ArtReview May 2022 by ArtReview

Flying solo and unpiloted since 1949

Ibrahim Mahama

Sturtevant, The Store of Claes Oldenburg, 623 East Ninth Street, New York, 1967 Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul © Sturtevant Estate, Paris

Sturtevant

Dialectic of Distance Sturtevant Oldenburg Store 55th anniversary Paris Marais May—June 2022

Sprüth Magers

Berlin Sterling Ruby IN WARM SHROUD. KISSING THE BLOOM CRUX. A FROST WINDOW. April – June 2022 Rust Bernd & Hilla Becher, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Stephen Shore July – August 2022 Michail Pirgelis July – August 2022

London Karen Kilimnik Early Drawings 1976–1998 Joint exhibition with Eva Presenhuber, New York April – May 2022 Henni Alftan Contour June – July 2022 Kara Walker Ring Around the Rosy June – July 2022 Anne Imhof September – October 2022

Los Angeles Barbara Kruger March – July 2022 Hanne Darboven Six Books on 1968 March – July 2022 Kaari Upson August – October 2022 spruethmagers.com

Curated by Francesco Bonami

BEGINNING

Maurizio Cattelan Felix Gonzalez-Torres Richard Prince Rudolf Stingel

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled ” (Beginning), 1994 © Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres/ Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Photo: Kioku Keizo

Gagosian Beverly Hills

ArtReview vol 74 no 4 May 2022

Bye Bye Butterfly In case you’re not in the habit of reading these things, this issue’s cover features the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. Mahama is one of an increasing number of artists worldwide who view the role of the artist not just as a maker of objects (whether material or immaterial), but also as a builder of communities and networks: in his case (among a number of other activities), the founding of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in his hometown of Tamale. It’s an artistrun project space, research centre, cultural repository, exhibition space and residency programme. You can read all about that in the features section though. Apart from pointing you in that direction (as if the cover wasn’t enough of an advertisement) ArtReview mentions this because the social aspects of art and the worlds it manufactures have been on its mind of late. Probably because it has just survived the opening week of the Venice Biennale, which, as you may have read about elsewhere (although – seriously – ArtReview should be all the reading you need), was the first big international artworld event since the onset of the pandemic. For the first time since then, ArtReview rubbed shoulders (and then thoroughly sanitised its own) with comrades from Asia, the us, Australia and Africa. Which was great in the sense that it made discourse and exchange that had become a little abstract (in the sense of talking to a person or a bot) feel real again, but a little weird too. And not just because ArtReview was having difficulty reattaching faces to names and vice versa. (It wasn’t. And it loves what you do. Whoever you are.) A little perhaps because it has become unused to being a part of large crowds without having previously analysed the risk factor and checking

In...

(open) windows and (easy) exits. But more because it has come to see sociability for its functional rather than recreational usefulness. Which ArtReview knows makes it sound like a politician. Of course, being a politician is a part of what constitutes being sociable. And of course, ArtReview sees its glorious magazine as a manifestation of a type of sociability, between communities of writers, artists and readers. And obviously with its underlings in the editorial department as glorified party planners. But what it’s been wondering about is what the function – beyond a rather forced form of leisure – of the social swirl of these large artcrushes might be. Yeah, it’s nice to reconnect. Yeah, it’s nice to hang out. And discourse and discussion is what ArtReview is all about. No one has more to say than it. Unless it’s in a crowd full of diseased monkeys, in which case its mouth stays firmly shut. And it’s even excited to hear other people’s opinions so it can correct them. It’s more that where artists like Mahama deploy sociability with purpose (building opportunity for a community of artists to develop), the social bubble around biennales often seems to have none. Or one that’s hard to grasp. Unless it’s about trade, or promises to visit a place one has no intention of ever going, or liking whatever it is that someone does, or congratulating people on still being alive. Unless it’s about expressing power or desire or some tokenistic resistance to both of these (for how can it be resistance if you were already always there). So here’s looking forward to making artworld sociability do more than that. Although, of course, ArtReview is never going out again. ArtReview

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Robert Nava, Night and Day Separator, 2021 (detail), acrylic and grease pencil on canvas, 182.9 × 213.7 cm

Robert Nava Thunderbolt Disco

London

pacegallery.com

N. DASH

June 25 - November 6, 2022

S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium Represented by Mehdi Chouakri Gallery - Casey Kaplan Gallery - Zeno X Gallery

Art Observed

Revelation and Illusion at the Venice Biennale by Mark Rappolt 18 Worlds Colliding at sp-Arte by Oliver Basciano 21 Desert Storm by Rahel Aima 22

Trance by Emmanuel Iduma 24 Fake Friends by Martin Herbert 26 Thinking Through Asia: Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain and Ming Tiampo Interview by Mark Rappolt 29

page 22 Shaikha Al Mazrou, Measuring the Physicality of Void, 2022. Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy Desert X AlUla

Art Featured

Ibrahim Mahama by Azu Nwagbogu 36

A Spiritual Journey: From Anger to Spiritual Healing Project by Tabita Rezaire and Naomi Moonlion 54

Magic: The Gathering by J.J. Charlesworth 46

Unicorn Syndrome by Rosanna McLaughlin 62

page 46 Remedios Varo, Celestial Pablum, 1958, oil on masonite, 92 × 62 cm. Courtesy femsa Collection

THE PEACOCK MACHINE, DOCUMENTA 7, KASSEL, 1982

REBECCA HORN THE PEACOCK MACHINE | 11 JUNE to 20 AUGUST 2022

BERLIN, CHARLOTTENSTRASSE 24 WWW.GALERIETHOMASSCHULTE.DE

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 72 Charles Ray, by Digby Warde-Aldam Yoko Ono, by Damian Christinger Kenneth Bergfeld, by Francesco Tenaglia Whitney Biennial, by Ela Bittencourt Fernanda Laguna, by Owen Duffy Leidy Churchman, by Evan Moffitt Alanis Obomsawin, by Mitch Speed Stano Filko, by Christian Egger Trisha Brown / Rambert Dance Company, by Emily May Sara Basta, by Ana Vukadin Nell, by Neha Kale Ulysses Jenkins, by Claudia Ross Jac Leirner, by Martin Herbert vih/Sida : l’épidémie n’est pas finie!, by Benoît Loiseau rsa New Contemporaries, by John Quin Rebecca Morris, by Alex Jen Paulo Nimer Pjota, by Tomas Weber Katie Paterson, by Tom Jeffreys

Quantum Listening, by Pauline Oliveros, reviewed by En Liang Khong I Paint What I See, by Philip Guston, reviewed by Ben Street Carnival Strippers, by Susan Meiselas, reviewed by Louise Darblay Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Night Bus, by Zuo Ma, reviewed by Fi Churchman Conversations, by B.N. Goswamy, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Prime: Arts Next Generation, reviewed by Mark Rappolt

aftertaste 106

page 90 Encapotage de l’Obélisque place de la Concorde par Act Up-Paris, Paris, 1 December 1993. Photo: Jean-Marc Armani / pink / Saif Images

21.05. – 04.09. 22

Synnøve Anker Aurdal

Astrup Fearnley Museet

Art Observed

Something 17

Perhaps it was a result of the amber time of lockdowns and bad dreams of past Venice Biennales, but my recollection of these kinds of ‘big’ artworld event is that, more often than not, they offer you what’s best described as the artistic director’s aesthetic vomitorium, with disparate ideas, born of disparate contexts, splattered all over the walls and floors, with nothing other than the projections of the person responsible to connect them. Too much to see; too much to parse; too much to process in one sitting. (And, where travel is involved, the chances of multiple sittings are remote for anyone even pretending to be conscious of or monitoring their carbon footprint: and any sane person is doing that right now.) Of course, it’s been a while (the profitably polyphonic 2020 Berlin Biennale to be precise); but my overwhelming feeling when first pushing through crowds of tourists – terrible what they’re doing to the city; albeit fully conscious, despite having ticked ‘here on business’ on an inflight survey form, that I was one of them – along Venice’s canals while wearing a hoodie and a mask to avoid progress-retarding chit-chat was one of trepidation. Given all that, The Milk of Dreams was something of a revelation. And in more ways than one. It featured many artists (213 in total of which 21 are men), about whom I knew little, offering the seductive potential of a first encounter. Tick. As importantly, its careful design (by Italy’s Studio Formafantasma) and curatorial direction (Italy’s Cecilia Alemani) achieves the delicate balancing act of orienting visitors while allowing them to imagine the possibility that they are being encouraged to orient themselves. Double tick. Unsurprisingly, it was as full of people as it was of artworks during the preview days and from the minute I touched down it felt like everyone (who managed to penetrate my hoodie-mask combo) was asking ‘What do you think?’ and ‘What was the best thing?’ – already busily constructing the latest iteration of the artworld’s overarching consensus- and fomo-culture. And that culture in itself is another, albeit less delicate, balance between orienting and being oriented.

Revelation and Illusion

There’s a nagging sense that Cecilia Alemani’s edition of the Venice Biennale might just vanish in a puff of smoke, says Mark Rappolt

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Beginning / Middle / End), 2022, print on vinyl, three-channel video installation, sound, dimensions variable, 5 min 35 sec. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

ArtReview

So let’s get it out of the way: a room dedicated to the work of Paula Rego in the Giardini (one of several take-breath-andpause-for-a-moment mini-surveys of women artists’ work, others of which are devoted, also profitably, to the subversive sloganeering of Barbara Kruger, fabric works by Rosemarie Trockel and a series of fantastical paintings by Cecilia Vicuña) was the best thing. And when it comes to thoughts they’re still developing (a good sign). In the Central Pavilion, Vicuña’s paintings of fantastical creatures – Leoparda de Ojitos (1976), for example, is like some form of snow leopard with eyeballs instead of spots, human hands and feet instead of paws, grasping a pair of trees and opening her legs to display her genitals – introduce themes of metamorphosis, transformation and exchange (and a link to indigenous art practices) that permeate the rest of the show. They reach back to the surrealist work of Leonora Carrington, whose paintings are included in one of five historically focused micro-exhibitions that pepper the show – this one titled The Witch’s Cradle and devoted to women artists associated with or working alongside Surrealism. It’s from Carrington’s book of fairytales, written for her children, that Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams takes its name. One online book review – by ‘Emily’ – declares that Carrington’s The Milk of Dreams is ‘everything that you would want to give to a child if you so much as want them to grow up – different – in like the best ways possible’ – and there’s a strong sense that this exhibition wants to give its audiences the possibility of the same. But Vicuña’s themes stretch forward too, into paintings by Jana Euler, for example, or the sculptures of Ali Cherri (which also draw on Assyrian Lamassu deities). Although it’s not clear whether this sense of continuum tells us that nothing is ever new or that there’s always life in old dogs or old leopards. Nevertheless, there’s a sense that eliding differences is an idea that runs through much of the exhibition.

The Milk of Dreams is dominated by meditations on what constitutes the body, what clothes the body and what distinguishes one body from another, with desire a gentle hum in the background. A little less gentle in Zheng Bo’s Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) (2022), an inverted video shot in a Swedish forest and featuring five thrusting and grunting naked men, a continuation of his ongoing Pteridophilia series (2016-), exploring the potential interspecies erotic of humans and plants. Zheng’s work finds echoes and reflections in Precious Okoyomon’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2022), a garden at the end of the Arsenale featuring plants, totemic, anthropomorphic earth mounds, sugar cane and kudzu plants, the latter brought to the us from Japan to reintroduce nutrients to soil that had been drained by cotton plantations, and which are now running out of control. Whether or not they run out of control here, however, may well depend on how much natural light can penetrate the Arsenale walls – which in itself is a further chapter in the general sense of an embattled relationship between humans and nature (the abusive flipside to Zheng’s amorousness if you like) that also filters through the show. Indeed, echoes and reflections permeate the exhibition as a whole, in for example, the colourful boiled-sweet of Niki de Sant Phalle’s Gwendolyn (1966–90) and the massive, raw, anthropomorphic adobe ovens that make up Gabriel Chaile’s family portrait. There’s a menacing humour too in the eccentric and tragically funny paintings of American Jessie

top Jana Euler, Venice void, 2022, oil on linen, 205 × 400 cm. Photo: Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia above Work by Gabriel Chaile in The Milk of Dreams, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

May 2022

Homer French (a wall text says she’s a ‘selfproclaimed “regional narrative painter”’) which feature burning oil rigs, deer wandering over graveyards and stealth bombers flying over the Mojave Desert, which rearticulate human–nature relationships as something more bizarre than erotic. A sensation that’s elegantly pushed forward by Homer French’s flattened, naive painting style. The exhibition is pinned as much around theory as it is aesthetics: most notably that of Donna Haraway (which, as well as being evident throughout the exhibition, provides the source-code for one of those historical displays, this one titled Seduction of the Cyborg) and Ursula Le Guin (whose 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction anchors the microshow A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container). Outside these displays, a working through of the issues surrounding the Anthropocene, identity politics and indigenous rights are constantly present in the artworks on display. Which does leave you wondering a bit as to how necessary the direct evocation of theory and theorists was in the first place. Overwhelmingly, this is a show that triumphantly emphasises fluidity despite the Biennale’s institutional fixity. And yet, particularly in the densely stocked Central Pavilion, there’s always a nagging sense that all this really presents us with is an illusion (to paraphrase Georges Perec’s theory of travel) of having overcome distance, of having erased time, while in reality it is only reality that’s far away. And that art, as figured here, belongs more fully than one might like to the realm of dreams. Bombs, intolerance and violence belong to our current reality – from India to Palestine, to Ukraine and everywhere else you can imagine. For all that this exhibition is predicated, with its fetish for painting and sculpture, on art that is solid and tangible (at the expense of new media in its various forms), there’s nevertheless a sense that it might melt into air.

