ArtReview May 2024 by ArtReview

Mining complex histories since 1949

Nicholas Mangan From Bitcoin to the Great Barrier Reef

Georg Baselitz, Sigmund ist von der Berggasse 19 in Wien nach 20 Maresfield Gardens nach London gezogen (detail), 2024 Oil on canvas. 300 x 450 cm. © Georg Baselitz. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi.

Georg Baselitz adler barfuß Salzburg May—June 2024

ArtReview vol 76 no 4 May 2024

Up its own… Last month ArtReview was at a conference. No, not that kind of conference: a proper academic one. I know, the organisers must never have read a page of its monthly magazine and mistaken it for something else entirely. Anyway, the speakers all had PhDs or were Professors, and the audience were all PhDs or Professors or aspirants to one or both of those two. And the PhDs and Professors all worked in departments of philosophy or history or economics or linguistics, and were writing books or papers and in between teaching some of the aspirants how to realise their dreams. There was a handful of artists too. Presenting papers. And at the initial ‘social’ and ‘mingling’ events it became clear, as the PhDs and Professors were asking the artists if they were going to be showing videos and asking how long they might last, that those PhDs and Professors regarded the artist presentations as some sort of amateurish, perhaps clownish, interlude amid the serious business of thinking. And of course the artists were thinking something similar: that the PhDs and Professors might be good for the odd killer quote, or pseudo-intellectual reference, but were so detached from the ‘real’ world of art and tangible productions that they might also present a kind of chillout zone, a break from the serious business of invention. By the end, of course, everyone was paying attention to everyone. Which was even worse, ArtReview thought to itself as it looked, as it is used to doing at every art event, for companions to head out on a bar crawl. Still – and here’s the dangerous bit – it got ArtReview thinking (that’s what’s called a rhetorical device btw, when it comes to thinking ArtReview obviously never stops). Thinking about the fad over the last decade or so, for what’s called

Mingling

‘artistic research’. Now, even though ArtReview has encountered a lot of it, it still doesn’t know exactly what it is. Like, what does the ‘artistic’ bit mean? That it’s not scientifically accurate? That it’s totally made up? Or that the research bit, the background stories, if you like, are more important than the art bit, which doesn’t really stand up without the research bit? The stories behind the tangible productions. And yes, before you stick your hand up (sorry, ArtReview did say it had been at a conference) and squeal has it read Claire Bishop’s latest book? That’s not the point. (Perhaps there never is one – that’s one of the reasons ArtReview got into the art game in the first place, back in 1949, when research was the province of ‘boffins’ and painting and sculpture, preferably made by men, was the domain of art – but now it digresses and those of you who know ArtReview know that it never ever does that. ‘There’s no room for paths here,’ as ArtReview’s gardener always, and rather unhelpfully, tells it when ArtReview unfurls its latest ‘schemes’ for the vegetation that will grace its balcony.) The point is that the PhDs and Professors and the decade-old fad inspired ArtReview to do some ‘thinking’ and ‘fieldwork’ of its own. Yes, artistic research! Because ArtReview, a connoisseur of the contemporary, an inquisitor of the immediate and an orator of the obvious, always has its finger on the pulse (even if it has stopped), its snout deep in the trough of the moment, in order to provide artistic truffles for your delectation. Whether they are beautiful or ugly, fetid or fragrant, because you need to know what’s going on. Everywhere. All of the time. And it doesn’t matter whether or not that impulse is voluntary or simply a sheepish, involuntary product of our late-capitalist present. That’s not how media works in the present age. Ha ha ha… The point, then, if there is one, is that ArtReview has decided to take a peek, in the pages that follow, at the practices of artists who deploy some sort of ‘artistic’ research. All it wants is to be taken seriously goddamit! Isn’t that what we all want! ArtReview

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Huong Dodinh

TRANSCENDENCE

New York pacegallery.com

archie moore kith & kin

australia pavilion at venice biennale

from 20 april to 24 november 2024 commissioned by creative australia

curated by ellie buttrose

kithandkin.me

Art Observed

The Interview Alexandra Pirici by Emily McDermott 18

Judith Butler by Rosanna McLaughlin 28 Lost Causes by Juliet Jacques 30

page 18 Alexandra Pirici, Encyclopedia of Relations, ongoing action, 2023 (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Eduard Constantin. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Art Featured

Nicholas Mangan by Naomi Riddle 36

Vangelis Vlahos by Stephanie Bailey 54

mschf Interview by Jonathan T.D. Neil 46

Liu Chuang by Mark Rappolt 62

page 46 mschf, This Foot Does Not Exist (detail), 2020, ai-generated photos of feet. Courtesy mschf, New York

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 72 60th Venice Biennale, by J.J. Charlesworth Poetics of Encryption, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Sarah Rapson, by Digby Warde-Aldam Liam Gillick, by Pádraic E. Moore The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, by Jenny Wu Peter Blake, by Yuwen Jiang Farah Al Qasimi, by Stephanie Bailey Donna Dennis, by Cassie Packard Biennale of Sydney, by Naomi Riddle Manuele Cerutti, by Martin Herbert Paêbirú, by Oliver Basciano Damien Hirst, by Gaby Cepeda Arthur Jafa, by Zoë Hopkins Mao Yan, by Fi Churchman Margarita Azurdia, by Ignacio Szmulewicz R. Yoi Kawakubo and Nao Matsunaga, by Alexander Leissle The Time is Always Now, by J.J. Charlesworth Thailand Biennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, by Claire Bishop, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Your Utopia, by Bora Chung, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang Trophy Lives, by Philippa Snow, reviewed by Eliza Goodpasture The Last Safe Abortion, by Carmen Winant, reviewed by Louise Darblay The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, by Sara Ahmed, reviewed by Adeline Chia Faraway the Southern Sky, by Joseph Andras, reviewed by Mark Rappolt comic by molly mendoza 106

page 84 Gordon Hookey, Terrarists Colonialhism, 2008, oil on linen, 350 × 290 cm. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin / Brisbane

Sprüth Magers Berlin territory Mire Lee, Liu Yujia, Gala Porras-Kim, Tan Jing, Zhang Ruyi April – August Oliver Bak September – October

London John Baldessari Ahmedabad 1992 May – July Gary Hume September – October Anthony McCall Raised Voices September – October

Los Angeles Gretchen Bender The Perversion of the Visual May – August Otto Piene The Proliferation of the Sun May – August

New York David Ostrowski Parliament June – July Jenny Holzer September – October spruethmagers.com

Art Observed

Teach 17

Photo: Andrei Dinu

ArtReview

The Interview by Emily McDermott

Alexandra Pirici

“Moving differently is thinking differently”

Peering down from a walkway connecting the two upper wings of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, I see small figures moving around a lifesize sand dune in the ground floor’s historic hall. From here the figures, though human, look like ants. To their left and right, spindly silver spider-leg-like structures spill out of crates and rest, some still wrapped, against towering metal support-beams. The crates, along with the sand, had arrived at the museum four days prior, along with the Romanian artist Alexandra Pirici. The dune and silver structures will soon be joined by chemical gardens growing in glass cylinders; liquids automatically changing colours due to their physical properties; human performers and more to create Attune, Pirici’s new site-specific installation. Attune is a natural expansion of her overarching practice. For more than a decade, Pirici has choreographed ongoing actions

and environments that bring together elements of dance, sculpture, spoken word and music to reflect on everything from art history and pop culture to questions about where the body begins and ends to our relationships with other forms of being. When Pirici represented Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2013, performers embodied artworks from previous iterations of the Biennale. For Signals (9th Berlin Biennale, 2016; Kunsthaus Zürich, 2017), performers wore motion-capture suits, acting out a stream of images and information akin to a content-ranking algorithm creating a newsfeed; their movements were prioritised based on input provided by audience members, or ‘users’, who could select news items on a related website in real time. In Aggregate (Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2017; Art Basel, 2018), over 60 performers formed a living time-capsule of human expression;

May 2024

references expressed in movement and sound ranged from Depeche Mode’s 1990 song Enjoy the Silence to Michelangelo’s David (1501–04), Wifredo Lam’s 1950 painting Lisa Mona, Bollywood movies and Romanian folk music. Then, as part of Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale in 2022, Pirici debuted Encyclopedia of Relations, which centres on embodiments of collective relations as seen in biology and botany. For Attune, a co-commission by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, she is building on all of this while expanding the focus to also include the nonliving. Here, various types of matter from both the natural and humanmade worlds will show that being inanimate does not equate to being inert. Taking a break from the installation process, we walk over to the museum’s café, order coffees and dive right into the subject at hand.

Self-organising Matter What was the starting point for this show? “The main idea is that matter has the capacity to self-structure and self-organise,” says Pirici. “The most recent developments in chemistry and physics make it clear there is no ontological or fundamental difference between systems that are alive, like biological systems, and systems that are not alive but that can behave in ways similar to living matter. This [show] marks a development into the realm of the more-thanhuman but also the nonliving which nevertheless is active.” Although engaging with species beyond humans is not new to her practice, working with the entirely nonliving – a sand dune, experiments with liquids – feels like a relatively big jump to make. So, I wonder, how did you come to this development? “I was reading Order Out of Chaos [1984] by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, which is about dissipative systems, and I became interested in how systems that are unstable and in nonequilibrium come to a point where they have to restructure themselves and actually have the capacity to do so. In biology one example is morphogenesis, a process through which there is cell differentiation, and a cell, tissue

or organism starts to acquire a form. There is a local interaction between smaller elements of a system – and when I say system, it could also be an organism – that creates a logic or structure. In nature a clear example is murmuration: the way in which a large flock of starlings manages to move together without someone directing them. Sand dunes are also the results of a selforganising process; they self-structure. They’re also beautiful, sculptural, active elements.”

Science Mustn’t Be Reductionist In addition to chemical gardens and automated experiments producing colour-changing substances, the show will stage a largescale version of the Bénard convection cell experiment, from 1900, which shows how cells form specific patterns when a liquid is boiled. Typically invisible to the naked eye, the phenomenon becomes visible when something like mica powder, which reflects light, is added to a liquid. Why did you choose to work with scientific experiments alongside matter from the natural world? Aggregate, 2017 (installation view, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein). Photo: Joseph Devitt Tremblay. © Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

ArtReview

“I’ve always been fascinated by the scientific perspective, and I was interested in including examples from science or the world of the lab in something that feels more like a story. Today, I think science is seen either as something that is going to save the world or as a field that has sold out to the military-industrial complex. I perceived this growing distrust in science, and it is too reductionist – yet it doesn’t have to be. We think about Newtonian physics and this mechanical world that is rationalist and reductionist and it allows for one door [to open]; but that is outdated and belongs to a different era of science. I’m interested in the continuum between the animate and inanimate, between us and a chemical reaction.” In other words, bringing scientific experiments into the exhibition reframes them. Instead of being reduced to one of two poles on a very large spectrum, science becomes, once again, part of our larger, more complex, human story – one with, as Pirici says, “movement and song and action”.

Chemical, Bodily and Aural Transformations Bringing together organic and inorganic matter to form self-structuring sculptures, choreography

and song is the crux of this new work. What is the process like, thinking about these examples of self-organisation and then translating them into the work? “I read a lot and I also move, and somehow these two processes come together.” At the start of a project, she adds, “I work a lot on my own. I’m not enough, because there will be more performers, but I try to imagine and anticipate how people will move.” For the performative aspects of Attune, “I am thinking about how I relate to [the self-organising processes]. There are parts where the human performers embody certain self-organising processes, but there are also parts where they sing.” When it comes to the experiments, Pirici worked with her partner, who is also the show’s set designer, Andrei Dinu. Together they tested some of the experiments “at home in very safe conditions”, before joining forces with professional chemists to develop ways of scaling up to transform small lab experiments into giant sculptural works. What is the significance of the physical human embodiment? “There’s something interesting in the capacity of trained performers and bodies to become other. If you don’t think of yourself only in

a bipedal position and you bring your body into other forms, other dynamics and ways of moving, it does something to your brain. I think it enlarges your perspective and makes you approach otherness differently. I think it makes your brain more fluid as well. Moving differently is thinking differently.” And embodiment through sound? “When it comes to sound, I’ve always been interested in music and I’ve always sung, but I was also inspired by the space [of Hamburger Bahnhof] to sing more. First of all, sound travels the best in space. It’s the element that can take up space most efficiently. Secondly, I think our intellectual experience of something has to be connected to pleasure, so singing about a chemical reaction might be a more pleasurable way to become curious about that phenomenon.” “Then there’s a certain availability to shift, which I find interesting from a political point of view,” she continues. “I’m interested in working with polyphony and polyphonic structures – multiple voices singing slightly different Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022 (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Ela Bialkowska / okno Studio

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melodic lines at the same time. It’s such an uncommon form of composition today and it also produces a very uncommon sound. Modern music is so much about one thing; polyphony is very challenging for the modern ear. And there’s a political meaning to being able to hear more voices, to harmonise them. You have to listen to yourself and the other at the same time. This is an interesting training to perform and also to hear – to truly listen to this polyphony of voices, to this multiplicity of voices that are different but can nevertheless coexist. Maybe this is the training we actually need.”

Technology Is More Than a Tool The algorithm employed in Pirici’s Signals was just one part of the whole, which she says “was about the [human] relationship to the internet”. In another piece, Leaking Territories (2017), conceived for Skulptur Projekte Münster, performers collectively embodied a search engine, acting according to the parameters of a Google search: an audience member could call out a search term and the performers would analyse the querier’s appearance and subsequent reaction to continually recalibrate their personalised answers (delivered by way of sound and

ArtReview

May 2024

above Signals, 2016 (installation view, 9th Berlin Biennale, kw Institute, Berlin). Photo: Timo Ohler preceding pages Aggregate, 2017–19 (installation view, Art Basel, Messeplatz Basel, 2019). Photo: Andrei Dinu

ArtReview

Matter Possesses Its Own Spirit

movement). With such pieces in mind, I ask, are you still using or thinking about technology? “Yes, it’s always in my head,” Pirici replies without hesitation. “I come from this world of movement, but I still like to talk about the digital space, virtual bodies and technologies. I’ve been reading and thinking about algorithmic structures and machine learning. Here, I’m planning to include a reflection on machine learning systems, because they are also talked about as self-organising; they rely on human design, but then they do things on their own.” How do you see technological self-organisation in relation to self-organising processes found in nature? “When you speak about self-organisation, you also have cybernetics and cellular automata, which is all about modelling pattern formations. For example, there are seashell and animal patterns that are examples of Turing patterns and can be modelled with cellular automata, and I’m including a reference to that. Because, again, what is interesting to me is that this very material world of graspable, active, intelligent substance need not be and is not opposed to mathematical modelling and computation. We are not machines, but some parts of us are.”

Without any specific prompts, Pirici speaks passionately about her research into selforganising structures and process, as well as her more conceptual interests, going off on captivating tangents throughout our conversation. After explaining some of the various chemical experiments she is working with in Attune, she muses: “It’s fascinating to observe something we normally believe to be inert. We believe there is a clear difference between something alive and something inert, but it’s just about existing in certain conditions in which inert material starts doing something. And this has really important implications for our place in the world.” Such as? “The whole discussion of the origin of life: abiogenesis came from inorganic matter that, under certain conditions, started to produce something and metabolise. It’s a kind of materialist perspective on the world, where matter doesn’t need a transcendent spirit to activate it; it already contains its own spirit, and it has the capacity to produce life. And this ties into larger theoretical fields and philosophy, maybe even the actor–network theory,

as well as [what are commonly understood as] metaphors about the world where we are the same as stardust or rivers. And in the end, these are not metaphors: it is scientific reality.” Towards the end of our conversation, we zoom out and return to the title. Beyond the obvious connection of attuning one’s ear to the polyphonic voices, why did you choose the title Attune? “I think about it as an invitation to accept or to understand and harmonise with this reality of intelligent, vibrant matter,” Pirici says. “It’s important today to also reclaim science from reductionist tendencies and, this sounds really pretentious, but to rediscover or to make a new attempt to understand our relationship to other forms of matter. In the end, it’s just other structures; the difference is in the configuration. There is no essence, which is maybe also disturbing, because maybe there is no soul, there is no architect, there is no God. Everything is within – and this is also how we, humans, came about. That’s wondrous.” Attune is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, through 6 October Emily McDermott is a writer and editor living in Berlin

Leaking Territories, 2017 (installation view, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017). Photo: Alexandra Pirici

May 2024

AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes: Kahlil Robert Irving On view through July 7, 2024 Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art · Overland Park, KS · 913-469-3000 · nermanmuseum.org

Image: AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes: Kahlil Robert Irving installation view, Feb. 9-Jul. 7, 2024 Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: EG Schempf

For at least half a decade I have been living with a debilitating condition. It’s called identity fatigue. Recently it’s got so bad that I worry I’m no longer in control of my actions. If I read one more opinion piece on J.K. Rowling, one more article about how all the tomboys are getting transed, I may sign myself up for a voluntary lobotomy. Because of all the identity-based discussions, the ‘trans debate’ is the most depressing. The moral panic, the political and careerist opportunism, the holy war mentality, have turned dignity and compassion into dead languages, things that people will study in years to come and argue over how they were pronounced. Judith Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is billed as a roadmap for navigating today’s deeply fractious gender wars. When Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990 it contributed to a profound change in how people understand identity, popularising the idea that sex and gender are both social constructs, naturalised through the constant repetition of learned speech and behaviour. If, once upon a time, Butler was a cultural agitator, today they are firmly ensconced in the academic establishment, a kind of queer Pope who is revered and reviled. (In the afterword to the book they cite being attacked in Brazil while attending a conference in 2017 as the inspiration to write it.) What does Butler have to say about the world they helped create, and a subject that has since been talked into the gutter?

Identity Fatigue

If you know anything about Judith Butler, you know that during the 1990s they revolutionised gender theory. But, wonders Rosanna McLaughlin, can even they navigate the current gender wars?

Conservative groups protest Judith Butler during a lecture by the theorist in São Paulo, 2017. Photo: zuma Press / Alamy Stock Photo

ArtReview

The book sets out to illustrate a global alliance of conservative forces – including the Catholic Church, the World Congress of Families (a us Christian organisation that opposes divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage and ‘gender theory’) and rightwing populist politicians such as Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro – who are conspiring to demonise trans and nonbinary people. Butler argues that the rise in ‘anti-gender ideology’ is part of a fantasy of a return to the good old days when men were alpha, women were wives and white people held ‘uncontested racial supremacy’ – a fantasy fuelled by misplaced existential insecurities and instrumentalised by patriarchal actors. Those who buy into it are described as suffering from a collective ‘psychosis’, ensorcelled by a false promise that slaying the trans bogeyman will put an end ‘to the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers or intensifying economic precarity’. It’s sobering to see the links between populist rightwing politics and anti-trans sentiment. Yet at times Butler seems more comfortable railing at familiar foes, such as the Christian right, than engaging with the particularities of the present. After all, we are living through a moment when the Overton window on gender is swinging wildly. A battle is commencing over the middle ground and what counts as a ‘reasonable’ position, and the old political divisions do not always hold. As the anti-trans movement in the uk demonstrates, many of those who deny that a person can or should change sex come from the feminist left. In the chapter ‘terfs and British Matters of Sex: How Critical Is Gender-Critical Feminism’, Butler grapples with ‘gender critical’ feminists by psychoanalysing them, suggesting that traumas suffered at the hands of the patriarchy are being unfairly displaced onto trans people, who have become a receptacle for their worst fears. Yet the book largely avoids addressing commonplace concerns about the risks of transitioning that dominate public debate. How, for instance, should a well-meaning parent of a child who wants to transition act? Help, and they may be labelled a child abuser. Don’t, and they may be accused of pushing their child towards suicide. The stakes are high, opinions violently polarised, medical and governmental advice changing all the time. Despite being advertised as Butler’s most accessible book to date, Who’s Afraid of Gender? offers little to appeal to those outside of liberal academia’s orbit. Butler describes ‘being anti-gender’ as ‘a form of anti-intellectualism’,

citing the refusal of the anti-trans lobby to read the many gender-studies texts that are available – an irksome suggestion that ignores the extent to which academic disciplines conduct conversations with themselves in specialised languages. ‘Log on to jstor, stupid’ is not a position that is going to win hearts and minds. Nor is describing those who disagree with you as psychotic, a position that only mirrors the frequent framing of transness as a dangerous mental-health epidemic, infiltrating the minds of children and menacing women in public toilets. At times, so similar are Butler’s characterisations of the anti-trans movement to those often used to denigrate trans people and their supporters – suffering from mental illness, wilfully ignoring the literature, peddling harmful ideologies – that reading the book feels like being stuck in that meme where all the Spidermen are pointing at each other. So where do we go from here? Butler argues that ‘anti-gender ideology’ should be addressed as part of a wider history of colonialism and white supremacy. They lean into the idea that the gender binary is a Western imposition, lay the blame for the current cruelties enacted upon queer people by postcolonial nations squarely at the feet of former colonisers and call for a global coalition of oppressed groups to unite in the push for a more liveable world.

