all for the audience for there to be some kind of value. For me there’s

he is a man | Daily Mystery Law and Order – Serenity for us all, 2018.

Courtesy the artist

May 2023

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ArtReview

May 2023

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above and preceding pages Archaeology of the Present, 2023 (installation views).

Photos: Kameron Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

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ArtReview

a schism between just that and trying to make something to which the general audience might have access and a space in which Black people can access certain information to which everybody else won’t necessarily have access.

Infinite and Beyond ar The floor pieces ask us to look down into the depths of space, to suggest the pavement as a glimpse of the infinite. The title of the Walker show poses the exhibition as an archaeological site; do you think of your work as layers of geology and detritus for us to dig through? What do you think we might find? kri I feel like a lot of my work is around the idea of a ground: the pictorial space of the screen as the ground, the surface of a canvas that’s gessoed as a ground, and the ground as the surface of something you walk on.

The conflation of the connotations of ground is something that I’m really interested in playing with.

I think about my work as a kind of abstraction that is layered and incestuous and feeding

into itself, and regurgitating from itself, and buying back into itself, and then presenting and folding back into itself, flourishing or dying, and coming back into a kind of form, and never truly being resolved. I would love to get to a place where there’s a resolution with my floor sculptures; but in facing how physical the ground and the asphalt street are – the layers of violence that have taken buildings and communities down into the ground, and never being able to rise again – there can’t be any resolution. The ground sculptures are a kind of weird demarcation for that liminal space that has not been necessarily registered or remembered, nor can it actually even be pinpointed. One of the floor sculptures is called Ground Gate – [Way View, glam and glitter (Aligned)] Portal, and having recently lost my grandmother, it’s like: where do people go afterwards? You’re making reference to the infinite, and the beyond. Can there be room for things to exist in a way that all this doesn’t necessarily have to tie in explicitly? How far can you stretch a link?

kri I would like to make sculptures that are bigger, but I understand my material limitations. Ceramic can only get so big: when they get to a certain size they need to be made in parts.

That’s one reason why I started to make the floor sculptures in tile: it was a way to deal with the illusionistic issue, but also to deal with spatial navigation and the practicality of just packing things up into boxes. At the moment, with the idea of the monument and dealing with scale, making large things relates to loss. It’s not to fill that loss, but to think about the impact of the memory of the person being memorialised, about experiences with that person, and how those aspects might come into some kind of poetic space with me. I don’t know if I’m necessarily searching for answers, but I know in my work in a lot of ways, in a lot of projects, I’m weeping.

ar Your work has been moving towards bigger pieces.

Are you interested in the language of monumentality?

Archaeology of the Present is at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, through 21 January 2024. Irving’s work will also be included in Bold Tendencies 2023: Crisis, London, 19 May – 16 September

Spring streets & stars | Rose Memories & foil (To: Jack), 2019, collograph and collaged found objects, 240 × 108 × 1 cm.

Printed with Bedrock Art Editions, Kansas City. Courtesy the artist

May 2023

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June

Art Fair 12.–18.6.

202 3

VI, VII, Oslo Belmacz, London Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Efremidis, Berlin Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam Et al. / Et al. etc., San Francisco Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam galerija ASNI, Riga Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Parisa Kind, Frankfurt Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Tara Downs, New York 4649, Tokyo

Riehenstrasse 90B 4058 Basel

Special Projects: Établissement d’en face, Brussels june-art-fair.com @juneartfair

Don’t worry, the art market is, still, doing just fine. Or at least that’s the takeaway from The Art Market 2023, the latest annual overview of the global artworld’s buying and selling, published jointly by Swiss art-fair giant Art Basel and Swiss banking giant (and Art Basel sponsor) ubs. ‘Global art sales increased by 3% year-onyear to an estimated $67.8 billion, bringing the market higher than its pre-pandemic level in 2019’, it chirps in its introduction – it’s a figure up there with the art market’s post-financial crash all-time high of $68.2bn (in 2014), so the sense that the dreadful pandemic years are behind it is palpable. Yet this year’s apparent optimism is fringed with the gloom of the current moment; Christl Novakovic, head of ubs wealth management for Europe, solemnly notes the art market’s rebound ‘despite severe economic uncertainty and the return of war to Europe’.

The nonstop party that is the art market of the last decade has of course roared on regardless of conflicts around the world, but the ‘return of war in Europe’, even as Art Basel gears up for its home edition next month, hints at growing anxieties, even among the superrich, of a world economic order that could be coming apart at the seams. With unfortunate timing, the report was published two weeks after the rescue, by ubs, of Switzerland’s second largest bank, Credit Suisse, itself closely following the crash of us banks Silicon Valley Bank and Signature.

Of course, banking jitters don’t connect directly to the fortunes of the very wealthy and their taste (and budget) for contemporary art; if the Art Market Report, which has been published annually since 2017, tells us anything, it’s that the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing decade of austerity and economic drift didn’t really figure for the art market and its clients. The global class of art buyers floats above such troubles, and always has done.

Nevertheless, this year’s report indicates how this detachment is evolving. One of the most significant trends here is the relentless upscaling of the market, away from galleries selling work at the bottom end of the market, and towards those who regularly sell works costing over $10 million.

Winning Streaks

Will the art market ever come back to earth?

Should we care?

Yes, says J.J. Charlesworth, and here’s why

top Boy playing poker.

Photo: Pixabay / Leemurray01 (cc0) above The Directors Summit, expo Chicago, 2022.

Photo: Justin Barbin

May 2023

The report also notes the uptick in the number of galleries operating over more than one site both within a single region and across multiple regions. So as the art market skews towards bigger galleries and pricier sales, it’s also steadily becoming more internationalised, with the pandemic further provoking a geographical dislocation of sales by accelerating the use of online sales and auction platforms.

Art was never some grass-rootsy form of local folk culture, but this de-locating of the artworld is a trend that makes the culture of art even more detached and aloof from audiences on the ground, as both galleries and art fairs become more internationally integrated. It’s ironic, too, that just as ubs gobbled up its rival Credit Suisse, so Art Basel in 2022 moved to oust the longstanding Paris art fair fiac from its old venue and dates, installing its own ‘Paris +’ fair to join Art Basel’s fairs in Miami, Basel and Hong Kong. This past year also saw Art Basel’s only other big rival, the American-owned Frieze, extend to Asia, with its inaugural Frieze Seoul opening last September.

But this high-ending and globalising of the art market also dislocates the ways in which artists can become visible. The report frets about the emergence of ‘ultra-contemporary’ artists, those young(ish) artists (Anna Weyant and Christina Quarles among them) catapulted into visibility by high-profile, first-time-at-auction, $1m-plus sales. So the low-end of the art market dwindles, the base of more numerous but modestly resourced collectors fades and the tastemakers in art become increasingly rarefied and detached, the art only relevant to a narrowing audience of collectors.

The art market is doing just fine, but at what point should we stop caring? In all the detail of the Art Market Report it’s easy to miss the headline trend. Markets are cyclical, of course, shrinking and growing, but that cycle is flatlining. After the postpandemic rebound of 2021, 2022 was the weakest year for growth in sales since the financial crash – and the trendline is downwards. For all its vast wealth, the global art market is running on fumes.

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What should contemporary art do for a society?

And are there things that it should not do?

What if obviously different paradigms of what art ought to do collide – such as that of open societies characterised (at least in theory) by artistic freedom – with the traditional Chinese one, or even with its authoritarian subvariant, or with that of the Global South? Two battlegrounds have laid bare these differences over the past two years: the debates surrounding the opening of the m+ museum for visual culture in Hong Kong; and Documenta 15 in Kassel.

Already in the runup to the opening of m+ in November 2021 the question of what usevalue contemporary art should be aligned with, and whose use-value that should be, flared up in a public discourse now dominated by the People’s Republic. Except for the small circle of those interested in contemporary art, the mainstream in the entire China-dominated cultural area views art through a lens shaped by its ancestral tradition: art is supposed to bring us into a sphere of beauty and harmony, towards the sublime, into an ideal world so as to allow us to escape from the mundane. In the mode of this traditional thinking, art is our good friend.

Contemporary art in open societies, characterised by artistic freedom, is shaped according to a completely different paradigm. It is not our good friend, nor is it our therapist – if anything, it is our pain: it is mostly analytical, and critical; it often puts its finger in the wound; it does not show an ideal world, but rather reality, or what

What Is Art For?

Uli Sigg, a major patron of Hong Kong’s m+ museum, asks how we might balance competing visions of what art ought to do

artists take that to be. These artists, too, may at times aspire to beauty and other aspects of formalism; these are certainly options, but just some among many others. This kind of contemporary art demands from a society curiosity and openness for the new; at times it might even demand that we leave our comfort zone in order to experience new perspectives or new spheres of thought. This perception of art does not happen overnight but over years; it requires access, exposure and an open and permanent debate about what is meaningful art and what is not; and where exactly social consensus, tolerance and criminal law should draw boundaries. It is this that then determines the degree of artistic freedom a society will tolerate.

In authoritarian societies, this debate cannot flow freely. The authoritarian subvariant of the traditional Chinese paradigm narrows down art’s function even further – quite in line with the guiding ideology. This is illustrated by a 2014 statement from China’s President Xi: ‘Works of art should be like sunshine and a spring breeze from a blue sky, inspiring minds, warming hearts, cultivating tastes and clearing away lethargic and decadent trends.’

It is evident from this, then, that the discussion has already taken place. This implicitly means that any potential for social dissent (in any domain, public or private) is to be shunned. But dissent is precisely what a liberated contemporary art, one that considers

m+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation, 2021–23 (installation view).

Photo: Lok Cheng. Courtesy m+, Hong Kong

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ArtReview

alternate perspectives or potentials, may point out or even provoke. In China only complete unity behind the party’s thinking can make it possible to achieve the great strategic goal – to be a world power that due to its distinctly different development model leaves the usa behind.

For Hong Kong, though, the current five-year plan of the prc prescribes a special mission: to be the cultural bridge between the Mainland and the outside world. It is now up to Hong Kong’s institutions to test how much breathing space that may entail. More than two million people out of a population of 7.4 million have visited m+ in a little over a year – and for many of them this is a first encounter with art they at times perceive as provocative.

The other battleground in 2022 was Documenta 15, where every five years the hierarchy of the artworld is paid homage to or overwritten. For the first time, curating was placed in the hands of a collective of artists and curators from Indonesia called ruangrupa.

The idea, one presumes, was to bring a new perspective on art from the Global South. And they did just that – much to the displeasure of the large majority of commentators. A fierce antisemitism debate, however, overshadowed this essential facet of the exhibition, namely the rejection and incomprehension by this majority of a completely different paradigm of what art should do and what art should be.

Partly, of course, this label – the Global South – is too big a cipher. For in the Global South there are autocrats and failed states galore, but also bubbles of thoroughly open societies with art scenes and infrastructures that enable contemporary artists to make a living. ruangrupa, however, focused on the Global South ‘where you can’t drink water from the tap’ (the definition provided by the group

Tropical tap Water, also represented in Documenta 15) – nations in which artists, apart from a few stars who live mainly in the diaspora, eke out a precarious existence, ignored and abandoned by governments and institutions and without a chance to produce for a market. So, artists there often join together in collectives that discuss, reflect, create and engage in political activism from the margins, with easily understandable means, and less with the production of the art object per se or sophisticated but obtuse conceptual art. It is there, according to ruangrupa, that life and art become one.

This contrasts completely with the hegemonic Western art canon that has predominantly shaped the Documenta audience.

top m+, Hong Kong.

Photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand.

Courtesy Herzog & de Meuron, Basel above List of censored Artists, 2022 (installation view, Documenta Halle, Kassel, 2022).

Photo: Nicolas Wefers.

Courtesy Documenta, Kassel

May 2023

The jury that put ruangrupa in charge – could they have known, or should they have known about the completely different paradigm of this Global South? Should they have known, as the Mexican curator Marisol Rodriguez so very aptly writes, that ‘when you invite to the table people that have, for several hundred years, been watching the feast from the outside, contemplating under rain and snow while you eat that juicy steak…, they will come in, but they won’t eat under your terms, at your pace, or following your notion of manners. They may even change the terms of the party.’ Or even turn the party upside down?

Uli Sigg is a former Swiss ambassador to the prc, North Korea and Mongolia, and a leading collector of Chinese art

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THE ART MARKET 2023 A report by Art Basel & UBS. Launching April 4.

Art Featured

£1.58 41

Frida Orupabo

by Fi Churchman

Lies, 2022, collage with paper pins, 113 × 45 cm.

Photo: Mario Todeschini. © the artist.

Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg & Amsterdam

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Using images sourced from colonial archives, film, fashion and family albums, the artist carves representation and empowerment from stereotype

Batwoman, 2021, collage with paper pins mounted on aluminium, 114 × 121 cm. Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm & Mexico City

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Three Legged Woman, 2022, collage with paper pins on birch plywood panel, 99 × 148 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London

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‘There is no set of years in which to be born Black and woman anthropologists like Northcote W. Thomas, who was appointed by the would not be met with violence,’ states Christina Sharpe in her book British government to document the ‘physical types’ of West African Ordinary Notes (2023). Having read these words shortly before visiting people for the Colonial Office. Thomas’s anthropometric photoFrida Orupabo’s latest exhibition, I find the writer’s concise assess- graphs, recorded between 1909 and 1915, contributed to the stereoment of the historical injustices done to Black women reflected typing of African communities on the basis of physical attributes. in the Norwegian-Nigerian artist and sociologist’s chimeric and The photos were disseminated among British government administrations as a means of ‘proving’ their inferiority – and therefore suitconfronting photographic collages.

Sharpe’s single sentence comprises Note 232. The book as a whole able for continued subjugation by ‘superior’ colonists. This objectiis made up of 248 texts of various lengths that take – in part – art, fying practice via photography finds its roots in the earlier 1850 series of slave daguerreotypes commissioned literature, mass media, memorials and Perhaps to really see this woman historical and recent events as points

by Swiss-American biologist Louis of departure from which to consider Agassiz, whose ‘scientific’ application in the photograph is to ask: the complexities of the Black experiof taxonomic traits paved the foundawho is she? Who is taking her ence (primarily in the us), while adtions for historical racism – on which photograph? Under what conditions dressing the issue of ‘who gets to tell much of today’s anti-Black racism the story of the African diaspora’. It stands. Orupabo’s work reckons with is her image being taken? How does strikes me how its structure is much this loaded history of representation this make her feel? And how would like a collage; and much like the way and misrepresentation. her presence in this transfigured, in Orupabo’s work contorted female Here, Note 184 of Ordinary Notes bodies are made up of cut-out scans comes to mind, a contribution from mutant artwork make her feel? of photos from colonial archives, film, Black feminist theorist Tina Campt fashion, art and family albums. (one of several writers and thinkers Sharpe called upon to help create a Orupabo mines the internet for the source images and pieces of ‘Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness’ that weaves its way through footage that are later incorporated into the collages, publishing a frac- the book) on the concept of the ‘gaze’: ‘A Black gaze challenges us to tion of her findings into her own digital archive of collected material embrace the affective labor of grappling with uncomfortable gaps under the Instagram handle @nemipeba. It also includes wide-ranging between proximity and protectedness and in doing so, opens up the visual references to artworks including those by Grada Kilomba, Carrie possibility of a future lived otherwise’. Coming into proximity with Mae Weems and Kara Walker, stills of films, including Blacula (1972), Two Heads raises questions of difference between the acts of ‘gazing’ images from university library photo-collections, clips of singers and, as Orupabo emphasised, ‘seeing’. The direct stare of the anonyincluding Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Barbara Lynn, and footage mous woman in the photo challenges the viewer’s gaze, which in an of firsthand accounts of racism. The finished collages are formed by exhibition setting typically comes from a protected and distanced multiple layers of these scans and pinned together with metal tacks so position of observation. Perhaps to really see this woman in the photothat they resemble pantin dolls; seemingly manipulable female forms. graph is to ask: who is she? Who is taking her photograph? Under what Born to a white Norwegian mother and a Black Nigerian father, conditions is her image being taken? How does this make her feel?

Orupabo grew up in Sarpsborg, a small city with, like all of Norway, And how would her presence in this transfigured, mutant artwork a predominantly white population. For make her feel? In this context, the shift Reclaiming the power to choose Orupabo, who is nominated for the between ‘gazing’ and ‘seeing’ requires Deutsche Börse Photography Foundaof the viewer an engagement not only how a woman’s body, and more tion Prize this year, personal experiwith the portrait as an artwork but as a specifically Black female sexuality, ences of racism and a feeling of invisportrait of a person whose experience is presented and received is fuelled ibility are also inextricably bound to of being photographed is located in the social and cultural contexts of the the real world.

by Orupabo’s own anger at the African diasporic experience. “The Hostile stares pierce through many simultaneous indignity of racialised representation was not there,” says of Orupabo’s collages, particularly images of Black women and the Orupabo, referring, in a 2022 interthose that most straightforwardly deal with Black female sexuality and objecview published by Louisiana Museum’s lack of positive representation tification. Three Legged Woman (2022), for video platform, to the lack of Black visibility in the different forms of mass media and education that she example, a work currently on show at Modern Art in London, presents encountered while growing up. The few representations she did find a naked, reclining white female body (above it Eye, 2022, is installed; were most often “racialised and [or] sexualised”. “I was very aware of the this collage of an eye, the space of its iris and pupil filled by the partial power of images,” she says. “For me, to create work that looks back at the profile of a Black woman, offers another reference to the ‘gaze’). Two viewer is a way to refuse to be made into an object, and to say, ‘I see you’.” legs are bent towards the viewer, while a third, stockinged leg is raised A hard stare emanates from Two Heads (2022). This photographic to create an open, sexually suggestive pose; attached to the body is the portrait of a woman, her brow furrowed, is mirrored by an exact copy head of a Black woman who is frowning at the viewer. Paper-pinned at attached upside-down at the neck. In keeping with all of Orupabo’s various points of her body, the limbs of the woman look as if they might works, the source of the original image is not revealed, but it recalls the be moveable. Orupabo employs the use of pins throughout her works, style of photographs taken by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century which are not only suggestive of the ways in which the female body

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Untitled (Spider ii), 2022, collage with paper pins, 108 × 180 cm.

Photo: Mario Todeschini. © the artist.

Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg & Amsterdam

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Baby in belly, 2020, collage with paper pins, 60 × 122 cm.

Photo: Mario Todeschini. © the artist.

Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg & Amsterdam

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Woman with knife, 2022, collage, pigment print on acid-free cotton paper, mounting tape, split pins, 160 × 114 × 6 cm (framed).

Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm & Mexico City

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has (and continues to be) seen as an object to be manipulated, but that your way in… I had the need to manipulate reality – to create my own action of pinning many-layered images emphasises how, historically, narrative”. Labour i (2020) and Baby in belly (2020) are each collages of a certain racial representations of Black women have been reinforced. different woman lying horizontally. The former is made up of blackDespite the initial suggestion of sexual availability, the Three and-white images: a young girl’s face layered over the top of the head Legged Woman’s countenance indicates otherwise. Two of the legs of what looks to be a pornographic photo of a bare-breasted woman. remain knees-locked, in a final closed-off position; she’s in control She is partially clothed, with one stockinged leg and a cut-out piece here. That sense of reclaiming the power to choose how a woman’s of rumpled fabric Orupabo has pinned to her torso. A baby’s head body, and more specifically Black female sexuality, is presented and emerges from her vagina. In Baby in belly the woman’s body is again received is a central theme of Orupabo’s work; in part fuelled by the made up of parts from different photographic sources: a huge pink artist’s own anger (to which she alludes in the Louisiana video) at the ‘womb’ takes up the space of her abdomen, elongating it, and inside simultaneous indignity of racialised images of Black women and which a photograph of a seemingly already-born baby is pinned. the lack of positive representation. It’s an anger that is multilayered A pair of high heels lie by the feet of the mother; an allusion to the and expressed by Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider (1984), a collection of ever-present pressure to work, while actually in labour, perhaps. The the writer and poet’s essays and speeches that explore race, sexuality expressions on the mothers’ faces are inscrutable. There is a physical and female solidarity: ‘Women responding to racism means women violence in these images, in the splitting of the Black female body, responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privi- that recalls notoriously cruel incidents of scientific experimentalege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensive- tion on Black bodies, including that of American physician J. Marion ness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation’.

Sims, who, Sharpe writes in Note 62, ‘tortured many enslaved women Orupabo’s works are reminiscent of vintage paper fashion dolls, – among them Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, to call just three of these onto which paper cutouts of the latest fashionable outfit could be at- women by their names – by performing multiple surgeries on them tached to the figure of, typically, a pretty, white woman. The first Black as he experimented for a way to cure vaginal fistulas. It goes without paper doll to be mass-produced in the us (in 1863, the year of the Eman- saying that these women were unable to consent. Sims carried out these surgeries without the use of cipation Proclamation) was modelled While projecting Black female after Topsy, a character from Harriet readily available anaesthesia.’ And yet, Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s for all the violent references to historvisibility in her collages, Orupabo’s Cabin. Though considered an Aboliical injustices against and violations of incorporation of white torsos, tionist novel, Stowe’s characterisation Black female bodies, Orupabo’s reconbreasts, arms and legs adds further of Topsy – as an ‘odd and goblin-like’ structions also picture transformation ‘specimen’ with ‘woolly hair’ – also led and renewal, birthing hope for the complexity to Western ideas of what to the reinforcement of racial stereonext generation of Black lives. is considered a ‘desirable’ body: types. While projecting Black female For the artist, manipulating reality here, instead of the application visibility in her collages, Orupabo’s and transformation also takes the occaincorporation of white torsos, breasts, sional form of human-animal hybrids. of clothing, is white skin In the Deutsche Börse Prize exhibition arms and legs adds further complexity to Western ideas of what is considered a ‘desirable’ body: here, instead at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Batwoman (2021) appears of the application of clothing, is white skin. pinned to the wall: an archival photo of a woman’s head is attached In Woman with knife (2022), Orupabo takes a digital copy of Lucas to black outspread ‘wings’. In Untitled (Spider ii) (2022, which was on Cranach the Elder’s painting Lucretia (1526–27), cuts the naked white show at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town last year), a woman’s head female body out of the original image (a Renaissance example of the sits atop a white spiderlike form. Both of these works appear to allude feminine ideal: smooth alabaster skin and golden hair that signified to West African folkloric traditions: the former a nod to witchcraft health and purity) and pieces it back together with the head of a young practices, in which bats are considered evil spirits or indeed witches Black woman. She looks impassively back at the viewer, the knife held themselves, while the latter speaks to tales of Anansi, the god of between her hands pointing towards her ribcage but not yet piercing wisdom and trickery, who is often depicted in spider form and who, flesh; to the left of the female body Orupabo adds a collage of a stone via stories carried across the world by the Atlantic slave trade, became figure, which squats in a rolled up, legs-over-head position. The story a symbol of slave resistance. In these works, there’s a sense that of Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman who was celebrated for her virtue, Orupabo upends the racist agendas of colonial images by presenting loyalty and beauty, and who was raped and subsequently killed herself hybrid female forms as images of empowerment. Here, in this reconto preserve her ‘honour’, was historically used as a tale of morality for figured state, these people are unknowingly drawn from the archive European audiences. Woman with knife, by contrast, calls into ques- towards finding “joy”, as she says, “in creating new realities and new tion the brutality of honour suicides and killings, the disposability of identities”. In the destruction of the stereotype, Orupabo reconstructs women’s bodies and the exclusionary nature of Western beauty ideals new narratives that centre around, as Campt put it, the ‘possibility reinforced by art historical paintings. It also, perhaps, alludes to the of a future lived otherwise’. ar colonial rape of occupied African countries.

Cutting up images, revealing the violence done to Black women’s A solo exhibition of work by Frida Orupabo, Things I saw at night, is on view at Modern Art, London, through 20 May; work by Orupabo can bodies, and pinning them back together to form new representations also be seen in the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and contexts, Orupabo explains in the Louisiana video, is “like you exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, through 11 June want to rip everything away that has made you feel invisible, and force

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New Futures, Queer Pasts How Isaac Julien’s transgressive reworkings of history and time itself have expanded our potential to deal with the complexities of the present and paved the way for generations of artists to come

by Prince Shakur

In 1982 twenty-year-old film student Isaac Julien was walking through the East End of London when he encountered a crowd of men, women and children protesting the death of a young Black man named Colin Roach. Roach had died while in police custody: an alleged suicide.

Although Julien didn’t know Roach, he was just a year older than the dead man and the two lived only a few blocks apart. The death sparked mass demonstrations across London as the Black community took to the streets to protest the police.

Julien would later describe the death as a lightbulb moment for him, occurring during a pivotal time in the transformation of race relations, as London reckoned with its own broken system. In his debut film the following year, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), he explored how the camera could be used as ‘a street weapon’; a creative approach that he learned during art workshops in secondary school and through books like the academic Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in a Third World (1982) in which the camera is used to oppose whitewashed depictions of reality or history, and to indict oppressive systems by offering others forms of visualisation. The film combined elements of documentary, including footage of the demonstrations, with elements of performance and music videos.

This framework of using art as a means of recontextualising history and dissolving the boundaries between genres underpins all of Julien’s work to date, and is evident throughout the current survey of his work at London’s Tate Britain, What Freedom Is To Me. Julien uses and then redefines the visual medium as a tool against cultural erasure and capitalism. He makes a demand for boundless, often queer Black histories as a means of conjuring a liberating dream space in the face of reality. Speaking to me earlier this year, Julien described his work as an attempt to resonate across time: “The imaginary is a space for thinking about future possibilities and political autonomy”. Julien dares to offer himself and other queer Black artists, like me, permission to see how art can become a vital transgression against a complex world.

Julien would become a founding member of Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1983. Here he learned the importance of creative

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communities within the developing milieu of cinema that sprang up in London during the 1980s. Here, “diasporic conversations” could be had, Julien said during our discussion. He nods to Teshome Gabriel and filmmaker Haile Gerima, both from Ethiopia, citing the “strong beginning of the queer cinema movement in Britain” and seminal queer Black artists like Essex Hemphill as important influences on him during this period.

The Tate exhibition includes his most recent film, Once Again…

(Statues Never Die) (2022), a visual and poetic five-screen installation that centres around a staged conversation between two twentieth-century figures: Black philosopher Alain Locke and collector of African art Albert C. Barnes, who reflect on the place and meaning of African and Black art, interspersed with narrated excerpts of writings from bell hooks, Aimé Césaire and Alice Smith. The film was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation, and much of their conversation in the film was inspired

by Julien’s research in the foundation’s archive, in Philadelphia. At one point, framing a Black woman on the centre screen as she observes examples of African art in a museum with a forlorn expression, Julien places his audience in the perspective of the sceptical museumgoer, forcing us to confront the colonial fetishisation of Black art. The art fills the surrounding four screens in magnified clarity as the narrator asserts, “Better if they [the Europeans] let those civilisations develop and flourish rather than offering up scattered limbs”.

Black and African diasporic art fills the five screens in stunning detail. With the image of scattered limbs in mind, I see Once Again…

(Statues Never Die) and Julien’s wider body of work as attempts to find clarity through almost-microscopic examinations, using multiple screens to illustrate how Black and African art is disembodied by the museum’s colonial violence.

There is, though, some sense of hope offered. The film opens with shots of a snow-covered museum; in the ending scenes, Locke sits outside as the snow around him floats back up to the sky. In Julien’s work time, always connected to the past and moving in unlikely ways, is not linear. This dedication to a personal, creative and collective past

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Who Killed Colin Roach? (stills), 1983, U-matic transferred to digital, colour, stereo sound, 34 min 42 sec

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has inspired artists, including myself, to grapple more with how to watch the dreamy depictions of Hughes enthralled by his lover the past is so vividly connected to the present. In many ways Julien’s and realise that I could display the same once-taboo desire in my dismantling of time itself is a weapon against colonial structures. own work. I marvelled at smiling queer Black men twirling through In his best-known film, Looking for Langston (1989), the viewer is taken banquet halls, a vision of a past and reality I hungered for. This dream through a surrealist depiction of American poet Langston Hughes on space of creative possibility was a launchpad for imagining another a night out in a queer speakeasy, all shot in black-and-white. possible future. The film offered a tool that helped me revisit my own “There’s a funny way that when you make work, it haunts past – to help me understand how visualising the past, even if it is a the present,” Julien told me. “I would say in a work like Looking for dream space, can help us survive the terrors of the present through Langston I was looking for a way of transgressing time. It wasn’t about examinations of real and imagined histories. I understood that we a historical period, but more the point of what is seen as historical and must reckon with the dead, in order for our grief to not control us. contemporaneous. I wanted to time travel.”

For many queer Black artists, we see life and violence through a In 2016 I was hungry to wrangle with life and prove my ideals as a multiplicity of intersections. Death becomes the threshold we must radical after spending my senior year of college organising during the cross to create an authentic, alternative world within our reality. In Looking for Langston, Julien asserts that beginnings of the Black Lives Matter Julien dares to offer himself the celebration and memorialising of movement. Like Colin Roach for Isaac queer love should have been centreJulien, the 2014 police murders of and other queer Black artists, stage during the aids crisis, a riposte Michael Brown and Tamir Rice were like me, permission to see how the radicalising catalyst for me in my to repression and murder of the soul. life and on the page as a burgeoning A parallel collapsing of time takes art can become a vital transgression place in Lessons of the Hour (2019), a tenwriter. A queer Black child of Jamaican against a complex world immigrants to the us, I later travelled screen video installation exploring the to the Philippines, where I had my first taste of the global reach of life of nineteenth-century writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. anti-Blackness. In this delirium of dredging through a world that The images recreate moments in his life, such as a view of cotton fields could so easily destroy me, I felt lost, less beautiful and ensnared by in which he is forced to work, or later speaking to audiences about state violence and my double consciousness. If I were shot by police, abolition, with narration that draws on his writing. Sounds like the like those Black faces strewn across the news, I would surely be lost to sharp cracking of whips draw the viewer back into his time. Among a meaningless oblivion, forever stained by that last violence. Is this all the many screens, we are placed within Douglass’s imagined intethat Black people will be to this world? I asked myself again and again. riority as he navigates escaping slavery and advocating for its end.

A few months later I watched Julien’s Looking for Langston for the Julien noted when we spoke of completing the film in the two years first time. Queer Black desire is so brazenly explored in the main char- before the George Floyd protests of 2020; the subsequent events, he acter’s dream spaces, merging photography and film to shift from said, deepened his conviction to make use of the camera as a weapon dance scenes to memories of queer lovers in bed. In the film’s opening against anti-Black forces that continue to haunt the present. scene, funeral attendees stare at Langston Hughes’s body in a casket, Throughout his body of work, Julien has worked diligently to and then the film shifts to images of Hughes’s work. It inspired me break the boundaries of memory, genre and linear representation of

Film-Noir Angels (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2016, Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminium, 58 × 75 cm (framed)

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Stars (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2017, Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminium, 58 × 75 cm (framed)

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above Sonata in Red (Once Again… Statues Never Die), 2022, inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth, 225 × 150 cm preceding pages Statues Never Die (Once Again... Statues Never Die), 2022, inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, 150 × 200 cm

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queer desire. In his first feature film, Young Soul Rebels (1991), Julien land than where my parents had been born. I sought to make sense of makes use of both the documentary and thriller genres to give a mainstream masculinity and grappled for liberated queer desire. By portrait of London’s vibrant scene at a time when queer Black narra- the end of my book, I depart from journalistic and cultural interpretives were considered far more taboo. Childhood best friends and tations to reach a deeper dream space; an imagined reality where my funk-music pirate-radio djs Chris and Caz grapple with the murder father has not died, but one that still reckons with the complexities of of their gay friend tj. The London summer is depicted with somewhat my queerness and the deaths of others around me. History, love, pain muted tones and in stark contrast to the dramatic style of partygoers and imagination merge, my own iteration of Julien’s mission. I saw in leather, chains, mesh tank-tops and dyed hair. The exuberant night- firsthand what Isaac Julien’s work offers to artists and writers who life is offset by the main characters grappling with their changing have come after him, including British painter and writer Lynette friendship, as Caz explores his queerness through a fling with a white Yiadom-Boakye. Jamaican-American filmmaker Rodney Evans once punk and Chris is unjustly accused of tj’s murder by police. Moments noted he wished to continue the legacy of filmmakers like Julien. after finding out about their friend’s Julien opens the door for them to cross “There’s a funny way that when you death, Caz says to Chris, “I know that threshold and queer the archive, to free themselves from white supremit ain’t right, but I just keep thinking, make work, it haunts the present. acist frameworks and to create a dream it could’ve been me, you know?”

In Looking for Langston I was looking I related so much to Chaz, as a queer space of rest and reckoning. With his for a way of transgressing time. survey exhibition now offering new Black man who loved the diy/punk music scene around me as I came of audiences a route into his remarkable, It wasn’t about a historical period, age, but still had to navigate both expansive body of work, Julien does but more the point of what is seen anti-Blackness from white peers and away once more with the boundaries as historical and contemporaneous. homophobia from Black peers. Young between past and present. For Julien, Soul Rebels ends on a note of hope, freedom is found through the realisaI wanted to time travel” where Caz and Chris reconcile the tion that we each live right alongside underlying tension of their friendship once they solve their friend’s history. How we choose to define it for ourselves is the way in which murder. The film asserts that art and community can help us survive we can revolutionise the present. ar hard times, with a loving friendship between a straight and queer man. Both Looking for Langston and Young Soul Rebels were pivotal addiIsaac Julien: What Freedom Is To Me is on view at Tate Britain, London, through 20 August. Isaac Julien, Once Again… (Statues tions to the beginnings of the New Queer Cinema Movement of the Never Die) – Photographs, can be seen at Victoria Miro, London, early 1990s, alongside the work of filmmakers like Todd Haynes and 2 May – 4 June. Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022) Derek Jarman. is also on show as part of the Sharjah Biennial 15, through 11 June From 2017 to 2021 I embarked on writing a memoir, inspired by the dogged approach of artists like Julien to confront my personal and Prince Shakur, a writer and activist based in New York City, collective past. I traced the history of slavery and migration that led to is the author of When They Tell You To Be Good (2022) my own experience as a Black and Caribbean American body in another

above In the Life (Iolaus), Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022, inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth, 153 × 203 × 6 cm (framed) all images © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

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Christina Quarles Figuration, embodied states and the limits of the recognisable body Interview by Jonathan T.D. Neil

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above Vulgar Moon, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 127 × 102 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London preceding pages Collapsed Time, 2023 (installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin). © the artist. Photo: Jacopo La Forgia.

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London

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The paintings of Christina Quarles are inhabited by curious figures: elastic humanoids, often with elongated limbs and spindly, delicate fingers that reach out beyond the ambiguously defined planes of existence which they seem to be occupying. These contortionists seem uneasy – their bodies interlocked, sometimes embracing, sometimes clutching at each other’s elusive appendages in a struggle for intimacy.

As in her current show in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, Collapsed Time, at times their dance is backdropped by the floral patterns of wallpaper, or distant mountains; at other points, their world more proscribed by monolithic walls and windows, attempting to manoeuvre in a shifting symbolic universe. Here, Quarles speaks about legibility, the code switching of our sense of space, and depicting the body beyond categorisation.

rude! So when I took out the language, I found that I still needed something. Also there is this element in my paintings of having areas where the paint will just be linear and it won’t be filled in. Text was the anchor for a work to feel like a finished set of choices. When I removed the text, I found that the anchor was missing.

I wanted something that could anchor the work in that shared language that you could hook into, but which was also open-ended. I looked for patterns that are sort of a reference: something that you’ve maybe seen in art history, but maybe it’s actually from television and maybe it’s television referencing art history.

So it still has that iterative quality.

cq I’m interested in having moments of legibility that are immediately apparent and then other contextual clues within the painting that undermine that first reading. That legibility breaks down not because there’s a lack of information, but because there’s too much information that contradicts itself. That’s always the standpoint I have: away from the idea of a lack and into the idea of excess. ar It becomes more like signal and noise versus figure and ground. cq Exactly. I find that question of legibility to be central to my practice. ar You have said that you like to use Adobe Illustrator as part of your process because of the ability to scale infinitely: the vector image versus the bitmap. A lot of the work has either a kind of architectural element that defines a space or there are the 2d planes that have been rotated into space that lay out a zone in the canvas. How do you conceive of the scale and space of your paintings?

artreview You stated once that when you moved to painting from drawing, language was replaced by pattern. Can you elaborate on that? christina quarles When I was first moved into painting in grad school, I just went ahead and wrote on the canvases alongside the imagery that I was working with. All the things that I loved about text were the way that it flattened a plane, literally, and that it is also a reference to something that isn’t there. It was a way of creating this common ground, something like a shared understanding, that was also really specific to the individual reading it. So much of my work is about the way that you read an image and the way that an image unfolds with meaning, based on how we’re sort of trained and taught to read an image. I think that there’s just an inevitable desire when you see a visual image to understand it, and to find answers quickly. We don’t trust ourselves to live with the visual image. If there’s text, most people will go to the text to answer the image because it’s scary to be in that place of not understanding.