Potsdamer Straße 81B, 10785 BERLIN | D08-3, 798 East Road, 798 Art District, BEIJING info@hua-international.com +49 (0)30 25792410

FANNY GICQUEL now, and then May 27th-August 6th, 2022 Hua International Beijing

For more info please visit: hua-international.com

On the ground floor of the pavilion hosting sp-Arte, a recent art fair in São Paulo, a police car was parked up inside the building. You could tell it had come from Rio de Janeiro by its blue, white and grey paintwork, but its insignia had been roughly painted over, its siren smashed in and its interior rendered a mess of torn seats and trashed mouldings. It looked like it had been caught up in a riot. The reason it was here, however, is because it had been procured and was now being exhibited by Allan Pinheiro, an artist from Complexo do Alemão, a favela in the north of Rio, as a crude symbol of his and his neighbourhood’s often fraught relationship with the city’s security forces. Pinheiro has garnered attention for himself in the last year as a painter, often working on found scraps of discarded wood as much as canvas to document the vernacular motifs and aesthetics of his surroundings. His text-based paintings reference the rough signs that advertise taxi services or car washes, while tanks, guns and mouths evoke the violence and disorder of favela life. One oil-and-graphite work, Produto de limpeza (Cleaning Product, 2021), shows a faceless police officer, the title a reference to the authorities’ often violent attempts to ‘cleanse’ the favelas of organised crime; endeavours frequently resulting in multiple casualties, among them children and bystanders as much as hardened criminals. A Cadeira (The Chair, 2020) is based on a press photograph in which a chair stands incongruously next to a bloodsoaked body as two gun-toting military police in balaclavas look on, the victim one of 12 killed in Complexo do Alemão that day. The car sculpture, titled Fragments of the recent history of Brazil and Latin America (2022), is part of a corrective in which scenes of favela life, a daily reality for so many, make their way into Brazil’s galleries and museums (with all the contradictions and tensions involved in showing and to an extent commodifying that imagery within such traditionally economically and racially coded spaces). Maxwell Alexandre’s paintings have been the subject of various institutional shows here and internationally: Só quando tu tá com folhas geral gosta de salada (Only when you have leaves do you tend to like salad, 2018) is typical of his largescale paintings on paper,

Worlds Colliding

What happens when artists from Brazil’s favelas get increased institutional visibility and market value, asks Oliver Basciano while visiting sp-Arte

Allan Pinheiro, Fragments of the recent history of Brazil and Latin America, 2022 (installation view, sp-Arte, São Paulo). Courtesy sp-Arte

May 2022

shown unframed and freehanging like curtains from the ceiling. It depicts the material aspirations of the artist’s peers (fast cars and stylish clothes) alongside one small detail: a woman with a pram aiming a kick at a police car’s window, a moment of frustration against a system in which wealth is often denied. The police are also a frequent motif in the work of Jota, who is from another of Rio’s favelas, often pictured in scenes featuring the artist himself. Yet Pinheiro’s police car, like the artist’s wider practice, is more than mere representation. The artist has written that he is interested in exploring the ‘different social realities’ of a typical Brazilian city, encapsulating not just the life of the poorer factions of society, but the moments in which different classes briefly, and unequally, interact. Pinheiro often hangs his paintings so that they overlap each other in a kind of bricolage, indicative perhaps of how the lives of car washers and Uber drivers and other such personnel overlap social spheres, ricocheting between the wealthy realms in which they provide services and the precarity of life at home. The police car at the fair represents a similar collision: a symbol of state violence brought into the monied environs of sp-Arte (for most of those visiting the fair, the car will be the nearest interaction they have with the police). Now of course the art market has infinite capacity to neutralise all commentary through co-option/assimilation and turn it into commodity, and the car proved a hit on social media, with many of the linen-clad middle-class fairgoers happily posing for selfies. But then something else happened: by the weekend a graffiti artist named Massive Mia defied security to spray ‘Mother Child Police Kill’ across the car’s exterior. More came, playing a cat-and-mouse game with fair staff, sneaking spraypaint through the doors, until the vehicle was a mess of political slogans and artist symbols. The work was elevated beyond mere representation of the gulf between Pinheiro’s community and the artworld, to a living battleground, a social sculpture in which the gates to the artworld were breached. There were still selfies, but this time it was the taggers themselves posing next to their handiwork.

The most exciting thing that I saw in AlUla, a remote town in northwestern Saudi Arabia, were some dustbins. They come in pairs of green and brown, the former for recycling and the latter for mixed trash, and are placed at intervals up and down the arterial street of the Old Town, a heritage site dating back to the twelfth century. But that’s not why they were exciting. Things weren’t that bad. Written on them is the slogan Keep AlUla clean. In Arabic and the Nabatean script. The latter hasn’t been used for some 1,600 years. Nearby, a language institute offers courses in Chinese, French and Nabatean. Ancient history is being revitalised everywhere you look, with a tourist infrastructure that sutures the Iron Age to Saudi Arabia’s masterplan of Vision 2030 (a strategic framework that aims to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil by developing the cultural, educational, health, tourism and recreation sectors). All around AlUla, magnificent rock formations running the gamut from ochre-red to basalt-grey rise out of the desert, now shot with palm and citrus groves as part of an aggressive oasis-regeneration programme. It’s as utterly magical as it is artificial. “We are not opening a resort, we are opening a city and a country,” said the manager of Habitas, a new eco-luxe resort built in the same valley in which the inaugural Desert X AlUla, the Saudi edition – one of many soft-power handshakes – of the Coachella Valley-based Land-art exhibition, was held in 2020. In California, Desert X operates with an ethos

Desert Storm

Visiting one of the Arabian Peninsula’s oldest cities, Rahel Aima finds an ancient culture in the bins and thermodynamic sea creatures in the desert

Dana Awartani, Where the Dwellers Lay, 2022

ArtReview

of leave no trace and works are dismantled after each run. Not here: private chalets look out onto works by Nadim Karam, Manal AlDowayan and superflex, and an ikb Lita Albuquerque work – erroneously trumpeted as the first female figurative sculpture in Saudi in a millennium – can be seen from the infinity pool. It’s worth noting that as much as it hopes to attract wealthy visitors from overseas, AlUla seems to function primarily to introduce Saudis to themselves, to their pre-Islamic past and a new national narrative of civilisational greatness. One wonders what lies in store for this year’s location, situated a 30-minute drive from the first, darker and more atmospheric than its predecessor, with remnants of petroglyphic rock art. Whereas the first edition suggested paintings hung in a circuit around the perimeter of a large hall, Desert X 2022 is installed around a series of canyons that puts each work more directly in conversation with both its setting and the piece(s) visible next to it. And contra the bombasticism of 2020, this time the 15 Saudi and international artists involved mostly didn’t attempt to compete with the majesty of the landscape. The exhibition is all the better for it. Curators Reem Fadda, Raneem Farsi and Neville Wakefield chose the theme of Sarab, or mirage, gesturing towards a tension between the manmade and the natural, and man’s attempts to control nature. (In Riyadh, Misk Art Institute subsequently announced the same theme for this year’s grants, with no apparent irony.) Fadda

added, “The [participating] artists spoke to the rocks, they spoke to the sand, they spoke to the bushes and the trees”. But the rocks, sand, bushes and trees don’t seem to have been listening. More successful, rather, were the works that looked beyond the immediate site to the broader AlUla region. Rusted steel rods splay out of the ground like gargantuan reeds in Monika Sosnowska’s installation, which references AlUla’s position at the confluence of the incense and spice roads. But the metal is distressingly taken from the historic Hejaz railway: some heritages are clearly more worthy of preservation than others. Nearby, Shezad Dawood’s gnarly coral forms – one pleasingly installed high up on a cliffside – speak to a geological timescale when the valley would have been underwater. They are painted with thermodynamic paint and, unlike their curiously resilient brethren in the Red Sea, will slowly bleach to white over time. AlUla’s primary draw might be the Nabatean necropolis of Madain Saleh, or Hegra, which features stunning rock-cut tombs and inscriptions, dating from the first century and similar to those found in its sister city of Petra. The relief staircases on their facades, along with Islamic geometry from farther afield, inspire Dana Awartani’s pixelated sandstone throne, blending beautifully into its surrounds. At the centre of Sultan bin Fahad’s earthen desert kite – ancient claustrophobia-inducing animal herding structures that converge on a killing floor – is a funny, globby sculpture topped with a spadix that features animal motifs found on Hegra tombs, except here they’re trapped in the fibreglass; the work would have been quite stunning without it.

top Sultan bin Fahad, Desert Kite, 2022 above Shezad Dawood, Coral Alchemy i (Dipsastrea Speciosa), 2022 all images Photos: Lance Gerber. Courtesy Desert X AlUla

May 2022

Mada’in Saleh has long been believed to be cursed and forbidden for Muslims – a Quranic verse details how lightning and earthquakes decimated its idolatrous residents – and although Saudi authorities are doing their best to rehabilitate this image, the paranormal still suffuses the air. Soldiers tell tales of a wizened crone seen creeping around the sleeping town late at night, a man went mad after spotting a Slenderman figure on the road and locals believe that jinn protect the town from raiders who come seeking rumoured stashes of buried Ottoman gold, or from dark forces as yet unknown. The unstoppable behemoth of development, perhaps: much of the area is being transformed in partnership with the French Agency for AlUla Development, an alliance that was confirmed, some would say not without coincidence, at the same time as a defence contract between the Republic and the Gulf state. Outside of Desert X, cultural initiatives include a robust public-art programme, an arthouse cinema, two artist residencies and a bellwether outpost of Jeddah’s Athr gallery, which seems to gesture towards AlUla’s framing as a destination for the monied. What lies beneath? A rich loam of asyet-unearthed history: whereas much of the surrounding region was plundered by Europeans in the last century, the recently resumed archaeological excavations in AlUla, a vast region of intracivilisational connective tissue, have reportedly barely scratched the surface. Ground so fertile that it is said if you simply toss a date seed, a tree will grow, with a burgeoning wellness-influencer industry to match. A month later I returned to AlUla on a roadtrip and, away from the lubrication of a biennial opening, found a very different town. In the old-but-not-historic town where the people who service the tourist industry live I notice a handpainted advertisement for land-investment opportunities, outside a laundromat wallpapered with idyllic tropical beaches. Gone was the easy, improvisational enchantment, replaced by a frictive apparatus of ticketing and entry, a slick, hypercommercialised veneer overlaying an ambiently grim, gold-rush-feeling town. Rahel Aima is a writer based in Dubai

Every so often I return with frenzy to the photographs Bruno Barbey took in Nigeria during the country’s 30-month civil war, lasting between 1967 and 1970. And I return as though to create a frame-by-frame account of the conditions of despair during years that are the most documented in Nigerian history. In addition to French-born Barbey, a few dozen other foreign photographers had descended on the scene of the conflict, and the atrocities they pictured spawned sufficient international outrage that a student at Columbia University self-immolated in protest. Barbey was embedded with the Nigerian Army, and yet he is, in my viewing and thinking, drawn less to the crescendos of the conflict itself, and more to the dirgelike traces left in its wake. Hence this photograph, taken in Lagos, roughly 60 kilometres from the closest battlefield. The clean demarcations of the telephone booths, in which each speaker is isolated – focused entirely on their private intrigues – seem to me a quiet dirge, the echo of a faraway cry. I can imagine a relative on the other end of the line, who’s perhaps travelled kilometres to find a working telephone; who had been informed of the timing of their telephonic rendezvous in a letter that took weeks to arrive; so that the woman and child you see have gone to the booth at the same time hoping someone will pick up. And the boy – in the slant of his pose, his open right palm broadened into a why – tells of a reconciliation taking longer than he’d imagined. It remains a fact, however, that the photographs taken during the Nigerian Civil War, those accessible through a Google search, are almost in every case attributable to a non-Nigerian photographer. What to make of this? What to make of the systems of preservation – of an agency like Magnum, for instance – that allow for a foreigner’s photograph of an event to outlive a local’s? I think, for instance, of Peter Obe, a famed Nigerian photojournalist of that era, whose photographs of the Nigerian Army I have seen referred to in accounts of the

Traces

It’s not obviously a war photograph, but for Emmanuel Iduma it recalls the calm amid the chaos of a country coming apart

war but are not referenceable, as far as I know, in any digital archive. Yet I am not overburdened by the question of how I am granted access to history: I claim Barbey’s photograph as I would Obe’s. It is an entitlement born of the degree of affinity I feel to the war, a cataclysm that resulted in the disappearance of one of my uncles. Barbey’s photograph is most accomplished when I consider its composition. He must have stepped back to get all four booths in the frame, at a moment when each was occupied. If there was a line of people in his peripheral Bruno Barbey, Poster against the General Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the Igbos. City of Lagos, Nigeria, 1967. © Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos

ArtReview

vision, he deemed anyone on either side of the booths superfluous, focusing instead on a dramatis personae made up of telephone users as diverse in idiosyncrasy as in the range of their conversations. The panache of each person: consider as an example the hand cupped over an ear by the man whose briefcase rests on the floor, who stands sharp and rigid as a recruit. These roles would otherwise be mundane if this weren’t, obliquely at the very least, a wartime photograph, a literal connotation of the spread of country united by telephone. (To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done, reads the sign perched atop the booth – the slogan used by the Nigerian government to galvanise its soldiers, the thrust of its propaganda, and words still invoked in conversations around ‘national unity’ in Nigeria today.) As a wartime photograph taken in an unaffected Nigerian city, it indicates a contraposition of normalcy against chaos, and tells of what cannot be imagined in Lagos by those who are outside the thickets of misery, the pace of their lives uninterrupted. But when I first saw the people in the photograph, particularly the boy and woman in the leftmost booth, I made a connection to an occasion other than war. During my childhood, my father lived abroad for four years. My brother and I would sometimes be taken to a neighbour’s house to speak with him over the phone. Three decades later, I still recall the emotional distance my father and I tried to bridge during those calls: the nervous flush in my heart as I tried and failed not to stutter, as though drawing from a muddy cistern, and the eagerness in his own voice, a father who understood the limits of my communication, compressing his vocabulary into monosyllables of affection. Emmanuel Iduma is a writer and photographer. His works include the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (2018) and a forthcoming memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War

David Medalla 9 Apr 14 Sep 2022

Parables of Friendship MUSEION Museum for modern and contemporary art Bolzano Bozen museion.it Funded by

Institutional Partners David Medalla, Bambi Shitting Dollars, 1989. Collage on paper. Courtesy: private collection Design: Studio Mut

In collaboration with

BIRD FLIGHT

Erika Giovanna Klien in dialogue with contemporary artistic positions

9 Apr 7 Sep 2022

MUSEION Museum for modern and contemporary art Bolzano Bozen museion.it Institutional Partners

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Design: Studio Mut

If you’ve operated professionally within the contemporary art scene for a decade or two, and you attend one of its larger gatherings – say, the Venice Biennale, which my spies tell me is happening around now – then you might find that you know a lot of people. The ones you genuinely like and who, seemingly, genuinely like you; the ones you know by face and name and rub along with; the ones who look sort of familiar while they’re reminding you in detail of that escapade last time you met, in 2003; those somewhere in between. A biennale vernissage renders this shifting dynamic at outsize scale. It’s a fizzing Leyden jar of such interactions, which might lead a person to walk away from such an event thinking: ‘Wow, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances!’ or, ‘The artworld is such a friendly place!’ Well, yes. And no. Leaving aside for a moment all that’s putatively good about the sphere of contemporary art, the latter runs on a cocktail of fuels: one is actual alcohol; another is bullshit; a third is bonhomie. Any art event involving quite a few people is a collective, if improvised, theatrical presentation that commingles realities; there’s room for genuine pleasure at meeting or seeing someone, but there’s also a lot of mask-wearing or, as sociologist Erving Goffman famously theorised it, presentation of self. People in this field – at least until around the fifth glass of white wine, or the point in the gallery dinner where a performance artist jumps on the table – are, in my warped experience as someone who might be useful in terms of press coverage, but also as someone who enjoys people-watching, generally nice to each other. (That is, if they interact at all. A cat may look at a king, but there are a bunch of individuals in any art gathering that probably won’t get to interact with certain others, unless they spill a drink on them.) Underlying this professional nice-making, which is not exclusive to contemporary art but which the latter has twisted in an interesting way, is the idea – and it is just an idea, or rather an ideology – that the artworld is collegiate. That we’re all trying, in our own ways, to contribute to an improvisatory but important process, keep it going and make new things happen within it. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that accountants, for example, don’t think like that. The insidiousness of this, the reason it’s hard to shake and easy to instrumentalise, is that it’s half true. It is enjoyable and

Friends?