‘The only way out of this bind’, they write, ‘is to ally the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food across all regions.’ However attractive this sentiment, it feels like an easy out – the kind of sweeping socialist platitude that can be reeled off without any explanation as to how it might happen, and without accounting for anything as troublesome as cultural specificity. For while it’s true that Western powers often exported their homophobic laws to colonised nations, stripping those nations of their political autonomy in the present is infantilising, and only serves to place the West centre stage. Liberal academia’s tendency to romanticise the precolonial Global South as a queer utopia is also questionable – a reboot of primitivism for the identity-political era. There are many examples of cultures with variations on the categories of men and women, but they must be viewed in context, and are not necessarily indicative of greater tolerance towards those who exist outside the parameters of normalcy. The thing about gender is that there is no obvious right or wrong. How a person feels about themselves is evidently a matter of deeply held personal opinion. The same could be said of abortion, or the age of consent. There is no way to prove with certainty at how many weeks a foetus is sufficiently human to obtain the right to life, or to pick the precise time at which every single member of a society is physically and psychologically adult enough for sex. Such debates must therefore be won by arguing which course of action is the most humane, not who is categorically right. The problem is, it is precisely these kinds of issues that feed the outrage machine, fuelling media platforms and political opportunists who thrive on polarisation, dehumanisation and the formation of tribal factions that wear intolerance with pride – the very stuff identity fatigue is made of. While Who’s Afraid of Gender? may satisfy those who already share Butler’s opinions, it is neither daring enough to force the conversation into new terrain, or generous enough to appeal beyond the ranks of the converted. Unlike Gender Trouble, it is not a book that will change the way people see themselves and the world, but one that will confirm – to detractors and supporters of trans rights – what people already think they know. Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, engraving, 25 × 20 cm. Licensed to public domain

May 2024

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer and editor based in East Sussex

At 10pm on 12 December 2019 I burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for weeks. I’d spent long days campaigning for Labour during the British general-election campaign, and years supporting the party’s social democratic project in my writing, demonstrating about the Grenfell Tower disaster and the rise of fascism. The scale of our defeat was unbearable. I raced through Kübler-Ross’s grief cycle, skipping denial (the exit poll was all too clear) and bargaining (what was the point?), going straight to anger and depression. The tears stopped around February, and I began to recover my energy. I channelled it into a futile attempt to stop the right taking back the Labour Party. My fleeting hope of renewal was crushed, however, by the covid-19 lockdowns, which made it impossible to organise against the Blairite restoration or the triumphant Conservatives’ authoritarian anti-protest laws. I collapsed into an exhaustion I’ve felt ever since, wondering if I would ever recover – and if so, how. Without quite knowing it, I’d been waiting for a book like Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat – published in April by Verso and ‘addressed to burntout comrades’ – all this time. Burnout isn’t a guide to curing ‘the emotional experience of political defeat’; while it offers some recommendations from those whose movements were crushed or collapsed, from the Commune of Paris to the present, the main consolation it offers is that of feelings shared across time and space. Its chapters are structured around the emotions that campaigners commonly feel in the wake of defeat: melancholia,

Lost Causes

Defeat in political battle is painful. A new book reminds Juliet Jacques that at times one must abandon all hope in order to carry on

In the Intense Now (still), 2017, dir João Moreira Salles. Courtesy Icarus Films

ArtReview

nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion (and the ‘exhaustion that comes from fighting exhaustion’s causes’), bitterness, trauma and mourning. Proctor pays close attention to political histories, of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the Commune of 1871 and the miners’ strike of 1984–85, second wave feminism and the Black Panthers, and many others. She questions the left’s criticism of psychotherapy as seeking to reconcile individuals with a sick society, rather than encouraging them to change it, highlighting times when therapy helped people or groups understand their struggles and ready themselves to fight anew. She is generous to Huey Newton’s concept of ‘revolutionary suicide’, where people subordinate their physical and mental health to the movement – this, she says, ‘is not a death wish but expresses the desire to live in a less deathly world’, even if it may mean being crushed in the process. Such realism, Proctor argues throughout the book, is vital for radicals if they want to head off the psychological collapse that comes with the raising and crushing of hopes. She also analyses a wide range of literature and film, looking at how fiction, memoir and documentary can allow us to access different psychological aspects to defeat on individual and collective levels. She does this not just to understand how specific works have explored the reasons for people’s reactions to defeat (in particular the documentaries about the Weather Underground or the Japanese Red Army of the 1970s) and for what they did next, but to think about how revolutionary activity shares parallels

with art practice – how pursuing it can make oneself an outsider with severe financial and psychological consequences, with posthumous recognition being scant reward for a lifetime of (often thankless) struggle. Radical activity, like the process of making or enjoying art, often unleashes explosions of energy – notably in Paris in 1871 and 1968, when artists, writers and filmmakers wanted to involve themselves in insurrections. In a book written out of ‘suspicion of rhetorical appeals to hope’ after a defeat, Proctor dives into participants’ accounts of depression, disengagement, recrimination and suicide. Her chapter on nostalgia hits just as hard as post-68 films such as Romain Goupil’s Mourir à trente ans (Half a Life, 1982) or João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now (2017), which follows Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977) in charting the generational defeat of worldwide insurgencies. In her exploration of artistic responses to the disasters of the 1970s and 80s, Proctor proves especially acute. She explores in depth the work of Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who made The Battle of Chile (1976–79) about the Popular Unity government and its death in the cia-backed Pinochet coup, as a case study in how to process trauma through art. Burnout achieves commendable synthesis between its argument and sources, but this section stands out: Proctor quotes Guzmán talking about how he had to deal with his personal history before he could make work on Chile’s national memory, and how his filmmaking demonstrates Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ traumatic moments – ‘to go back to a time before the ruins and ashes’. Guzmán’s film cycle began

with Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), where he returned from exile to interview people who appeared in his earlier films about how they survived Pinochet’s regime, before making a trilogy that more obliquely dealt with the thousands of ‘disappeared’ people and their relatives’ search for their remains. In My Imaginary Country (2022), Guzmán documented

top Mourir à trente ans (Half a Life) (still), 1982, dir Romain Goupil above My Imaginary Country (still), 2022, dir Patricio Guzmán. Courtesy Pyramide

May 2024

the radical surge of 2019, when protests against subway fare rises turned into an uprising against the neoliberalism introduced in Pinochet’s constitution, with feminist art group lastesis being prominent on the streets and in the film. Guzmán ends with the election of leftwing activist Gabriel Boric, and a note of hope that the constitution will change – hope that has died amid ineptly handled referenda and rightwing opposition, in a major setback for one of the last of many radical movements throughout the world during the 2010s. The collapse of hope in so many of the junctures that Proctor describes, from the loss of the Spanish Civil War to the shattering of the Labour left at the start of the current decade, does not mean giving up the struggle. Proctor closes by quoting Mike Davis, who argues that hope is not ‘a necessary obligation in polemical writing’, urging us to ‘Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’. The movements Proctor – and I – are interested in, and became involved with, sprang from an awareness that social conditions were bad, had got markedly worse during our lifetimes and looked likely to get worse still in future. Whether we fight that through activism, electoral politics, writing, filmmaking, art or some other way, we cannot let optimism of the will blind us to the fact that our fights will not be painless. The more people are writing books like Burnout, the better we might overcome our pains, and remain in the struggle. Juliet Jacques is a writer based in London

Andrzej Wróblewski Boy with a Sculpture I | 1955 mixed technique, paper | 126,5×100 cm Starak Collection Copyright to the art works of Andrzej Wróblewski © Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation | www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

Monographic exhibition of Andrzej Wróblewski, one of the most important Polish painters of the second half of the XX century who was born in 1927 and died prematurely before he turned 30. He left behind a courageous, revolutionary and bold legacy, including undeniable monuments of Polish contemporary art represented by series such as Executions, Chauffeurs, Queues, Chaired, Tombstones. Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), the eminent Polish film director and Wróblewski’s friend considered him the most outstanding artist of their generation and frequently paid tribute to Wróblewski’s genius in his films. The exhibition would not be possible without the unique selection of works, consisting mainly of oil paintings and gouaches from the private collection of Anna and Jerzy Starak. It is currently the most extensive collection of the artist’s work in Poland. The collection, consciously built with personal engagement, can be admired for capturing the insight and vision of the young painter. The exhibition will be complemented by works from other private collections, as well as the collections of the National Museums in Warsaw, Wrocław, and Lublin. As emphasized by Elżbieta Dzikowska, the President of the Starak Family Foundation: “We hope that the exhibition in Venice, in the very heart of it in St. Mark’s square, visited yearly by about thirty million people, will open new ways of understanding the extraordinary work of Andrzej Wroblewski. His genius merits a fixed place in the canon of world art of the second half of the XX century; it deserves new interpretations and should be confronted with the biggest names of that time”. Curator: Ania Muszyńska Promotor: Starak Family Foundation

20th April – 24th November 2024 Procuratie Vecchie di San Marco | San Marco 139–153/A | Venice w

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A crab 35

Core Stories by Naomi Riddle

Extraction, value systems and the potential for transformation drive the ‘material storytelling’ in Nicholas Mangan’s films and sculptures 36

ArtReview

above and facing page Core-Coralations (stills), 2022–23, single-channel hd video, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

May 2024

Australia and its role in the Pacific – as a settler colony built on resource pulsing glow mimics the fluorescence response deployed by corals extraction, as the world’s second largest coal exporter, as a nation- as a protective mechanism during the bleaching process. state exercising geopolitical influence on its neighbours – is a recurCore-Coralations is one of Mangan’s most profoundly affective ring motif across Nicholas Mangan’s oeuvre. In the Melbourne-based works, and he’s conscious of the fact that it’s the emotional response artist’s most recent and ongoing project, Core-Coralations (2021–), the often elicited by mass bleaching events that continues to draw both world’s largest and longest reef complex, the Great Barrier Reef, is the himself and his audiences to the project. “I don’t think it’s just locus for a speculation on the relationship between human and coral because of [the coral’s] beauty,” he says, during a video call. “It’s the futures. This work, like many of those that preceded it, combines both fact that it’s alive, that it’s an animal and it’s a mineral all at once. film and sculpture, and is shaped by Mangan’s travels to the coral-rich There’s a crossover, a blurriness, that happens.” And in other works, Heron Island, as well as his encounters with coral ‘core’ specimens in such ambivalent blurriness takes on a variety of forms. the SeaSim research lab in Townsville, Queensland. After gaining independence in 1968, the Republic of Nauru, Coral is acutely impacted by rising sea temperatures, which are a Micronesian island-state, experienced a sudden moment of wealth, currently turbocharged by unchecked global heating, and the Reef having sold the rights to its phosphate reserves to Western interhas experienced an unprecedented five mass bleaching events since ests. A large portion of the profits was invested in international real2016 (the most widespread and ongoing began at the start of 2024). estate, including Nauru House, a highrise building in Melbourne, The meditative film component of Core-Coralations not only engages which featured two coral limestone pinnacles shipped from Nauru in with this current ecological threat, but also with the colonial history its forecourt. of the Reef, which Captain Cook ‘discovered’ in 1770 when a coral By the early 2000s, Nauru’s deposits had been exhausted and outcrop pierced a hole in his ship, hms Endeavour. In turn, the largest decades of strip-mining had caused widespread environmental sculpture in the project, Death Assemblage (2022), a massive flat, bill- damage. Facing bankruptcy, the world’s smallest republic was forced board-like work constructed out of coral, aragonite, mineral powder to sell off many of its assets, including Nauru House. At the same and resin, is part-monument, part-barrier, and acts as both an elegy to time, the Australian government began implementing its brutal the coral death toll and an indictment of Australia’s dismal and inac- and contentious ‘Pacific Solution’, transporting asylum seekers to tive approach to climate action. When making the sculpture, Mangan offshore detention centres in Nauru and other island nations. In mixed bioluminescent ink with the coral bones and aragonite, and 2003, President Bernard Dowiyogo, just before being hospitalised then layered this on the front side of the piece. in Washington, dc, confided to a journalist Proposition for Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table, that he had a plan to turn around Nauru’s In the gallery, the finished work is intermit2009, coral limestone from the island of Nauru, economy: he wished to use the island’s retently bathed in ultraviolet light, with the wooden travel crate, dimensions variable. activated pigment exposing the coral skelemaining coral limestone to construct ancient Photo: Zan Wimberley. © the artist; Courtesy the artist, tons embedded in its composite surface. This coral coffee tables, which could then be sold mca, Sydney; and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

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Core-Coralations (still), 2022–23, single-channel hd video, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

May 2024

Core-Coralations (still), 2022–23, single-channel hd video, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

ArtReview

to the us market. Dowiyogo died a short time later, before his idea compound or interact with one another. Indeed, it is his action of disassembling or reassembling materials – be they a rock sample, an could reach fruition. In one of his earliest bodies of work, Nauru – Notes from a Cretaceous archival print, a newsreel or a photocopier – that then enables us to World (2009–10), Mangan charts this complex sociopolitical and understand the world anew. Part of it is “an attempt to think about ecological history via sculpture, archival images and objects, and how things might be other than they are”, says Mangan. “How we video. His project enters the narrative by attempting, symbolically, to might take a different path, or open things up, or reconfigure them complete the former president’s proposition. Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral in a different way.” Coffee Table (2009–10) is made from a sliced section of coral limestone Such an approach has led Mangan to a sustained focus on supported by limestone legs (Mangan sourced the material from the energy: its extraction, production and depletion; how it might be divided, compressed or redistribpinnacles that once graced Nauru “I don’t think in a linear way. I think in House). With its chalky-white tone uted. Progress in Action (2013), also and fossilised coral, Mangan’s table currently on view, considers events a way that sort of brings things together” linked to the Panguna copper-mine renders Dowiyogo’s scheme in all its absurdity, imbuing the geological material with Nauru’s tale of established by a subsidiary of the Australian company Rio Tinto in economic and environmental collapse. Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which led to a brutal civil war from Coral-Coralations and an excised selection of works from Nauru – 1988 to 1998. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army (bra), which Notes from a Cretaceous World both appear in A World Undone, Mangan’s mounted the opposition to the mine and found itself cut off from fuel first retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and resources, turned to coconuts as a source for biofuel. Mangan’s (mca), Sydney, which showcases eight expanded sculptures. With installation, paying homage to this act of eco-resistance, includes a practice spanning two decades, Mangan’s work can be defined by a provisional coconut-oil refinery and modified diesel-generator. what he describes as a longstanding interest in ‘material storytelling’ (While it was originally presented as a working model powering a – in the way that physical objects allow us to comprehend more projector, Mangan decided that recent iterations would only show abstract political, economic and social systems, and then, in turn, the work in displayed form, given the unsustainability of the refining how these systems engage with, or transform, the physical world. process.) Alongside the generator, a video montage splices together “I don’t think in a linear way,” Mangan tells me. “I think in a way a range of footage from Shell Corporation, newsreels, Australian that sort of brings things together.” That is, government film-units and current-affairs Ancient Lights (detail), 2015, two-channel hd video, rather than conceiving of an event in chronoprogrammes in a rapid succession. With its colour, sound, off-grid solar power supply, steel cage, logical or cause-and-effect sequences, Mangan emphasis on jump-cuts and repetition, the dimensions variable. Photo: Hamish McIntosh. is more interested in how different matefilm reiterates Mangan’s materialist approach © the artist. Courtesy the artist; mca, Sydney; rials or forces surrounding the event might to storytelling. Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and Labor, Mexico City

May 2024

ArtReview

May 2024

above O’Keefe stones aboard sv Mnuw junk ship, Colonia, Yap, Micronesia, 2016. Photo: Nicholas Mangan preceding pages Death Assemblage, 2022, coral, aragonite, mineral powder, acrylic resin, bioluminescent pigment, ultraviolet light, fibreglass-reinforced plastic grating, mild steel, enamel paint, dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley. © the artist. Courtesy the artis; mca, Sydney; and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.

ArtReview

For Ancient Lights (2015), which references the 1663 British doctrine safeguarding the ‘right to light’ from already-existing windows in the face of urban redevelopment and expansion, Mangan has created an energy system within the gallery: the work converts sunlight (via solar panels installed on the gallery’s roof) into energy, which is then converted back into light through two digital film projectors. One projector then displays a series of images linked to the sun, such as tree rings from a laboratory in Arizona, or a 24-hour solar storage plant in Spain. The other shows a video of a revolving Mexican ten-peso coin that depicts the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh, the footage edited so that the coin spins indefinitely. Here the turning of the coin symbolises not only economic value, a never-ending shift between surplus and expense, but also the sun’s energy in motion. For Mangan, each of an installation’s components, be it an image, a generator, a power cord or coral rubble, can combine with others to form what he describes as a “zone” – an open-ended system built from the aggregation of parts. Limits to Growth (2016–21), an iterative work that Mangan has repeatedly revised and extended, investigates the connections between two seemingly disparate forms of currency: Rai stones, an ancient money from the Pacific island of Yap, and bitcoin. Here Mangan is considering whether Rai – large limestone discs with a carved hole in their centre – can be seen as anticipating digital currency. In the case of Rai, an oral ledger validated ownership, so a stone often did not have to be physically moved (which, due to their sometimes-huge scale, would have been difficult at best) to be traded or owned – a method that aligns with contemporary bitcoin operations. Alongside this, Mangan is also engaging with the ostensibly immaterial bitcoin’s hidden material impact: the reserves it draws

from energy infrastructure, and the environmental cost required to sustain cryptocurrency transactions. In the work’s first iteration, Mangan set up a bitcoin mining rig, the profits from which were used to fund the production of photographs of Rai stones. Each of these images then had an indexical relationship to the value created and energy expended via the mining. In the most recent version, Limits to Growth – Part 3 (Letter to Rai) (2020–21), Mangan has mined the artwork itself. Extracted aluminium from the obsolete computers used to set up the bitcoin mine is turned into ingots, and 149 shredded surplus photographs are transformed into a giant papier-mâché Rai stone. (The process of making these works is also documented and presented via a video in the space.) The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh has argued that the failure to address climate change is a failure of imagination. Too often Westerncentric narratives view nature as inert and thus easily relegated to the background, which in turn leads to a ‘great derangement’ (as Ghosh’s 2016 book on climate change is titled) – the belief held by many humans that they exist outside of nature, even as we remain wholly dependent on it. For Ghosh, new narrative forms must emerge that push against such a dangerous belief. What is required, then, is exactly the kind of material storytelling that is so central to Mangan’s practice: a refusal to separate human agents, systems and processes, a desire to aggregate and chart energetic forces, and a reminder that systems and worlds can be undone, and remade. ar Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (mca), Sydney, through 30 June Naomi Riddle is a writer and editor based in Sydney

Core-Coralations, 2021–ongoing (installation view, Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone, 2024, mca, Sydney). Photo: Hamish McIntosh. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; mca, Sydney; and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

May 2024

ArtReview

“Make It Shittier” It takes more than irreverence and a good lawyer to subvert contemporary art. The duo behind mschf discuss their methods Interview by Jonathan T.D. Neil

Cave Hieroglyph Venus De Avignon Descending a Staircase Sexy Robot, 2024, oil on canvas, 75 × 153 cm (framed)

May 2024

When I first mentioned to a friend (who makes her life in the media, but outside the artworld) that I was conducting an interview with some of the members of the American art collective mschf, she professed ignorance. But then, after a beat, she said, “Wait! They did those rubber boots… They’re my eternal enemies!” She was of course thinking of the collective’s Big Red Boots (2023), which came to dominate social-media feeds early last year by making their wearers look improbably like cartoon characters from the knees down. Her half-serious ire was directed not at mschf, but at the online clout-chasing that turned this particular mschf product into, as she so acutely diagnosed, a “whole emperor’snew-clothes thing, but taken up by influencers”. After I directed her to the full list of mschf’s boundary prodding projects, she conceded that the work was “very, very funny”, and went so far as to express genuine affection for Rat Chat, a website through which members of the public could pay $3 to name the group’s pet rat, or refer ten friends and name the rat for free – a memeified lead-generation pyramid scheme. The most mischievous work in the group’s current exhibition at Perrotin (their second at a gallery, hence the title art2) is probably Met’s Sink of Theseus (2024), a cast-resin sink whose plumbing and fixtures come from a public restroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where fully functional, high-fidelity copies were swapped out for the originals under the cover of an authorised repair. But the show includes everything from Candy Airpods (2024), which are just what they say they are, to a series of designer handbags (Bottega Veneta, Hermès, etc) that have been ‘knocked off’ at microscopic scale, to paintings that depict art-historical artefacts morphing into contemporary art icons (like Muralangelo, 2024, in which Michelangelo’s David transforms in stages to Murakami’s ejaculating Lonesome Cowboy anime figure), making something like pictoral literalisations of a generative-ai prompt. It should be clear that mschf takes humour seriously. If much contemporary art today is unbearably and even unsustainably earnest, then mschf’s projects offer an antidote, a counterpractice that exceeds the bounds of art as something far more sacrilegiously intersectional: high design, direct action and institutional critique, but also comedy and satire, lifestyle brand and ambiguous politics – all backed by venture capital, and the group’s dedication to the detail-oriented hard work of irreverence as both ethos and business model.