Since I wasn’t using the text as a caption for the narrative or for a conclusion about the image, I found that it was like putting in a few red herrings, and that felt unnecessarily misleading – to be like, here’s text on the bottom righthand corner with an image above it and the two do not have anything to do with one another. That’s

ar Is this why the bodies that are depicted are pushed to the brink of legibility? There’s a push and pull of recognisability, areas where that legibility is distinct and then breaks down.

ar Is it important that it remains a two-dimensional flattening? cq Yes, the flattening is part of it. In many ways the idea of pattern and planes in my work could replace the way that I think about language.

It is a more two-dimensional reference to something that you have to complete in your memory.

I always try to find – whether it’s language or imagery – moments of punning and double meaning. That’s important to me.

(Bad Air) Yer Grievances, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 158 × 140 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London

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cq I think of the composition of the figures in architecture within the painting to exist fully within that canvas space. It’s sort of like outside of the painting none of the elements of the painting exist.

Even though I’m referencing moments of architecture or pattern or imagery that I have seen, whether it’s high moments of architecture and art or these very low or mass forms of culture. The figures also come from the sustained practice of figure drawing with live models. But when I come to the painting, all of that is just used as snippets of memory that get filtered through the process of making the painting. Scale is very much determined by the edge of the canvas, and constants that relate purely to my scale of making. The way I think about the scale of painting is really related to my physical scale and the figures within it. They’re interacting with objects and the environment that relates to their scale. It’s because they are more in this embodied state of experiencing the world.

Sometimes we have, whether it’s an awareness of our own body or the spaces that we’re in,

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moments when the scale of things is unnoticed or unseen because we seamlessly move through the scale of our world. And then there are other times when there really is a misfit between how we fit into our environments or how our environments fit into us. It’s like, when you become really aware, you’re like, ‘oh, I’m in a seat that’s too small for me’, or ‘I’m in a couch that’s making my body sink too much’. So it’s how to represent those moments of moving through a world that is taken as a given. We take architectural spaces as a given, but they’re actually decisions that were made, representations of how a body would move through them. What does it mean when your body doesn’t quite work in that space? There is a distortion of scale within the figuration. It’s more how you feel your body. How if there’s a part of your body that’s in pain, for example, it distorts the scale of your perception. It’s more a sense of perceived scale. But it’s always related to the physical limitations of my wingspan. Which is why the computer and bringing in the digital is something that I like. It’s a way of working more in that psychic space without having it always be interpreted via my own body. ar Do you think of every painting as an attempt to look at or develop this sense of perceived embodied experience?

cq It’s also just the feeling of that disconnect, and at other times the harmonious experience of your sense of self moving through the world.

I think of this idea kind of like code switching: how you are constantly aware of how your sense of self is shifting in your environment.

It’s always this sort of play between occupying space versus being occupied by space; what it means to be a person that can occupy space and what it means to be a person that is occupied by space. ar Space not as neutral but always coded. cq I don’t really adhere to this idea of neutrality. I think that everything has a presence. It’s just there are certain states of being where you’re not having to be aware of that presence because it is catered to how you move through the world. ar In the past when you’ve said your work is about what it’s like to ‘live in a body’ – this is a curious way of putting it, because it implies a kind of inherent dualism. But I don’t get the sense that you believe that, right? I’d argue your work is an attempt to demonstrate the irrelevance or the illogic of that dualism. Embodiment is a process or a practice, like painting is a practice, and one can be more or less attuned to it. This is where we come to how you adapt

Now We’re There (And We’ Only Just Begun) (detail), 2023, acrylic on canvas, six parts, 343 × 996 cm.

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London

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to spaces or communities that you either do or don’t line up with, which is where the conversations about race and gender usually come in. But once you’re past those initial categories, there is a more universal problem, this problem of embodiment. cq Those ideas of race or gender, all identity categories, they are the product of that problem, which is more universal. I think that it’s easy to function in the framework of a duality or of a binary, and I fall into that trap a lot myself, even with the language and ways that I discuss my work. But I do think that one of the reasons why I make art is because I can express these ideas through the art. ar Though race and gender or sexuality are almost always mentioned in the context of your work, I think what’s interesting is that the perceptual and cognitive demands of the viewer have more to do with some process of recognition, of something becoming legible, and cognisable, rather than merely identifiable. Your figures appear as prior to any given representational category. They are pushing the boundaries of recognition, not representation. Would you agree? cq I think that’s a different way of phrasing this idea of ‘living in a body’ versus looking at a body.

Living in a body is more like that recognition rather than that externalised or internalised

representation. Recognition is actually going past that facade of representation. That idea of representation, it still creates this dynamic that others, and it still creates a dynamic that maintains the current power structure. Because it ignores the fact that if you can easily move through the world, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t still moving through a bunch of systems that were designed to organise how you have to move within them. There are people who have not had to question their identity as much, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole host of assumptions being made about them. So yes, pushing the limits of recognition while still having elements that you can easily latch onto – pattern is one and figuration is a huge one; we try to find a figure in almost anything. I’ve always felt like the figure is a foil in the paintings to talk about humanity, but using the figure just as an entry point.

the space of the canvas to think up new rules of the game, rather than playing some existing game.

ar ‘Surrealism’ is a word that has been used to situate your work, perhaps with an idea that your figures might look like some of the figures seen in surrealist photographs or painting. Surrealism was often an attempt to undo certain categories of thought, to break free from social constraint or convention in general. There is an echo here of your trying to unlock a way of thinking about embodiment that isn’t categorical, that uses painting and figuration and

sustainable, or just the way we function as humans in this stage of our evolution. I think that the call for breaking down categories is one that works really well in theory, but not in practice. Being somebody that is multiracial in a system that fundamentally is not designed for that and can’t reconcile the disconnect between looking white while also identifying as a person of colour – that’s just too incongruous. And

cq Where I always come from is having lived through certain identity categories that I find do exist beyond categorisation, like primarily with my racial identity, and experiencing the isolation and difficulty of that position. There is this theoretical ideal of breaking down categorisation that I find to be not actually liveable,

“I’ve always felt like the figure is a foil in the paintings to talk about humanity, but using the figure just as an entry point”

I find it just leads to a great deal of alienation.

Ultimately it creates this sense of not having a sense of self in a social context. Social context only undermines my sense of self. I only feel othered by camaraderie. Maybe it is more like what you’re saying, the idea of recognition is what is needed more than representation.

We have this idea that in our art, that if we are too personal or too specific, too individual with what we work with in our practice, it’s going to be selfish and nobody will relate to it.

So we try to be more general to appeal to more people and not feel so self-centred. And it’s whenever those general moves are made that it feels actually completely superficial and hard to access as work. I found that for my own work and for other people’s work that I’ve really been able to connect with; it’s because of tapping into this personal and individual experience, it somehow unlocks the ability to trust. ar Collapsed Time, a solo exhibition of work

by Christina Quarles, is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, through 17 September.

Quarles will also have a solo show at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 17 June – 29 October Jonathan T.D. Neil is cofounder of Inversion Art, Los Angeles

Collapsed Time, 2023 (installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin). © the artist. Photo: Jacopo La Forgia.

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London

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Sarah Pierce

by Judith Wilkinson

How uncertainty and disorientation become tactics to inspire a ‘community of the exhibition’ 64

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While watching a performance of American artist Sarah Pierce’s work long light-filled corridor of the museum’s east wing to pull back and Future Exhibitions (2013), as part of her ongoing retrospective, Sarah forth a series of large red square curtains, jumping in and out of the Pierce: Scene of the Myth, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, one of the hanging fabric while stamping and making gestures associated with five performers came up behind me, placed their hand on my back and protest movements, such as raised fists, which in an Irish context gently pushed me into the centre of the room. They carried out the correspond most recently with the ‘Repeal the Eighth’ movement same action on a person who’d been lurking in the doorway, the only leading to the legalisation of abortion in 2018. other member of the public apart from myself present in that gallery to Pierce’s quietly subversive and purposefully unorthodox exhibiwitness what was taking place. Up until that point, I’d felt more or less tion involves an overlapping and eclectic mix of materials and forms like a detached observer. Participation and inclusion are two central of presentation. It represents 20 years of art practice that includes terms feeding the development of art institutions today, but whether installation, performance, archives, talks, papers, workshops and the activities of self-publishing and these concepts function as buzzwords teaching. References and themes in or the starting point for a genuine Placing the visitor off-balance and the exhibition are equally diverse transformation of the museum is the unsettling their habits is precisely and often intentionally difficult to subject of much debate. They are also the point. Pierce is attempting fully grasp: the work and legacies of key elements of Pierce’s work. artists such as Kazimir Malevich and I’d followed the group of performto destabilise how we’ve grown Bruce Nauman, the history of radical ers up from the museum’s mezzanine, accustomed to viewing, interpreting, pedagogy and protest, Irish nationwhere they’d begun by performing classifying and understanding art alism and the diaspora, new models another of Pierce’s works, Campus for ethical collaboration. Linking (2011). I’d watched them stride purposefully and quickly through galleries housing other works by Pierce, Pierce’s varied work is a common motivation to disrupt the learned such as the largescale installation Towards a Newer Laocoön (2012), which behaviours ingrained within the institutions of art, from the gallery features an enormous plaster replica of the Ancient Greek sculpture to the academy. Placing the visitor off-balance and unsettling their Laocoön and His Sons that has undergone countless, debated restora- habits is precisely the point. Pierce is attempting to destabilise how tions (this replica was gifted to Dublin’s National College of Art and we’ve grown accustomed to viewing, interpreting, classifying and Design in 1790 by David La Touche, a wealthy banker, and was used understanding art. up until the 1970s to teach drawing classes at the institution, where One performance melded into the next, as we arrived in a room Pierce is a teacher), surrounded by paint-splattered worktables strewn painted black, with an adjoining room painted white. In both rooms with rubble and newspaper clippings relating to student protests. various objects related to the making of exhibitions – such as picture frames, wooden plinths, wire stands, cardContinuing though, the performers chanted facing page An Artwork in the Third Person, 2009 unexpected slogans like: “It’s not just the board sheets, tubes, tarpaulin, Styrofoam (installation view, Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2009). seeing, you have to feel”, or “These kinds of and packing tape – had been stacked in carePhoto: Vincent Lestienne structures need attention and finesse”. The above An Artwork in the Third Person, 2009 (production still, fully assembled sculptural forms and posismart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2009) group had paused for several minutes in a tioned around the space. This was, apparently,

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a separate work, Future Exhibitions: amidst the clutter, the performers diverse people, histories and ideas that art seems uniquely capable read aloud from texts that seemed to offer accounts of a series of exhibi- of facilitating. It’s an optimistic view of art’s continued importance tions that had already taken place. One read a description of what they and relevance, and it makes me think about whether I had felt part said was a photograph of The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10, in of such a community during my two days visiting the exhibition. which Malevich’s works were shown in 1915: “This is a photograph of It’s been a long time since I engaged in as many conversations about an exhibition,” they began, “the paintings are hung in groups, salon an exhibition, its ambitions and difficulties, with as many people: style. Hung in the upper corner, near the ceiling, is a black square on a from performers in the works, to invigilators, to visitors and other white canvas. On the floor, placed next to the wall, is a modest black artists. In some ways, I have to acknowledge that I did feel part chair.” Another gave an account they claimed was taken from the cata- of something. logue for the 1969 Conceptual art exhibition One Month, organised by Pierce considers pedagogy to be an integral part of her work, rather curator Seth Siegelaub in his New York than a parallel or lesser activity. Figures gallery. Hearing the texts being read, such philosopher Hannah Arendt and It’s been a long time since I engaged it was impossible to ascertain whether the American Sociologist C. Wright in as many conversations about an any of them was entirely factual. But Mills inform both her teaching and exhibition, its ambitions and diffigiven the straight-faced commitment her artmaking. In ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, the appendix to his of the performers to their delivery, that culties, with as many people: from most famous work, The Sociological somehow didn’t seem to matter. As the performers in the works, to invigilators, Imagination (1959), Mills instructs his performers moved slowly around the to visitors and other artists. students to periodically dump their room, they adopted a series of different right-angle poses that appeared to be research files onto the floor, mixing up in dialogue with the geometric forms being created by the discarded and reordering their contents. This allows, according to Mills, ‘fruitful exhibition objects. After being guided into the centre of the room, my developments’ and new forms of cross-classification to emerge. fellow museumgoer and I were effectively added to the accumulation One can clearly see Mills’s thinking at work in Pierce’s practice.

Standard institutional conventions and protocols are often jumbled, of materials making up this artwork.

But despite all the disruptions, dismantling and intentional reconfigured or abandoned. In the work The Square (2017), a large confusion at play, Scene of the Myth doesn’t come across as a cynical black square is handpainted on the wall of a traditional white-cube attempt to pull apart and expose the false promises or preten- gallery space. Viewing the painted shape, Malevich is again evoked, sions of the artworld. Preserving some forms of inheritance, while but this square is even more wonky than some of his iterations of the resisting others, Pierce seems intent on encouraging the visitor shape. A museum bench is positioned in front of the square, a convento question how they should act or interact in the company of art tional frontal viewing arrangement to encourage visitors to sit and and what the possibilities of the gallery space might be. For Pierce, spend time looking at it. Nowhere in the room are details pertaining that potential lies in what she has referred to the circumstances of the painted square The Square, 2014, performance and workshop to as the ‘community of the exhibition’, displayed, and it’s only by reading the zine at Rua Red, Tallaght, Dublin, 2017. that accompanies the exhibition that we learn a kind of unpredictable coming together of Photo: David Reilly. Courtesy the artist

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Campus, 2011 (performance view, eva International, Limerick, 2012).

Photo: Eamonn O’Mahony

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An Artwork in the Third Person, 2009 (installation view, Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth, imma, Dublin, 2023). Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

Courtesy the artist and imma, Dublin

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ArtReview

that it was painted by a group of workshop participants. The collective Precisely what kinds of knowledge and forms of community act of painting the square is, according to the text, the starting point might emerge from the encounters that Pierce stages, both within for the development of a ‘play without a script’, inspired by Bertolt and beyond the gallery space, are not always clear. The artist seems Brecht’s experimental Lehrstücke ‘learning play’, consisting of unspeci- genuinely comfortable with this uncertainty. Her wager is that it’s fied chants and gestures, and to be performed without an audience. this unpredictability and disorientation that provide the conditions Here, in this mostly blank room, which is also apparently a theatrical for new forms of dissent and self-determination to be generated. That stage for a performance we will never see, we are left with questions – leaves open the question, however, of whether the various exhibition not least, ‘what am I supposed to make of this?’ visitors, performers and workshop participants involved feel equally This encouragement of questioning without explicit or author- comfortable with this experience of uncertainty. My discussions itative guidance is an underlying ethos of Pierce’s project, as is the with the museum invigilators revealed that they’d been receiving restaging of other artists’ works and the reexamination of art-historical fewer information requests from visitors than usual. Viewers, they legacies. In An Artwork in the Third Person (2009), Pierce references a video- said, seemed to be comfortable “just to get on with it”. Indeed, one work by British artist Kevin Atherton entitled In Two Minds (1978), in group of visitors had apparently taken down and reordered all the which the artist engages in a tongue-in-cheek question-and-answer items on the shelves of Pierce’s work Affinity Archive (2000), a collecsession with himself on the topic of making and exhibiting art. Pierce tion of objects, including magazines, scripts and informal artworks, borrows Atherton’s questions, using them to interview a group of donated to Pierce by other artists, writers and curators; another group students, firing questions at them in quick succession. “What is this had repositioned all the carpets in the installation An Artwork in the about?”, “Are these questions difficult?”, “Are exhibitions the same Third Person. Despite the exhibition’s sometimes confounding nature, as theatre?”, “Where are you going as an artist?”, “Does an artwork from my observations, the visitors to imma appeared at least willing change when it’s remade?” The questions flash up intermittently on a to engage, discuss and think about what was being presented to them. series of eight flatscreen monitors in brightly coloured text set against They, like me, seemed to navigate the exhibition as they chose, even a black background, all of it staged within a black cube with theatrical after a push, remaining open to what the works might offer, deciding props and lighting. On each screen, we see a closeup of a student’s if they wished to investigate further, determining which quesface, capturing all the hesitancy and insights that result. Attached to tions to take up and which to leave unanswered. At a moment when each monitor is a pair of headphones and in front is placed a small museums and institutions are rethinking how they’re organised and rectangular piece of carpet that invites the viewer to kneel or sit and run, Pierce’s interventions may not present any straightforward solulisten to the students’ thoughtful and carefully considered responses, tions, but they do invite audiences to ask themselves what role they despite the speed of the questioning. “A performance,” one student might want to play in that process. ar muses, “if it is in front of an audience, needs to have that exchange, it doesn’t mean that its ready or completed, but without that exchange, Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth is on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through 3 September you don’t know how it works.” Another Future Exhibitions, 2013 offers: “Sometimes it doesn’t matter if things (performance view, Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth, are true or not, just the fact that people relate Judith Wilkinson is an art writer and curator imma, Dublin, 2023). Photo: Louis Haugh. based in London to them as such makes them true.”

Courtesy the artist and imma, Dublin

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Art Reviewed

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Signals: How Video Transformed the World moma, New York 5 March – 8 July Mona Hatoum’s 1988 video Measures of Distance features photographs the artist took of her mother in the shower. According to a letter from her mother, which Hatoum reads aloud, these intimate images of artistic expression irritated the artist’s father, who perceived them as a form of “trespass” against him. The Lebanese Civil War had since separated the women – one in Beirut, the other in London. Nevertheless, the mother’s cadences can be heard in the daughter’s voice, as if Hatoum were smuggling her mother’s personality out from behind a patriarchal censor. Such ideas – that the image, once captured, trespasses against authority, that people have the power to transmit unsanctioned information across time and space, and that broadcast makes the personal political and vice versa – are latent in a wide range of practices considered ‘video art’. These tensions and revelations recur throughout moma’s sprawling sixth-floor exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World – in which Hatoum’s piece appears along with over 70 other transmissionbased works – forming the emotional rip current of what is, at first glance, a show that’s all about visuals.

Signals is moma’s largest media exhibition to date, showcasing over half a century of work starting from the 1960s, a decade marked by the release of the Sony Portapak, the first commercially available portable camera, which put agency in the hands of ordinary consumers and artists, even as mass media became synonymous with corporate power in the West and the state apparatus in the East. As the curators point out, viewers are seldom brainwashed so much as they are actively ‘talking back’, jamming signals, pirating, infiltrating and testing alternatives to mass media. Signals proceeds from the truism that the televisual image is both constructed and unstable, and argues that these qualities are what make video a powerful tool for protest.