In the artworld, people think they’re hanging out, when they’re really just hanging on, writes Martin Herbert validating to feel part of the enterprise of culture: to have one foot in the long tradition of advanced human creativity and the other in the terra incognita of its perpetual, if not always so interesting, change and development. It’s gratifying in general to feel part of a group, however hazy its membership; to share a common language; to stand around in a white room with backs turned to some paintings, making wisecracks about rich artists you don’t Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, The School of Athens (detail), 1511

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know. But, as in politics, the all-in-it-together notion also covers a multitude of sins. There is, of course, a great deal of precarity underlying most art-related social occasions; a lot of nerviness under the gladhanding. (Without the latter compensation, the plentiful amounts of people who’ve drifted into contemporary art despite being socially awkward might not be there.) And the intermix of precariousness, best behaviour and imagined community extends beyond the social sphere. Every time a ‘cultural producer’ receives an invitation to do something and is informed, in the same breath, that ‘unfortunately we cannot offer a fee for this’, or is offered an honorarium that in terms of hours worked would fall below minimum wage (or fill in your own example of unacceptable working practices in arts institutions, art education, or wherever) the idea of contemporary art as a team endeavour is mobilised while real-world hierarchies are obscured. How mercenary or uncommitted are you, the appeal to conscience insinuates, should you refuse to work for little or nothing or otherwise put up with unpleasant working conditions, when we’re all trying to do something valuable here? Whatever, we don’t really care – if you don’t sign up, someone else will. The artworld is terrific at blurring actual work and vague moral obligation, and also friendship and self-preservation, as you might discover when on the wrong end of an invisible asymmetry. If you’re an artist who’s no longer in favour (read: selling) with your gallery, you may find yourself dropped by proforma email or, slightly more classily, letter, many sociable years together be damned. If you’re a critic who leaves a prominent perch, as in the experience of a colleague of mine, forget about those schmoozy invites to openings and/or dinners – you’re surplus now, plus we need to invite your replacement. These are facts, but it’s easy to imagine that such things just happen to other people when you’re caught up in the artworld’s blurrily defined relations, when nobody’s asked you to work pro bono for a while, when you’re having a fun time among all these like-minded people and this isn’t work, is it? How many real friends do you have here, beyond the ones you’re sure about? If you’re lucky, you’ll never – oh hey, it’s you. Cheers! So great to see you again! Love what you do…

June une

Art Fair Art Ar rt Fa F Fai air 13.–19.6. 202 2 ! , n o i 0B t a c e9 o l ld rass o w nst el e N ehe as Ri 58 B 40

VI, VII, Oslo Arcade, London & Brussels Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam Christian Andersen, Copenhagen Downs & Ross, New York Établissement d’en face, Brussels Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam Fabian Lang, Zurich Foxy Production, New York The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Parisa Kind, Frankfurt Sentiment, Zurich Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam Sydney, Sydney Special Projects: DARP, Derbyshire Red Tracy, Copenhagen PROVENCE, Zurich Gina Folly Juneart.io, curated by Jared Madere june-art-fair.com @juneartfair @juneart.io

Thinking Through Asia with the Asia Forum Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain and Ming Tiampo Interview by Mark Rappolt

“Part of the reasoning of why we four came together from the different fields and expertises in which we work, is so we could have those kinds of conversations where we position Asia differently and question what it is, but also use it as a lens, as an engine to further other questionings in terms of big current critical topics”

The Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asias, sponsored by the Bagri Foundation, is an itinerant platform for discourse surrounding experimental art practices and research. Conceived by Annie Jael Kwan, the Asia Forum works

with an international council of curators and researchers, Hammad Nasar, John Tain and Ming Tiampo, in a sustained dialogue with contributors to navigate the key themes that have arisen in relation to contemporary artistic practices of Asias in

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a plural and global sense. Prior to the launch of the forum with a one-day programme held during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, ArtReview met with the four members of the council to discuss the forum’s origins and ambitions.

artreview How and why did the Asia Forum come into being? annie jael kwan On repeated trips to Venice I had noticed, alongside certain changes within the cultural landscape in London and Europe, that there seemed to be an increased presence of Asian artists (or artists working in relation to Asia). Then, in 2017, the African Art in Venice Forum was launched. I attended that for all three days, and became interested in the way that they had managed to pull out different thematic strands, and to provide a space in which to explore them in more detail. Some of those themes – those surrounding cultural relations and representation – get a bit lost in the louder narratives of nation that spring up during the Biennale. So I began to wonder what shape an Asia Forum might take and approached Ming [Tiampo], Hammad [Nasar] and John [Tain] to start a conversation. ar Why is it important to do this in Venice? In some respects it feels like it’s a dying structure of an outdated ‘great exhibition’ view of the world. ming tiampo You’re right, but it’s also a place that brings together many like-minded people; it enables certain kinds of intersections and conversations to take place. If we wanted to look a little bit further, then there are obviously other links to Asia through Venice: it is home to one of the most important East Asian studies departments in Italy [at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia]; it has long relationships through its maritime history. But in the main it’s very much about those intersections of people and intellectual structures. hammad nasar There are no neutral spaces. They don’t exist. Name me a place and I’ll give you a counter-argument. And there is value in using the energies that already exist, the energies that Venice attracts, and then redirecting them. Like in the Tai Chi technique of pushing hands. john tain I think one of the reasons why we wanted to engage Venice specifically has also to do with the way that the Asia Forum is positioning Asia itself: not as a place but really as a position. Part of the reason why we’re doing the Asia Forum in Venice is because it’s not necessarily for Asia per se, it’s as an interface between Asia or ways of thinking about Asia and other parts of the world. As Ming said, I think Venice is still a place where that kind of convergence does happen. The other things to say is that the Asia Forum is not limited or tied to Venice in a way that the African forum has been. I think there is the hope that this can continue beyond the context of Venice as well.

ar Perhaps the other big question in relation to all this is what is ‘Asia’ in this context. There are many different ways of defining it depending on context, history and politics, and in many cases we seem to be dealing with ‘Asias’, rather than any single geography or context. ajk That’s a really complex question but also a really exciting one, because it leads to all sorts of productive explorations. It was also part of the reasoning of why we four came together from the different fields and expertises in which we work, is so we could have those kinds of conversations where we position Asia differently and question what it is, but also use it as a lens, as an engine to further other questionings in terms of big current critical topics. When you ask ‘What is Asia?’, it’s complex. Is there Asia in the uk? Certainly there’s an ‘Asia’ in the uk. And then there are Asia-Pacific histories. So do we look at the diaspora and

“There’s always a question mark when anybody says ‘South Asia’, because South Asia only exists outside of South Asia. You can behold it from the Gulf or from Venice or London, or potentially from Singapore. When you do that, it’s a different South Asia that emerges, shaped by its own particular histories and entanglements from where you are beholding it.” their practices? Is that Asian? Or is it Asian to be in Asia? The questions themselves can continue to expand, because the histories themselves are very much entangled. ar It certainly seems to be the case that during the pandemic and in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement there has been a move in the artworld to highlight people’s ‘otherness’ in places like Europe. But for someone who’s mixed race, like myself, for example, these often seem to be labels that suit the purposes of someone else. I’ll be Sri Lankan to some people, British to others and German to others still. mt I think that what John said earlier about this being a critical category that we’re using, or what Annie said in terms of it being a lens, is really very much how we’re thinking of Asia. Not so much as a geography but as a method,

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as a way of thinking about certain issues, so that we’re thinking through Asia rather than about Asia. The question of where the boundaries are become a little bit less urgent, although we are very aware of including West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and really trying to make sure that we are addressing different geographies too. ar And presumably that becomes more complex because those different geographies are in many ways – politics, religion, history, economics – radically different. hn Originally I’m from Pakistan, and there’s always a question mark when anybody says South Asia, because South Asia doesn’t exist in the countries of South Asia, because they can’t really talk to each other. They can’t travel. South Asia only exists outside of South Asia. Now, you can behold it from the Gulf or you can behold it from Venice or London, or potentially from Singapore. When you do that, it’s a different South Asia that emerges, shaped by its own particular histories and entanglements from where you are beholding it. I think those are really interesting, not just for folks in South Asia itself but then as ways of thinking, both comparatively but also in an entangled, messy way. I think we are embracing that. In a way it’s about thinking through and trying to stay with the mess, to borrow Donna Haraway, in considering this ‘lumpy framing’ of Asia. ar How would you characterise this Asia lens or Asia thinking? Just messy? Or is there more you can say to that, about what the possibilities opened up by viewing things through this Asian lens or lenses might be? ajk It does decentre a certain kind of conditioned access that we tend to think of when we think of art and the circulations of value. It moves a centre away from, I suppose, a more Eurocentric understanding of knowledge. It affords those possibilities to some extent. Going back to what you were saying earlier, we work in the field of discourses and ideas, but nevertheless, of course, there’s also embodied lived experiences and there’s always this ambiguous, sometimes ambivalent negotiation between how we see ourselves, how others see us and how that’s entangled with these broader thematics. Certainly, in some way, I never feel very Chinese until I’m in the uk, and then people ask me a lot about that. jt To follow up on your question about the potentials and the possibilities, I think – and to continue with the thought that Hammad and Annie were pursuing – I think some of

Ming Tiampo. Photo: Raul Betti

Hammad Nasar. Photo: Raul Betti

John Tain

Annie Jael Kwan

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the possibilities have to do with ‘Asia’. It’s not just South Asia that doesn’t exist within the region; Asia, as a larger construct, is a European project. There is a sense that Europeans understand – even if they don’t agree with being part of the eu – that ‘Oh, I am European in some ways’. Whereas the idea of commonality within Asia is a very contentious one. Just this morning I was listening to the idea of China and Japan relations and the Rape of Nanking. There’s all kinds of ongoing simmering feuds between the different countries, and there’s this very long held sense of national identity or cultural identity that’s separate from a continental one. I think one thing that the Asia Forum can allow for is an exploration of those other commonalities that are defined from the outside, where it’s Europe defining Asia or the us defining Asia, and what it is that diaspora communities working with communities within the region can contribute. I think some of these things have already come out in the online forums that we’ve had. ar I think we’re talking about a certain contingency that’s embedded in the very idea of ‘Asia’, but that’s something that’s historical too – you might look to the treatment of Buddhism in India, which for a long time was erased from its history, or the current attempts to erase its Muslim histories. hn What you’re pointing towards is the difference between history and fact. That history is always contingent. I think one of the things about the lens of Asia, or the lenses of Asia, is the fact that there are now such institutional efforts in history writing, particularly around cultural infrastructure. There’s, for want of a better metaphor, an ‘arms race’ for the discourse at various institutions to create histories around nation, region or even the world, if you have a big enough budget. You can take positions of dismissing them or you can take positions of championing and cheerleading them. But I think those then also point to where some of the energies and money are headed – quite frankly, art’s always been entwined with money, it’s about which empire had it, whether it’s the Mughal or the Ottoman, and then who did they share it with and in what form; that’s the history of art. What I think we are trying to do is to wrestle with those positions. To see what energies they’re bringing, and what they do to the dominant forums and structures of the artworld. At the same time the artworld is very good at assimilating this. It’s very good at expansion by assimilation and assimilation by resemblance.

ar We described a lot of what you’re doing in terms of thought and thinking, and now you’ve brought up the artworld and its more tangible infrastructures. Is the aim to play a role in shaping or reconsidering the direction those things go in, say, arts institutions, or arts education? Moving beyond thought into practice. mt I think for now we’re imagining ourselves as a descriptive space that has the ability to expand into other structures and infect them in terms of changing discourses and being in dialogue with arts institutions, with various types of educational organisations, but really from the inside out in a sense, rather than directly engaging with the projects of institution building. It seems to me that that’s the project right now, that it’s to create this network of people and ideas that can then serve as the soil in which other things can grow.

“I think that in this community, we’re also trying to define new ways of being together, new ways of communicating, of creating community, that involve practices of radical listening. What that means is that we’re open to listening and we’re open to learning from each other, which means that I can’t, as an academic, say, ‘It must be this way because this is the precise way of describing what we need to say in my language” ar How do you decide which people or ideas are of interest? jt I think that comes out of the conversations that we’ve been having. The kind of conversations between the four of us that don’t make it to the public part of what we do – the ‘Oh, have you heard about this person, that person?’ It’s interesting how much consensus there is, but also I think sometimes one of us may know something or know about someone or know about a project that the others don’t know about, and we can make these recommendations. I think that’s part of the fun. ar Do you think that’s changing the way you approach… let’s call them your ‘day jobs’? hn Actually, that was precisely what I wanted to come to, because when you raise the

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infrastructure and institutional question, we’re all inside or working with, or avoiding, or dancing around multiple institutions. Part of what we can see the Asia Forum doing is opening up a space where we can bounce ideas, but also socialise them. More than just ideas, it’s about an attitude and openness to allowing ourselves to be pushed or infected (I’m thinking about when that used to be an innocent word) in different ways. For example, Ming and I started working together as part of the London Asia research project, which is really coming out of an institution of British art history (the Paul Mellon Centre) and trying to cleave it open and create a social space as much as a discursive one where people can find a place to bounce ideas. That in itself sets off so many more and different ideas than we could on our own. The question then is, ‘Well, what can we catalyse?’ mt It’s about trying to build communities that are horizontal, that cut across various geographical silos that exist, as well as sectoral silos, I think, because we do come from very different places. John, as you know, from Asia Art Archive, Hammad from a curatorial role, as well as Annie, and I am an academic. These worlds don’t always mix. It’s really our hope that what we can do is bring these worlds together across geographies and sectors and understand how those discourses can shape each other in really powerful ways. I think that in this community, we’re also trying to define new ways of being together, new ways of communicating, of creating community, that involve practices of radical listening. What that means is that we’re open to listening and we’re open to learning from each other, which means that I can’t, as an academic, say, ‘It must be this way because this is the precise way of describing what we need to say in my language’. Rather, because of the ethics of care and radical listening that we’re engaging in here, I necessarily have to be thinking relationally with our audiences and vice versa as well. ar And of course many of your audiences won’t have English as a first language. hn From my perspective, I often think with and through artworks and with artists around this. I go back to the late Zarina [Hashmi, 1937–2020], for example: she would describe herself as an Urdu artist rather than an Indian, Muslim or some other formulation indicating a nationality, and that provokes thinking about what language enables. Actually, if we study her work, we learn that language allows us entry into a world of thought, of history,

of etiquette; of different modes of being, thinking and perceiving. English is not the language that we’re working with. English is actually the most common mode of translation around another language – the language(s) of art. I think, in that way, perhaps we can also decentre and deprioritise the language as we think of it as an extension of the civilisation value and think of it more as a structure of thought that artists are working with. I think a great example of that was Anna Tsing and Lantian Xie bonding over silverfish in our first session online. That said, with the right infrastructure and the right level of funding, in future iterations we might be able to afford an iteration elsewhere, where a different language or a different system takes centre stage? Then English could perhaps be one of the other languages that you can access particular conversations in. ajk I often work with diaspora communities that navigate between ‘here’ and ‘there’ but also different minority communities in Southeast Asia, and certainly I always feel a little conscious of the fact that my Vietnamese friends or Cambodian friends have to usually communicate in English in order to have their

position heard or be accepted into a particular discourse. I’m very aware that often in many seminars we’re not doing enough to support them expressing themselves in the fullness of how they want to. That also goes back to colonial legacies where we look at how a lot of art histories in that region are written in French, for example, or Dutch. It’s very ironic that to be Cambodian in a contemporary art world, you have to be French proficient to study the archives. There are these ongoing tensions with regards to the use of language. We’re trying to be very aware of these tensions and how we are responding to them, so that it wouldn’t be seen that the Asia Forum is trying to assume a certain position of authority. ar Perhaps one of the other issues is that there are certain things – words, expressions, modes of thought – that simply can’t be translated. mt Absolutely. I think that it’s not even just about language but it’s also about ways of knowing and ways of seeing and ways of expressing that changed through language. It’s poetics, but also it’s politics. What do we do with languages that are disappearing, and the use of languages by communities who don’t actually speak them? I’m from Canada

and there’s a movement of indigenous languages being used for music and film even though there are very, very few native speakers, and it’s about a certain kind of politics. I could imagine us engaging with that at some point in the future. ajk I think there’s also been interesting articles written about contemporary art and live performance in Cambodia, and how the words for contemporary art don’t actually exist in Khmer, particularly in relation to performance art. ar Perhaps that brings us to a final question – which is what do you think that art brings to all of these issues? Do you see art as a very, very broad thing or does it have limits that make it art and not something else? mt It’s a space that allows for reflection and hope and imagination of new futures. One term that Hammad often uses, and I’ll just borrow it from him here, is ‘pocket utopias’. We’re able to think through art in ways that aren’t possible in politics or sociology, in terms of speculative futures as well as interpretive pasts, and understanding the ways in which art can function as a space for healing and for rethinking this place where we are right now, which is obviously a place that’s in crisis.

all images Courtesy The Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asias