According to its own descriptions, mschf endeavours to ‘challenge every sphere with which it comes into contact’. This can make an interviewer nervous. How would the ‘sphere’ of our conversation be challenged? How would the members of mschf with whom I was scheduled to speak, Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel, both chief creative officers of the studio, cleverly subvert the conventions of our q&a (with me surely coming out as the butt of the jokes)? Mercifully,

“There are a few words we really don’t like, and one is ‘prankster’” my interlocutors proved to be candid and forthcoming – dare I say earnest – about their work. They also, in true collective fashion, began and finished each other’s thoughts and sentences, so we, in turn, make no attempt to distinguish them in the copy below. artreview The jester, the trickster, the mischief maker are well codified social roles that have always existed within power structures of one sort or another. How do you think of mschf, to the extent that you do at all, in terms of these roles? mschf There are a few words we really don’t like, one that you didn’t mention, and that is ‘prankster’. People say that about us.

ar A prank suggests that there’s a victim. mschf It’s a gotcha at the end. In contrast, humour is such an important part of our work, and I think humour as a tool is incredibly powerful to get people to engage with certain subject matter that maybe they wouldn’t be able to if they were approached in a much more serious manner. A lot of that trickster sensibility that people rightly see when they look at mschf comes from the fact that we’re often looking for exploits and loopholes, because those are the things that you only get when there are grey areas, and that tends to be fertile ground for exploration. So, for example, with regard to copyright, it turns out that places that art history has ended up are wildly different than the places that the legal system has ended up. That tension makes it very productive to play with, and often it involves a little bit of directed antagonism. ar How stressed out is your legal counsel? mschf John Belcaster, our lawyer, is great, and he’s a really important part of the process in terms of figuring out how to thread the needle through a lot of projects. Sometimes he’s really stressed out, and sometimes maybe he should be more stressed out than he is. ar Who are your own artistic or design heroes? mschf One that is specifically connected to Perrotin is Maurizio Cattelan. From our backgrounds, Dunne & Raby and the entire speculative-design tradition were a big influence. dis magazine and k-Hole were very important for that ambiguous quasi-business-entityas-artist-persona, the ‘young incorporated artists’, as they were so lambasted. ar How does cynicism play a role or show up in the studio, or in the practice? Another way to ask this would be: what are you as a studio, or individually, most cynical about? mschf We have seen many instances in the past decade where satire becomes powerless. Insofar as satire has to be a recognisable absurd intensification of an existing impulse, in many places it is no longer possible to go far enough to differentiate it from sincerity. Perhaps it’s the ineffectiveness of certain creative approaches. You see a lot of artists making things that they think are doing something but it really feels like it isn’t. ar What are the rules that dominate the artworld that you would see your work as beginning to challenge or subvert?

Bootlegs (Red), 2024, resin, silicone, paint, 69 × 48 × 42 cm

ArtReview

mschf There is a very ‘if you build it, they will come’ attitude to a lot of art production. But there’s a lot of value in aggressively

Birkin Bag (Microscopic Handbags), 2024, photopolymer resin, gel case, microscope, 76 × 41 × 20 cm (microscope); 978 × 355 × 1010 um (microscopic bag)

May 2024

above Lil Nas X and mschf collaboration for Nike, Satan Shoe, 2021 preceding pages Public Universal Car, 2022, 2004 pt Cruiser, Chicken Run vhs tape, antifreeze, air freshener, found objects, 160 × 429 × 173 cm

ArtReview

chasing down your audience, and having as a core consideration where the work is going to go and live in the world and who’s going to see it, and not something that’s applied after the object is perfect. To design things for their ability to spread, and with consideration for where they will be seen, as opposed to just making something, putting it on Instagram and hoping someone will see it.

because you can send a website link, and message people with one cent and a Venmo link. It was a very effective way to get people’s attention. You’d get an email and you’d get a Venmo notification confirmation because it was a financial transaction. Eventually Venmo kicked us off. Then we moved to texting because we had everybody’s phone numbers from Venmo. And eventually we did two projects – one that

ar There’s a balance between virality and containment at work. The gallery and museum are containment mechanisms, physical embodiments of a kind of constraint, that has a discourse related to it, has an economy related to it. The internet, in terms of virality, lacks some of that containment. How do you think about the containment or constraint mechanisms that you are working with as a medium? Perhaps intellectual property is one kind of containment mechanism. Inside the studio, are there other things that you have identified as containers or containment issues that you are dealing with?

“People online trying to go viral will do any stupid thing to achieve that goal. As a goal it is not a good goal”

mschf Sitting with ‘virality’ for a second, people that we’ve talked to often think that we’re just chasing that all the time. For certain projects that’s not really the case. Having something go viral is never an end in and of itself. It’s a tool that you can aim towards to spread. Certain projects need a big enough audience for them to work. I’m speaking specifically about Key4All [2022, for which mschf sold thousands of keys that all unlocked and operated a single car, with an expectation of Grand Theft Auto-type behaviour; the result was closer to a tight-knit Discord channel come to life]. That was an idea that we had for a really, really long time, and we needed a certain number of people with a pretty uniform distribution through the 50 us states for that to work before we could even consider it. People online trying to go viral, just to go viral, will do any stupid thing to achieve that goal. As a goal it is not a good goal. When a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric. When we think about working online, we’ve tried to be as off-platform as we can. Part of that is: ‘just don’t make things that are intended to live on Instagram or YouTube or even Netflix’. We have built 300 websites in the course of this practice because we want everything to live on its own terms: firstly, often purely for technical reasons, but second, just because there’s a flattening effect for everything that passes through those platforms. And, obviously, for some of the things we’re doing, you can get kicked off. We’ve been kicked off a number of platforms. When we started, we started on Venmo,

was slightly a campaign-finance rule violation, and one that was slightly drug related – and then we got banned by T-Mobile. ar What would be, do you think, the highest compliment that someone could pay your practice? mschf Depends on where it’s coming from. There’s a kind of popular recognition that I think we have been chasing, which would hold up things like the Public Universal Car [2022, the collaboratively tricked-out and graffitied 2004 pt Cruiser that was the result of Key4All] or Tax Heaven 3000 [2023, an anime-influenced dating

simulation that files us Federal Income taxes for free] as mschf’s best artworks. It’s a funny place to be, because now that we make things that go in galleries, we have a vertical of outputs that are so clearly artworks, but they’re a very small slice of the practice. I’m looking for the interactive-performance-art read of a lot of the big, overtly mass-culture swings that we’re making. For a while people didn’t see what we were doing as an art practice. I think they couldn’t make sense of it – that was partially deliberate – but we were trying to make things in as many different verticals as possible. Many of those projects wouldn’t necessarily have been served by presenting them as artwork. That mass accessibility is held by looking like a brand or whatever in the moment. ar In the current show, what are your personal favourite works? mschf For me the sink [Met’s Sink of Theseus, 2024], and also the Botero [Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarrillos), 2024, in which Fernando Botero’s bulky smoker is given a weight-reducing retouch]. The car – Public Universal Car – is also a personal favourite project. But for works made for the show, the sink was difficult to do and kind of scary. I also feel like there are very, very few other people in the world who would or could have done that particular project. ar If you had to create an earnest motivational poster or video for the studio, what would that earnest motivational poster or video tell the people in the studio? Not ‘nothing is sacred’, right? Because obviously there are things that are sacred in the studio. mschf The feedback we end up giving more than anything else when talking through things is ‘can we make it shittier?’ That goes to our ‘preserve the idea and the concept at all costs’ mentality. There is a huge attention to detail, but at the end of the day, all the decisions are designed around the question: is this keeping the core concept, the beautiful initial spark that the idea had, and presenting it as well as possible – trying to maximise its delivery, its power, its lifespan? ‘Make it shittier’ is more of just ‘simplify’, make it more approachable. It’s shorthand for a lot of things. ar

Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarrillos), 2023, Fernando Botero’s Fumador de Cigarrillos, 1975; acrylic, coloured pencil, 53 × 43 cm (framed) all images but page 52 Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy mschf and Perrotin, Los Angeles

May 2024

art2, a solo show by mschf, is on view at Perrotin, Los Angeles, through 1 June Jonathan T.D. Neil is a writer and educator based in Los Angeles

Dig Deeper In layered installations, Vangelis Vlahos excavates fragments of Greek history to ask what is considered an event, and when, if ever, an event ends by Stephanie Bailey

“When I say that I don’t want to take a position in my work, it’s because I believe that I don’t have one,” Vangelis Vlahos tells me via video call. The Greek artist began exploring Greece’s post-dictatorship political history during the early 2000s, in an attempt to develop a sociopolitical consciousness through his artistic practice. Born during the so-called Regime of the Colonels, when a rightwing military junta ruled Greece, from 1967 to 1974, and growing up amid the transition to democracy, he remembers political discussions carrying a negative stigma. “A passive model of historical memory was largely dominant during the 1980s and 90s,” he recalls – Untitled Knight i (1997), screened in 2023 at the Stockholm School of Economics as part of Magasin iii’s film programme Borderland – where outer and inner meet, seems to grapple with that passivity. In a gymnasium, the artist struggles to roller-skate in medieval armour. As he stumbles and falls, his restrictive covering – a metaphor for self-protection – gradually comes undone. What followed were 1:150 scale architectural models that extended the artist’s confrontation with rigid facades, by interrogating the social, political and economic conditions that have shaped emblematic structures within the built environment. Presented at Manifesta 5, Buildings like texts are socially constructed (2004) comprises five models of European skyscrapers that were constructed under dictatorship or communism. Each model was created by architects based on information gleaned from discussions among amateurs in online forums. Among the skyscrapers is Athens Tower, whose model also appears in the installation Athens Tower (Tenants Lists 1974– 2004) (2004) alongside printed tenant lists from between 1974 and 2004, indicating a shift from state- and American-owned companies to (mostly) private Greek firms. The entanglement of national and international interests informs each study. “1992” (The renovation of the Bosnian Parliament) (2006–07) comprises two models of the Greece– Bosnia and Herzegovina Friendship Building, a government property damaged during the 1992 Siege of Sarajevo. Dossiers cover the building’s reconstruction (funded by the Greek state), economic agreements between both countries, and Greek foreign policy in the Balkans between 1992 and 2007.

But Vlahos is quick to emphasise that he’s not a historian. With a focus on the mediated footnotes to Greece’s modern geopolitical history, the artist is not concerned with producing research that contributes to the field of historical study – he works with secondary sources and material found online and through the media, after all. “I am more interested in finding a way to deal with an event and to activate it, if possible, in a contemporary context, and test its impact today,” he explains. Describing archaeology as an ideal metaphor for his process, the fragments of the past that Vlahos digs up are not intended to complete a historical picture – archaeology, after all, produces knowledge built up from an accumulation of objects that inevitably shifts and at times collapses as new discoveries appear. In keeping, Vlahos unearths historical traces to burn holes through official narratives that frame history as a closed book, which in turn treats the public as passive recipients of an established plotline. “My goal is to create an open narrative, an open platform, for anyone to project their own perceptions – if they have any – on the event I’m working through, rather than say how it should be understood,” the artist explains. A shift from architectural models to photographic assemblages during the late 2000s evolved that open-ended approach, as exemplified by Grey Zones (2009). Presented at the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, 75 black-and-white images sourced from newspapers and magazines are divided into two rows, each depicting details of a Cold War-era vessel. The first is an American drillship, Wodeco, used to exploit oil discovered in the Aegean Sea during the 1970s amid the 1973 oil crisis, which intensified an ongoing territorial dispute between Greece and Turkey that the latter’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 exacerbated. The second is Koyda, the first Soviet vessel to use statecontrolled shipyards on the Greek island of Syros as part of a 1979 agreement with the ussr, which was denounced by the us as ‘precedent breaking’ for a nato country and soon suspended. Though the conservative, pro-Western Greek government at the time apparently framed the agreement in economic terms, its resumption after the October 1981 election of Greece’s first socialist government, known for its anti-American rhetoric, was clearly political. 1981 (Allagi) (2007), named after the socialist party’s campaign slogan,

ArtReview

1981 (Allagi) (detail), 2007, 22 collages of photos and newspaper clippings on cardboard, 80 × 110 cm (each). Courtesy National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens

May 2024

“1992” (The renovation of the Bosnian Parliament), 2006–07, two models and seven dossiers on a table, dimensions variable. Photo: Viviana Athanasopoulou. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens

ArtReview

Remains (detail), 2011, collage of news clippings on cardboard on a wall-mounted shelf, a dossier and a pile of newspapers, dimensions variable. Photo: Viviana Athanasopoulou. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens

‘Change’, commemorates that transition. Images from the archives Yet that intermediary role is an enduring one – as evidenced in of pro-dictatorship newspaper Eleftheros Kosmos are arranged on 2022, when the Greek state mediated another byzantine international 22 boards spanning the moment the socialists took office to when incident. While moored at a Greek port, a Russian-flagged tanker carrying Iranian crude oil was impounded due to eu sanctions over Eleftheros Kosmos closed in June 1982. The military dictatorship and the us support it received has cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Recently renamed Lana after its former a long shadow over Greek politics. Buildings that proclaim a nation’s title appeared on a us sanctions list due to its ownership by a Russian identity to the world should not be misunderstood (2003), a model of the us bank’s subsidiary, Greek authorities released the vessel after finding embassy in Athens designed by Walter Gropius, visualises that shade the ship, which had replaced its flag with an Iranian one, had acquired with a curved wire tracing the trajectory of the rocket that Greek mili- new unsanctioned owners in 2021, whom the us promptly listed. Greek tant group 17 November fired at the building in 1996. Formed in 1975, authorities, acting on an official us request, then seized Lana’s oil, November 17 was named after the day triggering Iran’s retaliatory capture the dictatorship violently suppressed of two Greek tankers in the Arabian “My goal is to create an open a student uprising in 1973 – an event Gulf. Finally, a Greek appeals court narrative, an open platform, for anythat is commemorated annually by a ordered the oil’s return, a decision the one to project their own perceptions” march through central Athens that Supreme Court in Athens sustained, culminates at the us embassy, which thus concluding what was described in has since been enclosed by fortresslike fencing, demonstrating an the national press as a thriller. enduring, popular suspicion of American power and its imposition Lana is the focus of This event has now ended (lana) (2023), the title of on national politics. which defines a series of works that reflects on ‘what is considered an is there any oversight on ocalan? (2009–11) and Remains (2011) event, and when an event ends, if it ever does’. Fittingly, it was shown highlight the extent of that mistrust. The former installation tracks with Grey Zones in Elefsina Mon Amour, a group exhibition curated by the route taken by Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s Katerina Gregos in the Greek port city of Eleusis, one of the three founding leader, before Turkish authorities arrested him for terror- European Capitals of Culture in 2023, thus uniting three vessels to ism in February 1999. Drawing from the internet and tourist guides, create a geopolitical constellation across time that seems to answer a sequence of 119 photos – of airport buildings and landscape views – the question the work’s title poses regarding an incident’s lifespan. on a 23-metre-long shelf, log places where Öcalan unsuccessfully The two text-on-paper timelines composing the installation emphasought political asylum after leaving Damascus in October 1998, sise a temporal stretch. One tracks the political events surrounding including Moscow, Rome and Athens, where his clandestine arrival in Lana from when it entered Greek waters and left, and the other logs January 1999, aided by ultranationalist socialist mps, sealed his fate. contemporaneous weather conditions and changes to the tanker’s Trying to join the European single currency, the Greek state was put draught – the distance from the keel’s base to the waterline – which in an impossible position. Despite the Greek population generally cargo volume can impact. By mapping the Aegean’s climate, the sea sympathising with the Kurdish cause, supporting Öcalan was tanta- is presented as an event in its own right: a porous context that exists mount to aligning with a us-listed terrorist group and declaring war both within and beyond the measure of a single incident. Vlahos tends to decentre the drama in his compositions – a choice with Turkey. The secret service was thus tasked with moving him to Holland to request political asylum. Failing that, he was taken to that echoes ancient tragedy, where violence was rarely acted out onNairobi, where he was arrested after leaving – either voluntarily or stage in order to amplify the conditions surrounding its eruption. “A strong image of a person or event with already strong associaforcibly – the Greek ambassador’s residence. While Kurdish protests across Europe accused Greece of betrayal, tions and connotations blocks the ability to see differently, to see and Greek prime minister Costas Simitis shared blame with Europe’s beyond them, to see outside of preconceived notions,” he explains. failure to collaborate on a solution–per the Los Angeles Times, Paris, Bonn, Take Objects to relate to a trial (Nov 17) (2016–17), part of a series on notable Oslo, Stockholm, Bern, Rotterdam court cases. The project departs from a and Kiev all told Öcalan not to bother failed bombing attempt in Athens in “I approach my subjects from the landing – Remains focuses on the fall2002 that led to the first arrest of a 17 position of someone who does not out of Öcalan’s capture in Greece. November member and the discovery have a complete picture of the subjects Materials organised according to when of two Athens apartments used by the group as hideouts, each filled his arrest hit Greek newspaper headthey are researching” with incriminating items. But rather lines to when his name disappeared from them, tracking the mediatisation of a political scandal, include than engage with that inventory, Vlahos lists everything that was a dossier related to the Greek economy and stock market at the time, not included as evidence across framed, printed a4 pages. Common which soon recovered from the initial shock; and seven boards isolating household items like toilet paper, paired with an image of the two images of foreign minister Theodoros Pangalos, who resigned with flats’ unassuming front doors, seem to humanise – or at least complitwo other ministers as a result. The last person to resign was intelli- cate – what the media so often portrays as simply monstrous. gence officer Savvas Kalenterides, who accompanied Öcalan to Nairobi That relatability is contrasted by another set of panels, with photos – and, per a cia journal paper, repeatedly refused orders to ditch him. of the front door of every guest room in the Intercontinental Hotel In the aftermath, he told The Guardian that Athens cooperated with in Athens organised by floor, presented alongside a dossier naming America and Kenya to deliver Öcalan to Turkey. ‘We were the middle politicians, such as us president Bill Clinton, who stayed there in men,’ he said. ‘As a Greek, I feel deeply ashamed about our role.’ 1999. That year, the hotel was bombed by the Revolutionary Cells,

ArtReview

Objects to relate to a trial ii (detail), 2015, texts and photographs on cardboard, triptych, 35 × 50 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Radio Athènes, Athens

Color Test (grey hat on yellow background) (detail), 2015, collage of photos on cardboard, three pieces, 35 × 50 cm, 35 × 50 cm, 28 × 35 cm. Courtesy the artist and Radio Athènes, Athens

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killing one, in protest against nato’s un-bypassing air strikes on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) during the Kosovo War. It’s an uncomfortably coy juxtaposition of scales that asks what comparable crimes have been plotted within these many privileged, private quarters. Particularly when thinking about the unofficial meeting in Belgrade that year between former Greek premier Constantine Mitsotakis and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, who had just been indicted for war crimes. A 47-second clip of that encounter is described in forensic detail in the video This event has now ended (May 27, 1999, Belgrade) (2019), with text rolling over an image of Milošević: a format borrowing from cinematic decoupage – a screenplay that includes elements like camera angles – which characterises Vlahos’s recent works. “Greece was maybe the only European country in favour of Serbia during the war,” Vlahos recalls, referring to a relationship between the two nations, tied by history and religion, and which lawyer and politician Alexandros Lykourezos once described as ‘difficult for anybody outside Greece to understand rationally’. Objects to relate to a trial (Mladic’s hat) (2015), a series of image and text panels relating to the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, confronts that relationship by departing from a military hat that appeared in an Associated Press news clip of Lykourezos voicing support for Mladić, who was charged with (and later convicted of) genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the Bosnian War – a gift from Mladić himself. ‘What does this mean for Greek politics today?’ Vlahos asks, referring to such dubious connections. He complicates the question by highlighting the changing perceptions of former Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi through the decades; a point that recalls what Vlahos once said about time and place playing a role in how his projects are read. Of course, Vlahos doesn’t have the answers. “I approach my subjects from the position of someone who does not have a complete picture of the subjects they are researching,” he insists. The Elounda Summit (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition) (2009), which amasses photos taken by Greek and foreign press at the 1984 meeting at which Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou mediated discussions between Gaddafi and French president François

