News

Sense of Humanity

LACED New Art Exchange, Nottingham | Until 8 January nae.org.uk

Laced: In Search of What Connects Us is an immersive show comprising painting, photography, video, sound, textiles and drawing. It welcomes audiences into a bold landscape of vivid colours, deep-ocean waters and lush tropical vegetation – spaces that are contemplative and empowering. Seven women artists, presented here as part of a cultural network, are linked to curator Loren Hansi Gordon through shared connections to Africa and its Diasporas. This "temporary stitchwork" brings together Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Rahima Gambo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Zohra Opoku, Tabita Rezaire, Lerato Shadi and Michaela Yearwood-Dan.

Several of the artists employ textiles to tell their stories, threading their practice directly to the city of Nottingham, which, for over 100 years, was known as the lacemaking capital of the world. Lerato Shadi (b. 1979), for example, offers a series of wall-hung pieces made in 2020 – red crocheted squares and rectangles sewn onto raw linen canvases and mounted on stretcher bars. Wura-Natasha Ogunji (b. 1970) presents a selection of hand-stitched drawings on architectural paper. Ogunji’s practice, as a whole, interrogates the thresholds between public and private spaces and the experiences of women throughout these spheres, particularly in the everyday action of walking.

Timely and relevant, this show also contemplates the repeated threats to women’s safety. Gordon invites us to consider whether we are truly free if we still feel fear, whilst also drawing attention to our wider sense of humanity – the interconnected experience we share as a species regardless of gender, nationality or age.

Points of Departure

CONSTELLATIONS

SFMOMA, San Francisco | Until 21 August sfmoma.org

The ethics of representation have never been more important, or more closely scrutinised. Whose stories can we tell, how and why? Are we aware of the history that comes with the material? How can museums – and by extension, all public platforms, whether cultural, political or social – offer diverse and authentic projects? Galleries all over the world are now making widespread structural changes and institutional pledges, owing to the “asymmetries of power” that have governed over the years.

Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue explores how additions to a collection “expand, deepen and complicate the stories a museum can tell.” Across six galleries, the exhibition creates moments of “dialogue, resonance and tension”, with four curators choosing brand new acquisitions as a point of departure. Featured names include Poklong Anading, Daisuke Yokota, Zanele Muholi and Imogen Cunningham, amongst others.

Wendy Red Star's stand-out pieces challenge mainstream representations of Native American peoples, having photographed Crow culture on her own terms for many years. The Four Seasons series uses visual bathos to undermine the romantic idealisations of Native Americans being “one with nature.” Cardboard cut-out animals and Astroturf reference commercially produced prints from the 1970s. In a 2016 interview with Aperture, Star notes: “The USA was founded on the eradication of Native people. We were also, paradoxically, used for tourism to promote the expansion of the west. For some reason, Native people are represented as eradicated. We are these mythical creatures.”

Images and Activism

DEVOUR THE LAND Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge | Until 16 January harvardartmuseums.org

Photography plays a significant role in highlighting environmental damage, which can be difficult to see, much less identify and measure. Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970 shines a light on the unexpected and often hidden consequences of militarism on general wellbeing in the United States. The show explores the impacts of armed activity on the American landscape – and the ways in which photography supports activism in response to these effects. It begins in a dynamic period for both environmental activism and photography, continuing through five decades. It provides visitors with a space to consider the precariousness of our collective future, whilst suggesting how preparations for war and its aftermath can, at times, lead to instances of ecological regeneration.

Some 60 artists bring together a variety of approaches, each considering the role of the human hand, or lack thereof, in the landscape. Sim Chi Yin’s Mountain range surrounding the Nevada Test Site (2017) casts the landscape in a brilliant hyperreal blue. As the artist notes: “My intention was to get the viewer to suspend their sense of place and perhaps moral judgement: who gets to call whom a 'rouge state' or decide how many nuclear warheads is too many?” By contrast, Ansel Adams’ Aspens, Northern New Mexico (1958), suggests the pleasant indifference of a shady grove to its human visitors, cast in dramatic monochrome.

A curated Spotify playlist is available, extending the experience of the exhibition, featuring key songs by artists such as Johnny Cash, Mos Def, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and Midnight Oil.

Creativity under Constraint

ART IN THE PLAGUE YEAR

Ongoing | Online artintheplagueyear.com

Emerging from lockdown, many of us might find that our memories are hazy, the events of the last 20 months blending together as we moved from one room to the next, and back again. For many of us, 2020 is a year that's hard to remember at all.

Beyond human reception to trauma, there's a tangible reason for this blurring as our brains stop taking notes of our surroundings. As British economist Tim Harford notes: “Our brains seem to record a new place with a particular vividness. Even when a moment has nothing to do with place and everything to do with intellectual or emotional novelty, place still registers. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the ‘diffs’ are not significant enough for the brain to bother with.” (Financial Times, August 2020).

Despite this sense of stagnation, creativity thrives in constraints. California Museum of Photography celebrates this notion with an online exhibition, Art in the Plague Year. In this expansive show, subtitled There is Another World, But it is in this One, 55 photographers explore how the future leaks into the present – how we can use art to find new pathways beyond the physical.

Douglas McCulloh, Senior Curator, notes: “What will emerge from a year of tumultuous events? How do we cross into a new future? 2020 was a year of beauty, pain and strangeness. Coronavirus laid bare societal inequities, racial rifts and economic injustices. Artists, meanwhile, did what they always do: respond, create, guide us into the future.” Art in the Plague Year is a testament to photography as a record, and also as an act of recovery.

Playing with Perception

MIRROR WITHOUT MEMORY Garage Museum, Moscow | Until 30 January garagemca.org/en

The work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964) may, at first glance, appear to show empty, mundane interiors. Don’t be fooled. These are, in fact, highly politically charged locations that have been painstakingly re-staged in paper and cardboard using found photographs as a guide. Room (Zimmer) (1996), for example, is inspired by photographs of the hotel room in which Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics, whilst Kitchen (2004) is based on shots taken by soldiers of the compound in Tikrit where Sadam Hussein was captured.

Over the years, Demand has crafted a unique compositional process that is both Constructivist and Deconstructionist – exploring the life cycles of models and their synchronisation or juxtaposition with reality. Once the artist photographs these impressively realistic-looking sets with a large format camera, he destroys them, leaving only the still image in its place. French philosopher Jacques Rancière describes these compositions as “mirrors” – leading to the title of Demand’s first show in Russia.

Mirror Without Memory comprises several fragments spread across two floors, bringing together pieces from 1991 to 2021. Curator Katya Inozemtseva expands: “The various combinations of the exhibition become part of a lengthy process of seeking, selecting, constructing / cutting and photographing objects, imparting a specific sense of temporariness that merges with other ‘temporarinesses’: our unreliable memory, the washing out of pictures from the first pages of search engines and their immersion into an endless digital archive of images ‘on demand.’”