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Art Featured

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The Builder How the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama is leveraging his fame and influence to create African arts institutions of the future – today by Azu Nwagbogu

is mentioned in nearly every conversation about art and museology in Africa. He is backed by White Cube, a top international blue-chip gallery, and has been invited as a participating artist to the major global art events since that edition of Venice: Documenta 14, in 2017; Ghana Freedom, the inaugural Ghana Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019; Lagos Photo Festival, 2016; Lubumbashi Biennale, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2019. His monumental installations, particularly the jute sacks dropped over buildings, are among the most recognisable art interventions around the world. Unrelated but similarly, over this same period the growth in Africa of event-based art programmes such as festivals, biennials and fairs have also contributed significantly in drawing attention to art from the continent. However, the pandemic and the upheaval it has wrought have mitigated this continuity and exposed Africa’s infrastructural deficits. Contemporary art museums are at a premium, and even when available they are largely unwieldy, expensive to run or inoperable. Let’s go back to 2015 and recall the 56th Venice Biennale, All the World’s Celebrated museums and art spaces such as Zeitz mocaa offered little Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental and struggled to stay open; in the dystopia of the pandemic, rather site-specific installation Out of Bounds steals the show; his collage of than offer safe spaces for artists they were rather like mausoleums. jute sacks, stitched and woven together, are draped over the long This condition of museology is not unique to Africa. It is just the case external walls of the buildings that make up the Arsenale, trans- that several new museums in Africa model themselves on Western forming these corridorlike spaces while providing a visual history museums and hierarchies that make them ill-suited for the contiof the narratives of production, trade and the more human tales that nent. Conversely, art exhibitions in relation to Africa and its diaspora are embodied by these sacks. According to Enwezor, his edition of the have been dominated over the past few decades by futurism, such as world’s most famous biennial offered ‘a filter through which to reflect with Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures and its postulations about time, on both the current state of things and the appearance of things’. For imaginaries and dystopia/utopia; conditions presented to us by the Mahama, this theme and its possibilities were important consid- recent pandemic. But Mahama has never been content with theoerations: there is to be no dissonance between the ‘reality’ – a word rising about utopian ideas around futures and imaginaries. He seeks Nabokov famously believed should always appear in quotation marks to leverage his position and renown to help remediate present condi– of the world and its reflection in art. tions in Ghana by building infrastructure in order to enable longIn the seven years since that audacious introterm collaborations between citizens and institutions; between artists, curators and cultural duction to the artworld in Venice, Mahama has Ibrahim Mahama in Tamale, Ghana, producers across the continent and in diaspora gone from relatively unknown to a name that April 2022. Photo: Carlos Idun-Tawiah Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects – that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me – I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron. Vladimir Nabokov, bbc television interview, 1962

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preceding pages Out of Bounds, 2015 (installation view, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015) above Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (scca) and Red Clay Studio complex, Tamale

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through institution-building towards a fundamentally engaged and experimentation and artmaking, and, as importantly, to make art integrated methodology of art practice for the benefit of society at practice better understood in his hometown. The deeper philosophlarge. Savannah Contemporary Art Centre (scca), Red Clay Studio ical idea was, he says, “to make work that would somehow extend and Blaxtarlines are institutions Mahama has funded, founded, the legacy of these women and their children and grandchildren built and nourished in his native Ghana – and, significantly, not in by building something capable of changing the narrative around Accra, the capital, but in Tamale, in the unfashionable and oft-over- artistic work for generations to come”. Mahama thinks of scca as that looked agricultural northern part of the country. These initiatives, led artwork that will transcend time. by scca, are exemplars of museums of the future: alive, metabolic, scca is evolving, and through collaborations and partnerships nimble and experimental. They are with similar and diverse institutions in designed to engage with the commuAfrica like Congolese Plantation Workers The idea is “to make work that nity they purport to serve and are free Art League (catpc), my own African Artists’ would somehow extend the legacy at the point of entry. The vital civic role Foundation (aaf) Lagos, and Centre for of these women and their children museums are intended to play is realContemporary Art Lagos, Mahama creates ised at scca in Tamale. opportunities and linkages that underscore and grandchildren by building During our conversation via Zoom, both intergenerational and transmedia something capable of changing Mahama recounts a pivotal incident relationships, filling a gap that exists in art the narrative around artistic work that shifted his perspective and sparked practice across Africa. Art spaces in Africa tend to memory-hole the colonial era as the urgency to build scca in Tamale. for generations to come” they oscillate between obsessing about In 2014, while attempting to build a scaffold structure in the market complex, and then to cover it with contemporary art and artists, and about traditional artefacts. It is as jute sacks, he found that while the market women were supportive though the twentieth century never happened. Mahama and the instiof and intrigued by the project, the men were not. The women were tutions he has founded in Ghana offer a way out of this impasse by intrigued by the presence of a university graduate in their space, and focusing on the art space as a site for experimentation, regeneration, by his interest in creating an artistic intervention in the marketplace. restitution and repatriation, not necessarily by waiting for a direct The men were for the most part hostile, accusing him of being a spy return of objects, but of ideas and modern art-history both tangibly or of having sinister intentions. The women defended Mahama and and symbolically. His is an exercise in reclaiming the commons that calmed the men down. Nevertheless it gave birth to scca as an idea also serves to shift the decolonising paradigm away from Western and catalysed the scaling up of his studio as a wider space for open museums and towards a location-specific, solution-oriented approach.

Children in a repurposed airplane at Red Clay Studio, Tamale

May 2022

Teacher don’t teach me nonsense, 2013–22, wood panel wrapped in wax print cloth with jute thread, 122 × 183 cm. Photo: Ollie Hammick

Sorrow tears and blood, 2013–22, wood panel wrapped in wax print cloth with jute thread, 122 × 183 cm. Photo: Ollie Hammick

A perfect example is the imaginatively titled Dig Where You Stand rather, he sees the function of institutions in terms of their being project, a series of travelling exhibitions that offers a new model drivers of progress and mechanisms through which to engineer the of engagement with questions of decolonisation, restitution and refreshing of ideas. He’s a believer in “build it and they will create”. repatriation. Dig Where You Stand showcases sustainable models of Institutions that can influence artists to explore as widely as possible rerouting existing systems of legitimation and market-value crea- in terms of materials that they can work with are vital. Mahama is tion that have been perpetuating the extraction of resources and part of an incipient but disparate collection of artist-led initiatives capital away from the African continent. The exhibition invites artists on the African continent (Michael Armitage, Zanele Muholi and who work within the circularity of the artworld economies to partici- Barthélémy Toguo are doing similar work) that are keenly aware of pate in strategies of liberation from the ongoing extractive processes the mechanics of the artworld and seek to avoid further widening the both in the artworld and the broader gap between artists and their communieconomy. Dig Where You Stand brings ties as a result of the commercial value His is an exercise in reclaiming placed on artworks by bringing their art, together examples of regenerative artistic the commons that also serves positionality, influence, economy and practices and acts as a regenerative agent to shift the decolonising paradigm merits of current efforts around decoloin itself. The artists and local communinisation from global institutions, often ties will explore generative strategies of away from Western museums intervention, cooperation, activism and based in Europe, to decolonising the terriand towards a location-specific, pedagogy. It is a sort of labour movement tories from which they have been exprosolution-oriented approach within the artworld itself. priated and looted. This logic is embodied In Mahama’s words, “scca was one in Mahama’s ongoing exhibition where of those products, in a way, that an artist could use the residue of his his signature jute sack installation is draped over the eponymous work in terms of capital generated out of it in order to build, let’s say, White Cube in Lusanga, Congo, at catpc, an artist-run institution an institution in a form of artistic practice, that could allow for the on the very first palm-oil plantation, founded by Lever Brothers, now resurrection of other artists’ works”. scca’s first focus exhibition was Unilever, itself a sponsor of museums and academic research. Beyond a retrospective on the work of the influential modernist painter Galle the well-worn narrative trope of institutional critique, Mahama sees Winston Kofi Dawson curated by Bernard Akoi-Jackson. scca’s artistic this as a model for bottom-up infrastructure-building both physical director, Selom Kudjie, is responsible for programming and regular and intellectual for African communities. activities at the centre. Mahama balks at Western ideas around conserFor his first solo gallery exhibition in Hong Kong, Mahama vation, viewing them as undermining of artistic progress in Africa; reverts to the defining period in modern postcolonial African history.

Lazarus, 2021 (installation view, White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2021). Photo: Todd-White Art Photography

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A period during which China, the United States and the Soviet Union all scrambled for global influence and the term, ‘Third World’ was coined to refer to nations to be won over by these competing power blocs, whether the Communist Bloc (East) or nato (West). From the late 1950s to the early 60s, West African nations, led by Mahama’s native Ghana, had fought for and obtained independence from British colonial rule. These newly formed nations were determined to chart their own course. The famous maxim of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, ‘We face neither East nor West; we face forward’, captured the optimism, self-assurance and Pan-African feeling of those days. The chaos, conflicts and betrayals that derailed dreams of a harmonious Pan-African future following the optimism of the 1960s wave of independence is reflected in popular culture: in Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat music and in the works of novelists like Chinua Achebe (No Longer at Ease, 1960) and more recently Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006). Mahama did not therefore have to search far for inspiration: the titles of each work in his new series of textile paintings are drawn from Kuti’s 1970s catalogue; the exhibition title is taken from Adichie’s seminal work. For Mahama, literature has always been a source of artistic inspiration. The new fabric paintings follow Mahama’s familiar refrain of circulation and exchange, and correspond to the cultural history of cloth materials used to define, stereotype and shape African identities (while actually manufactured in China and Europe). The cloth swatches have been collected since 2012 through a process of Mahama’s exchange of old, worn, historically charged cloth for new cloth from traders, mostly women in Ghana. The painting Teacher don’t teach me nonsense (2013–22) is a piece that embodies all the ideas Mahama is interested in presenting.

Last November, at Lagos Photo Festival, I was moderating a talk between Mahama, artist Renzo Martens, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art director Ngaire Blankenberg and Hannah O’Leary of Sotheby’s on the ‘importance of creating regenerative economies for communities where artists live and work’, and I posed a question to Ibrahim in which I erroneously doubled the duration of his practice. He gently and humorously corrected me in a knowing manner, as though it was something all too familiar to him. Indeed it is. Anyone who has spent time with Mahama leaves with the feeling of a session with an older, wiser uncle. Mahama wears everything about him with a lightness that is metamorphosed and embodied through objects, narratives or conditions. For Mahama, art is a reality that consists of a ‘gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization’ in the sense described by Nabokov. The paradox with Mahama is that he is constantly collecting, archiving and studying minute artefacts and fragments, tiny objects – be they discarded shoeboxes, sewing machines or jute sacks – as the building blocks and colour palettes for the creation of something monumental in the future. In much the same way, he aggregates people, diverse talent, as he builds up his community. And as a builder, he knows that one never builds alone. Mahama subscribes to the Burkina Faso proverb ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together’. ar Ibrahim Mahama’s exhibition Half of a Yellow Sun is on view at White Cube, Hong Kong, through 14 May Azu Nwagbogu is founder and director of African Artists’ Foundation, Lagos

Lazarus, 2021 (installation view, White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2021). Photo: Todd-White Art Photography all images © the artist. Courtesy White Cube

May 2022

Magic, The Gathering by J. J. Charlesworth

notes on art ’ s return to the mystical i While the spiritual, the mystical and the magical have tended to exist at the fringes of contemporary art, they’ve always bubbled away at the centre of what’s cooking in the alternative and radical subcultures around which that art has circled, and often drawn from. Throughout the modern era, ever since the Symbolists and ‘decadents’ of the latenineteenth century, Western artists, bohemians and intellectuals have rebelled against the moral and religious orthodoxies by adopting invented or rediscovered occultism from the past, and borrowed from non-Western spiritualism of all kinds: it’s there in the Symbolist artists celebration of Satanic iconography; in Aleister Crowley’s neopaganist ‘religion’; in the Surrealists’ enduring fascination with occult practices, with artists like Maya Deren, who took on the identity of the witch and art as magic; in the adoption of Zoroastrianism by Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and of Zen Buddhism by the Beat Generation of John Cage and Allen Ginsberg; in how the Beatles got into the Maharishi and his Transcendental Meditation; in Joseph Beuys’s adoption of the figure of the shaman; in Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s creation of his ‘Orgies Mysteries Theatre’, bacchanalian celebrations full of purgative ritual and blood-soaked animal sacrifice. Even conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, in his Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968), felt impelled to declare that ‘Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach’. But throughout the twentieth century, though these various countercultures embraced spiritualism and the occult, the contemporary art mainstream has tended to downplay or ignore these artistic interests, as they were often put in the category of ‘outsider’ art, and non-Western spiritual art was relegated to the status of ethnography and superstition.

ArtReview

facing page Michael M. Hughes, ‘Hex Putin’ sigil, 2022

ii But the last decade has seen a shift of attention in contemporary art: magic, mysticism and spirituality, animism, the figure of the witch, the medium and the shaman, have all made a return to the art mainstream in the work of contemporary artists and thematic shows produced by contemporary curators, while also figuring in academic revisions and rediscoveries. Feminist takes on the occult and spiritual are a common thread: in her videos, installations and writings, Tai Shani has uncovered obscured stories of the place of the witch in European folklore; the late Chiara Fumai incorporated the language of magic, psychic abilities and spellcraft into her patriarchy-baiting performances and videos; meanwhile, attention to spirituality and mysticism has taken on new critical life as artists turn increasingly to the politics of indigenous culture, with some diaspora artists reclaiming precolonial folklores and mythical traditions of their cultural heritage in rejection of Western colonial histories – such as in Korean–Canadian artist Zadie Xa’s exploration of Korean Shamanic culture and origin myths. But these practices aren’t just a matter of artists quoting or appropriating cultural traditions of older or non-Western cultures. In fact these artists are often deeply invested in spiritual perspectives steeped in ideas of expanded consciousness or oneness with the environment, even when they recast forms of indigenous knowledge and ancestral tradition in the technological forms of twenty-first century network culture, as in the work of French Guyana-based Tabita Rezaire. Art-historical and curatorial thinking has also registered a growing openness to spiritual and mystical perspectives. Perhaps the 2013 Venice Biennale – which included figures such as the occultist Aleister Crowley and the rediscovered spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint (whose canonisation had begun with her first major survey show in Sweden the same year) – was a signal moment, with its more sympathetic and inclusive attention to ‘outsider’ artists, its fascination with art’s relation to ‘supernatural phenomena’ and ‘cosmic awe’, leading to a new attention to the mystical undercurrents of early twentieth-century abstraction. Today, the survey Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern in London, emphasises the place of mysticism in the work of women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun, criticising the appropriation of indigenous culture in the anticolonial politics of the core Surrealist group, while sympathetically treating Carrington’s interest in Mexican Indigenous myths and practices (she emigrated to Mexico during the 1940s). Carrington is herself the inspiration for curator Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale, which takes its title, The Milk of Dreams, from Carrington’s 1947 book. Meanwhile, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice makes the occult interests of the Surrealists the focus of its Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity. In Britain, a key (re)turn to all things magical was 2009’s exhibition The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art, which highlighted the long arc of esoteric influences among British artists from, amongst others, Colquhoun and Austin Osman Spare to Derek Jarman and Penny Slinger. More recently, 2020’s touring show Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium continued the spiritualist fascination by assembling artists from the nineteenth century to the present-day, including William Blake, Colquhoun, Spare, Fumai and Susan Hiller.