Mitterrand around bilateral troop withdrawals from Chad, summarises that approach. The work’s bracketed subtitle comes from a 1966 text by Sol LeWitt, which says the artist’s aim is to provide information rather than instruct, and describes the serial artist ‘as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise’. For Vlahos, that premise is simple: there is never one way to look at something, hence the seriality defining his work. Sequenced like units on a grid, information appears objective because multiple views of a single event have been unified into an object whose visual approximation to a scientific study invites peer review. The photographic installation This event has now ended (Tsakalotos’s notes) (2016–17), shown at the 2023 Thessaloniki Photo Biennale, expresses that formal sleight of hand. In 2015, Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos – newly appointed after Yanis Varoufakis’s resignation following Greece’s notorious bailout referendum that year – was photographed shaking hands with Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem during an emergency meeting in Brussels. In the photo, Tsakalotos, who negotiated new bailout terms in his first week in office, is seen holding his notes to camera, partly obscured by his thumb, with visible phrases like ‘no triumphalism’ and ‘message to people’. This tragicomic incident, which reflects the “hasty and clumsy return to history” that Vlahos observed in Greece with the onset of its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, sparked a wave of speculation on social media, where the image was zoomed in and pored over. Vlahos downloaded these images and arranged them on a panel presented alongside a printed list of words from those notes organised alphabetically, and a timeline of Tsakalotos’s activity that day. Details include the crumpled suit he wore without a tie – another messy footnote presented without comment. ar Work by Vlahos is currently on view in Nikos Alexiou. The Collection at the Benaki Museum, Athens, through 26 May; a two-artist presentation of his and Ala Younis’s work is scheduled to open at Tavros, Athens, on 10 October Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong

This event has now ended (Tsakalotos’s notes) (detail), 2016–17, collage of 27 photos on cardboard, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2024

Enjoy the Silence A new videowork by Liu Chuang, full of allegory and representation, posits an alien invasion against the beauty and lost opportunities of Earth and its dumb inhabitants by Mark Rappolt

Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (stills), 2023, three-channel 6k-video installation, 55 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

ArtReview

Taking past, present and future China as its playground, Bitcoin treated as if they were (threatening) aliens. Like most great art, the Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), a 40-minute, three- work performs a perfectly judged tightrope act, guiding viewers channel (think super-widescreen) videowork by Shanghai-based artist safely across the fine line that, to a purely academic mind, would sepaLiu Chuang, is a meditation on victims and oppressors and the inter- rate the profound from the ridiculous. While nevertheless keeping us related subjects of power, profit and control. In both human and entertained with the sensation that it is continuously tottering on the nonhuman arenas. If there’s such a thing as going ‘viral’ in the world brink of the latter. of art (tricky, given that the unspoken economy behind art is built Liu’s latest videowork, the near-hourlong, three-channel Lithium on scarcity), then Bitcoin Mining seems to have achieved it, seemingly Lake and Island of Polyphony (2023), deploys the same techniques as its on a continuous trundle through worldwide biennials, among them predecessor and debuted last November at Antenna Space, Shanghai. Like Bitcoin Mining, its title links two the Asian Art Biennial, Taipei and Humanity is doing a pretty good job, apparently disparate subject matters: the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of the production and extraction of an Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg, in through the destruction of other atomically unstable alkaline metal 2019; the Dhaka Art Summit, 2020; species and Earth’s atmosphere the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2021; (best known for its use in smartphone and the natural environment more batteries) and a musical texture made and most recently finding a corner in this year’s Diriyah Contemporary Art up of two or more equal but indegenerally, of retarding itself Biennale in Riyadh. pendent melodies. During the midThe work uses a blend of found and filmed footage, extracts from sixteenth century, in Italy, the Bishop of Verona forbade the form from popular and unpopular cinema, and citations from academic litera- being performed in convents on the basis that, unlike monophony ture and pop culture to draw out its core themes. By entangling fact (which became the dominant form in Western music), it was morally and fiction, time and space, Liu poses bitcoin miners as practitioners dangerous and encouraged individual vanity among the nuns. of traditional transhumance and, conversely, ethnic minority cultures Some of these latter, however, continued to write, in secret, polyas dead museum relics. As a viewer, one minute you’re pondering an phonic hymns, and when polyphonic singing is part of Liu’s video analysis of Zhou dynasty (c.1046–256 bce) economics, the next you’re it is notably performed by Lithuanian folksingers and Mbuti tribesconsidering the relationship of Mongolian wedding dresses to the women. While Europe is not the primary target of Liu’s work (other aesthetics of the Star Wars movie franchise, all the while wondering than as a colonial force, ultimately responsible for many of the probwhat any of that has to do with cheap karaoke machines, colonial lems related to capitalism and globalisation that plague the global majority today), Lithium Lake proposes the telegraph wires, a tendency to put big statues Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, persistence of related fears and proscripnext to big dams and why some human 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio tions. Not least in an intriguing segment on beings (ethnic minorities) are continuously

May 2024

Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (stills), 2023, three-channel 6k-video installation, 55 min 4 sec. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

ArtReview

Project Cybersyn, a decision-support system developed by British the transformation of apes into humans and the idea of progress and cyberneticist Stafford Beer and deployed during the early 1970s by its accompanying violence. This time, though, the bone has holes Salvador Allende’s shortlived socialist government in Chile to create a drilled into it, suggesting more a flute than a club. In keeping with managed economy with ‘almost instant’ feedback (via Telex machine) that, the shot of the bone cuts not to a rotating space station, as it does from factories and service industries. This polyvocal form of socialism in 2001, but to a cgi of the Voyager 1 spaceship (launched in 1977 and was crushed following an America-backed coup and Allende’s subse- now the most travelled humanmade object in the universe, hurtling towards nowhere in particular through interstellar space) and the quent death in late 1973. Lithium Lake also picks up themes that rumbled through Bitcoin Golden Record attached to it. The Golden Record is what it says it is. Mining: the link between the control of water and the exercise of Once an alien civilisation has worked out how to play it (instructions power, the relation, with respect to control, between silence and the on the golden packaging, which also contains a guide to the location of Earth), they will hear greetings lack of it, the more general links bein a number of languages, a speech tween ecology and economics, and The result is a paean to diversity in from Kurt Waldheim (back then an obsession with scenes from Steven the face of humanity’s blinkered drive Secretary General of the un) and a Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of down a highway to ecological hell general introduction to the diverthe Third Kind (1979), in which humans sity of life on Earth (in both sound attempt to communicate, through light and sound, with an alien mothership. The result is a paean to and images). A diversity, Liu’s video goes on to suggest, that is rapidly diversity in the face of humanity’s blinkered drive down a highway becoming extinct. to ecological hell. With song as its metaphor and representation as its From there, Liu channels the contemporary Chinese sciencedriving force, its narrative blends science-fiction movies and novels, fiction writer Cixin Liu, and in particular the plot of his novel The a long-extinct hominid ‘discovered’ in 2002, an incarnation of the Three-Body Problem (2008; translated into English in 2014 and this year Buddha whose compassion led him to become a meal for a tigress, adapted as a controversial Netflix series) and the related ‘dark forest the theories of historic and contemporary economists and physicists, theory’, which asserts that the first thing an alien race will do, on seventeenth-century philosophers, twentieth-century ethnomusicol- discovering the existence of another, is to destroy the threat. A theory, ogists and historians, the chief adviser to French president François effectively ‘silence is golden’ – an ironic riposte to the Golden Record – Mitterrand and a focus on Earth’s flora and fauna. that was also espoused by physicists such as Stephen Hawking, It starts, however, with a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s movie and which reflects the policy of most earthbound ‘superpowers’ throughout history. One of the limits of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): a bone rotating Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, through the air, presumably symbolising, science fiction, perhaps, is that we can only, 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, as in Kubrick’s film, the discovery of tools, really, imagine what we know: ourselves. If we Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio

May 2024

look to nature, Liu suggests, while projecting images of tiger moths evading predation by bats, aided by a soft, sound-absorbent fur and an ability to project the false sounds of other elements in the natural world, we might learn a thing or too. Even if the rule of this jungle is that every living thing is afraid of unfamiliar forms. Today, the tactics of the tiger moth are deployed in the creation of light shows designed to make ugly largescale infrastructure – here dams – less unpleasant and more entertaining. Back in the world of Cixin’s novel, that alien race is the Trisolarans, who upon discovering the existence of Earth set about to destroy it. However, on realising that it will take them 400 years to reach their target, by which time they surmise that humans will have evolved their technology beyond that of the Trisolaran’s own at the time of launch, they send a computer, the ‘Sophon’, as an avant-garde tasked with slowing down and confounding any technological development (particularly when it comes to particle physics and energy production), and generally spying on Earth. In Liu’s film, the Sophon, which has transformed into a female human, acts as our largely mute guide (words are provided via a narrator) through the rest of the artwork. And what she discovers is that humanity is doing a pretty good job, through the destruction of other species and Earth’s atmosphere and the natural environment more generally, of retarding itself. In relation to which, Liu evokes economist W. Brian Arthur’s ‘lock-in’ theory, by which increasing-returns technologies that ‘by chance gain an early lead in adoption’ corner the market to the extent that no one continues to think about alternatives (in Liu’s video this relates to the dominance of carbon and then lithium technologies). Similarly, in Lithium Lake the discovery of whale song is the accidental byproduct of the paranoic silence on Cold War submarines: woven together with

ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania’s theory that humans sang in the trees and became silent on the plains, progress is gradually related to silence, alterity to song. By the halfway point of the video, the Sophon has discovered and started dealing with its own redundancy, smoking and staring at a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s classic depiction of the Romantic sublime, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), touching and feeling the natural world in what, perhaps, are the alien equivalent of its moody teenage years. Perhaps what’s most intriguing about the film is that, like the Golden Record, much of the view of Earth presented by Liu is through representation. A Ming-dynasty scroll painting is used to depict urban demand for managed nature in the form of gardens. Hu Huai’s tenthcentury painting Bestiary of Real and Imaginary Animals is animated to depict the extinction of species. Vintage movie footage of a tiger on the prowl is presented in the context of a traditional theatre setting. In the midst of her musings, the Sophon is applying face paint as if to perform a Chinese Opera version of the mythical Sun Wukong; Edgar Degas’s 1875–76 painting Dans un Café becomes the trigger for an exploration of the spread of silence and distinctions of class; coins, with the heads of Ferdinand VII, King of Spain (1784–1833), and his predecessor Charles III (1759–88), become a cypher for colonial exploitation. The entirety presenting art as a space of truths and imagination. Towards the end of the film, Liu cites French economist and scholar (and adviser to François Mitterrand) Jacques Attali, who asserted that representation was a power that once only belonged to God. Today, seven billion mobile phones have changed that, Liu suggests. We’re subject to an uninterrupted stream of messages, but don’t really speak. Although we could. ar

Liu Chuang: Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony, 2023 (installation view, Antenna Space, Shanghai). Photo: 21 studio

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To walk straight 71

60th Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere Arsenale and Giardini, Venice 20 April – 24 November ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,’ wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I get something of that old twentieth-century European immigrant’s thought facing Foreigners Everywhere, curator Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale. Trumpeted as the Biennale’s first curator from South America, Pedrosa’s sprawling exhibition sets up multiple versions of the foreigner, or ‘stranger’: stranger to the place of Venice and the institution of the Biennale, seen as European, Western, probably white. But stranger, too, in the sense of those historically perceived as ‘strange’ by Western societies. So Foreigners Everywhere bundles together works from artists of the Global South, the art of Indigenous people, the work of queer artists, of folk artists, and work by artists falling within that still-contentious description of ‘outsider’ art. And it furthermore splits the show in half, between presentations of contemporary work and a large number of twentiethcentury paintings – the ‘Nucleo Storico’ sections – which focus on ‘global modernisms and modernisms of the Global South’. Of these three sections, two are salon-hang-style rooms, one of abstract art and another of portraiture (both in the International Pavilion venue in the Giardini); the third, in the Arsenale – which borrows the famous glass display panel system designed by Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi for São Paulo’s masp, where Pedrosa is artistic director – presents paintings by artists who left

Italy for foreign lands during the last century. Migration and the stories of migrants feature prominently. Who, in the face of such plurality, could possibly write anything about it? For Pedrosa, it’s clear what the political stakes are, the show’s rhetoric reflecting the kind of benign cosmopolitanism that preoccupies many liberal curators and art institutions currently. ‘Wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners – they/we are everywhere’, Pedrosa writes, adding that ‘no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner’. This doesn’t quite ring true, of course – most of us would prefer a home to exile, with others who share some common bond – and it reveals the limitations of a curatorial politics that, by seeking to give a platform to marginalised and minoritarian subjects everywhere (with the Venice Biennale as the supposed ‘centre’ of the artworld), can only ever really make symbolic gestures of acknowledgement and recognition. The political situations of the groups recognised in Pedrosa’s show are not changed by Foreigners Everywhere, because those situations are not susceptible to mere sympathy and gestures of artistic inclusion. It would of course be a narrow-minded philistine who was not interested in, and open to seeing, how other people articulate their own perspective on the world, and the form of their own difficulties and troubles, through artworks. But here one arrives at the limits of the ethical

Foreigners Everywhere, 2024 (installation view of a ‘Nucleo Storico’ section in the Arsenale at the 60th Venice Biennale). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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version of representation in art shows. It’s ethically good that everyone is represented, but what is there otherwise to say about the art? Who is it for, and who does it address? It’s perhaps why, in the contemporary work, Foreigners Everywhere has an emphasis on video documentary and video essay, works that straddle social reportage, activist documentation and critical interrogation. In the Arsenale is Marco Scotini’s ongoing Disobedience Archive (2005–), a circular enclosure of around 40 monitors, a collection of videos spanning decades that link migration, postcolonial and diaspora politics, and global lgbtq+ movements. Elsewhere there are the stories of lesbian couples facing the social and cultural difficulties of raising their own children in Singapore, in Charmaine Poh’s videos. Fred Kuwornu’s We Were Here (2024) essays the history of the representation of Black Africans in European culture since the Renaissance, in a style verging on tv documentary. Looming in the cavernous space of the Arsenale are the multiple hanging videoprojection screens of Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11); each screen a different story told by the person whose hand we see drawing on a map of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, tracing their routes – from Morocco, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere – towards and into Europe, as they narrate their experiences: the transit, the waiting for lawyers and immigration papers or visas, the relatives they stay with, the calls to family back home,

the cash-in-hand jobs, the boredom. Austere and precise in its structure, The Mapping Journey Project is exemplary in its use of video as human testimony and acknowledgement; one voice tells us that all they want is to live, to work, to be. Everyone would want that. The trouble is, social and economic power always gets in the way. These works notwithstanding, what visually dominates Foreigners Everywhere is the preponderance of painting, collage and drawing. It is an oddly comfortable show, for all the rhetoric, with many spaces looking a little too much like the booths of an art fair. The ‘Nucleo Storico’ galleries present a retold art history of the twentieth century through the two main cultures of modernist painting: realists, figurative and social documentary painting, and mostly hard-edged geometric abstraction. Redistributing the story of twentieth-century modernism has been going on for some time now, and Pedrosa’s selections are made to establish a distributed and diasporic multiplicity to these two great artistic paradigms. Here, they are both evidence of migrations, of artists and ideas, and a metaphor for the virtue assigned in the show to migration, ‘alterity’ and foreignnesswithin-oneself. On the other hand, if these galleries of paintings also, by accident, have echoes of the bric-a-brac and the thrift store, it’s because not all of the paintings, regardless of what life story and cultural history they are evidence of, are as good as each other. But then again, who can judge? While Foreigners Everywhere makes cultural inclusion and the celebration of distinct cultural identities a priority, in bringing artists together we’re faced with the question of how to look, and what to value, and whether this can

be shared. For example, in front of the bright acrylic-on-paper psychedelism of Colombian artist Aycoobo, whose intricate and dazzling paintings elaborate on the worldview of the Nonuya people, a culture whose cosmogeny and origin myths he represents, how do we relate? As a secular atheist, cosmologies and mythologies of every sort have never interested me. What, then, can we speak of? Politics and aesthetics don’t necessarily coincide, nor do ‘we’ all see or speak of the same experiences. It becomes a question of whether such largescale biennial exhibitions are starting to run out of road, while their thematic preoccupations seem now to run in circles. The last Venice Biennale exhibition, Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams, touted its majority-female lineup, while Alemani aligned her show with all the current posthuman, ecological thinking, with which ‘artists propose new alliances between species, and worlds inhabited by porous, hybrid, manifold beings’, and who challenge ‘the modern Western vision of the human being − and especially the presumed universal ideal of the white, male “Man of Reason”’. Maybe these are the right ideas to have. Maybe ‘modern’ ideas were really just ‘Western’ ones, or white male ones. The through line to Foreigners Everywhere, though, is in the absence of any ‘universalising’ approach that might allow us to find what people might have in common, through artworks. Ironically, the ideology of modernism, for its flaws, suggested something of that universalism. Instead, cultural difference tends to become aesthetic indifference. Pedrosa’s prioritising of the many local manifestations of modern works begs the question of what tied artists, often thousands of miles apart,

in a conversation about the values of certain artistic forms, while exaggerating modernism’s authority (or complicity) as a manifestation of the West. But at a deeper level, Foreigners Everywhere settles on an idea of the global in which, since all global experience is seen only as aspects of particularity, displacement, migration or a privileged marginality, and in which the idea of nation-states is treated with suspicion, no bigger idea of political (or, as it happens, aesthetic) community emerges. There are of course themes here presented as common between artists, but these are the gift of the curator’s orchestration. Pedrosa tries to argue in his introduction that Venice is ‘a city whose original population consisted of refugees from Roman cities’. He forgets that in coming together, those refugees went on to forge the Venetian Republic, a citystate that lasted a thousand years. Now it is a charming relic and the global artworld’s playground. Magical thinking about how we are ‘all foreigners’ helps no one, since it denies the realities of what it means to negotiate political differences and make a society in common with others, to become no-longer-foreign. Those politics are real, and often profoundly difficult, if not brutal, and cannot be wished away by art shows: during the Biennale’s opening week, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s rightwing premier, was busy signing accords with the Tunisian president, Kais Saied, offering business credit and investment to bolster Tunisia’s control of illegal migration, itself having become a focus for migrants intent on crossing where Italy is closest to Africa. Foreigners everywhere? At the Biennale, yes. In the real world, not so much. J.J. Charlesworth

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, 2008–11 (installation view, Foreigners Everywhere, 2024, in the Arsenale at the 60th Venice Biennale). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