Throughout the show, we see ways in which rogue signals persist across time and geography, connecting, for instance, pro-democracy struggles in China to those in Myanmar and the fight to preserve public space in Russia to similar questions being asked in Sweden.

The first work one encounters on the sixth floor is Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space (1980), a split-screen satellite broadcast between Lincoln Center in New York and Century City in Los Angeles that stands sentry on adjoining walls by the entrance.

In this then-novel work, crowds in two cities gather, with enthusiasm and slight disbelief, before their counterparts on the opposite coast.

This early telematic transmission primes the viewer to spot moments of recognition between everyday people separated by literal and figurative distance throughout the show.

It is important to note that the medium of video is not solely the image on the screen, nor is it limited to the screen itself or where the image is stored. It is instead something wholly immaterial: an instant transmission that reaches a global network. Nonetheless, Signals does not hide the hardware that keeps its transmissions flowing.

Rows of monitors, hot beams of light from projectors and structures like Stan VanDerBeek’s 1964–65 Movie-Drome – the refabricated dome of a grain silo in which viewers lie on cushions and watch montages flashing overhead – fill the exhibition space and compete for attention.

Audio from each work bleeds into the galleries, adding a layer of white noise to the chaotic energy in the rooms. Within the frenzy, however, patterns emerge: crowds assemble, classified information leaks, images become visible, then fugitive, glitched and transfigured.

Capturing and circulating footage from political movements indexes and potentially implicates those present at scenes of unrest.

Doing so, however, is a way to oppose both the state and mass media’s selective and exploitative gaze. In response to news blackouts in China after the Tiananmen Square massacre that suppressed public knowledge of the death toll in Beijing, Dara Birnbaum excavated clips related to the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, including the Chinese government’s decree to end satellite broadcasting. Her fivechannel video installation Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990) loops these clips on lcd screens extending from the tentacular arms of a large, conspicuous metal scaffold.

facing page, top Marta Minujín, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (detail), 1966, documents, slides and ephemera. © the artist.

Courtesy Marta Minujín Studio and Henrique Faria, New York

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Tiffany Sia’s short film Never Rest / Unrest (2020), made 30 years later on Sia’s iPhone during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, documents the quieter, less newsworthy intervals of civil unrest: protesters’ subway commutes to and from demonstrations, conversations in secluded alleyways and moments of peace. Works such as these commemorate, to quote Harun Farocki, whose work also appears in the show, those who ‘dared to record’ what lay before their eyes.

While the televisual medium’s knack for bridging physical distances is no longer groundbreaking, its poignancy still lies in its ability to close temporal gaps. For example, Emily Jacir’s Ramallah / New York (2004–05), which compares the cities’ hair salons, shawarma shops and travel agencies on twin flat-screen monitors, feels stilted in its critical capacity. Conversely, Fujiko Nakaya’s Friends of Minamata Victims – Video Diary (1972), which documents protesters stationed in shifts outside the headquarters of a Tokyobased corporation charged with severe cases of mercury poisoning, demonstrates more complexity because the artist not only filmed the protest but also brought a battery-powered tv monitor to the sit-in, which she used to play back footage from previous shifts, allowing the crowd to see and relate to those who’d come before them.

Absent from the exhibition are names like Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis and Bruce Nauman, whose videoworks appear in Rosalind Krauss’s oft-cited 1976 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’. Signals has little to do with narcissism. However, resonances between the self – the personal – and the political are omnipresent.

Consider, finally, Martine Syms’s Lessons i–clxxx (2014–18), a 90-minute visual poem constructed from found footage that indexes the Black radical tradition via a hyperspecific culling of home videos, memes, talk shows and sitcoms.

Likewise, Signals traverses an eclectic medium’s history in a way that illuminates human connections within the polemical and vice versa.

In a world whose social spheres have collapsed into handheld devices, the show attunes us to how far connectivity has gotten us and how much farther we still have to go. Jenny Wu

facing page, bottom Tiffany Sia, Never Rest / Unrest, 2020, high-definition video (colour, sound), 29 min. © the artist

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Cay Bahnmiller Galerie Barbara Weiss Trautwein & Herleth, Berlin 17 February – 15 April Cay Bahnmiller didn’t make it easy on anyone, herself included. The Michigan-born artist, who died in 2007 in her early fifties, apparently shut down one of her solo shows on its opening day, and she evidently had problems finishing her works, for all that indecision is what made them good. The 30-plus wall-based works in this show – small, usually painted onto layered collages of found printed material, frequently undated – are less paintings than emotive encrustations: testaments to second (and third and fourth) thoughts and abundant inner disquiet. Untitled (undated), which dangles casually from a nail, seemingly rewinds to her childhood: worked into its bristling surface are vintage colour illustrations of children dancing by the seaside, torn-out biro drawings of houses and pages of text ripped from books (sample text: ‘I could not keep your hands in my own…’), all tied together by dark, uneasy daubs of paint. The whole suggests an unreclaimable and fragmentary

past, while a scrawled-upon scrap of paper clothespegged to the leftward edge suggests Bahnmiller was grounding herself in an outsider position: ‘Sucksess’, it reads, quoting Bob Dylan.

Bahnmiller spent her working life in Detroit, and the former industrial city’s rusting landscape found analogues in her curled-edge, decrepit aesthetic. But there’s a strongly personal sense in the work, thanks to her working consistently on old illustrations, restaurant menus, black-and-white photographs, etc, that things were better before: maybe in Germany and Argentina, where she spent some of her childhood, and undoubtedly before 1993, when, the handout informs us, she suffered a violent assault that made her work more inwardlooking. That grim biographical fact shadows works like 1997’s Untitled, which features slashing blue and black paint strokes – some of which resolve into the artist’s own Germanic surname, like a reassertion of selfhood – over

an ancient, yellowed, crumpled map of the city of Heidelberg.

Mostly, Bahnmiller comes over as both fiercely determined and not made for success, or at least not for production-line practice. One work, titled Artist’s Book (c. 2003), is an antique book of modernist paintings, open at a pagespread, and features an exhibition invite of hers roughly taped over a Matisse reproduction; another book, of the same title and date, sits next to it, closed, the word ‘nein’ handpainted on its cover. ‘The final construction and process often results from negation’, she wrote of her art.

(No shit.) Of course, our current artworld won’t allow an artist to negate themselves forever, particularly when they’re not around. One can’t necessarily say that this show – piercing as it is, strongly suggesting that its maker was the real deal – is what Bahnmiller would have wanted.

But most likely she would have, at least, half-wanted it. Martin Herbert

Untitled (La Griglia stationary), no date, acrylic, latex and adhesive tape on paper, 17 × 12 cm. Courtesy the estate of Cay Bahnmiller; Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin; and What Pipeline, Detroit

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Buck Ellison Little Brother Luhring Augustine, New York 17 March – 29 April The year was 2003, and the private military firm Blackwater had just attained lucrative us government contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The mercenary organisation, whose employees ignominiously went on to massacre 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, was founded by former Navy Seal Erik Prince, heir to a manufacturing fortune and brother to Betsy DeVos, best known for her disastrous tenure as secretary of education under Donald Trump. Prince, who charged $6,500 per seat for evacuation flights out of Kabul in 2021, is the subject of Little Brother, a show of work by Los Angeles-based photographer Buck Ellison.

Ellison is known for staging photographic tableaux of generic wealthy white Americans surrounded by the sometimes-insular symbols they use to telegraph financial and social power.

From 2017 to 2022 he narrowed his scope in a series focused on Blackwater’s loathsome founder.

Featuring a handsome Prince lookalike, the highly researched, meticulously constructed scenes are set in 2003, when Prince was thirtyfour years old, on an approximation of the family ranch in Wyoming. Six photographs (all 2021), two of which featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and one video (2022) on view abound with iconography that is simultaneously hyperspecific to Prince’s life and more broadly tied up with wealthy white conservatism,

(proto-)Trumpism and the new right. The show’s decorative backdrop is likewise grim: patterned with opium pipes, paper lanterns, blue and white porcelain, and East India Company rupees, the silkscreened wallpaper Five Windows (2023) illustrates Prince’s characterisation of his plans for privatised war in Afghanistan as an ‘East India Company approach’.

As explained in an accompanying reader, each photograph’s modular title contains excerpts from Blackwater pricing lists or tax filings as well as references to Prince’s autobiography. The vignettes linger, almost erotically, on the military contractor as he fingers his favourite book, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832), or squints into the scope of a Steyr rifle, a classic firearm also beloved by Ernest Hemingway. Blurring the distinctions between rigorous conceptual artist working photographically, zealous detractor and obsessed fan, Ellison labours over verisimilitude and details, down to digitally enlarging the model’s ears and adding Prince’s small scar above his eye.

The degree to which Ellison’s photos are encoded encourages a type of viewer engagement that oscillates between active spectatorship and paranoid reading. Prince, smiling and shirtless, is out of focus in Fog, In His Light We Shall See The Light, Raintree 23 Ltd Ptnr, Excess

Distribution Carryover, If Any, 2003 (2021). The viewer’s gaze is redirected to the symbol-laden background, which is populated by a cap from Prince’s conservative alma mater Hillsdale College (the subject of the recent New Yorker article ‘The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars’), equipment and instructions for equine artificial insemination and Principles of Economics (1871) by Carl Menger, a proponent of viewing economics through the lens of individualism.

Just shy of two minutes long and set to the gospel song Stand on the Word, the video Little Brother (2022) intercuts passages in which Prince spits in the sink or pores over papers with idyllic scenes of the family ranch – which, in addition to broadly evoking the role played by cowboys and ranchers in violent legacies of Manifest Destiny, has served as training grounds for operatives tasked with spying on Trump’s opponents and a critical node for a vile corporation serving nakedly imperialist and capitalist interests.

Is there anything more American than that?

In light of this question, which lies at the heart of Ellison’s project, some viewers might find their own efforts to distance themselves from Prince by casting him as aberrant – a blip in the system rather than its product – to be rather unconvincing. Cassie Packard

Fog, In His Light We Shall See The Light, Raintree 23 Ltd Ptnr, Excess Distribution Carryover, If Any, 2003, 2021, archival pigment print, 122 × 154 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Carolyn Lazard Long Take ica Philadelphia 10 March – 9 July While described as three individual artworks, Carolyn Lazard’s exhibition Long Take reads most convincingly as one cohesive installation.

The gallery intervention, Surround Sound (2022), suggests a space of both rehearsal and performance: dark vinyl lines the floor, spotlit like a black-box theatre. In Leans, Reverses (2022), measured breath and the thud of feet landing on earth play from a grid of speakers suspended from the ceiling, while at the centre of the room a cushioned bench, Institutional Seat (2022), sits before a line of three dark television monitors.

We listen to dancer Jerron Herman perform as, simultaneously, we hear poet Joselia Rebekah Hughes’s translation of his movement into

spoken word, Hughes’s speech itself captioned on the otherwise black screens at the middle of the gallery. The language is creative and poetic – an attempt to write a body in motion. The spoken words blend with the rhythm of the dancer’s exertion, with sound and language both offering fresh avenues to access the unseen dance at the centre of the exhibition.

Lazard developed Long Take in the intellectual shadow of dance for camera. Popular in modern dance circles of the 1960s and 1970s, these dance films became a way to record and archive performances, in the process reimagining how choreography might prioritise the cinematic frame. The result was something

Leans, Reverses (still), 2022, three-channel video, sound, 18 min.

Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street, New York

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of a new form, rooted in performance but altered for film and made to combat the fleeting nature of dance – to make it accessible across time and through history. Conceptually, Lazard connects dance for camera to a call for better access policies in art institutions. Lazard’s view of what constitutes access is sweeping, ranging from physical accommodations to ensuring the closed captioning of video, to the more cerebral political project that sees access as an instrument of collective care. In Long Take Lazard invokes dance for camera to critique how standard tools of access, such as subtitles, necessarily reduce a work of art to description and in the process deny viewers the meaningful

ambiguity of an artwork. Lazard hopes to propose an alternative: that access might become about true translation, the kind that allows for gaps, misunderstandings and, perhaps most crucially, the persistence of the untranslatable. Dance for camera was in many ways a rearticulation of choreography; Lazard transfers this idea to access policies, pitching for a method of reformulating artworks to and for various audiences rather than merely transcribing them, a process Lazard sees as necessarily reductive.

Lazard’s interdisciplinary practice has historically been grounded in generative critiques of institutions’ failure to be accessible, addressing the politics of chronic illness and calling for better awareness around possibilities for accommodating disabled audiences. In A Recipe for Disaster (2018), for example, Lazard appropriated an episode of Julia Child’s

television show The French Chef (1963–73), overlaying footage of Child making an omelette with a manifestolike text calling for artworks designed for ‘the possibility of an integrated audience’. Read aloud over the video’s original sound and briefly interrupting the track of audio description, the text scrolls upward in yellow type, competing with the subtitles. Part directive, part polemic, the work is unflinchingly precise in its demands. A Recipe for Disaster liberates the definition of access from its traditional constraints, calling for a rethink of how access can be granted and how it can be integrated into a work of art from the piece’s conception. Lazard’s interest in dance for camera seems naturally to evolve from these inquiries. But in Long Take, the form fails the concepts, and the exhibition itself falls short of conveying the solidity of Lazard’s ideas. The works ultimately speak only to the inadequacy

of description rather than expanding to address how the complexity of an artwork might be salvaged through its rearticulation.

With its emphasis on the unseen performance thrice translated, the focus is too much on the practicalities of remediation, obfuscating Lazard’s theoretical framework. The original conceit, that the opacity of an artwork is sacred, gets lost, and dance for camera – the conceptual hinge of the entire show – is only externally cited as an inspiration. Without it, the looping translation of sounds to words to sound again of Leans, Reverses becomes a work more about the process than its potential. And though this could be seen as intentional, forcing us to contend with all that is lost in translation, it would also make Long Take impossibly didactic, undercutting Lazard’s inquiries into how form can be renegotiated to accommodate.

Maddie Hampton

Leans, Reverses (still), 2022, three-channel video, sound, 18 min.

Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham/ Essex Street, New York

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Lee Lozano Strike Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin 8 March – 23 July Reading the words of Lee Lozano’s General Strike Piece (1969), at the entrance to this show, is like listening to a sour cackle through rotten teeth.

While the Pinacoteca Agnelli is currently receiving plenty of hype under new director (and this show’s cocurator) Sarah Cosulich, here is the American artist claiming the right, circa her fortieth year, to ‘gradually but determinedly avoid to be present at official or public uptown functions or gatherings’, until her definitive dropping out of the New York artworld around 1970. General Strike Piece is one of Lozano’s so-called Language Pieces, often handwritten in block letters, dictated by self-imposed rules and composed as a kind of script of actions, eg masturbating, smoking grass ‘to stay high all day and see what happens’ or being without grass for the same amount of time. The conceptual core thus had a performative effect, actively shaping Lozano’s everyday life. The stated desire to dedicate herself to a ‘total personal and public revolution’ away from the ‘uptown’ scene also fit perfectly into the utopian fantasies of late-60s counterculture, expressed in radical acts of defection and refusal for artists. The piece appears as a statement of intent, introducing us to a practice that mixes art and life; it invites viewers to read what follows – a selection of paintings from both her figurative and minimalist bodies of work, alongside accompanying studies and drawings – through the lens of her conceptual works.

In Strike, then, you’re encouraged to feel presence as the other side of absence, and figuration as the flipside of abstraction. This emerges clearly in the first room, via a breathtaking flood of academic graphite, crayon and pencil drawings (1959–64) of fragmented human anatomies; here Lozano combines male body parts with props and tools. These sardonic chimeras build a fundamental vocabulary, preparing us for the grotesque visual irony that dominates the cartoonish pop-expressionist Pun drawing series (1962), satirical compositions of words and caricatural images. One of these consists of a dick stuck in the roller of a typewriter on whose keys are words like think, cock, cunt and work. Again, Lozano’s practice prescribes actions. It’s entertaining to guess: who is this dick? A conceptual male artist?

The entire male gender? Or perhaps it belongs to Clement Greenberg: after all, Lozano seems to play with – and make worldly – all the modernist modes that the influential New York critic traced and wrote about, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art, winding up with post-painterly abstraction.

Elsewhere, the Tools paintings (1962–64) explode with vigorous brushstrokes, and become progressively more abstract until it is difficult to recognise the syncretism of bodies and tools that Lozano is apparently driving at.

Anthropomorphised bolts, screws and (maybe)

wrenches are marked by an eroticism situated between the tendency to reveal everything and the inclination to fade it into something else.

Abstraction is finally achieved in works from the All verbs series (1964–65), such as Clamp, Crook and Swap: monumental and minimalist paintings, where she reached pure action made by pure material, using straight brushstrokes and geometrical shapes where form and colour merge. Thus Strike, as we’re apprised from the outset, draws attention to the various fractures, twists, ruptures and withdrawals within Lozano’s career, and the artworld that surrounded and propelled them.

In this sense Lozano’s artistic practice runs directly parallel to her life, linked by the same tendency to progressively subtract, to lighten the load, before completely fading and disappearing. This becomes more and more clear when reading Lozano’s doubts around her search for a new knowledge system and way of learning in Notebook 8 (1970) – placed as the exhibition’s afterword – where she’s again looking for a fresh start. What the exhibition makes clear is not only her art’s protean nature, but how it mirrored a life angled towards self-annihilation. Lozano progressively changed her own forename from Lenore to Lee to just E; she finally elected to be buried, in 1999, under an unmarked tombstone.

Mariacarla Molè

Strike, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

Courtesy Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin

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No title, c. 1962–63, oil on wood, 38 × 34 × 2 cm. © The estate of Lee Lozano. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

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Masaya Chiba Sideward Exhibition Shugo Arts, Tokyo 18 March – 8 April Lopsided, hunched and bent-over-backwards are just some of the ways in which visitors to Masaya Chiba’s exhibition of paintings must view the works. There’s no option except to look a bit silly while navigating the two rooms where ten pairs of canvases (painted in portrait) and two individual paintings are variously positioned on the floor, high up on walls (both upright and sideways), on the ceiling and occasionally split across all three, resulting in a sort of pirouetting contortion of the body through the exhibition space.