May 2022

Maya Deren, The Witch’s Cradle (still), 1943, film, 12 min. Public domain

preceding pages Leonora Carrington, Self-portrait, c.1937–38. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York, 2022. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

iii If the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s sent out the heterodox seeds of spiritual and quasi-spiritual alternatives to the modern Western outlook, the last 50 years have seen all these progressively absorbed by mass culture. (It has taken the mainstream artworld a little longer to come round.) If you grew up (like this writer) in provincial England during the 1980s, you’d find that your generation were into ‘New Age’ practices, crystals, dreamcatchers, psychedelic drugs, cannabis, vegetarianism, meditation and, of course, Yoga, the descendants of the 60s Hippy moment. Indie bands were called things like The Shamen, and music occulture segued easily between the witchy medievalist obsessions of Goth to the technopsychedelic Gaia-consciousness of New Age techno and Rave culture. Today, once countercultural movements are no longer in the margin: Yoga is mainstream, mediation apps are on your phone and googling ‘Meditation for Ukraine’ comes up with numerous people organising group-meditation in order to bring peace and healing to a warzone. At the crankier limits, ‘Magical thinker and activist’ Michael M. Hughes, following up his viral ‘2017 Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him’, is organising a weekly ‘Hex Vladimir Putin’ ritual. (On current evidence, perhaps the spells are working.) Arguably, then, mystical, spiritual and esoteric interests in art were always there, but have become increasingly visible as mainstream culture has embraced more introspective, spiritual sensibilities. While interest in spirits, magic and mediums may have offended orthodox sensibilities during the late-nineteenth century and earlytwentieth century, the fact that artists from Blake to Spare to Fumai can be seen, retrospectively, as part of one long history suggests that mystical sensibilities are as old as modern art itself, only suppressed by a mainstream culture that saw belief in spirits, fairies and nonWestern gods as antithetical to the rationalistic, secular and scientific values out of which modernity developed, as much as to the straightlaced morality of orthodox religion.

Chiara Fumai, The Book Of Evil Spirits, 2016. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

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Leonora Carrington, Portrait of Max Ernst, c.1939, oil on canvas, 50 × 27 cm. Courtesy National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

In her 1991 book Surrealism and the Occult – an early outlier in the contemporary interest in art and occultism – art historian Nadia Choucha traces the esoteric interests of the Surrealists back through to the late-nineteenth century French Symbolist poets and artists. Symbolism, she argues, ‘was elitist and opposed to mass culture, modernity, and materialism. It was born in an atmosphere of political disillusionment and alienation, and its adherents sought inspiration in the past, the exotic, myths and legends, prizing the subjective imagination over external appearance, attempting to create something eternal and universal as opposed to transitory and contemporary.’ It’s a characterisation that could be applied to many artistic countercurrents that followed and, indeed, much of Western counterculture of the last century, and it could easily characterise much of today’s openness to the mystical and the magical in art. Arguably, what underpins today’s growing sympathy for occultism is the terminally declining influence of a rationalistic, secular modern worldview that is now associated with the depredations of capitalism, patriarchy and ecological disaster. Today’s magical revival is a rejection of the experience of the modern present, along both historical and topographical axes: historical because it reaches back to the worldviews, myths and rituals of the times and cultures before the modern era; topographical, because it privileges those cultures in the present that still exist in contrast to the prevailing forms of social modernity (technologically developed, industrially advanced societies of twenty-first-century global capitalism, inheritors of the industrial revolution and the European Enlightenment). This shift from historical thinking to magical thinking can also be linked to the growing politics of care for indigenous worldviews that have been long marginalised by Western modernity. In a recent exhibition dealing with the museum care of artefacts belonging to older, sometimes disappeared cultures and societies, artist Gala Porras-Kim suggests that the spiritual aspects of an artefact should continue to be respected by modern curators: Egyptian burial artefacts, for example, now held by the British Museum, could be presented in such a way that respects the ancient Egyptians’ belief in their afterlife – by, for example, repositioning a sarcophagus so that it points towards the rising sun, in accordance with Egyptian burial custom. The growing conflict in contemporary discourse between modern epistemology seen as Western or colonial, and the validity of indigenous cultural traditions, was sharply revealed last year in the controversy over an open letter by academics at the University of Auckland, who questioned whether Māori traditional knowledge could be placed on a par with modern science. More broadly, the notion that traditional and customary beliefs and mythologies are as valid as empirical and universalising forms of modern knowledge underpins the ambiguous return of magical thinking everywhere.

v As it reaches back to the past, the new magical thinking also projects into the future. Artist and writer Alice Bucknell has championed a group of artists monikered the ‘New Mystics’ (which includes Xa, Shani, Rezaire, Ian Cheng and Haroon Mirza, among others) for their work’s fusion of technology and mystical perspectives, linking it

May 2022

Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride, 1940, oil on canvas, 130 × 96 cm. Courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

to anticapitalist and postcolonial politics; ‘It would be a mistake to consider these works a nostalgic look back to simpler times,’ Bucknell wrote in ‘The New Mystics: High-Tech Magic for the Present’ (in Mousse magazine in 2019). ‘Instead, these artists are using the atmospheric potential of new technology to resurrect ancient belief systems bleached out of history, repositioning them as a powerful communal cipher into the present. Inside their ambient installations, race and identity politics are explored, forgotten folklore is resurrected, and the violent superstructures of colonialism and capitalism are critiqued’. A key point Bucknell makes is on the question of cultural appropriation; ‘The mystical has transitioned – or transcended – its abuse as an appropriated symbolic affectation by western art circles in the twentieth century to an intersectional social process in the present. (Instead of a white male artist hanging out in a Manhattan gallery with a coyote under the name of shamanistic experience, artists of color can reclaim and explore their diasporic heritage.)’ Here, mystical attitudes become positive simply because they are the supposedly authentic cultural property of marginalised and historically oppressed minorities, now reinvented in the futuristic millennial aesthetic of digital culture. It’s a descendent of the ‘TechnoPaganism’ that early internet critics such as Erik Davis and Mark Dery characterised in the mid-1990s, merged with a more recent emphasis on ecology and postcolonialism.

vi Magic returns because, in the last two or three decades, the ideas that underpinned modern society, philosophically and politically, have lost their traction and legitimacy. If modern societies are the product of that long period of modernity that started in the West – industrial, immensely productive, technologically sophisticated societies that have flourished all around the world, raising people out of poverty, extending life, health and liberty – few would defend those achievements today. That model of the modern society is now experiencing a profound loss of faith, a kind of cultural exhaustion in which we instead see modern societies as extractive, domineering and ecologically unsustainable. If ideas of reason, rational action, science and progress are in decline, and if the human culture and consciousness formed by those ideas is dangerous and destructive, then the only alternative can be a return to the premodern: or rather not a return, but a dissolution of modernity and modern ways of thinking in the present. This is the cultural driver for the revival of the sacred and the mystical in art. Magic replaces science, belief replaces knowledge, ritual replaces rational action. Circular time replaces history. And as a corollary, the idea of the distinctly human subject, a being different in thought and action to the rest of nature, is dismissed as the hubris of the colonist and oppressor. While much ecological thinking grounds itself in science, it leads back to what is really the premodern mystical view of humans as participants intertwined with nonhuman entities as part of a greater, harmonious ecosphere. Much of the new mysticism in art regularly invokes the old countercultural tropes of psychedelic transcendence and the loss of the individual self to the collective and a greater planetary entity – but this time it’s in vr.

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vii In 1947, the theorist Theodor Adorno, by then exiled to America as a result of the Second World War, wrote ‘Theses Against Occultism’, a polemic analysis of the forms of contemporary occultism that he found in late-capitalist American culture, a part of his wider study of fascism and its relationship to irrationality. He opens with the assertion that ‘The tendency to occultism is a symptom of the regression in consciousness’, arguing that while people no longer truly believe in occult forms, their reappearance in capitalist mass-culture – as newspaper horoscopes, palm-readers, ‘number mysticism’ and paranormal pseudoscience – represented an alienated retreat from a reasoned understanding of capitalist society; fantastical ways for people to project a sense of control and certainty onto a society that presented itself as fundamentally incomprehensible. ‘By its regression to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms’, he writes, while ‘Occultism is a reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification’. What Adorno means is that as capitalism becomes ever-more strange and inaccessible in its workings and ever more impervious to political change, people turn to spiritual inner worlds and mystical outer worlds. While much of the new magical thinking returns to the old countercultural aspiration to ‘expanded consciousness’, and a psychedelic oneness with the world, it’s really a ‘regression of consciousness’, a rejection of facing reality as it is, a retreat from trying to make sense of it and acting to change it. Magical thinking is a projection of wish-fulfilment onto a reality we’d rather withdraw from, into one where the troubles and contradictions of the modern world are resolved by merging the imaginary and the real – the ‘subjectification of all meaning’. Art has always walked the line between the real and the imaginary, but in the contemporary return of the magical, the unworldly is the world we’d rather live in. We might not really believe in magic, but we don’t really believe in anything else, and we’d prefer not to break the spell. ar

Michael M. Hughes, ‘Bind Trump’ sigil, 2017

May 2022

Tabita Rezaire

A spiritual journey: From anger to ancestral healing

Text and design by Naomi Moonlion

Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. - Layne Redmond

When I asked Tabita Rezaire what started her artistic practice, she spoke of anger. There is much to be angry about in the world, and lots of anger to fuel the creation of art. Anger can be resistance, it can be power. But anger too can be exhausting. In the context of a black woman, anger can become a stereotype. Observed and exploited by the white art world, without reflection or care. To heal her anger and to survive in this world, Tabita turned to self care. In Tabita’s “Peaceful Warrior,” she shares a decolonial self-care tutorial, transforming anger into peace, so becoming a stronger warrior. But to truly heal, we do not only need self care in the capitalist form or spirituality in the aesthetic realm. We must look inward, and beyond. Change our own perspectives of ourself, nurturing joy and love, examining life in all its forms, and finding ways to transform, together or alone. Throughout Tabita’s practice, spirituality became more than learning about yoga and nutrition, it turned into ancestral healing. Dealing with the trauma and history of your lineage, understanding how you became who you are. In some ways spirituality is all about listening, to yourself, to others, to the planet. Being in tune, but also deciding when to tune in. Strongly saying no, and wholeheartedly saying yes. Setting boundaries, protecting your peace. Both in physical and digital spheres, Tabita uses art as a decolonial healing technology. In her newest work, Tabita creates longstanding projects, ones that grow beyond her. A cacao farm, a doula school, a book full of letters from elder farmers, a moon observatory and many temples with medicinal herbs. In all forms, she comes back to the origins of spirituality, understanding the universe. Working with and learning from what nature has to offer, and what she can offer her.

Naomi Moonlion is a non binary artist, witch and writer. They are based in The Hague, The Netherlands

Unicorn Syndrome by Rosanna McLaughlin

In recent years, queer theory has gone from the margins to the mainstream. Is this a moment of triumph or merely a sign of our present psychic malaise – a need to make our otherwise dull, conformist selves seem… well… interesting?

As queer theory drifts towards its mid-thirties, what better way to zeal. Over time, queerness has become a popular replacement for its celebrate its establishment as an ‘alternative’ mainstream style than parent movement, feminism, among those wishing to distance themthe queering of Sex and the City (1998–), another cultural phenom- selves from transphobic factions and the unfashionable connotations enon in the throes of a difficult ageing process? In the show’s reboot, of second-wave feminism, as well as for the letters gathered, often the friendship group of middle-aged New York socialites – who once uneasily, in the lgbt alphabet. (In the latter case, whether queerness threw condoms at men in an Abu Dhabi souk in the name of American offers greater inclusivity, or whether its popularity has a homogefeminism – open minds and legs to the zeitgeist, embodied by a ‘queer, nising effect, is debatable.) non-binary, Irish, Mexican’ podcaster named Che Diaz (played by Sara While queerness’s mass appeal carries utopian promise, echoing Ramirez), ostensibly parachuted into the show to atone for its past the socialist agenda of uniting marginalised groups in a struggle moral failings – the ‘do better’ mantra by now a familiar excuse for against an oppressive ruling class, the reality is an existential malaise, repackaging tired commercial formats. and a blindspot to economic factors It has been 32 years since the publiSomeone who experiences no sexual such as class and wealth that tend to cation of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, fall outside the purview of representadesire at all can be queer, a resident a dense academic treatise arguing for tional politics. In this regard it follows a reformulation of the way we undergimp in a sex dungeon can be queer, in mother’s footsteps: just as feminism expanded to mean so many conflicting stand gender and power that became people in nominally heterosexual things – from the Lean In (2013) corpothe unlikely cornerstone for a popular marriages can be queer movement. Queerness’s extraordinary ratism of Facebook coo Sheryl Sandberg journey from the academy to the Che to intersectional feminism and the ugly Diazification of culture has much to do with its fundamental malle- rise of terfism – that two people who declare themselves ardently ability. Someone who experiences no sexual desire at all can be queer, feminist may have violently incompatible views, so too has queerness a resident gimp in a sex dungeon can be queer, people in nominally become riddled with contradiction. Does queerness mean working heterosexual marriages can be queer. The base requirement for entry towards a future of ‘somatic communism’ laid out in Paul B. Preciado’s – underpinned by a Foucauldian-inspired Weltanschauung in which Countersexual Manifesto (2000), where new organs and desires are identity is understood as a political construct, and the reductive invented and the means of reproduction seized for collective use? narratives told about you must be fought with the emancipatory ones Does it mean ‘influencer-activists’ who treat the self as a startup, you tell about yourself – is a feeling that you don’t align with what advertising their radical credentials in the hope of being sponsored are commonly referred to as normative expectations of gender or by multinational companies, as if arriving at the gates of Versailles sexuality, making it an unusually accommodating prospect in a time with a job application for the role of brand ambassador in one hand when the borders of identity are typically patrolled with militant and a pitchfork in the other? Or is it a project of canon-building and

preceding pages melanie bonajo, When the body says Yes (still), 2022 (presented at the Dutch Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale). Courtesy the artist

above Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781 (included in Queerate). © Tate

ArtReview

historical revisionism facilitated by conservative cultural institutions? Queer collectives and artists, such as melanie bonajo, engaging in public performances of social work and therapy? (In the press material for the Dutch Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, bonajo is described as a ‘sexological bodyworker, somatic sex coach and educator, cuddle workshop facilitator and activist’.) What about Lil Nas X advertising Uber Eats? The confusion extends to what is frequently referred to as ‘the queer community’. What, for instance, does a home-owning millennial in London have in common with a competitor at the underground ball scene in 1980s New York, beyond watching the ascendant genre of ‘public service announcement’ television shows like Pose (2018–), and the ‘yass queen’ mannerisms picked up from Ru Paul’s conveyorbelt of drag? Materially and experientially, the answer is very little. Often, the binding agent between dissimilar parts is the concept of solidarity, a term that like ‘community’ has been the subject of considerable bastardisation, used to describe parasocial consumption habits and a powerful desire to associate with the style and moral authority ascribed to the outsider. During the 1970s the American writer Tom Wolfe named a predigital manifestation of this phenomenon ‘radical chic’. Today it might be better understood as a feature of ‘Unicorn Syndrome’: a psychic infection endemic in societies, beset by moral confusion, whose citizens are raised on a diet of selfhelp and self-marketing. Symptoms include a deep need to be recognised as uniquely interesting, a concomitant phobia of being lumped with the ‘normies’, a compulsion to excavate every wound, secret or point of difference and use it as a usp, and an attitude of moral exceptionalism that encourages a focus on the ways in which we feel injured by power while ignoring the extent to which we may be executors of it.