May 2024

Poetics of Encryption kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 17 February – 26 May Featuring works by more than 40 artists across all four floors of kw, Poetics of Encryption is a vast, frequently overwhelming exhibition. It’s also part of a larger rollout: the eponymous 2023 book by the show’s curator, Nadim Samman, a website with three online commissions and a conference. Together these examine the role of digital technologies today and their implications for knowledge, power and liberation. The show is divided into three chapters: Black Site, Black Hole and Black Box. We begin, appropriately, in near darkness, walking unsurely through the ground floor’s chamberlike rooms. In Roger Hiorns’s Film Footage of ‘A Retrospective View of the Pathway’ Ipswich Burial (2016–) a military plane is interred deep in the ground; in Sebastian Schmieg’s Search by image, recursively, starting with a transparent png (400 × 225px), 2951 images, 12fps, 2011 (2011–) a transparent png with no visual information is run through Google’s ‘search by image’ function. Quickly it mutates into other, ever more outlandish images, their associative links obscure. The sense, upfront, is of being buried and overwhelmed. Can algorithms access hidden knowledge? In short, yes: if only in terms of scale, they are privy to knowledge that will always exceed the human. Poetics of Encryption focuses on and narrates this condition. In one elaborate representation of unknowing, Nico Vascellari’s videowork Vit (2020) – here projected to terrifying, epic proportions – the artist is sedated before being hoisted by a helicopter, his inert body dangling over a sublime Italian mountain landscape. What’s the alternative to passivity? One approach is to attempt an escape and visualise the fugitive ‘real’ and the actors determining it. For Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, that means tracking links between power,

technology and control across two huge, labyrinthine wall-based flowcharts (Calculating Empires, 2023). This diagnostic instinct reappears with Clusterduck’s The Detective Wall (2020–24), a cartographic account of contemporary memes. While Crawford and Joler’s work is more serious and academic, both exemplify a paranoid impulse to make sense of an increasingly complex and inhuman world. As a darkening, occluding force, contemporary technologies are increasingly in tension with the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as a liberatory force and, with it, of progress. In what writer James Bridle has termed the New Dark Age, there is simply too much data – mostly illegible, at least to those navigating it. Yet this data is the bedrock of machine intelligence, which, with ai, has a growing capacity for autogenesis. In Oliver Laric’s animation Exoskeleton (2022), biological forms amass, fall apart, reform: nothing dies but rather disintegrates and reappears ad infinitum, mirroring the entropic drift of digital life. Joshua Citarella’s e-deologies (2020–23), strange colourful flags representing real, albeit fringe, political movements (‘Anarcho-Collectivist Islamo’, for example), suggest a kind of seooptimised politics, like threads of words meant only for machine eyes. In their chaos, they neatly convey the power of digital media – or rather, those who shape and control it – to generate misinformation and fracture contemporary political life. This disruptive effect takes a comical turn in sculptures by Eva and Franco Mattes. Based on digital photography glitches, a pair of taxidermy cats (Panorama Cat, 2022, and Half Cat, 2020) – their bodies respectively stretched and squashed – convey the problem of applying

machine learning to reality. In their wall-based Abuse Standards Violations 3 (2016–21), we see examples of visual material censored by socialmedia platforms. Leaked to the artists by moderators who usually do not even know their employer’s identity, the images grasp the crude logic that determines what cannot be seen. Jon Rafman’s 2023 video installation Videocabin ii (You, The World, and I) transposes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the story of a lover’s sole image lost during a technological update. Throughout these works, digital translation of the real is invariably accompanied by distortion or omission, and a negotiation of loss. In Jonna Kina’s Secret Words and Related Stories (2013–16), teenagers read aloud anonymously collected passwords and the stories behind them. There is poetry in this, and a reminder: while we are increasingly tethered to and determined by systems and algorithms we can neither trace nor fully understand, they are not unknowable. That’s true also of the actors creating and controlling them. If entities such as Google function like ‘black holes’, as Vladan Joler claims here in his short video New Extractivism (2020), then they are entirely manmade ones. In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, referenced repeatedly here and in Samman’s book, the inhabitants never see reality, only its shadows moving across the cave walls. So too with contemporary digital life; our navigation is conditional on a studied, often enforced unseeing. Poetics of Encryption, in the main, doesn’t really attempt to undo this, to illuminate or bridge gaps in knowledge. Impressionistic and, indeed, poetic rather than prescriptive, it shows instead how contemporary vision is being restricted and ruptured, in the hope of seeing in other ways. Rebecca O’Dwyer

Clusterduck, The Detective Wall (detail), 2020–24, mixed media wall with memes. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artists and the anonymous creativity of the multitudinary subjectivities of the internet

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Eva & Franco Mattes, Panorama Cat, 2022, taxidermy cat. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artists and Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia

May 2024

Sarah Rapson Mad in Pursuit Modern Art, Paris 15 March – 20 April Since her first solo exhibition, in 1992, the British artist Sarah Rapson has acquired a welldeserved reputation for being ‘difficult’: difficult to write about, difficult to engage with. She is both a supreme conceptual strategist and a windup merchant par excellence – an artist who makes you suspect you’re an idiot and goads you into proving otherwise. Mad in Pursuit’s title comes from French author Violette Leduc’s novelised 1970 autobiography, and in this context could be read several ways: does it refer to us, desperately pursuing a means to read the work on show; or to Rapson herself, chasing – what? – our engagement? Regardless, the show is demonstrative in its inscrutability, which is not the oxymoron it might seem. The exhibition assembles around a dozen recent paintings, some large, some small, some formed of multiple canvases. Most are cut to irregular dimensions and contain – pace the list of works – ‘printed matter’. Some of this matter is visible. Titles allude to artists (Camille Claudel, for one, lends her initials to cc i. and cc ii., both 2024 ), or the production and sale of their work. Fragments of paper or card printed with the logos of blue-chip art dealerships line the sides of several canvases, and the artist has

published the text buried deep below the paintwork of Consortium (2023) as a printout; it bears choice sentences from art market articles. Nuance-signalling scraps torn from art publications – one from an old copy of Apollo showing an installation shot of a Monet exhibition, another a picture of a writing desk ripped from a furniture catalogue – might appear to impart great significance, but thicken the plot still further. That’s as explicit as it gets. Rapson has concealed all other ‘matter’ under layers of bone-hued oil paint or occasionally black pigment, the former sometimes applied thinly enough to expose the outlines of the materials buried beneath. The works are quite beautiful in a minimal-punky sort of way, and might in some cases – with extreme myopia – be mistaken for the paintings of Rapson’s touchstone, Agnes Martin. One series, comprising Newhouse i., Newhouse ii. and Newhouse iii. (2024/2003), was first exhibited 21 years ago, then subsequently reworked (we know not how) in the artist’s studio in Bridport, Dorset. Each work presents you with an apparent contradiction in terms: the paint masks rectangles of printed materials, about the size of double-page a4 spreads, their

outlines left prominent; they appear to conceal, to show the unshown. This dynamic demands an unusual degree of active engagement: text or images hide themselves as if wanting to be found, while what is exposed – those gallery logos, for example – seems broadly in tune with the art industry concerns evoked in the titles. If at first this seems forbidding, you might start to perceive a ludic, even procedural dimension to the show. Clues – in the form of the aforementioned, readable fragments of text – are scattered throughout, eventually building up to hints. Those references to the grand art publications and galleries (the ‘consortium’ referred to earlier?), and to artistic heroes – Martin, Claudel – suggest some degree of disenchantment with the way that even the best art is displayed, chronicled and sold. By way of response, Rapson’s work does its best to suppress those conventions. The very absence of a press release goes some way to tearing up the unspoken contract between visitor and gallery: why should a (skim-) reading of a work of art be handed over in a convenient package? Rapson puts a challenge to our expectations of such industry standards – and, in the process, dares us to have a bit of fun with it. Digby Warde-Aldam

Newhouse iii. (detail), 2024 (2003), oil paint plaster and printed matter on canvas, 245 × 92 cm. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London & Paris

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Liam Gillick Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures Kin, Brussels 1 March – 19 April For over three decades Liam Gillick has honed a modus operandi in which sculptures and installations alluding to rational modernism function as supports for his speculative theses. Fusing together formal registers and cultural references, the uk-born, New York-based artist produces essayistic work with a sociological slant. Research pertaining to often obscure but illuminating microhistories galvanises his extensive output of physical artworks: the phalanx of Plexiglas Screens and Discussion Platforms Gillick has produced since the 1990s, for example, parallels his research into nowdefunct approaches to car manufacturing in 1970s Sweden. This exhibition, at the recently opened commercial gallery Kin, is suggestive of Gillick’s modular approach; it’s concurrent with a very similar show at Esther Schipper, Berlin, which bears a near-identical title in which ‘Amount Structures’ is left unstruck. The show consists mainly of wall-mounted sculptures and reliefs fabricated from aluminium T-slot extrusions of varying lengths. This ubiquitous and generic modular material, used in retail, manufacturing and data centres, has been customised – most notably via the application of punchy colours in powder coating – to produce a body of work that draws heavily on American Minimalism,

both in terms of the formal language and the strategy of elevating lowly hardware. Formed from a spectrum of brightly coloured, snappedtogether metal sections, some works are elongated, others squarish, still others linear in a manner that suggests letterforms like Fs and Ns. Art-historical allusions are unavoidable: the horizontal relief entitled Model of a System Type 1 (all works 2024) is notably evocative (particularly in its colours) of Donald Judd’s late works, while Green Analogue Model, backlit by integrated leds, calls to mind Dan Flavin. The colours Gillick uses here derive from the ral colour standardisation system established in Germany in 1927. ral is just one of two specific historical methodologies that, according to the press release, sit in the background: the other is the 1920s isotype pictogram system by Marie and Otto Neurath, whose work fused design and social science. Their designs form the basis for new diagrammatic symbols in thought bubbles, on two framed mockups for book covers: Black Phase of Service and Red Phase of Modeling. In contrast to the original Neurath glyphs, Gillick’s are ludic and arcane. Their placement inside the cartoonish cloud suggests they are in fact subjective; expressive of information that cannot be readily communicated. Both ral

and isotype are aesthetic systems originally conceived as efficient, universal modes of communication for multiple contexts: industry, architecture, transport, etc. Crucially for Gillick, idealistic impulses lie at their hearts – each was conceived as integral to a mission of worldbuilding spurred on by the messianic zeal for progress that marked the zeitgeist of a century ago. Commercial application mattered, but there was more to them than the privatised, corporatised logic that proliferates in the present. Gillick’s evocation of the vocabularies of high modernism, then, reveals the extent to which they have been degraded and emptied of affect. This voiding occurred via overexposure, surely, but also because their underlying utopian fervour that once seemed available has been abandoned or nullified. The recourse to repetition, standardisation and detachment that distinguishes this show – and Gillick’s opus in general – mirrors the dominant order of this century. The application of these strategies would be numbing and deadening were they not coupled with the frisson of some ineffable element. What makes the particoloured arrangements on the walls here alluring is the idiosyncratic narratives with which Gillick has infused them. Pádraic E. Moore

Blue Selection Strategy, 2024, powder coated aluminium, 200 × 8 × 205 cm. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Kin, Brussels

May 2024

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 25 February – 28 July Two figures in fur coats pose for James Van Der Zee with their gleaming Cadillac v-16 parked in front of brownstones in Couple, Harlem (1932), an intimate and nostalgic gelatin silver print. A studio portrait from the same oeuvre, Person in Fur-Trimmed Ensemble (1926), captures the glamorous countenance of an individual likely dressed for a drag ball at the Hamilton Lodge. Van Der Zee, whose work is a mainstay in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, documented a period of cultural revival that blossomed in Upper Manhattan and internationally during the 1920s. His photographs were by nature collaborations between himself and the Black cosmopolitan urbanites he encountered on the streets or

hosted in his studio. Running through the 160-work survey of Van Der Zee’s milieu is, likewise, a palpable sense of the collectivity that sparked what is now called the Harlem Renaissance. From the start of the Great Migration (1910–70), when six million Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for the Northeast and other parts of the us, to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, approximately 175,000 African Americans lived and prospered in Harlem, an eight-square-kilometre neighbourhood north of Central Park, where they threw interracial soirées and published periodicals highlighting Black intellectuals, some of which, including The Crisis (1910–) and Opportunity (1923–1949),

James Van Der Zee, Couple, Harlem, 1932 (printed later), gelatin silver print, 20 × 25 cm. James Van Der Zee Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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appear in vitrines among the show’s ample selection of printed matter. In Harlem, collaborative cultural production thrived not only from consensus but also from debate. According to the exhibition materials, Black literati of the 1920s were split between two divergent strategies for racial equality. The first, proposed by W.E.B. Du Bois, who founded The Crisis, deployed Black art as a rhetorical weapon against existing racist propaganda. The second, spearheaded by Alain Locke, who wrote for Opportunity, urged for art to be treated as autonomous self-expression rather than as rhetoric. The shortlived but radical magazine Fire!! (1926) charted a third course. Founded by a cohort of writers and

artists who sought to address heterogeneity within the Black community, Fire!! featured writings on colourism, prostitution and queerness. Its first and only issue appears here with the scowling Sphinx on its red-andblack, Aaron Douglas-designed cover facing, as if to challenge, the demure, leashed lion on the cover of the more conservative Crisis’s September 1924 issue, illustrated by Laura Wheeler Waring. Throughout the exhibition, paintings, sculptures, photographs and films are grouped in ways that underscore competing visual idioms, such as those of Archibald Motley’s Portrait of a Cultured Lady (1948), an oil painting that depicts the gallerist Edna Powell Gayle in an elegant interior and a naturalistic style, and William H. Johnson’s Woman in Blue (c. 1943), one that monumentalises an unnamed Black sitter in a folk art-inspired idiom, with bold outlines, exaggerated proportions and thick

impasto. One of the subtler arguments the layout evinces is the inversion of traditional hierarchies of centre and margin. Works by white modernists such as Henri Matisse and Roland Penrose supplement, rather than overshadow, those of Black luminaries and are limited to those depicting convivial interracial relationships: actress Aïcha Goblet sits smiling with the Italian model Lorette in Matisse’s painting Aïcha and Lorette (1917), while model Ady Fidelin dozes with three white contemporaries in Penrose’s c-print Four Women Asleep (1937). Perhaps because it carries the weight of The Met’s infamous 1969 exhibition ‘Harlem on My Mind’: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which presented the neighbourhood through the lens of photojournalism and, according to reviews at the time, without sufficient didactics, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism offers no shortage of conscientiously positioned and meticulously

plotted visual arguments. The thoroughness produces, paradoxically, a longing for anomalous and unruly artworks that might prompt viewers to engage actively in interpretation. A spark of potentially unsettled meaning arises in Friends (1942), a lithograph made by Margaret Taylor Goss-Burroughs over a decade after the Wall Street Crash. It shows two women, one of whom appears Black and the other white, seated shoulder to shoulder, facing forward. According to the wall text, their mirrored poses convey how ‘human commonalities transcend racial difference’, but the image implies a more complex camaraderie. The women in fact both sit with their lips pursed and their arms crossed, as if they’ve been arguing. In light of the interpersonal negotiations that were required to produce the cultural renaissance in Harlem, one suspects their friendship was likewise tempestuous and hard-earned. Jenny Wu

William Henry Johnson, Woman in Blue, c. 1943, oil on burlap, 89 × 69 cm (framed). Photo: Mike Jensen. Courtesy Clark Atlanta University Art Museum

May 2024

Peter Blake Sculpture and Other Matters Waddington Custot, London 20 February – 13 April At first glance, nonagenarian British artist Peter Blake’s new exhibition teems with nostalgia – composed of collages and sculptures made of printed materials and ephemera that date from the Victorian era to mid-twentieth century. For a second it feels like Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne but for mass culture, created with a taxonomic, almost fetishistic fervour for printed images and kitschy trinkets. In The Big Little Books series (2023), for example, similar images culled from the titular children’s books are grouped together on each a4 page, where cocky superheroes flex muscles at bodybuilders and Roman gladiators (Big Little Books. ‘Galloping Toward Camp’) and variously sized elephants labour under strapped-on palanquins (Big Little Books. ‘Outraged Elephant’). Having presented two other solos at Waddington Custot over the past three years that focused on his portraits and drawings, Blake’s third exhibition at the gallery gathers new collages in his signature style, as well as sculptures, for which he is less well known. Filled to the brim with figures cut from old comic books, illustrated encyclopaedias and consumer catalogues, Blake’s collage indulges in a surplus of printed or materialist matters – the consumer pleasures that the middle classes have enjoyed since the Industrial Revolution. In Larousse. & Sears, Roebuck. ‘Collections’. (Mickey Mouse, Dolls, Teddy Bears, Hats, Seashells, Jelly Moulds, & Tea Pots) (2023), row upon row of portraits of mostly white male dignitaries, mixed with the occasional ethnographic images of nonwhite subjects – all cut from the late-nineteenth-century

encyclopaedia Larousse – look over a rank of fashion catalogue figures drawn from the 1920s or 30s, who themselves look on at the titular array of knickknacks and appliances collaged in the foreground. Rather than saying more about what’s being illustrated – be it clothing style or ethnic groups – these cutouts speak of how sales catalogues and encyclopaedias contributed to what constitutes visual knowledge through a syntax of representation highlighting the visual codes of authority (stern gazes, three-quarter views, sketched in fine lines) and domestic delights (20 kinds of jelly moulds), as well as a hierarchical visual order. One might read it as a suggestion of how agents of empire both literally and figuratively lurk behind a thriving consumer culture. With Blake a self-proclaimed royalist, it is not clear how much of these juxtapositions are offered with a pinch of salt. If Blake’s collages work with a visual culture structured by the enterprise of the printing press, his sculptural work comprises much more personal hoards, and a more whimsical taxonomic paradigm. In Fort. Siege (2012) – veering between what seems to be the results of a children’s play and some theatrical military operations – groups of porcelain dolls, Native American figurines and toy soldiers are deployed in and around a mediaeval fort, making it look like a sort of dollhouse display in which domesticity and aggression are not so far apart. Others navigate the blurry line between hoarding and collecting fine art. Still Life 4. ‘Homage to Morandi’ (2003) finds modernist shapes among

A Parade for Saul Steinberg, 2007–12, found object assemblage, 30 × 186 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Waddington Custot, London

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the likes of miniature glass bottles, grouped together to recreate one of the titular painter’s delicate still lifes. Museum of Black & White 12 (in homage to Mark Dion) (2008–10), meanwhile, looks like an exposed curiosity cabinet, with a disparate selection of items ranging from crucifixes to cutlery affixed to a canvas in a tidy grid that highlights their shared black-andwhite palette. Referencing conceptual artist Mark Dion – whose own work pokes at the arbitrary way knowledge is catalogued and produced by museums and institutions – the orderly, nonsensical alignment points out how much taxonomy might have to do with aesthetics. In the last room, a series of blackpatinated bronze casts of Blake’s assembled found objects are installed upon pedestals – flanking a miniature bronze version of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938). Alongside the modern artist’s canonical obelisk, these metal replicas of what used to be ephemera take on an air of timelessness. In Blake’s works, there’s a pleasure in the textures of printed or material matters, beneath which is our desire to see, own and fetishise them, which frames the way we interact with the world. But something more unsettling lingers behind these humorous, flippant gestures. As these hordes of antiquated, discarded items come back to life – or, alternately, as these animated things are reified as waste – they become a reminder of how much stuff we hold onto, and how we now have to deal with our own material legacies. Yuwen Jiang

Farah Al Qasimi Toy World The Third Line, Dubai 27 February – 19 April Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs have long been associated with the clashing aesthetics of an unfolding Gulf futurism, in which living culture fuses with accelerative global capitalism. Living Room Vape (2016), for example, shows a domestic, Emirati space embodying the contemporary opulence of a gilded, Silk Road transculturalism. Colour and pattern play a visceral role in the artist’s imagery. During the pandemic, the move towards muted palettes and depictions of open spaces in images like Woman and Snail (2022) – a blue-scale silhouette of a snail resting on a woman’s arm against the backdrop of the sea – signalled a palpable shift. Toy World reflects another change, with black-and-white photographs (all undated) appearing for the first time in the artist’s photographic installation. They are arranged in linear sequences, like hieroglyphic texts: one line features a burning palm frond; a figure embracing a horse; an American shop window whose title, Terrorist Hunting Permit, draws attention to a sticker describing just that in the photo; a young marine in profile; and a view of the temple of Artemis at Jerash, Jordan. ‘Black and white images automatically historicize,’ Al Qasimi tells Sarah Chekfa in an essay by the latter accompanying the show,

offering some insight into the artist’s engagement with the genre. A sense of history certainly pervades Toy World. Rather than installing images on wallpaper composed of blown-up prints to create her characteristic multicoloured compositional mashups, here the photographs are presented alongside smaller colour printouts and black-and-white photocopies – plus a few plastic flowers here and there – taped to the wall at varying heights, and depicting, among other things, ancient coins. One photocopy shows portraits from Wilfred Thesiger’s 1959 book Arabian Sands, of guides who accompanied Thesiger on his travels across Rub’ al-Khali or the ‘Empty Quarter’, the world’s largest sand sea, which connects Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the uae. Those portraits also appear in the mixed-media photographic collage Wingspan (2024), a density of images that traverse time while remaining anchored to context: from plaster stucco fragments discovered in Sir Bani Yas, where the earliest known evidence of Christianity in the uae exists in the form of a church, monastery and courtyard houses dating to the seventh and eighth centuries; to an advertisement for a ‘Gulf War U.S. Army Infantry Woman’ toy named Sandy.