In this series of works (all 2023), a Heath Robinson-like playfulness emerges from the paintings, where elongated abstract forms of balancing sticks of wood and wobbly hoops are arranged on tabletops and against vibrant backdrops. These contraptions – structures that look a bit like they might make things happen, but probably don’t – are presented as one half of each pair. Each has another half: a canvas of the same size (these are all painted pastel yellow), featuring cutout holes into which fit tinier canvases, each displaying a delicate

painting of a section from the corresponding contraption in the paired work, and around which Chiba has added seemingly random and disassociated doodles of faces, boats, hearts or abstract marks, more-intricate black-and-white paintings of figures (ghosts, a kitten, a husband and wife) and the occasional object, like a bottle of painkillers or Noh theatre masks, stuck onto the surface of the canvas.

The works’ titles (which refer to both halves of each pair) don’t give way to easy interpretation either, and instead add to a sensation of not knowing what the heck is going on. In Covid Morning/Drawing with Bell Crickets/Ibuprofen in Los Angeles, for example, a painting of a spindlylooking structure that looks a bit like a bead maze set against a blue backdrop is paired with a crudely painted face, a bug, an ‘X’, a ‘?’ and the aforementioned bottle of painkillers stuck to the top left corner of the frame. The two individual works, titled Green Room and Yellow Room, are paintings of Noh theatre masks – an angry male and a shocked female, respectively – onto which

Covid Morning / Drawing with Bell Crickets / Ibuprofen in Los Angeles, 2023, oil, panel, Japanese paper, ink, collage on canvas, set of two, 108 × 90 cm (each). Courtesy the artist

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the actual theatre masks have been stuck, sculpted nose-to-painted nose, so that in order to see both faces, visitors have to peer at the works from the side. A more obvious reference, perhaps, to the theatricality of the exhibition as a whole.

Among these seemingly disparate images, Chiba has one more trick up his sleeve: attached to some of the tantalisingly dynamic canvases are miniscule, easy-to-miss qr code stickers that can be scanned with a smartphone, which lead to short, oblique roughly two-minute videos. Story of Things/Drawing with Diagonal Lines – a swirling, looping mechanism on one canvas paired with simple wavy lines on the other – leads to a video in which a disembodied voice warbles a song in Japanese while a robotic figure constructed from wood, cardboard and fabric wanders through a patch of shrubs and trees; a single human hand protruding from the top of the robot makes talking gestures. Sideward Exhibition is an exercise in embracing the unexpected – and a reminder that it can occasionally be fun to be thrown out of kilter. Fi Churchman

Candice Breitz Whiteface Goodman Gallery, Cape Town 9 March – 22 April Candice Breitz’s new videowork Whiteface takes the form of a series of found sound-clips to which Breitz lip-syncs while dressed in a white shirt and various blonde wigs. The lip-syncing, inevitably summoning the performativity of TikTok, is to sources that range from American comedian Bill Maher and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson to homemade social-media clips. They encompass a variety of statements on whiteness, including “It’s not a privilege to be white”.

These range from alt-right ideological utterances to what Breitz (who is white), at the opening’s public interview, referred to as the pronouncements of “good whites” – those who believe they mean well, but still perpetuate racism.

Whiteface plays on the infamous theatrical caricature of ‘blackface’ of course. But it also references one of Breitz’s earliest works, Ghost

Series (1994–96), in which she ‘whited out’ (or ‘Tippexed’) the faces and bodies of Black South African women found on postcards, dressed in tribal outfits. Ghost Series was motivated by the apartheid-era removal of the Black female body in the South African social landscape. Breitz is now, in a sense, coming full circle. She is painting the ‘whitefaced’ presence into the picture: that is, far from the speechless nonpresence of ghosts, we have the white, ingrained, ideological presence personified or ‘whited in’.

As Breitz herself suggested in her interview at the show’s opening, the continual repetition of white ideology, in mainstream and social media, has reinforced the supposed ‘truth’ of the type of statements she is lip-syncing. Breitz’s idea here is not unlike the Aristotelian notion

that we learn social behaviour through acts of habituation and mimicry. The point that there is something wrong in the social media habituation is, slightly paradoxically, brought home

by Breitz herself habitually repeating while in ‘whiteface’ lines like: “We can’t have an opinion, we can’t say anything anymore” and “I’m not a racist, some of my best friends are Black”.

Embedded in the work are the tropes of the ‘whiteface’ of the mime and the ‘blackface’ mockery of white men claiming to mimic Black minstrels. Breitz seems to be asking us just what kind of ‘truth’ or indoctrination is created by our performativity on social media. That is, does this performativity hold a mirror up to nature, or does it simply ingrain behaviour?

Like much of Breitz’s work, Whiteface is suffused with a dramatic irony. Matthew Blackman

Whiteface (still), 2022, two-channel video installation, colour, 35 min 23 sec (loop). Courtesy the artist

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Exposé-es Palais de Tokyo, Paris 17 February – 15 May Translating a book into an exhibition is no easy task, particularly a book as rich and nuanced as Elisabeth Lebovici’s art historymemoir hybrid Ce que le sida m’a fait (What aids Did To Me, 2017). All in all, the curator François Piron did a decent job: much like the book that inspired it, Exposé·es at the Palais de Tokyo is less interested in art about aids than in what aids does to art. And while the show features many of the usual suspects – David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman and Nan Goldin, to name but a few – they are innovatively contextualised through rarely seen works and unexpected conversations.

From the gallery’s entrance, a yellow banner with red capitalised lettering by American artist Gregg Bordowitz sets the tone: ‘La crise du sida ne fait que commencer’, it reads (the English translation – ‘The aids crisis is still beginning’ – appears at the back). As a queer Jew and keen reader of critical theory, Bordowitz challenges the notion of linear progress in favour of what Walter Benjamin calls ‘Messianic time’ – a radical engagement with history through the present. This message announces the exhibition’s intention to trouble the Western assumption that aids is an isolated epidemic in the past.

Drawing on this notion, the exhibition orchestrates a number of thoughtful conversations between artists – dead and alive – across generations, media and territories. In homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, British artist Jesse Darling has filled two large glass boxes with the late Cuban-American artists’ leftover works, including bead curtains, broken lightbulbs and hundreds of cellophane candy wrappers.

In another room, Canadian artist and writer Moyra Davey shows a series of recent black-andwhite photographs alongside copies of a diary she kept while visiting her son in hospital while he recovered from an accident. Titled Visitor

Jesse Darling, studio view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 30 November 2022. Photo: Antoine Aphesbero.

Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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(2022), the works are inspired by the photographs of the late French artist and novelist Hervé Guibert – remembered for his playful and candid accounts of living with the virus during the late 1980s – some of which, including self-portraits, are shown on the opposite wall.

In Davey’s photographs, her son – who must be about the age Guibert was when he took his photographs – is seen mimicking some of the latter’s poses, choreographing an intricate dialogue across time.

Video too is front and centre. Rightfully so, given that the emergence of aids coincided with the availability of the camcorder and editing technology that became central to counterrepresentation strategies. Illustrative of this turn is Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of aids (1986), a short video by the late lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose postmodernist

aesthetics influenced video activists such as diva tv and Bordowitz. Made at the height of misinformation about the epidemic, the film juxtaposes newspaper headlines such as ‘Mosquitoes Can Spread aids’ with shots of Brent Nicholson Earle’s highly mediatised 16,000km run to promote sexual education.

In the same room, a series of short experimental films by the late magistrate-turned-writer Guillaume Dustan – an advocate of bareback sex in early 2000s France – play in a loop on a television set. While they’re not particularly interesting in and of themselves – mostly consisting of shaky, uninterrupted shots of Dustan’s everyday life – these strange videos show a little-known aspect of the writer’s practice. In another room, a deeply moving yet entertaining autobiographical film by Lionel Soukaz – a member of the 1970s Front

Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire – documents the end of his partner’s life. Titled rv, mon ami (1994), it forms part of the filmmaker’s expansive archival project Journal Annales (1991–2001) that he recently donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The downside of having so many videos, unfortunately, is that they make a lot of noise. And while the notion of ‘sonic infection’ certainly suits the theme of the show, all that cacophony leaves little room for quiet introspection.

Exposé·es is an ambitious exhibition which, in the wake of a new and ever-evolving global pandemic, shows that a virus transcends history.

However, the beauty of the book it claims to celebrate lies in Lebovici’s unapologetically personal voice. It is a shame that this subjective approach was abandoned in favour of a more institutional outlook. Benoît Loiseau

Hervé Guibert, Sienne, 1979, gelatin silver print, 15 × 22 cm. Courtesy Christine Guibert and Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

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David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) Lightroom, London 22 February – 1 October David Hockney likes looking, as he intones over his new 360-degree largescale film installation, “and there are a lot of different ways to look at things”. The 50-minute loop of vivid colour and sound is projected across all four walls (plus the grey carpeted floor) of Lightroom, a joint venture between a production house and a theatre company, self-described as ‘a new home for spectacular artist-led shows’. In his gravelly Yorkshire twang, Hockney tells of his fascination with new media. His famed iPad paintings of bucolic English landscapes are animated in the process of being drawn line by line, sped-up exponentially to erase any hint of hesitation or self-doubt and shown onscreen in portentous, gold-painted frames.

The voiceover, intimately spoken by Hockney in the first person, is in fact penned by a film and tv writer. The film, which presents him as an artist constantly attempting to capture the reality of how we see the world, arcs from his own early experiments and gripes with photography (“we see psychologically, but cameras see geometrically”), to 3d scanning and multicamera

video. He grapples with the theory of linear perspective, arguing, “If our eyes move, there is not just one perspective; there are thousands of perspectives. You are inside it, not outside it.”

It is just one of many not-so-subtle nods to the immersive experience offered by Lightroom’s audiovisual capabilities.

Hockney’s narration returns again and again to the boundaries of artmaking (and how he has consistently expanded them), and to the plurality of ways in which we each experience the world, a subject not without irony given the singular focus on his own point of view throughout.

The film zips through Hockney’s early days in Los Angeles, including his fascination with its perfectly turquoise pools, to Fantasia-esque animations of his luscious set designs for opera, flanked by hammy digital renderings of red velvet curtains, taking not so much a chronological as a scattergun approach to the highlights of his career.

Images of digital paintings and photographs multiply endlessly into smaller gridded tiles that wrap around the room, in a recurring visual

Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), 2023 (installation view).

Photo: Justin Sutcliffe. Courtesy Lightroom, London

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motif intended to conjure the awe-inspiring range of Hockney’s vision, but which leaves the viewer straining to focus on any one of them at all. Set to a prescriptively emotive score by Nico Muhly, all swelling strings and tinkling piano (bar a bizarre sequence of Hockney driving in the la mountains to Wagner’s Entry of the Gods into Valhalla), mixed with the cartoonish sound of a pencil scratching over paper, the effect is undeniably theatrical.

Yet for all its playful animations and behind-the-scenes photographs, what Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) fails to achieve is a lasting sense of the work’s wider cultural impact. Hockney’s connection to queer culture is erased for this familyfriendly affair, while his team of assistants is not once mentioned in favour of the tired auteur narrative. By insisting that he and his work are shown ‘bigger and closer’, it is impossible to find any sense of perspective, leaving one wishing for the relief that might ultimately be found in moving further away.

Louise Benson

Poppy Jones The Artist Room, London 24 March – 22 April In British artist Poppy Jones’s photorealist composition Sans Soleil (all works 2023), an immaculate wineglass stands upon a table. The sepia tinge and uneven tones recall a nineteenthcentury calotype. Looming behind is the glass’s mottled shadow, making the pristine glass look rather blemished or injured in its mirror image.

The eerie and paradoxical composition – which contains echoes in its staging of Henri Magritte’s 1937 painting of a mirrored man Not to Be Reproduced – disrupts the accuracy of the picture’s cosy nostalgia. The work’s title (literally meaning ‘without sun’) could be a reference to Chris Marker’s eponymous 1983 essay-film, which questions the possibility of memorising, narrating and documenting reality. Such a hesitance or distrust lurks behind Jones’s wistful still lifes.

Walking into the gallery space, one first encounters the seductive clarity of a photographed

Conch – its titular subject reminiscent of surrealist photographer Dora Maar’s famous shell-hand, which makes one wonder what is hidden within. A tension between display and invisibility persists in Jones’s works. In Tulips (Profile) the indigo silhouette of the flowers melts into another shadow on the wall. Like a reversed cyanotype, the photograph reveals the lights blocked by the plant and allows only a vague contour of its likeness. A Book (The Erasers) shows the blank sun-dappled pages of a volume lying open on a table, simultaneously disclosing its interior and refusing the possibility of reading. The treatment is at once honest and futile, as if caught somewhere between a fleeting memory and a foggy dream, its content faded.

Jones develops her photographs through a lithographic process onto fabric, which are

then painted and framed in thick aluminium.

The resulting ‘objects’, as she calls them, combine photographic images with complex haptic qualities, the evident materiality of Jones’s still lifes frustrating any desire for documentary transparency. In Day’s Close, which depicts a section of wrinkled puffer jacket, the threads of the silken canvas add to the jacket’s illusionism, making the image inseparable from the fabric surface (as the most ‘wrinkled’ image, its canvas is paradoxically the most tightly stretched). In other compositions, the base suede’s blotchy stains, finger marks and dust-grabbing textures frequently vie with the painted images applied on top.

In their hazy tactility, these paintings give the nostalgic snaps an inviting palpability, turning obscure images into objects of fetishistic allure. Yuwen Jiang

Day’s Close, 2023, oil and watercolour on dyed silk, soldered aluminium frame, 26 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Michael E. Smith Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 24 March – 18 June Considering the waves of industrial strikeaction that have swept the uk during early 2023, it seems only a matter of time before gallery technicians down tools and join the picket line. Or so you might think when entering Michael E. Smith’s solo show, which appears to have been left half-installed: the lights are switched off, window shutters are closed, the doors of a service lift have been left open and the space looks virtually empty, save for a modest smattering of sculptural collages made from simple reconfigurations of dilapidated furniture, obsolete tech and other discarded objects ostensibly salvaged from skips or found on roadsides. This stringent economy of means is standard fare for Smith, whose slight and understated works are typically improvised in situ, responding to the architectural specificities of the gallery, which itself becomes an integral sculptural ingredient via the American artist’s simple yet strangely disquieting interventions.

In the gloom of the first room, a grubby flatscreen television lies facedown on the floor, where it is accompanied by a large flat pebble, its puddlelike shape suggestive of an unpleasant liquid oozing from the screen. Nearby, continuing the mood of entropy and decay, a manky teal armchair is transformed by the macabre addition of a diorama featuring a cluster of five standing taxidermied ducks

stuck to the reverse of its backrest. In the next, airier, double-height gallery, a first-aid cabinet high above our heads is deployed to pin a shaggy animal pelt to the wall. The rest of the large space is left bare apart from the rectangular forms of a vhs recorder and dvd player, wall-mounted side by side in the show’s only titled work – bugs (all works 2023) – perhaps a comment on technological obsolescence; or maybe a nod to covert surveillance, or a wry allusion to the aseptic language of Minimalism.

In Smith’s speculative world of free-associative thinking, where all such readings are valid and encouraged, these austere black shapes might even be a sinister pair of eyes staring at us ominously.

Although Smith has developed an idiosyncratic approach to sculpture-making, art-historical reference points remain conspicuous – assemblage, conceptualism, Postminimalism, institutional critique, even Surrealism – with some works seeming to be in dialogue with specific artists. It’s hard, for instance, not to think of Jeff Koons’s Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) when looking at Smith’s untitled pair of basketballs, which appear to float together on a staircase. If Koons’s pristine specimens allude to the dream of achieving fame and fortune through sport – unattainable for all but an elite few – Smith’s humble, well-worn objects offer an antithesis,

Untitled, 2023, basketballs, stairs, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist; Modern Art, London; kow, Berlin; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

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suffused with a sense of pathos and loss rather than aspiration.

In the final room is a sculpture comprising two circular kitchen tables, one upturned on top of the other and crowned with a plastic milk bottle filled with red leds that glow like embers in the darkened space. Like all the works in this show, it exudes an uncanny domesticity, its constituent parts appearing as relics charged with a history of human use and touch, but also imbued by something less tangible that verges on the talismanic or ritualistic. This tension, between the mundane and the fantastical, is where Smith’s works find their potency.

The omission of wall texts and exhibition labels, along with the sparseness of Smith’s installation, invites a consideration of what might have been removed as much as it does that which remains. Outside the galleries, an easily missed videowork installed behind the reception desk initially appears to be a cctv feed from the museum’s stores. In fact, the grainy, looped footage shows a room in a boarding kennel, in which a resting canine rises briefly from its blankets before bedding down again, perpetually waiting for the return of its master. As with Smith’s off-kilter assemblages and environmental tweaks – all of which operate on a distinctly human scale – it is similarly haunted by the spectre of bodily absence. David Trigg

Untitled, 2023, tables, milk jug, leds, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist; Modern Art, London; kow, Berlin; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

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lakbayan: Voices of Resistance from the Philippines Savvy Contemporary, Berlin 19 March – 9 April Lakbayan – the Tagalog word for ‘journey’, which has, in turn, come to define a form of mobilisation in which people from the peripheries, both geographically and ideologically, march to the capital to voice their concerns and demands – is an archive show spanning almost half a century of sonic resistance in the Philippines. On ‘display’, attempting to represent revolutionary protest music of the Philippines from the 1970s to the present, are 18 featured songs, a documentary, various forms of archival material and two ‘sharing stations’, at which attendees can record their own aural histories. It’s curated by Dang a Dang Radio (which takes its name from the Ilocano word dangadang, for struggle), which formed towards the end of Rodrigo Duterte’s

presidential term (2016–22) as a collective, research platform and online radio programme.

Despite lakbayan’s thunderous tunes, revolutionary theme and evident energy, it struggles to communicate its contemporary significance and qualify the ‘solidarity’ its exhibition text claims to seek. lakbayan succeeds in contextualising the origins of the music collection that dates to the dictatorial era of Ferdinand Marcos Sr (1965–86).

We get some sense of the music’s revolutionary power in the past: Filipino and English pages from the songbook of the first known vinyl of Filipino protest music, Bangon! Arise! (1976), are affixed to two temporary pink walls. Here, the viewer can read essays on ‘The Philippine

lakbayan: Voices of Resistance from the Philippines, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Marvin Systermans.

Courtesy Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

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Struggle for Independence and Democracy: A Few Historical Notes’ and ‘To Struggle and Sing: The Role of Revolutionary Songs’ that further historically ground the exhibition. Each song page includes musical notation, Filipino lyrics, an English translation and additional context. Immediately behind these walls is a projection of Jose Luis Clemente and Nil Buan’s 1984 documentary Daluyong (Waves), which depicts the lakbayan known as Lakad ng Bayan para sa Kalayaan (People’s Walk for Freedom) that spanned 84km, from Southern Laguna to Manila.