Over the past three decades, queer theory’s mainstream appeal has been underpinned by its continued influence in Western academia, producing cohorts of graduates aligned with its values and operating as a powerful cultural export. A largely North American professorial class of crossover personalities that includes Maggie Nelson and Julietta Singh have helped improve the public image of the academy by writing popular and intelligent personal accounts of bourgeois queer family life, and the practice of ‘queering’ has opened myriad possibilities for research subjects while unmooring queerness from matters of the body and desire. To queer something is to provide a phenomenological reboot of a subject, an exercise that involves performing a kind of ideological capture. Everything, from the museum, the MiddleAges, herbalism, the countryside, the economy, colonialism, yoga, the law, and even entire nation states have been given the treatment. While queering intends to uncover evidence of latent heterosexual bias (and is often successful in doing so), the apparent limitlessness of its application has proved a useful rebranding exercise within and without the academy, where the language of systemic change has been adopted by everyone from museums to banks. ‘We’re done letting the system ignore us’, reads the marketing material for Daylight, a company that claims to ‘queer banking for the better.’ ‘No labels, no explanations, no hidden meanings, no “rights or wrongs”... You are enough’, says a short text on Tate’s website, describing the queer appeal of Yves Klein’s painting ikb 79 (1959) – a work included in Queerate, a digital exhibition curated by members of the lgbtqia+ public using images from the museum’s holdings during the pandemic. That it is possible to couch a heterosexual artist, whose use of women’s bodies as ‘human brushes’ has long drawn criticism for sexual objectification, in the language of gender fluidity and self-acceptance, exemplifies the extent to which anything and anyone can be repurposed.

Aquaria, crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar on the Season 10 finale of Ru Paul’s Drag Race

May 2022

Sara Ramirez as Che Diaz and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes in And Just Like That…, 2021. Photo: Craig Blankenhorn / hbo Max

ArtReview

Dominique Jackson as Elektra Abundance in the series Pose, 2018–. © bbc / fx / Eric Liebowitz

May 2022

Angelica Ross as Candy in the series Pose, 2018–. © bbc / fx / Eric Liebowitz

ArtReview

It is easy to be lulled into a sense of false security over the perma- movement with a promise to see, be and organise differently. If it nency of rights and public acceptance, particularly among those is to have any chance of reversing its slide into the Cherry Coke of indoctrinated by liberalism’s promise of a steadily improving world. identity – an auxiliary alternative to the status quo – it will require In reality, rights are subject to the caprices of political weather, not a committed reevaluation of queer exceptionalism. Mark Fisher so much definitively won as constantly negotiated. The uk govern- argued in Capitalist Realism (2009) that the problem facing counterment’s recent decision to exclude trans people from the Conversion cultures is no longer the danger of being consumed by commercial Therapy (Prohibition) Bill, to appease the country’s vocal anti-trans interests, but being preconfigured by them. What we are dealing lobby, is a case in point. That queerness is a now a highly visible with now, he wrote, is ‘precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting feature of the cultural mainstream does not mean that it is easy or and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture’. safe to be queer in every home, street, school or workplace – the There is no easy answer as to how precorporation might be avoided, disjunct between visibility and secuother than by social withdrawal, just rity is as much a feature of life in an as there is no door marked ‘exit here’ If queerness is to have any chance of identity-political climate as the gap that can be used to escape the reach reversing its slide into the Cherry Coke of technocapital, but attending to the between radical aesthetics and societal change – nor does it negate the ways in which commercial interests of identity – an auxiliary alternative are worked into the dna of contemprofoundly revelatory impact that to the status quo – it will require a queerness can and does have on an porary identity formation surely constireevaluation of queer exceptionalism individual’s understanding of self and tutes a start. sociality. Yet in the same way in which The cure for Unicorn Syndrome is it has become par for the course to suggest that the field of literary not to believe ourselves boring or unworthy of attention, nor is it fiction is male dominated, when in fact it is women authors who to resign ourselves to tradition or to ignore inequalities. Rather, have dominated for some time, queerness is frequently mobilised to by attempting to acknowledge the material reality in which we indicate an underdog status in the Western cultural sector despite live, and resisting the logic of the identity economy rather than fetishistic and extensive representation. As it has become a common- leaning in to it, we may begin to see the extent to which bureauplace to see the word ‘queer’ used as a brand intended to communi- cratic boxes and market demographics encourage us into managecate a subversive status that is far from guaranteed, it is clear that the able, and profitable, models of difference – models that occlude the solvent that promised to dissolve archetypes has transformed into possibility of societal change, and in the end do not allow for much difference at all. ar another kind of glue. In a culture awash in depressing reboots of everything from film franchises to fascisms, queerness once appeared as a future-facing Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in Glasgow

Ross Mathews, Michelle Visage, RuPaul, Carson Kressley and Christina Aguilera, forming the jury of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Season 10

May 2022

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OPERA CONCERTS INCISES AIX EN JUIN AC A D É M I E MEDITERRANEAN

RÉSURRECTION — MAHLER S A LO M E — STRAUSS I D O M E N E O, R E D I C R E TA — MOZART M O Ï S E E T P H A R AO N — ROSSINI I L V I AG G I O, DA N T E — WORLD PREMIERE PASCAL DUSAPIN L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA — MONTEVERDI W O M A N AT P O I N T Z E R O — WORLD PREMIERE BUSHRA EL-TURK

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Art Reviewed

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Charles Ray Centre Pompidou, Paris 16 February – 20 June Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris 16 February – 6 June ‘Charles Ray is one of the few artists of his generation who has had a lasting impact on recent art history,’ declares the literature for this double-headed exhibition dedicated to the American sculptor. It’s a bold claim, and not a particularly convincing one: born in 1953 in Chicago, Ray has been linked to a loose grouping of artists who emerged as contenders in 1980s New York. By comparison to some of his contemporaries – Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney, Robert Gober and Cindy Sherman, all of whose work featured alongside Ray’s in Jeffrey Deitch’s landmark 1992 group show Post Human – he could be considered a relative minnow in terms of influence. Nevertheless, Ray emerges well from this loose career overview. What distinguishes his art from the efforts of his touchstones and fellow travellers is a certain warmth, a willingness to make the spectator aware that he wants them to be in on the joke. Consider his student effort Plank Piece (1973), presented as a series of photographs depicting the artist himself mimicking the titular plank. ‘I simply let go of distance and allowed my body to enter my sculptural configurations,’ he explains in the wall text. Any visitors to the Pompidou familiar with Bruce Nauman’s single-channel video Walk with Contrapposto (1968) will instantly draw comparisons between the two pieces. Yet by contrast to the older artist’s alienating effort

in sculptural performance, Ray’s work seems wilfully goofy. This lightness of touch manifests in his contributions to the captions at the Centre Pompidou: ‘It’s not a bad sculpture of a woman, it’s a great sculpture of a mannequin!’, he writes of an effigy of an outsized department store dummy from his Fall ’91 series (1992), arguably the most obviously emblematic sequence in his repertoire; ‘If a ghost were to tie his shoe, he wouldn’t need a shoe’, reads the folksy origin story for Shoe Tie (2012), a sculpture of a naked youth bending over to mime the eponymous act. Often enough, Ray confronts the viewer with a kind of puzzle, challenging us to identify the qualities that make a sculpture a sculpture. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is Yes (1990): ‘I took a dose of lsd and when I was hallucinating and the room was breathing I had a portrait photographer take my picture’, Ray explains. Said portrait hangs on the wall of a purpose-built room within the exhibition. It takes a while for the eyes to adjust: both the wall and the frame of the photograph have been customised to follow a convex curve, mirroring something of the artist’s psychedelically abetted perception of space. Its companion piece, No (1992), plays a similar game: what initially appears to be a conventional photograph of the artist reveals itself as a portrait of an eerily lifelike sculptural mannequin.

Shoe Tie, 2012, stainless steel, 73 × 74 × 60 cm Photo: Bertrand Prévost. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris

ArtReview

Over at the Bourse, a more conventional and rather less interesting display, mostly composed of more recent works, is scattered through the institution’s galleries. Several sculptures riff on Italian religious statuary, while others play further games with the conventions of the medium. Horse and Rider (2014) gives us an equestrian statue on a plinth on which rests a dejected-looking likeness of the artist, his head bowed in defiance of the form’s triumphal connotations; Burger (2020) is a Thinker for the age of instant gratification, a scaled-up effigy of a man deep in contemplation as he tucks into a cheeseburger. Return to the One (2020), meanwhile, has the artist as he now looks – skinny as hell, clad in polo shirt and jeans – in a pose that suggests waiting. Here again, Ray offers a formal curveball: because it is fashioned from paper, he reasons, this work is not a sculpture but a drawing. You could get tired of this kind of thing. Elder statesman he might be, but Ray still comes across as the eternal eight-year-old, playing the role of conjurer to his parents’ increasingly exasperated dinner party guests – nothing is what it purports to be, how clever of you, Charley! – and one could well leave the show longing for a bit of Naumanesque chilliness. Yet while oddball charm has never been a prerequisite for creating great art, Ray projects it in spades. There are worse ways to win a critic over. Digby Warde-Aldam

Charles Ray, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Bertrand Prévost. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris

May 2022

Yoko Ono This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds Kunsthaus Zürich 4 March – 29 May At the time of writing, it’s just one week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the good people of Zürich are taking selfies in front of a poster at Yoko Ono’s retrospective. The message on the iconic piece, though dating back to 1969, has inevitable contemporary, if wishful, resonance: ‘War Is Over! If you want it (Love and Peace from John & Yoko)’. Notably it seems to be mostly visitors over fifty indulging in this strange act of vanity and approbation; the young people milling around the opening look on in bafflement. They aren’t in attendance to wallow in nostalgia and don’t overly associate Ono with Lennon and the Beatles, but rather came to explore some 60 works by a radical artist whose practice spans more than half a century.

They engage, here, with a multitude of interactive pieces such as Mend Piece (1966/2017), an assemblage of broken pottery, string, tape, chairs, water-soluble glue and needles whose instructions read, ‘Mend carefully. Think of mending the world at the same time.’ Or they ponder the implications of other instructions, typed on simple stationery: ‘Feel the wall. Examine its temperature and moisture. Take notes about many different walls.’ (Touch Poem v, 1963), or the short and enigmatic ‘Light a match and watch till it goes out.’ (Lighting Piece, 1955). We tend to forget that a living artist might have experienced the horrors of the Second World War, which Ono (b. 1933) did as a child: bombs falling from the sky, cities and villages on fire, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The poetics she applied

Yoko Ono and John Lennon, War is over! If you want it (Love and Peace from John & Yoko), original poster, 1969. © Yoko Ono

ArtReview

through her practice can be understood as a way of transforming these memories into art. Newer works like Arising (2013/2022), a film of a burning landscape, charred corpses of mannequins and a pile of discarded clothes in front of the projection draw from these experiences and integrate them into the now. The show builds upon these moments via an extensive programme of recreations of live performances, developed in collaboration with Ono. As one leaves, there’s a postscript in the form of a monumental banner in the enormous hall of the new wing of the Kunsthaus Zürich, reminding us of the importance of art as a model of alternative realities in periods of war: ‘Imagine Peace (love, yoko 2022)’. Damian Christinger

Kenneth Bergfeld Human Performance Jan Kaps, Cologne 12 March – 7 May ‘What we call a good story picture is always sure to be popular, but it requires some effort to become interested in a portrait,’ suggested the American scholar and art populariser Estelle M. Hurll at the beginning of the last century. The rich and famous commissioning paintings of themselves – and the accompanying artists’ flattery and bravura in synthesising the personalities, status and proclivities of the sitter – is a largely outdated custom; nonetheless, portraiture is currently experiencing one of its historical popularity peaks. (See, for example, Kehinde Wiley, Nicolas Party and Julien Nguyen.) So, who are the characters currently being depicted? In the case of Cologne-based Kenneth Bergfeld, an army of haughty and enigmatic

youngsters, so similar to each other as to suggest permutations emanating from an unknowable, unreal prototype. They’re cadaverous fashion goths with helmetlike bob haircuts, their poise and modellike distance eluding contact with the viewer: the eyes – always turned away – are covered by fringes or sunglasses, or they lack pupils. Even their shiny skin sends the light bouncing back. They struggle, at times, to keep their individuality together: as in a hi-tech psychosis, patterns and shapes from the surrounding environment show up in, for example, their clothes; or what we imagine to be their worries and restlessness take visible form and besiege them like hermetic allegories.

Waves of effects suggestive of Photoshop postproduction alter their skin, hair and pupils unnaturally, as if dissolving the self. In Debt (all works 2022), two models with equine bodies are riding on the back of counterparts with sliced-open heads, while Structured Like a Language is a mise en abyme in which a tribe of boys with those now-familiar features, though degenerate-looking this time, raises with an animalistic posture a canvas depicting a fancily dressed, well-groomed specimen. Such works unveil more portions of the creepy, candied universe inhabited by these hieratic mannequins and, in doing so, suggest new avenues for Bergfeld’s already solid, highly au courant practice. Francesco Tenaglia

Human Performance, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne

May 2022

Whitney Biennial 2022 Quiet As It’s Kept Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 6 April – 5 September This thoughtfully curated Whitney Biennial features the work of 63 artists, the majority relatively young, whose works prod the fragility of the American Dream through the prism of civil-rights struggles, racial violence, mass incarceration and environmental destruction. On the top floor of the museum, which is painted and carpeted in black, Denyse Thomasos’s obsessively layered, glorious black-and-white abstract acrylic painting Jail (1993) – corresponding, according to the wall text, to a prison at a colonial slaving depot – is paired alongside the similarly vigorous Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée (1993), referring to a burial ground on Gorée Island, Senegal.

Thomasos was featured, alongside Ed Clark and Stanley Whitney, in a 2002 exhibition titled Quiet as it’s kept (in turn referencing uses of the phrase by Max Roach and Toni Morrison), a show the biennial’s curators state was a paradigm for how to think about identity in porous ways. This last intent is convincingly conveyed by the biennial itself, with many works as attentive to formal as to social content, rendering them more open-ended. It’s true of Thomasos’s diptych, whose imposing, distorted grids are intensely claustrophobic – suggesting the oppressiveness of colonial systems – and yet, when looked at more closely, seem also to suggest a great degree of freedom,

conveyed by the sheer multidirectional sweep and fugacity of lines. In the exhibition materials, the Black American painter James Little, who grew up in the segregated South, also speaks of abstraction as an expression of freedom. In Little’s resolutely controlled series of paintings, Exceptional Blacks (2021), a mixture of oil and wax produces a unique, mercurial colour, shifting from opaque, inky black to metallic ash. A similarly protean quality emanates from the work of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore. In her sculpture ishkode ( fire) (2021), a sleeping bag, cast in rust-coloured clay, evokes a spectral figure – the bag’s blackened

top Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 274 × 549 cm. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto above Denyse Thomasos, Jail, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 274 × 549 cm. Courtesy the estate of the artist; Lennon, Weinberg, New York; and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto

ArtReview

folds rising from a mound of shimmery bullet casings. Several videoworks convey a lyrical intensity. Coco Fusco filmed Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021) while boating around Hart Island, in the Bronx, site of the us’s largest paupers’ grave through numerous pandemics. Poet Pamela Seed provides a voiceover performing Fusco’s passionate reflection on the statistics of illness and burial, alienating epidemiological vocabulary (“contagion”, “isolation”), human vulnerability, fear, but also resilience, in the face of death. Kandis Williams presents a four-channel video installation, Death of A (2021), in which monologues from Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, and words by Albert Einstein and others are delivered by a Black performer shown across two screens, while the other two screens show clips of Black men

portrayed on television and in cinema in wartime settings. Williams’s installation is a rhapsodic investigation of masculinity bound up in the politics and economics of power, and of familial love. Similarly to Thomasos and Little, but also to several younger artists, such as Woody De Othello, Danielle Dean and Na Mira, Williams engages the past to address the present from a personal perspective. On the fifth floor, which is brighter, with an open floorplan, videos by the Korean-American conceptual artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha are shown behind a gauzy curtain. Kyung Cha’s scrambled words – such as in the video displaying a white T-shirt that reads ‘a marr can ism’ or photographs documenting her ‘a ble w ail’ performance – speak to an expansionist notion of borders, with signs ‘smuggled’ across cognitive roadblocks. An equally playful albeit nonverbal approach

informs Emily Baker’s pet-plastic Kitchen (2019), a group of see-through cabinets, some hung unusually high, commenting on her experience of using a wheelchair. Here transparency (and inclusion) is a mirage, evidenced by a pointed displacement. And like Kyung Cha’s performances, Baker’s installation makes the human body art’s anchor, and ultimate measure. As do De Othello’s earthytoned ceramic sculptures of domestic objects, some morphed with human body parts, to sensuous effects. The mazelike, obdurately expansionist brushstrokes in artist and community-organiser Rick Lowe’s acrylic painting Row Houses: Artists Are Creative, So Why Can’t They Provide Solutions (2021) embody the fallibility that art shares with the sciences, and encapsulate the tenacious, prodding, quietly stirring tone set by the curators of this biennial. Ela Bittencourt