With its reference to Rub’ al-Khali, Wingspan functions like an index for Toy Story, where every image, object and frame articulates a sense of haunted time. Take one triptych of black-andwhite images, of a camel’s fly-covered head bookended by the concrete shell of a house under construction and a smattering of camel bones on the ground: the sequence recalls Al Qasimi’s video Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) (2023, not shown here), where two sisters from twenty-first-century Ras Al Khaimah connect with the spirit of a nineteenth-century anticolonial fighter from that region, through his remains. Amid these associative excavations, each black-and-white sequence burdens the colour images around them with a spectral weight. One colour photo of a figure draped over the edge of a moonlit sand dune (Sand Dune, 2023) echoes a video screened on a tv monitor showing a woman in red crawling and rolling down a desert incline repeatedly. Another colour video shows mechanical plastic toys moving across a tiled floor: a crawling spiderman with plastic flowers tied to his ankles carries a gun, as a walking cow drags a green bottle behind it. They move in aimless circles to an uncanny symphony of mechanical moos and gunshots: an uncanny loop. Stephanie Bailey

Sand Dune, 2023, archival inkjet print, 127 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

May 2024

Donna Dennis Houses and Hotels O’Flaherty’s, New York 9 March – 28 April In the semidarkness of the gallery is a rowhouse, its siding a pastiche of brick, clapboard and stone. Hinting at the absent occupants’ taste, floral wallpaper lit by a bare bulb peeks out of a second-storey window; downstairs, a bay window theatricalises an empty room where the wall clock is perpetually set to 6:05. Despite its illuminated ‘vacancy’ sign, this gently dilapidated home offers no entry; Donna Dennis’s Two Stories with Porch ( for Robert Cobuzio) (1977–79) is about three metres tall. The titular ‘stories’ indicate two floors as well as dual design inspirations: a tollbooth by the Holland Tunnel and a New Jersey home from a George A. Tice photograph. (The ‘vacancy’ sign, we learn in the press release, pays homage to Dennis’s New Jersey-born friend Robert Cobuzio, who died while she was working on the piece.) Too large for a manipulable model and too small for a habitable dwelling, the structure is one of five American vernacular follies that comprise Houses and Hotels, an oneiric show of the artist’s early installation works from 1972 to 1994. The uncanny architectures, four of which are displayed in a darkened room with a sloped floor, draw on various buildings, including those sourced from memories, photographs, fantasies and even literature. Houses, as Dennis’s evocative creations remind us, are always containers for ‘stories’: both as settings where lives unfold, and as structures that

materially reflect broader sociocultural and economic narratives. The Ohio-born artist, who moved to New York City during the 1960s, got her start as a figurative painter; her depictions of automobiles anticipated her interest in everyday infrastructure. Contemporaneous painters of the minimalist and hard-edge variety were working with shaped canvases that blurred the lines between painting and sculpture. At the outset of the 1970s, Dennis turned to shaped canvases of her own: hotel facades. Hotel Pacifica (1972), a narrow front labelled ‘hotel’, collapses the distinction between painting, sculpture and architecture while evoking an unsound world in which buildings are just stage flats (a fair assessment of flimsily constructed hotels that serve as theatres for fantasies). Scaled to the artist’s height – indicating that her size, rather than a man’s, was the unit on which this built environment was based – the doorway mixes trompe l’oeil latticework with three-dimensional blinds. Winkingly riffing on Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures, an aquacoloured light shines from behind the slats. In 1976 Dennis embarked upon her ‘Tourist Cabin’ works, humble wooden shacks that began more facadelike – Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine) (1976) consists of the front of a cabin with a porch – but evolved into compressed interiors – Tourist Cabin with Folded Bed (1986) contains a cot (conferring eligibility for a furniture-themed

Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine), 1976, acrylic and enamel on wood and Masonite,glass, metal screen, fabric, incandescent light, sound, 198 cm × 208 × 66 cm. Courtesy the artist

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show) and a suitcase (concealing car batteries that power lighting). As increasing dimensionality evinced Dennis’s interest in the literal and psychological ‘interiors’ of dwellings, the cabin form reflected her mounting desire to wrestle with her lived experiences in her work, particularly in light of her participation in feminist consciousness-raising groups. The structures were inspired by the cabins where Dennis stayed during childhood roadtrips in the Midwest; Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs of cottages at the Ossining Campwoods in New York; and in the case of Cataract Cabin (1994), a New Hampshire cabin and Jane Bowles’s short story ‘Camp Cataract’ (1949), about the fraught relationships between sisters. Located in a room of its own, Cataract Cabin is a white clapboard shanty perched atop a gargantuan boulder alongside a small blue rowboat. The installation was originally displayed outdoors, and the ceiling of the gallery has been cut to accommodate its height. While the house’s illuminated interior is largely obscured, there is a clear view of a screened-in porch – a liminal space between inside and outside – in which a few mesh screens are stacked like forgotten projects. The boulder is riven. Crouching to peer into its fault line reveals a simple wooden chair and a dirtstreaked mirror. As the plot unfolds upstairs, a subterranean narrative holds us in its grip. Cassie Packard

Cataract Cabin, 1994, acrylic and enamel on wood and Masonite with glass, metal, grout, rope, pump, mirror, 366 × 366 × 366 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2024

24th Biennale of Sydney Ten Thousand Suns Various venues 9 March – 10 June Featuring over 400 works by 96 artists and collectives, Ten Thousand Suns is a kaleidoscopic, celebratory and vibrant display sprawling across six locations. Led by artistic directors Cosmin Costinaş and Inti Guerrero, the exhibition ‘refuses to concede to apocalyptic visions of the future’. Instead, Ten Thousand Suns presents joy and celebration as crucial forms of resistance, whether they are aimed at settler colonialism, ecological destruction, gender-based violence or discrimination. As its title suggests, the biennale exalts in multiple interpretations of the sun, and the thousands of words used to describe it: here, it acts as a witness to the violence of Empire, a harbinger of unchecked global heating, a deity in many First Nation cosmologies, a figure of queer resilience and a symbol of a new dawn. The biennale’s central venue is White Bay Power Station, a former coal-fuelled plant constructed between 1912 and 1917 and open to the public for the first time. Here works

are interspersed among machinery, equipment, control rooms and wash basins. Dylan Mooney’s vivid mural honouring the life of queer Indigenous activist and dancer Malcolm Cole, who passed away with hiv/aids in 1995, scales multiple stories in the boiler house. Depicting Cole dressed in drag as a Black Captain Cook, Malcolm Cole – larger than life (2024) pays tribute to Cole’s performance atop the first Indigenous float at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1988, 200 years after the arrival of the First Fleet. In the same space, a series of multicoloured barriletes – enormous circular tissue-paper kites made by the allfemale collective Orquídeas Barrileteras, which was established in the wake of the Guatemalan Civil War and genocide of the Mayan people – hang suspended from the rafters. Flown in celebration of life and in honour of the dead, these barriletes are an homage to two deaf women in the community, their likenesses surrounded by radiant images of native

Ten Thousand Suns, 2024 (installation view, White Bay Power Station). Photo: Daniel Boud. Courtesy 24th Biennale of Sydney

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flowers and animals. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales (agnsw), The Pacific Sisters’s MuruMoa (2023) is a figurative sculpture of strength and empowerment, clothed in a dazzling robe and headpiece constructed out of volcanic rock, shells, silk, raffia, horse bone, wool and other materials. One of four aitu (avatars) on display, and made in response to French nuclear testing in the Mururoa atoll, MuruMoa keeps a protective eye on the lands, oceans and people of a postnuclear world. Often a biennial’s overall concept can feel too broad or too narrow, flattening a massive number of artworks into a didactic message. In its unabashed willingness to embrace so many differing interpretations of its overarching theme, from Indigenous futurism to the history of Islam in Australia, Ten Thousand Suns manages to avoid this trap. Indeed, much of the biennale’s energy comes from the way it showcases the breadth and possibility of artistic practices grounded in multiple

languages, cultures, rituals, cosmologies and histories. On one wall of the Udeido Collective’s crimson room-size mural, a man breaks free from chains on a mound of flaming skulls. A part of The Koreri Transformation (2024), an installation on view at unsw Galleries, the work memorialises Papuan spiritual and political ideals amidst the threat of neocolonial expansion. At agnsw, Francisco Toledo’s mixed-media works on paper see people transforming into beasts drawn from Oaxacan fables; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kirtika Kain’s glinting ten-metre canvas The illusion of your history (2023), which layers the sacred materials of cow dung, gold leaf and wax into a lush and tactile surface, reflects her experience as part of the Dalit diaspora. Among all these works, joy, alongside remembrance, grief or rage, is found in the materials themselves, in the process of resurfacing forgotten traditions and legends, or in the commemorating of acts of resistance. But what if the apocalypse is already here? The exhibition text, somewhat cryptically, speaks of ‘a world ablaze’, and given its avowed concern with ‘colonial oppression

and dehumanisation’, it’s impossible to disconnect Ten Thousand Suns from our current moment. Six months into Israel’s genocidal campaign in response to Hamas’s terror attacks on 7 October – its unrelenting bombardment of the Palestinian people and its flagrant, ongoing violations of human rights and international law – Sydney’s art institutions continue to remain publicly silent, despite numerous petitions to do otherwise. What does it mean for these institutions to distance themselves from the immediate pleas of artists and activists, even as they showcase biennale works that explicitly ‘rall[y] against oppression’? Such a question is not aimed at the works themselves but the institutional context in which they are viewed, and whether this context blunts their potency. In part, it is because of this question that White Bay is the most successful biennale location: there is a more overt awareness of the relationship between the space’s context, the site’s extractive colonial history and the artworks housed within it. Monira Al Qadiri’s videowork Crude Eye (2022), for instance, which recreates the inside of a Kuwait oil refinery in miniature, is surrounded by machinery once

used to power the settler colony. As the camera pans across the unsettlingly majestic chambers of the refinery, a narrator extols the divine properties of oil. With its warm seductive lighting and slow-motion glide, the work is a mystical and ironic response to the logic of extractive capitalism and our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels. But it is also a work that sits in direct conversation with the room in which it is housed – we are drawn to consider both the virtual equipment on the screen and the legacy of the relics beside it. By actively engaging with the site in this way, White Bay highlights the difference between a spatial intervention (where an artwork can disrupt, reconfigure or transgress a space) and a presentation. One of the most galvanising and celebratory aspects of Ten Thousand Suns is the way it showcases that, even in the face of the unspeakable violence of Empire, of the horror of the hiv/aids pandemic or of the environmental catastrophes wrought by nuclear testing, transformative acts of making and imagining have always continued. That the joy of making, and the refusal to give in to the apocalypse, will go on regardless, and often in spite of, not because of, a gallery wall. Naomi Riddle

Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano, Britz & Mitte, 2023 (installation view, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station). Photo: Daniel Boud. Courtesy the artists and 24th Biennale of Sydney

May 2024

Manuele Cerutti quem genuit adoravit Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia 10 March – 28 July In Reggio Emilia, the compact Italian city where the Collezione Maramotti’s exhibition space is located, there’s a church that contains a 1570s fresco of the Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bianchi, aka Bertone. In 1596, according to local legend, a deaf-mute teenage boy stood in front of this image and could suddenly hear and speak; the Church verified the miracle and Reggio joined the pilgrimage list. Upon the fresco’s frame is the phrase ‘Quem Genuit Adoravit’ (approximately, ‘she adored whom she begat’), and four centuries later this phrase serves to title Manuele Cerutti’s show of six large, offbeat, jewel-toned oil paintings, two small ones, and 31 tightly worked pencil sketches and watercolours. The Turin-based artist, the gallery handout tells us, himself became a parent not long ago, and his small son appears throughout, accompanied by a crop-headed, bearded adult male who closely resembles the artist. But there are no beatific Madonnas here; rather, there’s a hard-won, idiosyncratic, fictional miracolo. Across the cycle of canvases and via some arcane, mostly offstage alchemical process, a boychild sprouts from the man’s left leg. This kid feels equally like a real person and

a transparent metaphor for the dual inscrutabilities of creativity and parenthood, the images seemingly the work of someone who, in the studio and the home, has become accustomed to squinting bemusedly and saying to himself, ‘where did that come from?’ In Tutte le mani dormono (All Hands Are Asleep, 2023–24) Cerutti’s stand-in naps in his aquamarine, paint-potstudded studio while sporting a workingman’s vest and braces. Tied around his left calf with string is a black plastic bag; this, the handout says, refers to marcotting, a technique of encouraging new growths on the stems or branches of plants. Other works show him at varying waystations on a mysterious route to male pregnancy. In Perdere l’eroe conservare la ferita (Losing the Hero Sustains the Wound, 2023–24) he appears in the foreground beneath an underpass, smearing something on his leg out of a bucket. In the background, he reappears several times along a path curving away to the landscape (referencing how Bible stories are often narrated in early Renaissance paintings); variously making weird hand gestures, finding his leg turning glowingly transparent and passed out in the dirt.

Meriti e colpe, 2022–24, oil on linen, 230 × 173 cm. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy the artist and Guido Costa Projects, Turin. © the artist

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In other compositions, we see him turning a sickly green in face and hand, dividing into multiple avatars who sometimes perch on each other’s shoulders, and finally, postmarcotting, sporting his conjoined offspring. In the secular ceremonial of Meriti e colpe (Merits and Faults, 2022–24), the man – now with slightly longer hair and beard, plus four arms and three legs for domestic multitasking – anoints his conjoined descendant with liquid from an enamelled bowl while illuminating his face with his smartphone’s torch. Aside from the weird gardening-genesis narrative and filtered adoration that powers these works, though, it’s often left open what’s really happening across them, an aspect encouraged by the seemingly achronological hang, and in a manner that recalls looking at ecclesiastical artworks whose storylines and dogmas we’re distanced from. As a result, the show sustains a haloing and persuasive enigma that aligns with both the fumbling and awed nature of new parenthood and the vagaries of artmaking. The one thing a viewer can truly ascertain from quem genuit adoravit, which elides motherhood entirely, is that Cerutti must have a very understanding partner. Martin Herbert

Paêbirú Espaço Delirium, São Paulo 26 March – 27 April In 1975 the two godfathers of Brazilian psychedelia, musicians Lula Côrtes and Zé Ramalho, packed a bag with magic mushrooms and not much else and embarked on a trip through the state of Paraíba. Their destination was the Ingá Stone, located in the middle of the Ingá River, a winding Brazilian waterway that meets the Atlantic at the easternmost point of the Americas. If this auspicious location wasn’t charged enough, it’s also a highly decorated edifice, the rock’s surface carved with an intricate map of symbols made by those who lived near the river as far back as 10,000 bce. The scratched stars, swirls and circles with appended crosses – represented in this tight group show by curator and artist Tiago Malagodi’s series of charcoal frottage prints made from the rock’s surface – are assumed to relate to the night sky, perhaps as a protoastronomer’s chart. But their meaning and purpose remain ultimately unknowable. Knowledge and how it travels, where it gets lost on the journey and where and how it accumulates, are some of the threads underpinning Paêbirú, which borrows its title from the legendary 1975 album Côrtes and Ramalho made after their trip. Thiago Costa’s iron wall sculpture Flecha para dentro (2022), in the first

of the gallery’s two rooms, evokes the Exu, the trident symbol of Candomblé. In this context it speaks to how the Afro-Brazilian religion was forged through forced migration, a spiritualism founded in the lower decks of enslaver ships, fusing disparate African religions as well as elements of Roman Catholicism. Mônica Ventura’s Canto (2024) is a length of vertical wood stretching up to just shy of the gallery ceiling on which three nests of wood shavings are attached, each cossetting an egg – a metaphor for the moment in which all journeys begin. Paulo Nimer Pjota’s Geométrico com vaso (2022) seems pictorially simple enough at first glance: a black shiny goblet, its exact origin and culture undetermined, but archaeological and ancient in nature, is depicted in acrylic in the upper half of a bisected canvas. It’s an image that sits neatly with Raphael Oboé’s 2023 untitled bust of a jug-eared man that stands on a museological pedestal next to the painting. The lower half of Pjota’s canvas is covered with a sheet of orange enamelled, slightly dented scrap metal on which the artist has painted three squares, each containing Op art-style black and white parallel lines swirling into vanishing points. This abstraction sits in marked contrast to the realism of the goblet – and indeed the other

work in this room – but tees up the videowork that lies in the second part of the show. Alessandra Bergamaschi and Rudá Babau’s Jojabá (2024) is a 17-minute glitchy collage of computer-game-like animation, live footage and found imagery depicting a speculative point-of-view journey across the Brazilian interior via a single mythical Indigenous path, narrated by a tapestry of English and Portuguese academic and literary texts read by a text-tovoice app, as well as interviews with archaeologists. It’s a journey mapping more questions than certainties as the viewer is toured through a series of archaeological and geological oddities: “objects without memory”, as they are described. There’s a general sense that all knowledge is speculation: “intelligence is predicting future observations from past observations”. After Paêbirú was released as a small pressing, most of the album’s copies were lost to a flood and its authors fell out, thwarting any reissue for decades. The project was left only as a triptinged folk memory that nonetheless snowballed into an entire musical movement: evidence perhaps, as this show also posits, that sometimes the most powerful form of knowledge is imaginative and mythological rather than empirical or material. Oliver Basciano

Paêbirú, 2024 (installation view with work by Raphael Oboe, left, and Paulo Nimer Pjota, right). Courtesy the artists and Espaço Delirium, São Paulo

May 2024

Damien Hirst To Live Forever (For a While) Museo Jumex, Mexico City 23 March – 25 August Damien Hirst’s first ever retrospective exhibition in Mexico flaunts all the bells and whistles of grand old prepandemic blockbusters. Massive, encompassing all three floors of the snazzy Museo Jumex building, it is brimful of all the ‘greatest hits’ and looks expensive as hell. In that sense, it feels slightly anachronistic too, very pre-vibe shift – that collective worldwide moment when something definitely cracked, for the worse – in the same way that Beyoncé’s recent albums sound like they come from a more prosperous time. But judging by the large crowds attracted like flies to Jumex juice, that sense of disparity continues to be a very enticing experience: who could resist the proximity to opulence, to capital A, Taschen-book Art?

The first gallery is packed with fish tanks from the ‘Natural History’ series. Over here is Stimulants (and the Way They Affect the Mind and Body) (1991), a pair of severed sheep’s heads in glass cubes; over there, Black Sheep (Twice) (2007), two, uh, black sheep in identical sheep-sized, black-framed tanks; in a corner, Away from the Flock (1994), another sheep in a white-framed tank. In the middle, more redundant splendour: Death Explained (2007), the famously bisected tiger shark that allows for excited spectators to traverse its guts; sitting next to Death Denied (2008), another shark, this one whole. The more modest The Impossible Lovers (1991), a neat group of shelves stacked with cow organs stuffed in assorted

jars, is a successful, precise piece of work. There’s a twisted yearning, a sorrow in the immutability of their separateness and classification, that seems to embody the whole point of the pickled pieces more clearly. I only wish Hirst’s goth sensibilities were given a bit more space for drama, but the pathos and morbidity of animal corpses and medical utensils is hindered by the overlapping of bodies of work: the ‘Cabinets’ lined with semiprecious stones, and the ‘Dot Paintings’, with grids of fastidiously painted circles of different colours. A main wall presents Urea-13c (2001), a gigantic example of the dot paintings, which carries airs of confetti-filled birthday parties; while the entire back wall of the room

To Live Forever (For a While), 2024 (installation view with For the Love of God, 2007, Museo Jumex, Mexico City). Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. © the artist and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, dacs / Artimage 2024

ArtReview

is covered in Tears of Joy Wallpaper (2011), a tacky print of variously sized zirconia crystals sitting on golden shelves. Over the wallpaper is hung Judgement Day (2009), an actual goldplated steel cabinet of massive size whose long, narrow shelves are lined with 30,000 sparkling crystals. The shiny, pretty rocks would have worked better on the second floor, where many of the ‘Butterfly Paintings’ hang. Anoint (2016), with its moody, unsettlingly symmetrical composition, is a definitive highlight, its near-monochromatic dark palette evoking a void except for bright intrusions of colour on the dainty insect’s wings; as is Hades (2008) with its rich, earthy tones provided by the extremities of monarchs and moths. Perhaps a contrast between the prosaic value of the zirconias and the ephemeral poetry of butterflies could have articulated something, but alas this room was already crowded with more animals in

formaldehyde: a bisected cow and calf (Mother and Child [Divided], 1993), three soaring geese (Up, Up and Away, 1997) and four more sharks (Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, Justice, 2008). The third floor is total whiplash: Hirst’s recent ‘Cherry Blossoms’ paintings, made of jejune blotches of luridly coloured oil paint, served as the vaudeville background for the central attraction, For the Love of God (2007), the famous platinum skull spangled in real diamonds. It is hard to say more about this room, except that it is perhaps the most grotesque one of all. The show evinces a link between early Hirst, his earnest inquiries into the ultimate mystery of life, aka death, and the naivete of his later, more garish work. The continuity of juvenile gestures growing in value would seem especially evocative and lucid for the man-children of the extreme upper echelons of our society, advancing the belief that the accumulation of diamonds, buildings and

art collections can ultimately achieve transcendence and cheat death. This narrative seems to have, sadly, overpowered Hirst’s original goth ardour, extinguished its nihilistic, kid-who-just-found-Sartre depths. It could be simply a matter of taste and how it is shaped today: millionaires and their institutions love nothing more than a flashy work of art, but perhaps not so much to have it remind them of their imminent demise, so they pay enough to flip its purpose, turn it aspirational. It is now so expensive, so ostentatious to own or show a Hirst, that it has become a symbol of the grandeur of those who do, of their importance that will undoubtedly extend in time. The joke is on the sharks; decomposing (for decades, or for a few years, depending on which batch you’ve purchased), silly scapegoats for deathlessness through wealth. Maybe it was always a joke, an expensive one, and it’s for sale. Gaby Cepeda