Towards the end of the film, a live recording of Jess Santiago’s beloved Martsa ng Bayan (March of the People, 1981) overlays clips of people marching. This noise, coupled with music from

three listening stations that carry through the space, enforce the sense that revolution is loud.

The listening stations, though, are the exhibition’s main feature. They allow visitors to sit within a semicurtained space while music – ranging from marching anthems to indigenous and folk tunes, conceptual tracks, blues, rock and rap – in Filipino languages plays from speakers above. For those who do not understand the languages at play, there is a song book with original lyrics and English translations; but if you don’t speak English, you may struggle.

Despite its claim of calling ‘for solidarity’, there’s no clear sense of the exhibition making itself accessible to anyone who is not Filipino, given the extent to which it relies on knowledge that many visitors won’t have.

Take, for example, the pink-painted walls.

The pink is a clear, though unacknowledged, homage to the 2022 Liberal Party presidential candidate Leni Robredo, whose campaign colour

was pink. She ultimately lost to Ferdinand Marcos Jr, but the colour pink endures as a symbol for the left. Three contemporary digital artworks by artist Federico ‘boyD’ Dominguez are also displayed here: two black-and-white digital prints on lightboxes, titled Sandugo (One blood, 2016) and Pangiyaki, I Matoy (A time to fight till death, 2017), show a group of diverse people who represent various sectors in the Philippines as they protest; then a large colourful digital projection on the back wall titled Dayaw (Praise, 2009), which features diverse Filipinos singing, marching and playing instruments with banners waving behind them. It’s not quite clear what these works, which come from a distinct aesthetic tradition of social realism, add to the archival material, however. A central column, lined with rows of over 100 cassettes and cds dating from 1982 to 2022, gives a much better sense of what protest visuals look like and how they have (or haven’t) changed over time.

Ultimately, however, the visitor is left with the enduring question of why this exhibition is taking place in Berlin. In their exhibition text, Dang a Dang Radio cite the necessity of preserving dissenting archival material from the Marcos Sr era, because the former president’s son – the current president – has successfully revised perceptions of his parents’ violent period. But they fail to make clear the wider, and current, contexts that might make the exhibition more resonant to those unfamiliar with its intricacies. Historically, the aural platform has been both specifically influential with the Philippines and a particular target for government repression: more radio journalists have been killed than journalists operating in any other medium. The works on display also barely acknowledge that activists and artists are being targeted for their dissent today. The volume can be raised, but is it enough to make you listen? Marv Recinto

Federico ‘boyD’ Dominguez, Dayaw, 2009.

Courtesy the artist

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The Accursed Share Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 17 March – 27 May Entering the Talbot Rice Gallery, the viewer finds an arrangement of mortar shells engraved with floral patterns, filled with plants from artist Sammy Baloji’s home country, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. The shells are arranged on steps mimicking those of a town hall in France (which the artist found depicted on a postcard in a thrift store, covered with huge First World War shell casings of similar style). Copper extracted from what was then the Belgian Congo (home to the world’s second-largest copper reserves) was vital to the construction of munitions such as these, and thus to the Allied war effort in both world wars. Extraction of copper by Western and Chinese companies in the drc continues to

the present day. This untitled work by Baloji, made between 2018 and 2023, stands out in The Accursed Share, a group show named after philosopher Georges Bataille’s 1949 book (the ‘accursed share’ is the portion of capital in any economy that must be channelled into cathartic, nonfunctional expenditure if it is not to be released through violence).

Bataille’s phrase is an enticing hook, but this is primarily a show about counterposed systems of debt in the contemporary world (albeit the curatorial thread becomes frayed at points): those by which Western Europe has placed other parts of the world in economic dependency and the moral debt owed to the populations swindled in this manner. Baloji’s

Sammy Baloji, Untitled (detail), 2018–2023, 50 copper gun shells, soil, plants, dimensions variable. Photo: Sally Jubb.

Courtesy Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh

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installation, for example, speaks to the implicit threat of violence by which foreign economic systems were imposed in colonies such as the Congo Free State. The conversion of martial relics into quirky ornaments – they are sold online as plant pots with flowery friezes already added – partly suggests the ways in which goods, materials and capital extracted during the era of colonial plunder continue to circulate in contemporary global marketplaces, often in ways that are hard to trace back to these points of origin.

On the opposite walls, Cian Dayrit’s textile hangings take on the connotations of protest banners and regional folk art, offering a more frontal encounter with postimperial economics.

Often working in collaboration with rural communities in his native Philippines, the artist presents colourful text-and-image-led cartography and diagrams, like his Valley of Dispossession (2021), an embroidered map of Central Luzon showing areas that include ‘military presence’, ‘aggressive development projects’ and ‘mining tenements’. Works like this one – emblazoned with the phrase ‘Agrarian Revolution is Justice!’

– document peasant-led protest against American occupation, Chinese military aggression and a system of modern feudal-style agriculture that sees much of the country’s rural labour taking place on land controlled by foreign corporations.

Completing a trio of contributions that dig beneath the surface of contemporary global wealth disparity, unearthing its economic and social origins, Lubaina Himid brings the scale and spectacle of her 2004 installation Naming the Money to the grand Georgian Gallery

(formerly part of a nineteenth-century naturalhistory museum). In these neoclassical environs, a gathering of lifesize figures, in colourful Renaissance and Baroque clothing, stands in for generations of forced emigrants from Africa, put to work as entertainers or servants (all forms of slavery, of exploitation as nameless chattel in the context of a wider process of imperial plunder). A musical soundtrack is accompanied by snippets of speech from a hidden speaker, haikulike constructions that give each character back their name: “My name is Mwambia. They call me Dan. I used to play on hilltops. Now I play in ballrooms. But I have my songs.”

It’s not all doom-mongering, however; other works present glimpses of possible futures free from the pathologies of debt. Marwa Arsanios’s speculation on the development of an agricultural commons in contemporary Lebanon – in her film Who Is Afraid of Ideology?

Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022) – complements the

terra0 group’s speculative systems for sustainable ai forest management and Goldin+Senneby’s excavation of the deep history of a plot of land (The Plot (Utopia Bloemen), 2018). The latter includes charcoal wall-paintings of primordial forests and a painter’s box easel containing diagrams and information.

The theme of debt is strained to snapping point at times. It’s not clear what Goldin+Senneby’s work adds to that topic, for example. But Hana Miletić’s gestures of postcapitalist care, handwoven bandages that ‘stitch up’ random sections of wall throughout the show, offer a neat throughline. The final word, however, must go to Hanna von Goeler’s delicate Migration series (2015–23), a collection of defunct banknotes adorned with the artist’s pictures of migratory birds, denizens of an older system of global exchange that might just outlast the chaos of the capitalist era.

Greg Thomas

Hanna von Goeler, Syrian Serin, Serinus syriacus, 2015, watercolour and gouache on defunct Greek paper currency, from Migration series, 2016–23.

Photo: Sally Jubb. Courtesy Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh

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Milk Wellcome Collection, London 30 March – 10 September The farming of cow’s milk for human consumption, we are told at the outset of this wide-ranging survey comprising art, archival materials and a fairly high-handed interpretational tone, was commercialised in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century before being imposed, in the manner of colonialism, on the rest of the world. (Around two thirds of humanity, mostly nonwhite, are lactose-intolerant.)

And while the exhibition includes the odd artefact providing evidence of ancient dairy consumption (for example a Roman terracotta model of a mule laden with cheeses), the exhibition situates itself within contemporary cultural debates.

Various nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertisements designed to demonstrate improved hygiene in milk production, with

language emphasising the ‘purity’ and ‘cleanliness’ of the end product, feature customers as white as the drink itself and are presented here as race-based dog whistles. In an American dairy producer’s poster from the 1950s – featuring an affluent white Norman Rockwell-style family guzzling the stuff, and tagged with the line, ‘Every member of our family drinks milk’ – the curators note both the apparent aspiration of the image and the exclusionary tone of its slogan.

Nor is it just us consumerism under the cosh; the British welfare state gets it too. A photograph of children protesting then-Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher’s planned cuts to free school milk in 1971, a scheme introduced by the Clement Attlee government to improve children’s health in the postwar years, is piously captioned with the claim that many of those students actually

‘resented being forced to drink milk when they did not like it or it made them ill’ (full disclosure: I was class milk monitor aged eight).

The mazelike exhibition moves on to themes of human milk, and here the polemic eases. Debates over breastmilk versus formula are presented with nuance: a 1990s-era handprinted English-language poster decrying Nestle’s aggressive marketing of baby formula in developing countries is shown alongside British artists Jen Conway and Jessy Young’s 2019 Milk Report project, a booklet detailing the 720 hours Young spent breastfeeding her child. Once 720 copies of the artists’ publication were sold, she was compensated (assuming national minimum wage) for that labour. Shame such a juxtaposition, favouring debate over lecture, was missing elsewhere. Oliver Basciano

Poster promoting milk consumption in the uk, designed by James Fitton and printed by the Ministry of Food, 1945–51, 85 × 58 cm.

Collection Imperial War Museum, London. Courtesy Wellcome Collection, London

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Finn Reinbothe more sad love songs (on a grey background) Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen 27 January – 18 March We all have certain ideas, often quite entrenched ones, about which worldly objects are precious and which aren’t. And plenty of artworks produced during the past century have attempted to change those ideas; some have even succeeded.

Today, any kind of found scrap can be read as sculpture, and yet, despite that, used and stained dishcloths hung on hooks as if by a sink actually do come off as relatively lowkey pieces of homeware. On entering Finn Reinbothe’s confidently scruffy exhibition – in the fanciest, most beige part of central Copenhagen – such dishcloths immediately leap out at you; they are eyecatching in their lowliness, but so is an unmissable sense of preciousness. These worn-out kitchen essentials hang beside large, framelike rectangles of taut string pinned to the wall, but the result doesn’t feel like you’re looking at conceptual absence, it feels like looking at emotional saturation: occasionally, little pieces of jewellery pierce the pieces of fabric, and

come off as traces of missing loved ones. Campy kids’ earrings and charms, possibly fake medals, serve as hints at decoration that the imageless frames are lacking.

A trashed stuffed toy rabbit hanging from the ceiling (Rabbit music (Nike), all works 2022) adds to the strong vibe of a skewed domestic scene. It’s the type of generic teddy where pulling a string makes it play rusty lullabies, pointing towards missing infants; but even when such traces of horror are unambiguous, the atmosphere oozing from the sexagenarian Danish artist’s consciously mundane works seems primarily affectionate. For several decades, Reinbothe’s practice has involved bland found objects galore, but in this show the normcore stuff comprising his pieces also features something that seems to have been owned, probably treasured – the dirty dishcloths are stained significantly with paint, the jewellery might have belonged to children or grandchildren. See, for

example, the mobile Untitled (Sad song), where a perforated sheet of leftover metal is subtly embellished with pearls and cheap-looking gold, and feels transformed into a quiet yet pristinely bleak memorial. In other words: nostalgia is real here, but not in a performative way and not in the shape of ironic, millennium-era aesthetics.

Over and over, more sad love songs walks a fine line with impressive precision: it implies longing but never comes off as sentimental, is opaque but not pretentious, fun but not overtly ironic, shabby but not gestureless. Every juxtaposing decision, even the most imperceptible, has clearly been taken with attentive, sculpture-minded eyes – eyes that seem to conceive art in general as a result of seeing rather than a mode of producing.

And such eyes, Reinbothe’s art suggests, are probably always capable of looking at the world with a particular tenderness, indifferent to material value. Nanna Friis

more sad love songs (on a grey background), 2023 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen

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Bohemia: History of an Idea, 1950–2000 Kunsthalle Praha, Prague 23 March – 16 October Spread across two floors, this exhibition blends art with documentary, fashion and archival photography to tell a story about ‘Bohemianism’.

And though it includes one small subsection on Prague, the show’s la-based curator, Russell Ferguson, isn’t referring to the citizens of the real Bohemia (ie the Czech people), but rather to an imaginary cosmopolitan, glitzily destitute community of postwar artists, writers, musicians and hangers-on living in various cities. Some of the scenes we see here (Paris, New York, London) are known to us; others (Tehran, Prague, Zagreb) much less so. This creates a split between Western, capitalist milieus publicly remembered for their indefinable air of ‘cool’ and those with less symbolic power or, effectively, cultural capital. This deficit of historical awareness cannot help but be reflected in how the exhibition is organised: aching chic (the basement) separated from what happens decades later in peripheral places (the first floor).

The basement gives us plenty of images of things we intuitively feel we know something about already: there’s chain-smoking ennui in 1950s Paris, with photographs of doe-eyed young lovers from Ed van der Elsken’s series Een Liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Love on the Left Bank, 1950–54). There’s jive talking in early 1960s New York with images of Willem de Kooning by Rudy Burckhardt, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac by Fred W. McDarrah. There’s groovy free love in ‘Swinging London’ with David Bailey’s images of an angelically unwrinkled Mick Jagger (1964),

the moody threat of gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray (1965) and the level gaze of Penelope Tree (1967) during a party.

We see all this end in two images titled Altamont (1969) by Bill Owens, the rock festival that notoriously concluded in multiple deaths, and be reborn in the almost apocalyptic conditions of New York City a decade later: the battered, crumbling Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978 (1978) by Thomas Struth, the glowering tenement buildings against a darkening flamelicked sky in Martin Wong’s painting Sweet Oblivion (1983) and the bedsit debris, sad lovers, gaunt starers and dreamy smoking trash-punk princess in Trixie on the Cot, New York City (1979) from Nan Goldin’s slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–). It is, however, the fragments from 1980s Tehran, Prague and Zagreb elsewhere on the first floor that compel; even if there’s not enough of this, it opens the possibility that more will be said about these places in the future.

Three drawings by Bijan Saffari – the moustached artist gazing aloof in aviator shades in Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1980), a shirtless man in Untitled (Davood) (1982), a serene sitter in Untitled (Majid Mozaffari) (1976) – offer a window on the secret history of gay life in Tehran just before and after the Iranian Revolution (1979).

Meanwhile, six black-and-white photographs from Libuše Jarcovjáková’s 1980s T-Club series document the raucous fun of Prague’s underground lesbian dive bars, and naked bodies in squalid apartments, during a particularly

Libuše Jarcovjáková, Untitled (T-Club series), c.1980s, b/w photo. © the artist

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grim and sexless period of communism after the 1968 Soviet invasion and the ensuing repressive period of ‘normalisation’.

There’s more nudity, meanwhile, in four photographic stills from provocateur Tomislav Gotovac’s performance Zagreb, volim te! (Zagreb, I love you!, 1981), in which the artist himself – a huge, bald physical presence – storms down the streets with arms aloft, kisses the tarmac, and tries to catch a tram before being arrested by a stern-faced cop. Creeping dawn sheds light on the aftermath of a wild party (bottles, cups, mess, dangling fairy lights) in Wolfgang Tillmans’s photo wake (2001), suggesting Bohemia’s dancing days are done. Perhaps the good times can still roll on, but the wretched influence of gentrification and online commodification means we can’t help but be sceptical that we can find these conditions (big spaces, cheap rent) again.

Bohemia: History of an Idea nevertheless faces two problems: one is that the stylish photographs of bohemians in their natural habitat, which greatly outnumber works of art here, give us a better sense of contemporary art’s prehistory and preconditions than many of the ‘actual’ works. The other concerns the texture of bohemian life: while Ferguson’s expanded bohemia begins to widen our sense of which scenes are worth looking at or understanding, and how geopolitics plays a role in this, those values are only really legible to people who already have an idea of what bohemian life is like, forever on the fringes of romanticised squalor. Max L. Feldman

Bijan Saffari, Untitled (Self-portrait), 1980. © the estate of Bijan Saffari, Paris, and Dastan Gallery, Tehran

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Simone Fattal and Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano Thus waves come in pairs Ocean Space, Venice 22 April – 5 November Catch the ebb and flow of acqua alta, the seasonal high tide in the Venetian lagoon, and you’ll be acutely aware of how fast both Venice is sinking and the sea rising. Water laps at the threshold of San Lorenzo, a deconsecrated church that in 2019 became home to Ocean Space, where tba21 – Academy convenes artists and scientists to consider the effect of climate change on marine ecosystems and that is currently hosting a two-part exhibition comprising a collaborative installation by Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano, and new sculptures by Simone Fattal. The exhibition, curated by Barbara Casavecchia, is the culmination of three years of walks,

talks and research conducted by the artists; yet Thus waves come in pairs is refreshingly free of the technical jargon or dire predictions that often characterise shows about climate change, instead immersing itself in the poetics of art.

The exhibition takes its title from ‘Sea and Fog’, a 2012 poem by Fattal’s late partner, the artist and writer Etel Adnan, who died in 2021 and whose spirit hovers over the works on view.

A pair of gentle, Gumby-like ceramic figures at near-human scale represent Máyya and Ghaylán, mythic lovers from classical Arabic poetry who captained rival fleets of pearling vessels in the Persian Gulf. According to legend,

Simone Fattal, Sempre il mare, uomo libero, amerai!, 2023 (installation view). Photo: gerdastudio.

Courtesy the artist and tba21 – Academy, Venice

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Máyya commands the faster ships until a dragonfly alights on Ghaylán’s shoulder, inspiring him to invent the sail. Fattal has sculpted the form of the insect’s carapace atop Ghaylán’s broad, headless torso. Another male figure, glazed pale yellow, has been placed in the high, empty niche of the church’s baroque altar; like its counterparts, it seems to predate the church, and even the city, around it. Fattal’s archaic visions nod to the Muslim world with which the city-state of Venice was often at war, aptly sited here atop what was the final burial place of that most famous Venetian seafarer, Marco Polo.

Visitors to Fattal’s presentation first pass through Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas (all works 2023), a luminous installation by Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano, cocommissioned

by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Forty-two fish-shaped instruments, fashioned from aluminium, will be played by an ensemble of two dozen musicians throughout the run of the show. When I previewed the work, I pulled paper strips cut in the shape of minnows through two small music boxes, making them play; another music box has been embedded in the metallic body of a stingray, whose fins can be flapped, amplifying its sound. A school of silvery trumpet-fish curl into horns, while a large flat creature resembling a halibut holds a hurdygurdy in its belly. A pair of fish on high wheeledpoles play, when pushed, the opposing notes of Ay mi pescadito deja de llorar (Ye-ho little fish,

don’t cry), a lullaby Urbano told me his grandmother sang to him as a child. Originally performed in English by Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous, a 1937 coming-of-age film about a Portuguese fishing vessel in the North Atlantic, it became a popular song of Republican liberation during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39): ‘You go to fish school and can learn from a book / How not to get caught on the fisherman’s hook. / Watch out, little fish, we’re out after you, / But you can escape away deep in the blue’. It’s nearly impossible to play both fish in perfect synchrony, a playful way to allude, perhaps, to the anthropogenic fact that the world’s ecosystems are now in a constant state of disequilibrium. Nonetheless, the slim chance that the song might eventually ring through this former Benedictine monastery, once famous for its liturgical music, points to the promise

of an ‘uprising’ – against climate change or other manmade atrocities – indicated by the work’s title.