Kandis Williams, preparatory work for Death of A, 2021. Courtesy the artist

May 2022

Fernanda Laguna The Path of the Heart The Drawing Center, New York 10 March – 22 May ‘I’m not interested in being accepted by the art world; I’m not even interested in having my works last forever. I want to meet people who love me as I am… who will send me an emoji heart on Instagram,’ the Argentine artist Fernanda Laguna professed in a 2020 conversation with writer Chris Kraus. While unsung in the United States, Laguna has achieved cult status in Argentina for her unironic artistic love letters, poetic drawings and paintings that read like the artist’s own diary pages, filled with doodles of hearts, glitter and coins. The Path of the Heart, Laguna’s first solo exhibition in New York, unabashedly leans into the artist’s heartfelt pathos, presenting more than 50 drawings, paintings and collages, all brimming with honest feeling. The exhibition introduces viewers to Laguna’s work via drawings like Te Amo from Set de 12 dibujos (Set of 12 drawings, 1994–95). On a leaf of notebook paper, Laguna scribbles

not just a planet, but something more like the idea of a planet, at least in the wandering mind of a youth. The affirmation “te amo” (I love you), scrawled with pencil in bubble letters, hangs above the ringed world immersed in a void of magic-marker blue. It is a charming, vernacular and personal artform that evokes the nostalgia of classroom boredom. From here, Laguna’s embrace of affect deepens. Works like Un día más sin amor (Another day without love, 2006) absorb the form of homemade calendars. Within a swirling border of charcoal-tinted paint, a sheet of white paper bears Laguna’s handwriting, a verse that bemoans lovelessness. It is embellished with bows of pink yarn, and Laguna has added a footer of 31 pencilled hearts, each scratched out. No necesito nada del primero mundo / The is a message to the people that live in the first world (I don’t need anything from the first world / …, 2001) takes the shape of a heart cut from newsprint, painted pink, dotted with

coins and mounted to cardboard. There’s an intense yet fragile materiality at work in this and many of Laguna’s works. The paper heart, an analogue emoji, dangles from a thin, bonewhite branch, and the work’s hand-painted poem-title becomes an ode to resilience – made in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 recession – cloaked with sentimentality. More recent paintings, like Llorar (Cry, 2017), continue Laguna’s pursuit of affect (there’s a concurrent exhibition of her paintings down the street at Bortolami). The outline of eyes bawl golden-glitter waterfalls against a sea of black. Although these works are ostensibly more abstract and less direct, Laguna aims to prevent the viewer from reading them without sentiment: during installation, she pencilled the wall space around this work (and others) with a bow and curled border frame. This exhibition seeks to warm the hearts of even the most embittered New York cynics. Owen Duffy

No necesito nada del primer mundo / This is a message to the people that live in the first world, 2001, newspaper, coins and acrylic on cardboard suspended from a branch, 40 × 57 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Leidy Churchman New You Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 11 March – 23 April In 1435 the artist Leon Battista Alberti described painting as ‘an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen’. Sometimes these windows open inwards, onto subjects that reside in the human psyche; sometimes they cut through aspects of art that can be more readily theorised than perceived. The intimate scenes and broad vistas of Leidy Churchman’s New You offer all these views – internal and external, material and abstract, earthly and metaphysical – and summon both the history of art and the construction of the self in equal measure. The content of this exhibition is so diverse as to feel like a scroll through an image bank. Nonetheless, each unframed canvas serves as its own frame around a subject that

is profoundly searching. Several (In The Mood, So Bright and Ohh I like That…, all works 2021) approximate casements in warm pastel colours with the quietude of Agnes Martin paintings. These are hung salon-style with more comically figurative windows onto contemporary life, such as mom – an incoming call from the artist’s mother on their iPhone screen – and Calculator, the square icon for the titular Apple app. There’s an aperture onto the artist’s bedside reading, too, with a faithful rendering of a dust jacket: Dying Every Day: Essence of the Bardos, a book about the states attainable after death. According to Tibetan Buddhism, in the afterlife you may eventually reach the bardo of becoming. To become the ‘new you’, you must leave your past self behind.

In the show’s most ambitious paintings, Churchman invites us to depart from this world and enter the sweeping landscapes of the soul. Seafoam rendered with the dappled softness of Gustave Courbet coats the rocks of Wonderland in white, beneath the watchful eye of a waxing moon. Eternal Life New You, Churchman’s largest wall-bound painting to date, imagines water lilies floating impossibly on the ocean’s salty surface. At the centre of this marine vista, a dark rectangular void both flattens our view and opens an escape hatch from reality. A similar crevasse has been rent from the grooved white edges of Not Knowing, like the bottomless melt hole in a glacier. Nature is the consummate space for self-reflection; look out Churchman’s windows and see in. Evan Moffitt

Not Knowing, 2021, oil on linen, 66 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

May 2022

Alanis Obomsawin The Children Have to Hear Another Story hkw, Berlin 12 February – 18 April The success of all political art rests on a balancing of truth, hope and magic that is as necessary as it is problematic. Alanis Obomsawin’s five-decade survey showcases this configuration of forces, presenting them as in flux and with a humour that is deeply impressive given the gravity of her context. Since the 1960s, the Indigenous Abenaki and Canadian-American filmmaker, artist and activist has engaged North American Indigenous concerns; the most tectonically violent of these, cultural genocide, conditions even the show’s beautiful moments, which are numerous. For years, Obomsawin made documentaries for Canada’s National Film Board. Over a dozen are displayed here, as is her work as a singer: of her own songs, and traditional Abenaki pieces. Also on show is her visual art, including

captivating and unprecious monotypes of dragons (Untitled, 1990), and in The Free Horse (2007), a barely identifiable horse consisting of a single eye and two pointy ears, within a storm of black lines, on a turquoise background. Not every handmade work is so successful; several papier-mâché masks are as familiarfeeling as they are charming. Originally made for a telecast called Sounds from Our People, though, these pieces are somewhat released of their obligation to perform as sculpture, and their inclusion usefully opens and complicates the exhibition’s scope to offer a complex, rounded profile of an artistic and political life. The films are shocking – sometimes embarrassingly so for me, having grown up in a white Canadian family in earshot of an effectively

segregated Indigenous neighbourhood, and its struggle for life amidst the shockwaves of institutionalised abuse. Between the 1830s and 1997, Indigenous children in Canada were forced by the government and Christian churches to attend residential schools that were effectively cultural indoctrination centres. With respect to the resultant intergenerational destruction, Obomsawin’s recent documentary work cuts deeply. Between 2007 and 2015, the Canadian government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recorded testimonies from over 6,500 witnesses and survivors, and Honour to Senator Murray Sinclair (2021) intercuts footage of these accounts with an address from the eponymous Sinclair, the Ojibway committee chair. Elderly Indigenous survivors recall

Mother of Many Children (still), 1977, 16mm film (colour, sound), 28 min. Courtesy National Film Board of Canada

ArtReview

sexual, physical and psychological abuse, and a crippling dearth of education. Their pain is raw, and horrible to describe in writing; every adjective, every clever turn of phrase, becomes a vulgar imposition of aesthetics onto inhumanity. Sinclair’s lecture is controlled and scalding. To bar the Indigenous population from airing their complaints, he explains, the Canadian government imposed totalitarian measures. In order to meet the Canadian government in court, Indigenous people required official permission from the government itself. It was never granted. In baldly presenting these revelations, Obomsawin’s show is a needed counterbalance to Canada’s undeservedly rosy image. This vast exhibition also includes Excerpts from cbc/Radio-Canada tv programs 1964–69, portraying Obomsawin’s regular media appearances. Sometimes she endures condescension; because she is a member of the Bear Clan – for whom eating bear meat is in fact a taboo –

a tv host attempts to serve her the animal’s flesh. A 1966 broadcast shows Obomsawin successfully fundraising to build a swimming pool on the Odanak reservation after pollution renders the local river unswimmable. Three years later, she participates in a roundtable on ‘violence, oppression and action’. Against the protestations of Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver and urban-planning theorist Jane Jacobs, Obomsawin defends the power of both nonviolence and humour. This position is complicated elsewhere by her films Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which respectively document Indigenous resistance to military and militarysupported capitalist incursions. While the first incorporates joking quips from Indigenous land defenders regarding their stays in prison, the subject of the second is violent resistance. In 1990 the Quebec town of Oka approved the expansion of a golf course onto a Mohawk burial ground and the Mohawk responded

with an armed barricade; one Canadian policeman and one Mohawk elder were killed. When the federal government purchased the land, the dispute came to an ambivalent end. Obomsawin’s show is inevitably and productively disorienting. Her numinous singing is accompanied by materials suggestive of tricky political and semiotic knots. Included among a presentation of ephemera is the sleeve of Obomsawin’s 1985 album Bush Lady, on which she appears with feather-dressed hair, backdropped by the glowing logo of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Palpable here is Canada’s pr machine: the incorporation of a convenient image of Indigeneity into the country’s self-image, at a time when crimes and horrors such as the residential schools, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and an Indigenous suicide crisis had not been publicly broached, much less resolved. Mitch Speed

Sleeping During the Oka Crisis, 1990. Photo: John Kenney. Courtesy the artist

May 2022

Stano Filko A Retrospective Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz 18 March – 5 June Such is the scale and profundity of Stano Filko’s oeuvre that ‘a retrospective’ can only mean presenting a section or cross-section of his art. The Slovakian conceptualist, who died in 2015 in his late seventies, was less interested in what art history made of his work than what he made of it; as a self-mythologiser, he’s less reminiscent of other artists than he is of maverick reggae producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Filko organised his art according to the holistic ‘System sf’ (System Stano Filko), which, in turn, was subject to strict colour, chakra, scientific and art-historical, temporal and multidimensional models. From the 1990s onwards, in his studio in the north of Bratislava,

he continuously revised his art on the basis of these criteria; but it was not always properly stored and archived. The possibility of viewing the works on the scale of this present show, then, is tantamount to an event, and curator Sandro Droschl uses both levels of the institution for A Retrospective, and even the roof of the exhibition building and the adjacent park, for a discovery-rich overview. Three substantial electric ventilators in white, red and blue, Wind (1967/c.1995), positioned in the entrance area leading towards the main room, literally indicate what the show delivers: a new and accelerated air supply for Filko’s complex, persistently fresh-looking

A Retrospective, 2022 (installation view). Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com. Courtesy Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz

ArtReview

work. The 20-metre-long, horizontally oriented silver tube Clinical Death Tunnel (2010) simultaneously measures, blocks and divides the main room, which is filled to the ceiling with a variety of artworks (pendulums, ladders, cartwheels, balloons, rockets, paintings, etc). The installation of altars from the series The Altar of Contemporaneity (1964) shown in the apse of the house, combines erotic and Catholic motifs in a manner that was doubly polarising at the time and in the socialist location of their creation, as they strengthened suspicions of Westernised deviance. Among further highlights, meanwhile, and serving as sensual and transcendent gateways into Filko’s intermedial universe,

are the star-map shooting-range installation Shooting Range – Target Universe (1966–67/2005); the uncanny-feeling Models of Observation Towers (1966–67) – partly coloured metal tools on a mirrored surface in front of a black-andwhite photographic view of a row of prefabricated concrete-slab-construction buildings in a district of Bratislava; and The Universal Environment (1966–67). This last, which audiences at the time could enter, is an installation comprising a chessboard, chess pieces and slide projections of then-consumerist images, a Western promise reduced to cars and women. Walking through this made viewers themselves an active living (and observable) part of the work. On the floor below, we’re able to place what we see above in the context of its creation, revision and previous examination. An archive room, modelled after the artist’s own chaotic,

organic studio and with an iPad installed in it, offers us the opportunity to conduct our own research and rummage through seemingly endless documentation, theoretical materials, etc. Here are collages, graphic ephemera, sketches, text works, project plans and drawings (“Every drawing is a project proposal!”, the artist says in a videoed studio visit with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Roman Ondak), which also prove that Filko, his raw idiosyncrasy aside, also always met the graphic demands and fashions of the time. One room is devoted to another key work, White Space in White Space: neutrally painted – pointedly free from artistic expression – white canvases, placed on the walls and floor of the white cube. First realised in 1973 as a 24-hour collaborative piece in Brno with colleagues Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský, this artistic absolute zero – only now slowly establishing

its full significance for the East European neoavant-garde – conceptually collapses together canvas, exhibition wall and space, authorship and artistic expression, in an attempt to figure liberation and something like infinity. It’s shown here by means of various set pieces and elements from different versions, relaying its eventful history far better than a detailed reconstruction of one iteration would be able to achieve today. The combined experiences of the monochrome and transcendence that were focused in this work continued to interest Filko after he emigrated to New York in 1982, mostly painting there, and then returned to Bratislava in 1990; he wanted to keep making art until his centenary birthday, in 2037, but also to live on after that. Of course, that didn’t happen, and the idea of a Stano Filko dedicated to idleness must thus necessarily remain hypothetical. Christian Egger

The Universal Environment (detail), 1966–67, mixed media installation, 300 × 400 × 400 cm. Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com. Courtesy The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava

May 2022

Trisha Brown / Rambert Dance Company Set and Reset The Tanks, Tate Modern, London 12–14 March Four dancers walk matter-of-factly into the performance space from up stage right. They carry another dancer, who, laid sideways on their upstretched arms, cycles her legs as if walking horizontally through the air. This is the opening scene of postmodern American choreographer and Judson Dance Theater founding member Trisha Brown’s 1983 work Set and Reset. A reference, in turn, to her 1971 work Walking on the Wall, the tableau disrupts the otherwise pedestrian motion of placing one foot in front of the other. It’s the perfect statement of intent for a piece showcasing Brown’s trademark language of movement, which sees dancers perform virtuosic choreography with a nonchalance and fluidity

that makes a leg unfolding high into the air look like a natural, everyday movement. Set and Reset is a seminal work that transformed dance history. Based on one phrase of movement exploring the concept of 45- and 90-degree angles in the body, the piece was Brown’s attempt to capture the joyful freshness of improvisation. The original cast of dancers created the piece by improvising collectively, using only the movements from Brown’s material, interacting with and responding to each other, as well as following rules such as ‘keep it simple’, ‘get in line’, ‘stay on the edge’ and ‘act on instinct’. After each short burst of improvisation, they would ‘reset’ and commit to memory what they had just done,

incrementally building the now renowned 30-minute-long dance work in the process. While London’s Rambert Dance Company – the first to be allowed to perform Set and Reset in its original form outside of the Trisha Brown Company – follows the original choreography, the work feels as innovative and relevant as it must have done 39 years ago. Swinging their arms, rebounding their elbows, dabbing their hands, rolling their wrists, hopping, skipping and falling playfully through space, each of the dancers’ gestures are the product of the movement that has come just before, creating a never-ending sense of sequential motion. Throughout, the performers’ gazes follow their limbs as if they are observing the

Trish Oesterling, Carolyn Lucas, David Thomson, Gregory Lara from Trisha Brown Dance Company performing Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983) in 1993. Photo: Mark Hanauer. Courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company

ArtReview

choreography they are executing, which appears to be happening organically in the moment rather than learned through a rigorous rehearsal process. At times, they roll into each other’s bodies to make physical contact, flying into the air in effortless lifts, their faces breaking into joyful smiles. These light-hearted expressions, combined with the coolness of Brown’s movement style, ensure the dancers are decidedly human. Set and Reset’s cast would be just as at home on the street as on the stage. Brown famously did stage works on roads, rooftops, even down the sides of buildings; in comparison, Set and Reset’s setup in Tate Modern’s concrete industrial tanks may seem less exciting. The work, however, still pushes boundaries in the way its dancers keep to the periphery of the performance space, reflecting Brown’s interest in subverting the conventions of prosceniumarch theatres.