May 2024

Arthur Jafa black power tool and die trynig 52 Walker, New York 5 April – 1 June The confrontation is immediate and unmitigated: setting foot in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition, visitors are accosted by a massive black structure measuring 2.6 metres wide, 18.5 metres long and 3.6 metres tall, an unwieldy presence that looms over almost half of the gallery. The exterior of this architectonic sculpture – titled Picture Unit (Structures) ii (all works 2024) – evokes a minimalist sculpture: its sleek mirrored acrylic facade is one of hard edges and impenetrable, reduced form. But the inside of the sculpture is a pictorial maelstrom. Openings at either end suck viewers into a literal labyrinth of images – blown up and displayed sequentially – that index a whiplashing sweep of heterogeneous people and places: as we meander through the maze’s twists and turns, our eye moves from a blurred picture of victims slaughtered by Charles Manson, to Arthur Rhames riffing on the guitar, to pole dancers at Atlanta’s Magic City strip club, to a memorial for those killed in the Rwandan genocide. Being caught in this current of images produces a turbulent, if not terrifying, ebb and flow of feeling, the tension of which only builds as you round each corner of the maze. And the only way out of it is through. This disturbed, indeterminate air steals into every encounter in Jafa’s exhibition: we find ourselves in the constant and unshakeable grip of artworks that elude emotional and intellectual resolution. The exhibition’s title turns on the charged proximity of Blackness, power and mortality. The works on view seem capable of knocking you over with all the loud overabundance that attends stereotypes of Black culture. Yet a sobering mood of violence and grief casts its shadow

across the gallery, often overtly – like in the photo of the Manson victims – but often with a subtlety that is arguably even more discomfiting. For example, a wall-based silkscreen titled Lateria features a pixelated black-and-white image of gospel singer Lateria Wooten, mouth wide open as she screams into a microphone. Her face is contorted into an expression that simultaneously evokes ecstasy, pain, praise and rage – epitomising the complex viscerality embedded in Black religious and musical traditions and evoking their intimate link to resistance movements. She looks like someone who might be ready to die trying for the love and salvation that gospel music promises. The mournful and ferocious beauty of Black music is more obviously summoned in loml (52 Walker Version), an hour-long film installation commemorating Jafa’s beloved friend, the late critic Greg Tate. Far from a typical elegy, the video does not feature images of Tate himself: instead it presents a thread of footage that includes tornadoes, Jafa himself and Black performers from Michael Jackson to a group of TikTok dancers. Intermittently, the film drifts into a blurred black-and-white abstraction, suspending us in a lull of visual quiet and contemplation. The score samples from ambient instrumentalism, soul and rap – at times overlapping different genres at once: it is a cacophonous outpouring redolent of the instability of grief itself. The crushing intensity of the work in this presentation picks up the cadence of other moments in Jafa’s film practice, which is known for its unsettling juxtapositions of images

black power tool and die trynig, 2024 (installation view with Large Array ii, 2024). Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker, New York

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mined from a dizzying array of sources with explicit and furtive links to Black culture. Here, this strategy is transmuted into intransigently in-your-face sculptures like Picture Unit (Structures) ii and Large Array ii. In the latter, Jafa assembles an iconic crowd of larger-thanlifesize Cady Noland-esque cutout figures, among which we recognise Miles Davis, Michel Foucault, Adrian Piper, the Sex Pistols and the artist himself. Many of the figures in Large Array ii don’t obviously relate to Black people. For Jafa, their presence is – put simply – visually interesting and beautiful. Rather than pointing to any neat idea of who or what represents Black culture, the work intimates Blackness in how it presents these images: they are joined through incoherence and collision, through dense contradictions that forcefully evoke the complex alterity and discomfort of Black aesthetics. Nearby, in his ‘rail sculptures’, Jafa pushes beyond representational images and pivots towards found objects, including traffic and construction materials, to evoke his idea of Black aesthetics. In Boundary 3, three plastic traffic bollards protrude from the wall in a stacked sequence redolent of Donald Judd. They bear all the dirt and marks of abuse that come from their previous life in the busy street. They signify an ontological register that, like Blackness, is deemed fungible and degraded. In Jafa’s hands, these found objects rhyme with the eerie violence that pulses from the found images and footage elsewhere in the gallery. Together, they suggest an abject and alienated political sensibility, a Blackness and power that is at once strikingly obtrusive and discreetly lingering. Zoë Hopkins

black power tool and die trynig, 2024 (installation view with Lateria, 2024). Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker, New York

May 2024

Mao Yan New Paintings Pace, London 19 January – 9 March It looks as though boredom has descended upon the figures in Mao Yan’s latest series of paintings. They sit and stare, some off to the side while others gaze directly at the viewer. If ennui has a colour palette, this is it: ashen skin tones and washed-out greyish-blue backdrops. Mostly, we don’t know who these characters are – Young Man with a Hat No.2 (2021), Madam (2022) or Man with Gloves (2023). There is, however, one portrait: Master Hongyi and Mariewicz, (2021). In it, the Chinese artist-turned-Buddhist monk lies peacefully on a cot: perhaps sleeping; perhaps dead. Above him hangs a painting – a black square, a reference to Kazimir Malevich (a contemporary of Hongyi), whose name here is spelled ‘Mariewicz’. It’s not so clear why, but maybe that doesn’t matter, because the square appears to be hung lopsided anyway (assuming that it is actually meant to be Black Square, 1915). Hongyi is named, presumably, because he was known for painting and teaching in the Western style – which sort of draws a connection with the

sfumato technique that’s incorporated into Mao’s paintings. While Malevich, for his part, had previously expressed that he wanted to ‘free art from the ballast of objectivity’ (The Non-Objective World, 1927). So perhaps that’s a clue of how we should look at things here, too; be a bit less prescriptive and more intuitive. There’s a nod to Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915), as well: in Young Man with a Hat No.2, three black rectangles – divorced of their original composition that includes other colour rectangles – hover by the figure’s head, like a trinity of angular thought-bubbles, while he slouches in an armchair and gloomily looks away at something outside the canvas. I’d be bored too, if the entire exhibition were made up of those portraits. For ‘new’, albeit more-defined works, they don’t seem all that different to Mao’s older hazier portraits. But it’s the series of abstract geometric paintings, Broken Teeth (2021–22, all roughly a3-sized) and Condensed or Adrift (2022–23, which are much

ArtReview

larger at 1.5m), hung in an adjacent room and in the basement, that add a degree of tension to the exhibition, rescinding the threat of its being merely a basic portrayal of despondency. Despite the two series’ titles, there isn’t a noticeable difference in the formal aspects of the paintings – and both share the same muted washy blueand-grey colour palette as the portraits. But these paintings invite visitors to look closer. They are many layered, each with what looks like hundreds of barely-visible overlapping circles drawn onto the canvas, intersecting sections of which are painted a different colour (usually a grey-black) to the background (usually a grey-blue), which results in paintings that look as though shattered and decayed bits of teeth are slowly sinking through a body of water. Although shown separately from the disinterested figures in the portraits, the shapes also look like they might represent the human psyche; scattered and broken, perhaps these fragments are all that remains of the ballast of a weary mind. Fi Churchman

Margarita Azurdia A Universe, Documented La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua 18 November – 28 April In the heart of the historic city of Antigua, a retrospective of the uncategorisable Guatemalan artist Margarita Azurdia is on view. The show highlights the material, visual and conceptual legacy of her life and work, both for the Central American country’s art scene and for Latin America as a whole. It includes a dozen medium and small-format paintings and textile works of geometric abstract language; a medium-sized sculpture made with found materials; a series of video recordings of ritual performances from the 1990s; a conceptual map on the wall synthesising her thoughts; and a hundred documentary sources such as press clippings, writings, letters and photographs, among others. Born in Antigua in the spring of 1931, Azurdia navigated her early years between international schools and academies before returning to her country during the early 60s and holding her first solo exhibition in 1963, which made a lasting impression in both public and intellectual circles. Her early endeavours took the form of medium-sized paintings and panels with colour fields and geometric shapes. From that moment on, no disciplinary boundary could contain her voracious appetite: textile, sculpture, video, performance, photography, poetry, all media were absorbed by her expansive drive. Rosina Cazali, in the curatorial

presentation, describes her as a ‘dissident of conventionalism’. Azurdia was a multifaceted artist who enjoyed confusing her audience with her name changes: Margot Fanjul, Anastasia Margarita or Margarita Rita Rica Dinamite. The exhibition identifies three areas in which Azurdia stood out: the object, the body and the archive. During the early 70s, she abandoned the geometric paintings for polychrome sculptures that drew inspiration from the imagery of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayan Quiché people. She had the pieces carved by local artisans and then adorned with feathers, clothing, ceramics and other materials, in a manner reminiscent of the altars of the Guatemalan highlands. They possess a millennial expressive power that arouses astonishment, curiosity and surprise in those who contemplate them. In the photographs, you can count about 50 of these medium-sized sculptures, painted in bright colours and referencing death cults, transcendence, animalism and popular culture. From this period are some of her most emblematic works, such as Cocodrilo Verde (Green Crocodile, 1974), which operates as a critique of the events of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960– 96). In this largescale sculpture, she represents her country’s situation with the caiman, a sacred

animal for Indigenous people, which is devouring babies’ bodies while standing on three women with masks. Around 1976 she crossed the Atlantic to settle in Paris, and unfortunately much of that impressive sculptural production disappeared with the artist’s move. Upon her return to Guatemala in 1984, she founded the Laboratorio de Creatividad along with artists Benjamin Herrarte and Fernando Iturbide with a clear mystical, healing and ritualistic focus as the world began to embrace free market, consumption and globalisation. In this new panorama, the Laboratorio explored the body via essential themes for the present such as feminism, community life and care for nature. The archives displayed in the exhibition reveal a restless and analytical personality that did not hesitate to publicly confront her peers from the Grupo Vértebra (notably its founders Roberto Cabrera, Elmar Rojas and Marco Augusto Quiroa) about the shortcomings of their art discourses. She passed away in the middle of the summer of 1998. Thanks to recent efforts to rehabilitate her work, the public has the opportunity to discover this remarkable figure of late-twentieth-century art history. Ignacio Szmulewicz R. Translated from Spanish by Louise Darblay

A Universe, Documented, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Ana Werren. Courtesy the artist

May 2024

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure National Portrait Gallery, London 22 February – 19 May Though it’s a standalone exhibition, The Time is Always Now makes its point all the more sharply if you visit the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection on the floors above. There you’ll find a history of portraits of the British and of portraits made by British artists. Gallery after gallery of paintings of eminent, mostly white, people: pallid, inscrutable Tudor nobility; chubby, pinkish and powdered Georgians; dashing, tousle-haired Romantics and freethinkers of the Enlightenment; through to arrogant, moustachioed Victorian military officers, reclining on settees, maps of the British Empire on the walls behind them. Black people don’t make it into this history of British portraiture until much later. With this in the institutional background, the present show surveys a more recent history of the painting of the ‘Black Figure’ (alongside a scattering of sculptural works), as curator Ekow Eshun frames it: an acknowledgement that it exists here both as a genre and a critical

concept lodged within the wider discourses of Blackness. What we get are 22 artists, mostly from America and Britain, who have come to prominence over the course of the last two decades and whose work, as Eshun writes in his catalogue introduction, invites ‘a shift in perspective from “looking at” the Black figure via an external, objectifying gaze to “seeing through” the eyes of Black artists and the figures they depict’. The show itself is divided into three loose thematic sections with the unsteady question of the subject’s position – of who is looking and who is painted, and what their relationship to the politics of ‘Blackness’ is – running through it. ‘Double Consciousness’ riffs on W.E.B. Dubois’s famous reflection on living as a Black person in a white society, as being a matter of a ‘peculiar sensation… this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others’. In this section, painting becomes the vehicle for ironic criticism of the overdetermined

meaning of ‘Black’, epitomised by Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Painter) (2009), whose female protagonist, painter’s palette in hand, smiles enigmatically at us as she works on a ‘paint by numbers’ version of herself. That her skin is chromatically black throws the semantics of being ‘seen as Black’ into crisis, since no skin in reality is this black. Marshall’s paintings open the door to less satirical negations of painterly naturalism: in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s grandiose portraits of glamourous, fashionable subjects whose skin is rendered in dense, nervous workings of pencil and charcoal, against the otherwise bright pastels of clothes and their opulent surroundings. Amy Sherald’s use of shades-of-grey for skin tones, against the posterlike hues and graphic clarity of her female subjects’ attire, make a different retort to ‘colour-blindness’. There’s something profoundly poised, gentle and unostentatious about Sherald’s depictions, such as the young woman of She was learning to love moments,

Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time 2, 2019. © the artist. Photo: Christopher Gardner. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian, London

ArtReview

to love moments for themselves (2017), her stance contrapposto, one forearm hitched up, hand around the back of her neck, a deft nod to the humanism of Michelangelo’s David (1501–04). But then, Sherald seems to suggest, all of painting’s history is the painter’s birthright – as with the flattened shading of the woman’s blue dress in A Midsummer Afternoon Dream (2020), with echoes of Poussin’s neoclassicism. In the section ‘Past and Presence’ these utopian reclamations of art history rub up against a more sceptical dismantling of European painting, full as it is of the imaginary forms of colonialism and racism. Titus Kaphar’s surrealistic reworkings of eighteenthcentury portraits (Seeing Through Time, 2018, and Seeing Through Time 2, 2019), in which (we assume) white aristocratic women, attended to by a Black servant, are redacted, cut out and replaced by a larger portrait of a young Black women staring out to us, implode the relations of racial visibility and invisibility in their uncanny rewiring of historical genre. A similar rhetoric is at work in Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point drawings, which erase the white figures from Old Master paintings in order to highlighting the previously ignored Black figures

lurking in the background. Vanishing Point 24 (Mignard) (2021) shares its source with Kaphar’s Seeing Through Time 2: Baroque painter Pierre Mignard’s Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth with an unknown female attendant (1682), which, it turns out, hangs upstairs in the permanent collection. But though these ripostes to Eurocentric history are necessary, they return the gaze of a society and a culture itself profoundly changed, so that even amid the currently charged politics of race and representation, some progress must have been achieved. This show would not be here if this wasn’t so. It’s perhaps why some of these works come up against a limit, dependent, despite themselves, on what they aim to critique. By contrast, the richest and most generative paintings here are the ones whose subjects look away from us, their viewers, and where the possibilities of painting as a medium are privileged: in Michael Armitage’s sensuous, tenebrous canvases, a contemporary world of political and personal events is condensed into almost psychedelic mythical scenes, such as in the strange world of Conjestina (2017). Here, the stocky figure, naked but for her boxing gloves – a reference to Kenyan boxer Conjestina

Achieng – appears haunted by monsters. Jennifer Packer’s fevered colour and vaporous brushwork conjures subjects lost in thought, or sleep. Any thoughts that they, or we (who are we, after all?) might have about the significance of race dissolve into the singular presence of Packer’s subjects and the intimacy of their individuality. As novelist Esi Edugyan notes in her text for the catalogue, ‘the people depicted are – or were – living, breathing beings, not ideas or points to be made or repositories of collective anxieties’. And yet the collective experience of Black people, as with many other social groups, is still a reality. Here it is rendered in Denzil Forrester’s standout canvas Itchin & Scratchin (2019), which depicts a mass of faceless clubbers as a crystalline shimmer of cubistic, futurist sapphire blues and amethyst purples, the mass dancing before the totemic speaker stacks of a sound system. It’s a transcendent vision of community, rooted in the particularity of London and Jamaican nightclubs. Uniquely in The Time is Always Now, Blackness or whiteness don’t figure. Or it could be a future in which such differences no longer signify, or we no longer notice. J.J. Charlesworth

Denzil Forrester, ltchin & Scratchin, 2019. © the artist. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

May 2024

Yoi Kawakubo and Nao Matsunaga Time Capsule Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London 15 March – 10 May Two years after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Japanese artist Yoi Kawakubo visited the exclusion zone – some 30 square kilometres of land abandoned after the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown following a devastating earthquake and tsunami – and attempted to photograph what was left there. His camera, though, remained in its case. Kawakubo buried 8 × 10 silver halide film sheets in the ground at various locations in the site, and the resulting works – five of which are enlarged and on display in Time Capsule – are a portrait of catastrophe in slow motion. In these works, the artist is not present: radiation in the ground activates the contact paper; moisture and fungi curl the edges or corrupt the sheet’s integrity; light emitted over time from the radioactive particles develops in print into abstract washes of Rothko-like colour. In the basement space, three works from the series titled If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the skies (2014; a line from the Bhagavad Gita famously quoted by Robert Oppenheimer) are presented untouched or cropped in frames – coral green, fiery yellow, rusty mauve respectively. There’s a sedimentary texture to the colours, as if you could draw a layer from it with a swipe of the finger. Beneath this surface, it’s hard not to keep looking further and further in, like a frozen lake. The dissonance is dizzying: the ambivalent beauty of these invisible photographs, and the

destruction wrought by our gamble on an energy source despite the potential cost. There’s a necessary objectivity about these images as documents of a continuous process of irradiation and mutation, photographs in their most fundamental definition: a chemical process. In Kawakubo’s hands, they’re powerful tools to visually portray the gradual but constant consequences of nuclear meltdown. This is what happens to the land 160,000 residents were displaced from. Other artists have more urgently tackled the ‘triple-disaster’ – like collective Chim Pom’s protest films and illegal trespass on the site, or similarly the artist Kota Takeuchi, filmed pointing a finger at a security camera on 24-hour live feed on Daiichi management firm tepco’s website. If these artists reacted to the explosion – all anger and immediacy – then Kawakubo reacted to the poisoning, the slow, invisible ravage. Like his photographs, the true consequences take time to become clear. In his ceramic, wood and textile sculptures, Nao Matsunaga is also concerned with abstraction, searching too for ways of capturing or activating the unspeakable. But where Kawakubo is more the initiator than the hands-on creator of his works, Matsunaga is all about the body – his sculptures all begin without planning or organised ideas; slapping clay and carving fluidly, he is entirely uninterested in completion,

aesthetic perfection or any particular formal rigour. An assortment of small wood and ceramic sculptures are stuck to the wall, arranged in a loosely human form on one, on another scattered and scaling upward to the ceiling as if rebounded from a blast. Shown next to Kawakubo’s, Matsunaga’s works take on added resonances: there’s something uncanny about the shine of Time Capsule 1 and 2 (both 2024), glazed earthy green and blue ceramic works that here look particularly like boiling and morphing matter; the acrylic paint sprayed onto the fabric of Growth is subtraction (2022) looks like a lit match, but is bent at the stem, as if swaying like some kind of phosphoric dandelion. The exhibition text describes Matsunaga’s interest in primitive history and civilisation, to understand shape and creation before language and visual culture. The best indication we have of such an intention, though, are a series of pointillist white acrylic markings, yellow curving stripes and grooves carved into wood on Large mask 3 (2017) – a troubling visual affinity to Indigenous Australian art that seems to bear no other necessity or relevance than a basic sense of ‘oldness’. It’s a little trite, and it’s disappointing that something so conceptually evocative and aesthetically assured should be paired with something so bumbling – floundering with clay pots and wood blocks, trying to find something that means anything. Alexander Leissle

Time Capsule, 2024 (installation view with work by Nao Matsunaga). Photo: Alexander Christie.Courtesy Nao Matsunaga and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London

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Yoi Kawakubo, If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky v, 2014, digital archival pigment print, 150 × 190 cm. Courtesy Yoi Kawakubo and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London

May 2024

Thailand Biennale The Open World Various venues, Chiang Rai 9 December – 30 April Firsthand accounts of Chiang Rai’s rise as an ‘art city’ often point to the origins of the Haw Kham pavilion: a vaulted repository of northern Thai ‘Lanna’ objects that looms large over the lawns and lotus ponds of the Mae Fah Luang Art and Cultural Park. Raised on stilts, the pavilion itself is a bricolage of 32 salvaged wood structures, while its contents, from sattapan (an ornate candleholder) to Buddha icons, were assembled during an annual festival during the late 1980s that, according to the third Thailand Biennale’s concept statement, ‘sparked a ferment of collaboration between artists, monks, and communities, which has continued to the present day’. Through April, the Haw Kham is also hosting a ‘live theatre’. Concealed among its treasures are makeshift versions of indigenous musical instruments, each mechanically triggered by data points being beamed from a water turbine and underwater microphone installed on a stretch of the Mekong River, near the town of Chiang Khong, about 90 kilometres north.