At various times of day, light filters through the clerestory windows of San Lorenzo and strikes the aluminium fish, which glitter like the canal water just outside the door – an effect as strikingly evanescent as the music they produce.

In this sense, Halilaj and Urbano’s sculptures aim, sometimes successfully, to appear as alive as the creatures they imitate. The artists, partners in work and life, are the second queer couple whose creativity is celebrated by this show, provocatively situated in a former Catholic sanctuary. There may be little hope for the oceans’ full renewal, but if they are to survive, their future will be different – even queer.

We’ll need art and poetry as much as science to imagine what that will look like. Evan Moffitt

Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano, Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artists; tba21 – Academy, Venice; and Audemars Piguet, Le Brassus

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Julia Maiuri Approach of Another Make Room, Los Angeles 1 April – 6 May Overlapping pairs of manicured hands clutch shiny keys; an open mouth hovers above a heart-shaped locket. These are images laden with drama – yet curiously meaningless. In her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Julia Maiuri uses the visual lexicon of film noir to conjure an unresolved intensity, depicting the genre’s characteristic femme fatale in a series of striking theatrical oil paintings. The resulting images reframe the restrictive norms of their source material, exposing the slippery underpinnings of female representation.

The portrayal of women in noir perpetuated social conventions: femme fatales were punished for their pursuit of individual interests at the expense of male heroes. Excised from context, Maiuri’s paintings both propose and deny this narrative legibility. Caught mid-dissolve, two sets of eyes in Inside Information (2023) capture

the glance of a woman in motion. The painting’s title implies hidden knowledge but forecloses its revelation. In Eclipse (2022) the shadow of a fedoraed man bisects a blonde woman’s face, suggesting an oncoming confrontation. The artist’s subjects appear stuck in time, their plans neither successful nor thwarted.

Maiuri’s technique disrupts the plot-driven formation of noir tropes. Her layered compositions recall the filmic cross-dissolve, which superimposed sequential frames to transition between scenes. But these paintings distort the temporal relationship between separate images, throwing their interpretation into confusion: in Measured (2022) the same woman appears with her eyes open and closed, the order of her actions undetermined. Has she just woken up, or died? A similar opacity inflects Letter to Another Julia (2023), where a sealed envelope

Letter to Another Julia, 2023, oil on canvas, 84 × 41 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles

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faces the viewer, overlaid with the body of the female recipient – or sender. The letter’s contents obscured, and its intended receiver unknown, Maiuri’s careful composition negates the value of the original noir plot. These paintings collapse the narrative structures that created the femme fatale.

‘Noir’, historian Mike Davis writes, ‘insinuated contempt for a depraved business culture while it simultaneously searched for a critical mode of writing or filmmaking within it’. The dual – and duelling – motivations of noir remain present in Maiuri’s work, which balances the constraints of the genre with a novel deconstruction of its images. Removed and restaged, Maiuri’s representations of the femme fatale offer a metonymically rich terrain that emerges from the narrow confines of cinematic history. Claudia Ross

Pilvi Takala On Discomfort cca Goldsmiths, London 19 March – 4 June In a classic Pilvi Takala video, a high-concept situation is arranged and unwinds in excruciating detail. The aesthetic experience involves figuring out the nature of the prank and cringing as unwitting participants fail to cope with someone else shirking social expectations.

Among the works shown in On Discomfort, a survey of Takala’s distinctive oeuvre from 2006 to the present, are The Trainee (2008), in which the artist confuses colleagues by idling aimlessly in an office; Real Snow White (2009), in which security is provoked as she attempts to enter Disneyland Paris in the character’s costume; and The Stroker (2018), which sees Takala irking strangers in a coworking space with excessive friendliness in the name of wellness. All this builds towards creating a captivating counter-iconography of contemporary life – one keenly attuned to the ways communal spaces are shaped by profit and productivity.

Yet in a recent three-channel video installation titled Close Watch (2022), the target is less clear. Much of the format of previous works is present – infiltration as an artistic mode – but the video itself records a workshop held after Takala has completed her stint as a security guard.

Where earlier works revelled in the texture of corporate life – lanyards, emails, copyright infringement, marketing lingo – with a heavy dose of ironic detachment, in this lifeless conversation clichés abound. Security guards defend racist jokes as a form of camaraderie while in an accompanying screen the ceo assures the artist that this is not in line with their values.

An encounter of sorts has taken place but it never gets beneath a surface of stock phrases. Critics who’ve described this work as addressing the role of private security firms are mostly reading the press release, as the actual content hovers in a generalised space of workplace misconduct and takes on the form of a hr training session.

It’s uncomfortable how often security guards feature as the poorly paid representation of unseen, unaccountable corporations in Takala’s work. By contrast, in Workers Forum (2014), an animated text conversation where microtaskers for a ‘fake relationship’ app vent their frustrations regarding managing customer expectations and the emotional demands of playing a persona, we glean a deeper sense of the texture of their lives and the reality of this strange digital phenomenon. The meeting of cringe and spectacle in Takala’s work can be understood as a navigation of attention and empathy. In this setup/payoff format, tension is teased but never fully released; pangs of sympathy breathe life into absurd situations, as does the sheer unpredictability of abandoning social norms.

We watch these narratively dense yet unresolved scenarios, waiting for the next thing to happen and, perhaps, to understand the world anew.

Chris Hayes

Workers Forum (still), 2014, video, 6 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artist

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The National 4: Australian Art Now Various venues, Sydney 24 March – 23 July Now in its fourth iteration, The National 4: Australian Art Now returns to Sydney across four cultural institutions: the Museum of Contemporary Art (mca), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (agnsw), Carriageworks and Campbelltown Arts Centre (cac). A mammoth biennial event, the exhibition showcases 48 new projects and contributions from more than 80 artists in total, selected by Beatrice Gralton, Emily Rolfe, Freja Carmichael, Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley and Jane Devery. Offering a much-needed respite from the current penchant for hyperactive and overcrowded displays, The National 4 is a considered, subtle and profoundly unhurried exhibition. It sits in contrast to the ostentatious Melbourne Now (on view at the National Gallery of Victoria), a survey of contemporary art and design from Victoria

state, that revels in its all-out embrace of oversized spectacle and interactive tech-work.

As with previous versions, The National 4 has no stated overall theme, allowing for resonances and connections to surface of their own accord. This is always a risky move, given that it can often make the multi-institutional exhibition feel unfocused and cumbersome.

Yet The National 4’s restrained mode of curating – one that enables a feeling of spaciousness that, in turn, invites a visitor to sit with works and seek out their relationships – helps to overcome this challenge. That this curatorial approach is more successful than past iterations is a testament to the way this sense of openendedness, rather than a feeling of overt juxtaposition or didacticism, coheres across all four venues.

Brook Andrew, gaban (still), 2022, three-channel video installation, 66 min 24 sec.

Photo: Mim Stirling. Courtesy the artist

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Allison Chhorn, a daughter and granddaughter of Cambodian migrants, has installed a shade house inside the mca, recreating an outdoor structure that the artist built in her rental home in Adelaide so as to cultivate a garden with her family. As a viewer, you can enter Skin Shade Night Day (2022) and walk on its earth floor, all while spectral figures are projected onto the cloth walls and a soundscape of wind and rain fills the gallery. This multisensory experience reimagines Chhorn’s family rituals of growing food and their necessary links to culture, with the shade house acting as a metaphor for protection. Fiji-Australian artist Shivanjani Lal’s Aise Aise Hai (how we remember) (2023), on view at cac, displays a field of 87 plaster- and cement-cast sugarcane stalks, commemorating the 60,000 people who were

transported from India to Fiji to work as indentured labourers. Lal’s great-grandparents were among them, and her work is a visual memorial to ancestral loss and cultural upheaval.

Eugene Carchesio’s intricate geometric matchbox constructions, with their painted cones and grids, sit alongside his luminous miniature watercolours of lightbulbs, birds and leaves at the mca. Maria’s Garden (2021),

by Simryn Gill, presents ink prints of plants that once existed in the garden of a friend – a garden in a rapidly gentrifying suburb that was subsequently demolished by a property developer following Maria’s death. Indeed, many of the works across the exhibition draw on everyday objects or flora and personal histories, to consider how the local and the incidental are implicated in broader social and political narratives.

Part of the strength of The National 4, too, comes from the way it showcases the breadth and specificity of Indigenous cultures and their connection to Country, as well as the

heterogeneity of First Nations voices. This is all the more pronounced, given that Australian political discourse is currently dominated by debates around the upcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament, so often flattened to the binary yes or no voting choice.

At Carriageworks, Yolngu artist Naminapu Maymuru-White depicts Milngiyawuy – the River of Stars, also known as the Milky Way – in a series of soaring black, grey and white ochre paintings on bark titled Milngiyawuy – Celestial River (2021). Thea Anamara Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist, turns intimate family photographs into paintings at agnsw, while the Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association Artists’ yoyi (2020) occupies the entire ground floor gallery at the mca. Celebrating Tiwi culture, the art collective’s four-channel work depicts 30 artists performing a solo ceremonial dance, spurred on by clapping and song that occurs off-camera. As a viewer, you rotate to a different screen with each new performance, experiencing the dancers’ rhythm and energy in the round.

As its name suggests, The National could easily morph into an argument for a distinctive kind of ‘Australian’ contemporary art practice.

But such an approach would be at odds with the artworks themselves, given that many are concerned with the processes of colonisation, migration, ecological collapse or First Nation sovereignty – concepts that wish to disrupt coherent understandings of Australia, both as a nation and as a marker of identity. Considered in this way, the lack of an overt theme or focus for The National becomes an opportunity rather than a hindrance. In presenting art being made in Australia today, as opposed to a definitive kind of Australian art, The National 4 proposes alternative modes of thinking about the local, the communal, the diasporic and the region of the Pacific. It champions a kind of artmaking that loosens the primacy of the nation-state, instead imagining new ways of worldmaking that are grounded in intergenerational conversations, community and respect for Country, rather than a territorial line. Naomi Riddle

Erika Scott, The Circadian Cul-de-sac, 2023, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley. © and courtesy the artist

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Books Small Worlds

by Caleb Azumah Nelson Penguin Random House, £14.99 (softcover) If you’ve read British-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson’s award-winning debut, Open Water (2021), about a fling between a photographer and a dancer, you might be forgiven for assuming that the twenty-nine-year-old’s second work of fiction is another romance, especially since its first few chapters focus on a love affair set in southeast London. But this, it transpires, is only a fraction of a much larger narrative. It is also about the character’s relationships with the people around him, his love of music and food, and his Ghanaian heritage. It’s a story about finding both one’s identity and one’s place in the world.

Small Worlds begins in and around Peckham in 2010, just as the narrator, Stephen, has left secondary school. Away from friends and family, he is coming to terms with the next stage of his life, and with his feelings for one of his best friends, Adeline. Their attraction makes sense: they have similar upbringings and a penchant for jazz, and both hope to become musicians.

But a number of factors (university, family and other suitors) soon get in the way. The book follows Stephen’s experiences over three consecutive years, jumping between the uk and Ghana both through his parent’s memories and a trip

Stephen takes himself near the end of the book.

Those jumps are further accentuated by the stories his parents tell of growing up and moving countries, and how their relationship blossomed during these processes.

Like Azumah Nelson, the protagonists of both Open Water and Small Worlds are in love with the arts, are Brits of Ghanaian heritage and are navigating a changing London and an environment unwelcoming to black people. While a good writer does not necessarily need to have similar experiences to their main characters, Azumah Nelson’s personal affinity with these makes for an engaging read, as he is able to describe the character’s thoughts, feelings and interactions with a level of authenticity and detail with which some readers may identify closely, especially other young Londoners of West African heritage. Azumah Nelson grew up in southeast London immersed in books, photography and the violin.

Azumah Nelson uses cultural markers to enhance readers’ understanding of his characters and their world. In Small Worlds music is as much a part of the plot as any other element of the novel – it not only helps the reader understand

Stephen and his love life but aids in the understanding of his parents and where they came from as well, which could also be alluding to the daily comforts that are easily lost as a part of migration. ‘I listen to [my mum’s] stories, often of how she and Pops would party on Saturday nights, back in Ghana, at Nick’s house,’ Stephen notes. ‘If the year was 1978, then they were listening to Ebo Taylor, Pat Thomas, and, of course, Fela. Nick would also import records from America: The Stylistics, Aretha, James Brown.’ Stephen also notes that after moving to the uk, his father – once an aspiring dj – discovered that to survive he’d need to give up that dream – a reality with which many settlers from the Global South will identify.

Near the end of the book, Stephen visits a family friend in Ghana and is gifted a suitcase full of his father’s old records. ‘He always said he would take this back to London and start a venue where they only played records,’ the friend explains. As Stephen, and later his father, sift through the collection alone and, at one moment, together, the music becomes a testament to a life lived with fantasies unfulfilled, and another still full of possibilities. Precious Adesina

Art’s Properties

by David Joselit Princeton University Press, £22 (hardcover) ‘A progressive politics of art must embrace dis-possession,’ concludes art historian David Joselit, in his short polemical experiment in rethinking the idea of property as a defining aspect of modern art. Selfie-takers in museums, he notes, epitomise ‘possessive modes of looking’ that are a symptom of a history of art rooted in the conflict between how the art system (museum, art market) ‘alienates’ the work of art, against art’s ‘constituent alterity’, its ‘infinite capacity… to generate experience over time’ – or, in other words, its freedom.

Joselit’s critical motif of modern art’s ‘dispossession’ takes in the whole of the modern period: threading all the way back to the origins of the modern Western concept of the art museum, starting with the Louvre – which

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‘dispossesses’ artworks from their context, whether as colonial plunder or the seizure of the possessions of deposed monarchies – all the way forward to Conceptual art, which Joselit interprets as the highpoint (and crisis) of the period of art-as-property, in which even an unmaterialised idea can become the property of the possessive artist.

Why does this bother Joselit so much?

Because the turning-into-property of art is the flipside of ‘possessive individualism’, an individualism (historically liberal, bourgeois and white) that excludes those who historically are themselves ‘dispossessed’. This novel and idiosyncratic reading is Joselit’s attempt to wire older art-andcommodity critique into current debates about whiteness, postcolonialism and identity politics:

ArtReview

criticising the debate around the 2017 Whitney Biennial’s presentation of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), in which some argued that a white artist should not exploit ‘Black pain’, Joselit argues that ‘if each of us regards our qualities as a form of property, then no genuine commonality is possible… The only effective route is to exit the proprietary regime of possessive individualism.’

Art’s Properties feels like the prototype for a bigger project to come, and its uncertainty lies in Joselit’s difficulty in seeing his way beyond the liberal (and capitalist) idea of private property.

His provisional solution – that we should recast ourselves as ‘witnesses’ rather than ‘consumers’ of art – seems more ethical than political, a cultural rejection of proprietorial relations rather than their social abolition. J.J. Charlesworth

May 2023

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Talk Art: The Interviews

by Russell Tovey and Robert Diament Ilex Press, £25 (softcover) Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Rob Diament set up their Talk Art podcast in 2018. Thus far it spans more than 200 episodes and 5 million downloads.

This book (their second, following 2021’s Talk Art: Everything you wanted to know about contemporary art but were afraid to ask) collects conversations with 24 artworld and artworld-related figures, and aims, as the authors put it, to be a ‘fun, relatable’, ‘geek out’ rebellion against bosses (the type who run the art media) and elitism that allows us (and them) ‘to hear the voices behind some of the greatest artworks being made on the planet right now’. You’ll have to make up your own mind about that last bit, but here you get to hear from everyone from Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, to Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran and Tyler Mitchell, to Elton John (‘he represents the very best of

qualities found in any genuine art nerd’), Stephen Fry and Paul Smith to help you along the way.

Although, in that, Tovey and Diament’s boundless enthusiasm plays an equal role. Of course, like art in general, the collection is not without its contradictions. The opening interview with New York-based critic Jerry Saltz (who wrote the introduction to their last book and a numbered list of 63 rules on ‘how to be an artist’) comes across as an establishment endorsement of their passions and methods (art has always been a part of life, from cave paintings onwards, everyone is an artist, etc). Stephen Fry’s interview descends into an unredacted form of hero worship (in response to his pronouncements, the pair offer one ‘Oh my God. That’s so true’, three wows, one ‘This is the best moment of our podcast ever,

Stephen’ and, in response to Stephen’s ‘I thought that was fascinating’, one ‘that’s fascinating’).

Where the collection really takes off is the interviews with younger artists, which are sensitive, unpatronising, genuinely questioning and fundamentally challenging. Among them are Tyler Mitchell’s analysis of the embedded hierarchies in photography and Michaela Yearwood-Dan on how the systems and conditioned behaviours required by the artworld are sometimes designed to make ‘you feel you can’t be authentically yourself within the work you make’. Indeed, this collection’s strength ultimately lies in the fact that it reveals nothing more than a battlefield in its quest to establish what contemporary art is all about. Which, as Pat Benatar once said, is also the case with love. Nirmala Devi

The Books and Life of Raymond Roussel

by Michael Sanchez Galerie Buchholz, €48 (hardcover) In the opening section of this book, art historian Michael Sanchez relays the often-repeated anecdote of the teenage Roussel’s ecstatic vision of a theophany as he wrote his first novel, La Doublure (The Understudy, 1897), in which the young writer was suddenly surrounded by rays of light that emanated from his pen, and concluded, ‘Doubtless, when the book was published, this dazzling blaze would be revealed even more and light up the entire universe’. The encounter assured the fledgling writer of his own predestined renown.

But recognition of Roussel’s genius was never to materialise, not in La Doublure nor any of his subsequent novels, poems, theatrical adaptations and fanciful inventions, which were ignored or roundly derided by the public during his lifetime.