An inconstant yet poignant presence, the ensuing ensemble recital by unseen wooden xylophones and whining flutes more closely resembles a cardiograph reading than notes on a stave: it tracks the pace and rhythm of a contested riverscape imperiled by hydropower development and rapids-blasting projects. And yet, Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s somber sound sculpture in hallowed space, Sound-Less (Ri s̄eīyng, 2023), is also emblematic of this exhibition’s core mode of intervention: how sites of social, spiritual or museological significance are meaningfully disturbed. The Open World, the 17 main venues and 13 pavilions of which are scattered like airborne seeds across two of Chiang Rai’s 18 districts, its provincial capital and its ancient city, doesn’t have a theme per se. Rather, it draws its stance from a Buddha posture unique to the region: standing on a lotus, arms down his sides, hands fully open, he faces out to, as the all-Thai curatorial team led by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija put it, open ‘the three

Ryusuke Kido, Inner Light -Chiang Rai Rice Barn-, 2023, wooden rice barn sculpture, 500 × 500 × 400 cm. Photo: Amnart Kankunthod. Courtesy Thailand Biennale

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worlds – the heavenly world, the underworld, and the human world – so that their inhabitants could behold one another’. Roaming at the Cherntawan International Meditation Centre, I spot a literal depiction: a banner by local artist Songdej Thipthong, draped down a steeply pitched meditation hall (Open World, 2023). But a spirit of open sociability – between Chiang Rai’s diverse ethnocultural ferment and 60 artists from across the Global South – is everywhere. On the lawn beyond the pond at Mae Fah Luang Art & Cultural Park, Ernesto Neto’s Chantdance (2023) – a biomorphic woven canopy tethered to the ground by ceramic jars – encourages gatherings and offers a space to still minds (and speaks to a Tiravanija-esque fostering of spaces and interactions in-between works). Nearby, Ryusuke Kido’s Inner Light -Chiang Rai Rice Barn- (2023) is a salvaged rice barn pockmarked with arabesques of amoebalike forms, an emblem of declining vernacular architecture and agrarian lifestyles carved with the help of local craftsmen. Elsewhere, the region’s syncretic

spirit world is embraced. At the Black House, the museum-studio of late painter Thawan Duchanee, for example, works by four female artists respond to his sought-after depictions of beefy mythical beings and gothic, hornstudded architecture. Self-taught local artist Busui Ajaw’s eight gestural paintings on strung-up buffalo hide – shamanistic portals into the animist afterlife of the Akha, a nomadic tribe – are a highlight: more lived-in and disturbing than anything Duchanee produced. Other takeaways emerge from venue hopping in this manner. For the first time in this travelling biennale’s history, the synergistic interaction and shared passion among local stakeholders is clear – to the extent that the centralised government culture ministry bankrolling it appears to be benefiting from the host province’s largesse and expertise, rather than vice versa. From the new private Chiang Rai International Art Museum (housing 14 artworks; built by Chiang Rai’s most famous living painter, Chalermchai Kositpipat) to the glut of artist studios (62!) and collateral events, a sense of Chiang Rai putting its best foot forward is unmistakable. With knotty debates and yelps of dissent also surfacing here and there, this edition also

feels more inclusive – and feistier. Located in a former bookstore, maiiam Contemporary Art Museum’s Point of No Concern pavilion, for example, uses the province’s territorial peripherality as a springboard for exploring how ‘colonization and intrusions of the modern nation-state draw dividing lines between individuals’. One work is a shelf of bottled ‘shan Spirit’ liquor (‘Shan’ being one of the region’s core ethnic groups), produced by a group calling itself the Phrae Pro-Democracy Network. Some bottles have been defaced; others depict the Shan rebels who, in 1902, led a failed uprising against Siamese rule in nearby Phrae province. Meanwhile, on a stretch of road bordering the Mekong, in the heart of the still-notorious Golden Triangle area, The Open World’s intertextual plays with the spatial and geopolitical dimensions of this porous context feel at their most hard-edged. At one end, Navin Rawanchaikul & studiok’s community billboard portrait exploring legacies of crossborder trade and migration, Once Within Borders (2023), towers above the river just across from one of neighbouring Laos’s Special Economic Zones, a quasi-autonomous gambling and crime playground known as Kings Romans.

The billboard’s beaming faces and cute vignettes are lifted from an accompanying video diary, in which documentary footage of Rawanchaikul meeting minority groups is coupled with a narration that, while expressing his thoughts, alternates between their marginal dialects and voices. In a warehouse nearby, the region’s tangled cartography and long-standing role in organised drug trafficking, among other prickly themes, are broached in works such as Nipan Oranniwesna’s Silent Traces (2023), an aerial-perspective map made from baby powder, and Ho Tzu Nyen’s woozy reimagining of opium trade archive footage in his film The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia: O for Opium (2022). From there it’s only a short drive to old Chiang Saen’s crumbling city walls, temple ruins and museum, where Chitti Kasemkitvatana’s Kala Ensemble (2023) – a study of Buddhism’s ancient cosmologies, centred on stone iterations of the Kala demon god and drumheads used in Lanna rituals – flanks the thirteenth-century Buddha statue that inspired this rambling event’s allembracing posture. He looks beatific and, understandably I think, a little bit pleased with himself. Max Crosbie-Jones

Navin Rawanchaikul & studiok, Displaced, Whose Land?, 2023, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Supported by National Center for Art Research, Japan

May 2024

Books Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today by Claire Bishop ‘Attention’, in art historian Claire Bishop’s deft examination of post-1990s contemporary art, is in all kinds of trouble. That’s the result, in large part, of digital networks and the new culture of mediation, in which the space between reality, experience and image is collapsed via social media. This ‘disorder’ shouldn’t be taken too negatively though, Bishop argues, pushing back against the trend for anxious denunciations of growing inattention among audiences of net-natives who can’t look at a painting, a theatrical performance or a music concert unless through their smartphones. Instead, this book wants to ‘move beyond the binary of attention/ distraction… to jettison plenitudinous modern attention as an impossible ideal, and to rethink contemporary spectatorship as neither good nor bad but perpetually hybrid and collective’. The book’s four chapters cover how, over the last three decades, shifting forms of audience attention have shaped contemporary art. Most closely tied to the promise of the book’s title is the second chapter, on ‘performance exhibitions’, in which Bishop traces how artists have come to interject time-based, body-focused choreographic work into the otherwise static environment of the museum. In doing so she gathers

Verso, £18.99 (hardcover)

a millennial history of works by the likes of Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof and Maria Hassabi, and their final merger of theatre and gallery modes of attention – the shift from ‘event time to exhibition time’, as Bishop puts it. Bishop welcomes the emergence of what she styles the ‘grey zone’ – neither gallery ‘white cube’ nor theatrical ‘black box’ – since, she argues, it disrupts ‘normative attention’, which ‘conforms to the Enlightenment conception of the modern subject as conscious, rational, and disciplined’. This opposition to the ‘bourgeois’, individual subject frames Bishop’s celebration of a more ‘sociable spectatorship’, in which the old classbased rules and etiquettes of looking at art dissolve into something more fluid, interpersonal and collective – less regimented by the expectation of genre, more causal, deskilled and popular. Yet this more networked and contingent state has produced different tensions in other forms of art. The opening chapter on ‘researchbased art’ considers how the trend for information-overloaded archival and documentdriven work, welcome during the 1990s for its potential to enable counter-histories and the use of fiction (here, for example, in the work of Renée Green and Walid Raad) has been overtaken

by the internet’s calamitous blurring of fact and fiction, leading to a more brittle, activist form of research-fetishising art – such as in that of Forensic Architecture – and a more anxious need to reclaim a verifiable truth from the glut of information (or disinformation). That art has drifted further into a form of quasi-political activism occupies a chapter on ‘interventions’, where Bishop offers a fast and illuminating retelling of the ‘artistic intervention’, from Dada via Latin American protest-art to Black Lives Matter, considering the political contradictions between local and global activism in the actions of Cuban Tania Bruguera and Russian group Pussy Riot. A final chapter on the noughties trend for evoking the art and architecture of modernism is less convincing, largely minimising the bigger debate of why ‘contemporary’ art happens also to be the art of the post-Cold War ‘end of history’. Underlying Bishop’s erudite and informed art-historical polemic, though, is a much bigger question about how (or whether) we might still be masters of our attention, or whether spectatorship will always be shaped by the power of capital and technology. After all, it takes attention to write (and read) such a book. tldr? J.J. Charlesworth

Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur Honford Star, £14.99 (softcover) Bora Chung’s second compilation of short stories begins with a normal office drama, in which the main character, a low-level employee at the ‘Center for Immortality Research’, goes about preparing for the centre’s anniversary party. With its cranky humour and a storyline teeming with familiar bureaucratic ironies, the tale feels like an outlier to the seven macabre, apocalyptic sci-fis that follow. It is not until the story’s end that we learn that the section head was born in 1914 and is immortal. The theme of outliving one’s contemporaries resonates throughout the rest of the book. In Your Utopia, to survive and outlive is to encounter loss and solitude – not just for humans but also and especially for machines.

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In its eponymous story, an intelligent, solarpowered vehicle designed to ‘convey slow and weak intelligence inside [it] over short and long distances’, outlasts all the humans it’s supposed to serve on a desolate, windy planet. After being registered as disowned, it sits in a hospital car park for ‘twenty-eight days, thirteen hours, and twenty-two minutes’ before strolling around ruminating on memories of its human owner and ai safety protocols. Eventually it finds solace carrying around a malfunctioning robot it finds in a junk pile (manufactured by the first settlers on the planet, robot 314 does nothing other than ask ‘Your utopia is… on a scale of one to ten’ making it an artefact of the settlers’ lost dream). In ‘The End of the Voyage’, a military-trained

ArtReview

linguist survives a cannibalistic virus – which wipes out life on Earth and on a spacecraft in exile – but finds herself all alone when she finally eliminates all danger. Architectural surroundings become the witness and receptor of loss in ‘A Song for Sleep’, in which an intelligent elevator falls in love with an old lady with Parkinson’s. She eventually dies and as it ferries her corpse down the building it thinks, ‘For the first time since my activation, I do not want to operate’. Your Utopia was written during the pandemic, a time that made the impact of loss palpable. ‘When faced with loss, one must mourn,’ Chung writes in an epilogue, ‘and to remember and mourn loss, one must survive.’ Yuwen Jiang

May 2024

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Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object by Philippa Snow Celebrity worship is a defining current of contemporary pop culture, and taking celebrity seriously as a purposeful artistic construction is an acknowledgement of the way art and beauty function in many people’s lives. As the ‘artworld’ turns ever more investor-oriented, maybe the celebrity, paradoxically, is becoming the democratised art form because of its universal consumability. I imagine some readers of Philippa Snow’s new book will find it overwhelmingly depressing to think that some of the great artworks of the early twenty-first century might be celebrities. But to me, reframing celebrity through the prism of art feels unexpectedly optimistic. Snow’s book states its aim in the title: to expand the idea of the art object to include celebrities. But she opens her book with a discussion of the place of beauty in contemporary society and what its relationship to art is, or should be. By starting here, she sets us up to see celebrity itself as predicated on beauty, which it sometimes is, although not always. Sex appeal, hotness and marketability are all entwined in this conception of the sort of celebrity that Snow reads as an art object. The question of whether or not art should have anything to do with beauty is something

Mack, £14 (softcover)

of a taboo in contemporary discourse, and Snow’s embrace of it as a criteria for the celebrity as an art object sits improbably in contrast with trends in art writing that focus on identity, ideology and other social lenses for reading art. Snow’s analysis of celebrities is more about the ways in which they turn themselves into traditionally legible fine art than the way they themselves are art objects. She looks at tangible art objects like Richard Phillips’s film Lindsay Lohan (2011), paintings of Leonardo DiCaprio by Elizabeth Peyton, and the Rizzoli coffee table book Selfish (2015), which is full of Kim Kardashian’s selfies. She also writes about the artists who are concerned with depicting or creating celebrity and who have sometimes become one themselves, among them Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Marina Abramović and Amalia Ulman. Not only is she interested in beauty, she is also interested in the construction of white beauty standards. ‘Both celebrities and artworks are in danger of not being taken seriously enough by cynics if they are outwardly pretty enough to be written off as purely decorative,’ Snow writes. It is in the ‘enough’ that this book sits: what is ‘seriously enough’, and what is ‘pretty enough’, and who are the cynics who decide?

It’s strange the way that art has become the space in which beauty doesn’t matter, given that it was traditionally made for aesthetic enjoyment (among other things). The last century has seen an active rejection of beauty in art as tastes have shifted to prefer concept over form. Our fear of beauty, which is a symptom of modernity, has made us reduce it to signifying shallowness, something pejoratively girly, pedestrian, commodified. Beauty doesn’t equal goodness, but our present discomfort with it in the context of art’s hierarchy of values comes from the long tradition of equating the two. Snow explicitly disavows this equation, but she also rests her central claim on the idea that the magnetism of beauty is inescapably human. I agree with her, and it’s this aspect of her book that I find truly incisive. The fraught contradiction between that innate human desire for beauty and the toxicity of chasing ever-changing standards of perfection is heightened by our climate of constant scrutiny and a new economy of monetisable fame. Snow’s work opens a new conversation about the complexity of wanting to make something beautiful – including yourself. Eliza Goodpasture

The Last Safe Abortion by Carmen Winant spbh Editions, £45 (softcover) Artist Carmen Winant has a history of working with found images to challenge the representation of women. In My Birth (2018), an exhibition and photobook, she collated hundreds of such images of women giving birth alongside photographs of her own delivery. Here she turns to birth’s antithesis, albeit while operating in a less direct manner: rather than focusing on the individual experience, Winant has drawn from a dozen photo archives documenting reproductive health clinics and planned parenthood in the American Midwest (Winant is from Ohio) to emphasise the care and community that made abortion possible and safe (all the images date from between 1973 and 2022, the 50 years during which abortion rights were guaranteed in the us). Updating these are photographs the artist took during pilgrimages to the clinics pictured in the archives.

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With its chunky spiral binding, the book has the feel of a photo album in which the black-and-white and coloured photographs appear to have been pasted on brightly coloured pages (here represented in the form of scans). The images (including Winant’s) have a vintage glow and an amateurish quality, emphasising the mundane reality of the clinics. Some of the groupings (each page features four images, some arranged thematically, others more randomly) document the buildings, the empty waiting and examination rooms; others zoom in on surgical tools, contraceptive devices, information stands or leaflets, and banners advocating women’s rights; other pages gather wonky shots of wall clocks – ominous reminders of time running out. In between, we see the all-female staff performing the often unsung, routine tasks

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that surround abortion: answering the phone, welcoming patients, sterilising medical equipment, running workshops on contraception or campaigning for reproductive rights. Photographs of colleagues posing together, smiling, further anchor the sense of joy, warmth and resilience that emanates from such community-building labour. Looming like a shadow however is the sobering reality hinted at in the book’s title: access to abortion is now banned or restricted in 21 states, forcing many women to undergo this experience alone, unsafely or not at all. On the last page, three shots of sunny skies surround a closeup of two hands holding one another – an ode, perhaps, to the resilience of such networks, some of which now operate clandestinely. Louise Darblay

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way by Sara Ahmed Penguin, £10.99 (softcover) You might know her. You might even be her. She refuses to laugh at a sexist joke at the dinner table, won’t ignore that racist comment at a meeting and takes offence at things most people let slide. The feminist killjoy is a party-pooping, fun-destroying, discord-sowing spoilsport – or so the haters say. Over the past decade, she has been reclaimed by writer and academic Sara Ahmed as a figure for the intersectional feminist who refuses to shut up about sexism, racism, ableism and transphobia. Compared to other historic slurs that have been co-opted by activists, like ‘queer’ during the 1970s, the feminist killjoy (let’s call her fk) has a shorter lineage, first appearing in Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and expanded upon in her subsequent writings. The term has caught on in the feminist culturosphere, with various black and brown fk reading groups and communities being set up, as well as those catering to more niche interests, like the ‘uss Feminist KillJoy’ on Facebook, ‘established in 2014 as a response to the sexist and racist and generally problematic behavior in Star Trek fandom’. The book is divided into four main sections – the fk as Cultural Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Activist – setting out how the fk can provide a model of action and knowledge production in these various spheres. Each chapter is organised under snappy subheads called killjoy truths, maxims or commitments: ‘To expose a problem

is to pose a problem’, ‘We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it’. Accompanying Ahmed’s punchy soundbites is a looser, more circuitous style of writing that doesn’t always follow linear argumentation. Each segment meanders through diverse sources including personal experience, literary and pop culture, feminist theory and anecdotes from other fks. The style is in keeping with Ahmed’s conviction that feminist theory and politics are embedded in everyday life. She uses recurring motifs of the table, window and door to discuss how they are experienced by women and minority groups, how these objects express power relations as well as the potential for ‘queer’ use. Take the topic of doors. Across different sections, she explores how they are metaphors for gatekeeping (‘we are more likely to notice doors when we can’t open them’); she prac-crits Audre Lorde’s 1978 poem ‘A Litany for Survival’, which addresses those who ‘love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns’; she discusses the Door of No Return in the ‘The House of Slaves’, a museum to the Atlantic Slave Trade in Gorée Island, Senegal; and recounts a time she hid in the bathroom when her father was abusing her (‘My father kicked the door down and then he kicked me, over and over… when someone knocks loudly on a door, any door, I feel panic’). The overall result is a deeply humane feminism that is engaged with feminist history but generated out of lived experience. In her

introduction to Living a Feminist Life (2017), Ahmed writes: ‘Insights into gender as well as race are worldly. Becoming a feminist involves coming up against the world.’ Here, this idea is reiterated – that feminist theory is generated through the friction that nonnormative bodies face in real life, and in their efforts to change their environments. ‘Those who are not “at home” in categories tend to know more about them.’ Suffused throughout the book is the belief that knowledge is gained by doing; and that activism itself is a mode of knowledge production. Ahmed’s ruminative style, while expansive in scope, can get repetitive and circuitous. Her love of antimetabole may also be more effective in her punchy maxims (‘Over-sensitive = sensitive to what is not over’) than in passages of sustained argumentation (‘We have to fight for possibility. We have to fight for some of us to be possible…. Possibility can take the longest time because to make something possible requires dismantling what makes it not so.’) These are minor complaints. For readers new to Ahmed, the handbook is an accessible introduction to ideas that are explored more thoroughly in earlier works, such as Queer Phenomenology (2006), on how queerness can disrupt normative spatial relations, and The Promise of Happiness (2010), a cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. For fks familiar with Ahmed’s work, it is a therapeutic read that provides guidance, succour and inspiration. Adeline Chia

Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Lesen Verso, £9.99 (softcover) Before he became Hô` Chí Minh, Hô` Chí Minh wasn’t. Like many Southeast Asian communists, he, to use Joseph Andras’s translated (from the French) words, ‘changed names like he changed shirts’. (Guestimates, for they can be only that, suggest he used anywhere between 50 and 200 of them during his lifetime.) Largely because, as he was increasingly kept under surveillance and spied upon, he had to. Ironically, it’s these surveillance reports that form the backbone of Andras’s attempt to trace part of the time when Hô` Chí Minh wasn’t: that part when the elusive Vietnamese revolutionary (later prime minister of Vietnam) was in Paris, for some of which time he was

Nguyên Ai Quôc (although the police thought he was called Antoine). When it comes to type, Andras’s short book is as elusive as Nguyên Ai Quâc (sic); it shimmies elegantly between speculative fiction, biography, psychogeography and revolutionary tract, managing to be all and none of those things. There are moments approaching poetry too: ‘the sky is like a sea the wind forgot’; ‘a sky so white it doesn’t deserve the name’. Yet it is as much a Georges Perec- or Situationist-style accounting of the French capital, tracing locations known or alleged to be associated with ‘Antoine’, as it is an attempt at a biography of Nguyên Tat Thanh. A ‘geography of events, topology of facts’, as Andras puts

May 2024

it. Or, more pointedly, an investigation into the histories the city reveals and those it conceals. ‘Stonework has a cleverness to it, erasing the memory of what it took,’ Andras writes, as he performs his own act of resistance by attempting to undo this. And while it turns up the story of a Vietnamese revolutionary and his struggle to be heard (‘Europeans weren’t all that interested in Indochina’), it also performs an archaeology of rebels, exiles, forty-eighters, communards, socialist thinkers, gilets jaunes and others who have operated away from the flock. People who evaded, for a number of reasons, institutionalisation during their lifetimes and continue, for a number of other reasons, to do so to this day. Mark Rappolt

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Art credit

Text credit

On the cover Nicholas Mangan, photographed by Bowen Aricò in Melbourne, April 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 35 and 71 are by Aristophanes, Peace (421 bce)

May 2024

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106

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