Again and again, Roussel’s baroque novels like Chiquenaude (1900), Impressions d’Afrique (1909) and Locus Solus (1913) baffled their readers. His longterm depression (and eventual suicide) was itself so grandiloquent that he served as a case study in French psychoanalyst Pierre Janet’s landmark text De l’Angoisse à l’Extase (From Agony to Ecstasy, 1926). It was Janet who, in diagnosing Roussel as a melancholic with delusions of persecution, wrote: ‘[his] life was constructed like his books’, an apt but disturbing analogy of Roussel’s increasingly theatrical renditions of reality.

Sanchez lays out his account accordingly, examining Roussel’s oeuvre and personal history,

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with a strong curatorial emphasis on the publishing history and adaptations of each text.

(The Books and Life… was released in tandem with a Roussel exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne, co-organised with Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller.) Throughout his bibliographic dredging, Sanchez details Roussel’s propensity to inflate and mythologise his works by various procedures, including the forgery of his books’ edition numbers, the repackaging of older editions, the publication of self-penned reviews (favourable, and under a pseudonym, of course) and the employment of sympathetic audiences at his premieres.

These are but a few of the theatrical machinations that Roussel conducted in his life, according to Sanchez. Others include Roussel’s decadeslong employment of a mistress to accompany him to all Parisian social events in an effort to conceal his homosexuality (he had suffered a very public prostitution scandal in 1904); the hiring of children to accompany him to puppet shows; and the expenditure of exorbitant sums of his own wealth on theatrical follies, global travel, inventions and monuments, all of which would eventually leave him penniless.

Sanchez proposes Roussel’s eccentricity was of a piece with his approach to writing, which was similarly baroque and consumed by fantasies of (self-)invention. This was most evident in Roussel’s development of a literary

ArtReview

procédé, a sort of elaborate ‘machine’ of homophonic punning, which he would use to produce his bizarre narrative tableaux. His ‘procedure’ would serve as an influential template for later explorers of both inner experience – for example the Surrealists, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault – and speculative language games – Marcel Duchamp, the Collège de ’Pataphysique and OuLiPo, and the poets of the New York School, among others.

But Roussel’s obsession with interiority necessitated the sequester of his narratives from any encroachment of the unmediated real, which he accomplished through the myriad uses of framing/stage narratives, parentheses, hypertexts, panoramas and miniatures in his writings.

Such fantasies would also manifest in Roussel’s fixation on his own domestic insularity. Among his inventions, the maison roulante – a ‘house on wheels’ caravan, which Roussel would use to travel the continent with all of the comforts of his living-room – suggests that the author’s vision of locus solus (‘solitary place’) was as much an architectural as a literary endeavour.

These fantasies followed him to his own suicide in 1933 in a Palermo hotel room, which he barricaded with a mattress, simulating a locked-room mystery. Even in death, it would seem that Raymond Roussel could not escape the labyrinth that he had invented in life.

Erik Morse

Raving

by McKenzie Wark Duke University Press, $15.95 (softcover) Raving, like writing, is a practice to which Australian writer and theorist McKenzie Wark turns ‘to get free, of dysphoria, of sadness, of useless desire’. Yet as she acknowledges late in her brief but intensely evocative account of her recent experiences dancing at (primarily illegal covid-era) techno raves in Brooklyn, even this need to escape herself remains rooted in a particular set of personal circumstances: she is old, white, crip, queer, trans and a writer, as she bluntly puts it. It is from this vantage point that she surveys the scene, emphasising not just the temporary freedom that all ravers seek – ‘the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening’ – but the brief liberation that it offers specifically to those from the queer community.

‘I’m interested in people for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life,’ she writes. ‘There’s a lot of metaphors I could throw at this: rave as addiction, ritual, performance, catharsis, sublimity, grace, resistance’, each of which she proceeds to chuck at her subject in a firsthand account, told vividly in the present tense, that takes the reader with her directly into the sweaty embrace of the dancefloor. She renders in exacting detail moments both trifling and profound to tragicomic effect. What is

a rave like? She deadpans: ‘A jackhammer in a sauna.’ She introduces us to ‘punishers’ and ‘coworkers’, typologies of ravers who won’t allow themselves to be ‘fucked by the beat’ and who ruin the mood for all around them.

We are with her in the toilet cubicle as she shares bumps of ketamine with a lover and kisses them passionately, and we are right beside her, shortly afterwards, when she encounters with dismay her own reflection in a harshly lit mirror, wincing at her thinning hair – ‘just another ageing, nonpassing transsexual’.

This is a diaristic, and at times painfully honest, document of club spaces that often enforce a no-photo policy. ‘The invisibility creates a kind of aura. As if the absence of reproducible images pointed to something with special provenance.’ Her attempts to render these encounters visible and record them, like a crayon rubbing of leaves or a gravestone, punctures this aura and produces a strange tension between secrecy and revelation that ultimately remains unresolved.

‘As much as I love a good concept, theory’s the (not-quite) opposite of rave as practice,’ she admits. Yet, ever the writer and New School professor, Wark can’t help but let the theory in – even against her own better judgement.

‘Sometimes when I’m raving, the theory

sequencer kicks off on its own.’ Raving is peppered with footnotes that lead to disparate citations – ranging from philosopher Theodor Adorno to artist Juliana Huxtable, from the Situationists to Facebook commentary – that never quite meld and instead feel more like an academic’s scattered Post-it notes relating to their earliest explorations into a new subject.

More engaging are her reflections on what she terms ‘style extraction’, whereby trends started at raves are extracted by brands and property developers as intellectual property to be monetised, and the role rave culture plays in gentrification. ‘Whatever actual jobs, if any, ravers have,’ she says ruefully, ‘we’re also at work producing styles for life inside the machine.’

Conversations at the bar and casual sex alike are measured in beats, rhythmic interludes as intrinsic to the rave as dancing.‘This is the need,’ Wark writes, ‘that for a few beats, or thousands, I’m not. Not here. Not anywhere.’ But, as she learns, her self-erasure is refuted by her compulsion to write. Wark grapples throughout with the ethics of her dual role as participant and observer, an inner conflict that ultimately undermines the book’s very purpose. Like the flash of an illicit camera in the rave, she freezes in time nights that are best left eternal.

Louise Benson

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

by Maria Ressa Penguin Random House, £20 (hardcover)

I’ve admired Maria Ressa for a long time, reading the online news source Rappler (which she cofounded) since its 2012 launch. Ressa’s co-win of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, with Dmitry Muratov, felt like a shared triumph for members of the Filipino press who struggle against censorship. Her latest book is then one part victory lap and one part rallying cry to ‘hold the line’ – a slogan that, for Ressa, means maintaining integrity against tyranny.

The author divides her memoir into three parts: the first predictably recounts her adolescence in the Philippines and United States, then her initial career in journalism; the second narrates Rappler’s genesis and social media; the third traces Ressa and Rappler’s recent resistance against the Philippine Government’s hostility, as well as interrogating the negative impact of Facebook (now Meta)’s decision to

privilege commercial growth or, more appropriately, world domination, over regulating disinformation (when Ressa told Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 that 97 percent of Filipinos are on Facebook, he asked, ‘Wait Maria, where are the other three percent?’).

While the personal touches – such as her relationship with childhood friend Twink Macaraig – are earnest, Ressa’s humanity isn’t really at stake. What is, however, are attitudes pertaining to social media and tyrannical regimes, making Ressa’s frank criticisms and account of Rappler’s counteractive initiatives against Meta and the Philippine government important. In chapter six she claims that social media (Facebook in particular) fuelled ‘the rise of digital authoritarians, the death of facts, and the insidious mass manipulation we live with today’. Rappler developed its Sharktank

May 2023

database to combat Meta’s apathy and political lies, capturing and mapping billions of posts, comments, groups and users on Facebook in an ‘information ecosystem’ to ‘identify posts that are meant to mislead’. When Ressa was arrested in 2019 on cyber-libel charges, for example, the Sharktank captured how reactions to that event were split.

The book pales with its corny preachings about morality. It finds its true mark, however, with Ressa’s precise journalistic facticity and the outlining of efforts to preserve the field’s integrity, such as when, in 2017, Rappler and other outlets established #FactCheckph, a multilayer check system that also works with lawyers to maintain accountability. It is these examples, more than any cliché about ‘believing in the good’, that offer meaningful guidance about how to stand up to a dictator. Marv Recinto

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Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

by Claire Dederer Sceptre, £20 (hardcover) In the current ‘cancel culture’, the work of canonical artists and authors becomes ‘problematic’ by dint of the personal failings of these (mostly male) creators; artists who have done or (particularly in the wake of #MeToo) are accused of having done terrible things, behaved awfully, abused and hurt people, are, in short, ‘monsters’. In her book of the same name, American critic and essayist Claire Dederer tries to answer the seemingly intractable question that continues to plague this debate: ‘what ought we to do about great art made by bad men?’

To her credit, Dederer takes on the problem from the perspective of the ‘fan’, and Monsters is a sensitive, sometimes overwrought read, for Dederer’s intense personalisation of her subjective investment in both artworks and the artists who make them. Starting from Roman Polanski’s conviction for having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977, she wends her way through different artists and different forms and degrees of ‘monstrosity’: the abuse and alleged abuse of children and women (Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Picasso, Hemingway), the virulent or petty antisemitism of Richard Wagner or Virginia Woolf, and the habitual racism of authors of onetime American ‘classics’, such as in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books (1932–43).

Many of these controversies are longstanding, and the yawning historical distance makes this early section of Dederer’s reflection

the least convincing: whatever we think of Picasso or Hemingway, however badly we think they treated their wives and lovers, these are people of another age. This isn’t to resort to the (weak) excuse – which Dederer sarcastically dismisses – that ‘The Past is a vast terrible place where they didn’t know better’. As Dederer rightly argues, antisemites like Wagner knew perfectly well what they thought about Jews. But what’s revealing is Dederer’s pessimism that contemporary liberal culture really does ‘know better’ now.

The question is not ‘what should we do about sins from the past, now that we’re enlightened?’ she writes, but rather ‘what should we do about sins from the past, when we haven’t improved?’

That sense that things are not getting better underpins the political and emotional handwringing of Monsters, written in the wake of the generational frustration that defined #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter protests, and which bracketed the Trump years. Dederer can’t fully side with the vengefulness and rage of the ‘cancel culture’ period (much as she’d like to admit the just cause of women against the patriarchy), because however well she articulates the case against the ‘monsters’, her heart always returns to artworks she repeatedly insists she loves.

Dederer is a perceptive and engaging critic – the middle, and in a sense pivotal, chapter on Vladimir Nabokov’s writing of Lolita (1955) beautifully sets out how Nabokov must have

necessarily inhabited the character of the monstrous paedophile Humbert Humbert, in order to reveal both his evil and mediocrity. In the second half of the book, Dederer turns to the question of female artistic ‘monstrousness’, in a series of striking chapters on women writers who demanded the same freedom as their male peers – that is, the freedom to be free of children – by considering her own ambivalent feelings about Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, both great artists who, in Dederer’s telling, abandoned their children in favour of their art.

But because Dederer never finds a way to separate the work from the artist, she can only solve her dilemma ethically, with a plea for redemption, since we are all flawed –‘monstrousness applies to everyone’ – who are we to judge? Finally grating against the self-righteousness of ‘cancel culture’, she concludes that ‘the way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one’. True enough, but her trouble is really one of how the claim for ‘cancelling’ bad individuals distorts the question of how art criticism – how to value the artwork, rather than the artist – doesn’t necessarily align with morality or politics. In the end, we shouldn’t be interested in artists for being bad or good people either; one’s moral outrage at their monstrosity fades, artists die and all that’s left is the artwork. Which is the only thing that was ever worth talking about in the first place.

J.J. Charlesworth

Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor Fleet, £20 (hardcover) Age of Vice is a novel about tradition and modernity, and about how the age of capitalism has changed India in some ways but in others not changed it at all. The plot of this gangster story revolves around three characters: a low-caste boy who is sold into slavery by his mother but is constantly trying to assuage the guilt he feels for his part in the family trauma that led her to that point; the astronomically wealthy but hopelessly naive son of a regional gangster who wants to use his influence and privilege to transform India for the better; and a middleclass journalist who is not sure if that’s what she really wants to be – an observer rather than

an instigator. Each fantasises about changing something of their realities; each is thwarted by the fact that they cannot change one part of that reality without changing it all. Those realities cover issues of custom, tradition, religion, emulation, caste, class, family ties, economic inequality, social repression and a more widespread apathy in the face of change.

All the things, in other words, that make up modern India. Kapoor’s strength lies in her ability to convincingly portray both a wealthy younger generation of ‘new’ Indians who are out of touch with India’s grassroots realities, and a poor, ‘old’ underclass who are suffocated

May 2023

beneath them. Yet for all that it picks at the Gordian knot that is Indian society today, this novel ends up feeling more like a Netflix pitch than a devastating social study. Its undoubtedly gripping drama (exploitation, corruption, sex, drugs, murders, betrayals, prison rape and general debauchery) mixes aspects of tv dramas like Oz (1997–2003), movies like The Godfather (1972) and a touch of Succession (2018–23), but never truly pushes the boundaries of any of these established genres, let alone exploding or reinventing them. Much as is the fate of the characters in the novel itself. Mark Rappolt

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Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Stockholm & Mexico City

Figures on the spine and on pages 25, 41 and 71 represent the prices of taxi rides during Art Basel in Hong Kong and related art events, March 2023

May 2023

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Sally Pacifica Goes Hollywood

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good stuff.

“What’s your skincare routine?” asks the director of an la gallery, stroking my cheek. “I love your shoes,” says his assistant, pointing at my sneakers, which light up as I walk. I don’t have the heart to tell them I’m nine, so I ask the director about his sweatshirt, which reads we belong in black lettering. Maybe it is a statement of fact, a welcoming gesture from the artworld. Maybe I too belong here, after all.

He points. The phrase is mirrored across the room, printed on one of the walls at Lisson Gallery. The sweatshirt, I realise, is promotional.

It’s not supposed to tell me anything. Tacky aphorisms are in. They’re

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everywhere. It’s ironic, I think. In Jordan Wolfson’s wall-mounted relief at Sadie Coles, lists of common, self-consciously trite phrases mark the side of a rough wooden panel. ‘Your feelings are valid,’ one of them reads. ‘It’s ok to not be ok,’ says another.

I peek inside the fair’s exclusive Deutsche lounge. You have to kill someone to get in, or be a Zwirner client. Just past the door a wall text announces a new fellowship, which will hire a lucky young person to create small action figures for a superhero franchise. Through a haze of blonde people I spot a small cell in the room’s centre. A shy usc film student peers at me from inside. An auctioneer bangs a gavel, and the film student beams, rattling the bars of his cage in celebration. He won the fellowship, at least. A bad feeling creeps over me. I leave the area, walking through the Koch pavilion, where the air is crisp and smells of sage. Elizabeth Koch, I’ve heard, is very into incense.

Outside I wind my way through crowds of influencers.

They’re gathered around something I cannot make out. Is it Stefan Simchowitz, milking a young calf? I smell straw. Gossip swirls. I shove past an infant left unattended in a stroller.

‘My dad is at the feminist champagne activation,’ a sign reads, perched on the baby’s tiny feet. I’ve heard about the event. It has something to do with beavers. I hand the baby one of the lollipops I’ve stashed in my fanny pack. It chokes, and I take it back, cursing my bad luck. I wasted a lollipop on a toddler with a bib pricier than dinner at Horses.

Finally, I see it. In the centre of the fair, a metal armature suspends a floating glass cube from long thin wires. Inside are two young female figures dressed in leather. They wear silver-ringed harnesses that evade logic.

A plaque hammered into the ground details the name of the sculpture: ozempic vs. adderall.

I hold a hand to my mouth. The figures begin to move. Their faces are bright orange pills. Ozempic holds a syringe. They fling fake bills and ball gags into the air. It is an ode, or maybe an elegy, to their success. A few sales assistants escort older couples around the cube.

The younger people seem uninterested – “passé”, whispers an Artnet columnist – except for the women with meme accounts. One, with Obama Daughter in tow, stands motionless at the cube’s edge, her manicured fingers clasped.

Sophina appears, offering me an apple she found on the ground.

I thank her and take a bite, watching the robotic, humanoid Adderall figure motion vaguely at its surroundings with a bullwhip. Sophina stabs daintily at a sprig of buffalo cauliflower in a recycled bamboo bowl. “The artist has a long history in pharmaceuticals,” says a salesman wearing tinted pink sunglasses. “Fascinating,” says his client, a woman with a purse shaped like a large white swan. He’s exploring domination, the man says. They walk away, discussing pricing.

GS

YO

“Here, Sally?” Sophina gestures over the steering wheel. I nod. I like Sophina. She’s lucky: an intern. They aren’t paying her anything, but she isn’t missing fourth grade. I cross my legs over the booster seat.

I want to appear professional. ArtReview hasn’t washed the seat since the last freelancer: it smells of lemon curd and sweat. I practise a firm handshake against my other hand, in preparation. If Sophina likes me enough I could get a real staff position, one where they let me eat actual food. Now they feed me through small tubes attached to buckets hidden below the passenger seat. I smell the left vat first. Shepherd’s pie. I can’t say it’s quite to my liking. I try the other one. pg Tips.

“Perfect,” I say, trying to deepen my voice.

Sophina says goodbye to me in British, and that she’ll see me inside the fair – I think. I can’t understand her very well, but I nod anyway, looking towards the tents. The festivities are run by Frieze, which is supposedly a media company. All of Hollywood’s Uber drivers have come out for this. I smile to a few suited men leaning on Subarus, smoking. They look like real artists. They are maybe the only ones here. I find the ticket booths by following a dense, moving mass of streetwear.

A security guard looks surprised by my press pass. He asks where my parents are. I loudly discuss nfts. I’m contemplating saying a slur – something to signal my contemporary eau de critique – but the guard lets me through, waving me in the direction of four or five women I recognise from their meme accounts.

In person they look more nervous, but also more funny. I watch as one of them tries to woo an Obama Daughter, offering her an American Spirit. I smirk and contemplate a porcelain replica of a trash bag. The Obama Daughters would come to the opening of an envelope.

Most of the fairgoers wear many hats. Shearling trappers, bright berets and model/writer/director/djs. Younger women don clothing made of strategically tied ribbons. I avoid the gazes of other children. In the corner of my eye I see Sophina, already sipping a glass of prosecco. A Drift editor fawns over her. I hear him offer a lengthy, ambivalent opinion on polyamory. I’m jealous. The interns get all the

25,000 beads embroidered by hand.

4 pairs of hands to sew each coat.

197 days of workmanship.

4728 hours of development. @AOI

Collectibles not collections.

IT TAKES TIME TO MASTER THE CRAFT.

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