The original set and costumes, created by Robert Rauschenberg, are faithfully present in Rambert’s recreation. The most evident element is a large geometric structure suspended above the stage, through which black-andwhite archival films are projected. However, it is the sheer mesh material used for the wings and back-curtain that has the most interesting effect, exposing the dancers when offstage and playing with the theme of visibility and invisibility that is key to Brown’s choreography: when dancing in groups, the performers often hide behind each other, appearing more like a large architectural structure of limbs rather than individual bodies. For me, watching such a revered and historically significant work is like being reunited with an old friend, especially considering this is the first dance work I’ve seen in London since before the pandemic. This feeling is amplified by Laurie Anderson’s electronic

score, in which the serendipitously poignant spoken phrase “long time no see” – also the title of the music – is repeated throughout. Being reunited with Set and Reset also raises discussions around the role museums can play in preserving, reviving and reconsidering old works from the contemporary dance canon, a task that can fall by the wayside in an artform predominantly focused on looking forward. It’s a responsibility Tate is approaching innovatively: the museum has also reimagined Set and Reset as an ongoing free installation featuring archival footage, staging elements and performance documentation. Rambert will also be present in the Tate until September for various lecture-demonstration performances. Not only does this give visitors an insight into how the work was constructed, but also grants the piece a longevity usually denied to live performance. I hope it’s a sign of things to come. Emily May

Adél Bálint, Seren Williams, Comfort Kondehson, Conor Kerrigan and Archie White from Rambert performing Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983) at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival

May 2022

Sara Basta La prima madre Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome 27 January – 26 March A small sepia photo shows a child in profile, her body a darkened silhouette against a patterned background. This, we learn, is the mother of Sara Basta. A short text by the Roman multimedia artist accompanies it, reflecting on their relationship: ‘I could sense how weary she was of what her being at home meant. Being inside and outside. Not wanting to be either inside or outside. Always being in the wrong space, always making a painful choice.’ Annotazione #2 (2021) parses some of the core issues tackled in La prima madre (The first mother), presented on the premises of a former pasta factory. In a deeply personal exhibition, skilfully oscillating between joy and mourning, Basta probes collective themes of identity, motherhood, family relationships and domesticity via videos, paintings and installations.

The Fondazione is not an easy space to exhibit in. The Silos space approximates a white cube, although its irregular layout and hardwood floors suggest a domestic space, while the Spazio Molini retains the raw industrial feel of a multiroom factory basement, with peeling walls and narrow, dark corridors revealing exposed pipes and old machinery. Basta harnesses these qualities to her advantage, reserving the cavernous underground spaces for her more elegiac reflections, while her colourful textile works and paintings concerning the body and domesticity are in the Silos. In Capanna (Hut, 2021) colourful patterned textiles are sewn together to create a sheltered space, which welcomes us to a projection of children building fabric dens – a playful yet poignant reflection on our elemental need for protection and shelter.

La prima madre, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Carlo Romano. Courtesy Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome

ArtReview

In the final, dimly lit room of Spazio Molini’s basement is the audiowork Mi Ricordo (I remember, 2011), the most moving piece in the show. We hear Basta’s mother recount two distinct memories of her parents. In a frail voice, she recalls the cherished time her father praised her when she turned six; her mother, instead, demanded she distance herself during an outing as she wasn’t dressed up to standard, implicitly revealing the different standards parents are held to by their children. Basta made this work when her mother’s language was falling apart and her own child, whom she recorded for other sound pieces, was learning to speak. These quiet explorations of human vulnerability never come across as fetishised or affected – rather, Basta lays bare the fragility of everyday life as an inescapable condition, brief moments of wonder coexisting with sorrow. Ana Vukadin

nell The way Home Station, Sydney 26 February – 26 March Across a glazed surface, wrinkled like skin, a pair of holes stand in for eyes. Below, a carved line curves up like a thin set of lips. The teardropshaped sculpture wears a smile. At first, however, this small earthenware work, which contains a bunch of faded hydrangeas, might easily be mistaken for a vase rather than something that’s alive and blissfully happy. hot in the city (2021) sits on a table as part of The way Home. Beside it, a canary-yellow egg, who are you (2021), grins at the viewer. Another creature, home boy / home girl (2021), perches on a wooden stool, mouthing a silent ‘ooh’. These and other ceramic works reflect a visual language the artist has honed for two decades; one that revolves around the secret lives of

objects and the unseen connections between disparate things. A house is the sum of bricks and mortar. But for Nell, a practising Zen Buddhist, a home is more elusive, a state that unfolds in an exchange of emotional energies. ‘My actions are my only true belongings’, declares Five Remembrances (2022), in words painted on a piece of fabric that adorns the gallery’s front wall. Nell has long explored dualities. Here, the artist plays with our ideas of the spiritual and the material. five remembrances may remind us that we own nothing beyond our choices. Yet the objects that she’s created spark a sense of emotional obligation. baby (2022), a tiny egglike creature, sits in one corner, cradled in a delicate,

pale-pink scallop shell, tapping into hidden reserves of tenderness I didn’t know I had. Sometimes home can stifle, curb the desire for freedom. But Nell’s legless creatures can’t run away, though they seem to try: one perches, face startled, atop a pile of walking sticks; another hitches a ride on a clog. Baby’s even smaller double shelters inside the sculpture The way Home (2022), made from the rudder of a wooden boat. These works, like the walking sticks that recur around the room, symbolise a journey. But the sculptures also reflect on the power of returning, despite how far you’ve travelled, to whomever – or whatever – is calling you back. Neha Kale

home boy / home girl, 2021, earthenware, underglaze, metal and wooden stool, 136 × 42 × 37 cm (overall). Photo: Document Photography. Courtesy the artist and Station, Sydney

May 2022

Ulysses Jenkins Without Your Interpretation Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 6 February – 15 May Ulysses Jenkins’s first retrospective deploys nearly 80 works, spanning a 50-year practice, that highlight the artist’s critiques of Black representation and multicultural activism, and his explorations of animation and digital technology as part of the la-based multimedia art collective Othervisions Studio. Jenkins, who primarily works in video, has been long overlooked (he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page) despite the success of his peers: artists and occasional collaborators Senga Nengudi, David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, to name a few. The exhibition follows the dictates of its title: the curators leave Jenkins’s work open for debate, providing only a bare outline of the artist’s history and practice. Jenkins’s singular interrogation of imagemaking lurks below the exhibition’s broad scope, illuminating a radical perspective that reimagines the relationship between media and Black subjects.

After acquiring a Sony Portapak during the 1970s, Jenkins made the videos that would define much of his career, from the experimental narrative Two-Zone Transfer (1979) to the montage-based Inconsequential Doggerel (1981). These associative, fast-paced videos mix archival footage – D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), clips from the 1965 Watts Rebellion – with Jenkins’s own performances, scenes that recreate encounters between Jenkins and the racist caricatures that attempt (and fail) to define him. While most analysis of Jenkins principally focuses on the artist’s criticism of Black stereotypes, the Hammer exhibition offers a more nuanced approach. In an essay reprinted in the exhibition’s catalogue, Aria Dean writes that Jenkins explores the ‘ontological impossibility of a black subjectivity’. This stance, drawing on the work of thinkers like Frank B. Wilderson III and Saidiya Hartman, sees Blackness as a condition constructed by

the white enslaver, one that can neither be self-defined nor liberated through positive representation. The canonical video Mass of Images (1978) serves as a would-be thesis for Jenkins’s oeuvre: wielding a small sledgehammer, Jenkins approaches the camera, reciting a polemic mantra. “I won’t,” he says, “and I don’t – relate.” In Jenkins’s later work, questions of Blackness and media stand next to the struggles of other marginalised groups, probing the hypocrisies of Reagan-era multiculturalism, alternative histories of the African diaspora and the plights of indigenous peoples. His videos are insistent, pointed examinations of what it means to represent Blackness onscreen, a challenge to sanctimonious deployments of diversity in contemporary media. A stone’s throw from Hollywood, where representation is made into the ultimate panacea, Jenkins’s work feels especially novel. Claudia Ross

Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem, 1979, documentation of a performance at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Photo: Nancy Buchanan. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Jac Leirner Esther Schipper, Berlin 12 March – 14 April Jac Leirner’s Us Horizon (1985–2022) is easily described, less easily accounted for. It’s a double row of some 200 plastic shopping bags – the upper frieze right-side-up, the lower inverted, the gap between them serving as the ‘horizon’ – that wraps itself around the gallery’s main space and serves as a consumerist cultural autobiography (or, as per the pluralised title, a collective one). From it we learn a few things about the Brazilian artist: she’s travelled a lot, she’s been in many museums, galleries and record shops, she’s a packrat and she recognises the multidirectional signification inherent in trash. Get enough plastic bags together and you can summarise, even rewind, time: watch Tate’s logo change over the years; alight nostalgically on an orangey wh Smith bag from the 1980s; remember when Tower or Virgin Records was where you bought music (remember buying

music); and think about how disposable plastic bags are seen now, compared to 37 years ago. Leirner, whose work is a Venn diagram of art-historical traditions from Arte Povera to Neo-Concretism to Pop, makes such layered meaning-making look deceptively effortless. Her preserved throwaways, it progressively transpires, balance their ecological tenor with attention to rhythm, colour and scale; the outer wings of her wraparound artwork are white and spectral before the work jumps into polychromatic life at its centre, while the plastic sheets are arranged so that their edges describe an undulating line, like a giant soundwave. At both beginning and end is a bag with Leirner’s name on it, framing the work as personal timeline; in a neat conceit, three airline bags towards the end, with a rising plane on them, function like a frame-by-frame cartoon of a departure – the artist’s, or, thanks to reckless stewardship of the planet, all of ours.

Another pair of works hung as two horizontal lines, My Unstable Way (2022) and Expressive Line (2020), respectively offer endto-end writing-pen casings and miniature tyres from toy vehicles strung on fine steel cords, arranged by colour, shape, size. There’s a sense, in the titles and iconography, of both life-writing and perpetual travel, rubber meeting road; and, again, open-ended, mortalityedged poetics. The tyres, read left to right, get smaller and smaller, though there’s room left on the cord for more. The pens, meanwhile, stretch out like a miniature tightrope, plastic and metal cases modulating from black to gold to, again, ghostly white. You picture Leirner having progressively used up the ink in each, such that the work has a shadow made of text we don’t have access to. No matter – what’s here speaks eloquently enough. Martin Herbert

Us Horizon (detail), 1985–2022, 220 plastic bags, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

May 2022

vih/Sida: l’épidémie n’est pas finie! mucem, Marseille 15 December – 2 May After a period of cultural amnesia, the continuing aids crisis in France is undergoing a sweeping process of historicisation. In 2017 Robin Campillo’s acclaimed film 120 bpm provided a moving cinematic portrayal of Parisian activist movements of the 1980s and 90s. That same year, Elisabeth Lebovici published her excellent book Ce que le sida m’a fait, which is now being adapted into an exhibition due to launch at the Palais de Tokyo in 2023. In the meantime, Marseille’s mucem has joined in with a moving, original and ambitious exhibition. Spanning video, photography, prints and media archives, it features some 440 items, the majority of which come from the museum’s collection. Surprisingly for a show at a major art institution, there’s hardly any art at all. Instead, it is

predominantly populated by posters, letters, tv footage, postcards, journals, leaflets, quilt panels and garments, which serve to turn the attention away from single authors and towards collective discourses. (The exhibition itself is the product of a curatorial group effort of some eight researchers and academics.) And if in recent years, some international exhibitions addressing the history of hiv/aids have been criticised for relying almost exclusively on a white gay male gaze (see the 2015 Art aids America debacle at the Tacoma Art Museum), vih/Sida deserves credit for its commitment to intersectionality. It thoughtfully navigates a multiplicity of French-specific social issues – past and present – and the communities they affect: hiv prevention among lesbians, safer

ArtReview

sex campaigns within migrant groups and needle exchange programmes for drug users, to name but a few. Near the beginning of the exhibition, two flat screens are installed side by side in a corner. The screen on the right plays archival television segments surveying some historical milestones: Pasteur Institute’s discovery of hiv-1 in 1983; Act Up-Paris storming Notre Dame Cathedral in 1989; the rapid spread of the epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. The other screen shows public figures – activists, virologists, lawyers – responding to the footage on the first screen. Titled Le sida à la television française (‘aids on French Television’), this original video montage is the result of a collaborative work lead by film-director-cum-scholar Pascal Cesaro and

anthropologist Sandrine Musso (who died of cancer before the opening of the show). The display appears as an unlikely spin on YouTube’s ‘reaction video’ trend, orchestrating a critical reflection on dominant media narratives. Some omissions, however, are puzzling. What of actress Isabelle Adjani’s intervention on the evening news in 1987 to confirm she was neither ill nor dead? Or the much-publicised media trial of writer Hervé Guibert in 1991 after he revealed philosopher Michel Foucault’s cause of death? Or the polemic appearances of writer Guillaume Dustan in the early-noughties advocating bareback sex? These instances have profoundly marked the cultural discourses of hiv/aids in France and revisiting them would be timely. More regrettable, however, is a lack of a critical engagement with transatlantic dialogues between France and the us. From the outset of the exhibition, America is centrally positioned through a photographic reportage

by Jean-Baptiste Carhaix. It depicts emerging efforts to combat hiv/aids in early-1980s San Francisco: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence raising funds for those suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma; the first People with aids Alliance’s street march; graffiti insisting that ‘aids is not a gay disease’. In conjunction with the overwhelming presence of Barbara Kruger-esque protest posters and Gran Fury’s pink triangles, these photographs reinforce a misconception that France merely imported strategies, aesthetics and ideas from the us. Of course, this notion isn’t unfounded: the influence of act up New York on the Paris chapter was significant. But the show fails to address a more complex dynamic characterised by the fact that American aids activism – and the coinciding rise of first-wave queer theory – was fuelled by French poststructuralism. And this nuance is critical in resisting conservative French academia’s and populist movements’ vilification of queer thought as an imperialist

American export threatening the Republic’s universalist values. The art that does feature in the show, however, is delightfully understated. There is an irreverent work on paper by Niki de Saint Phalle from her children’s book aids: You Can’t Catch it Holding Hands (1987); an absorbing video of Alain Buffard’s choreographic self-portrait Good Boy (1998); a haunting sound-sculpture from 2010 by Canadian artist Benny Nemer in the form of a gilded metal megaphone that periodically broadcasts a vocal interpretation of an air raid siren; a large and humorous oil painting from 1988 by Congolese artist Chéri Samba depicting a curious aids march of demonstrators brandishing bras, panties and multilingual banners in French, Kikongo and Swahili. These works are nonchalantly peppered across the vast space, sandwiched between prevention brochures, educational comics and other memorabilia. Their unglorified display is truly refreshing. Benoît Loiseau

Chéri Samba, Marche de soutien à la campagne sur le sida, 1988, oil and glitter on prepared canvas, 135 × 200 cm. Photo: Philippe Migeat / Centre Pompidou, mnam-cci, Dist. rmn-Grand Palais. Courtesy the artist and Magnin-A, Paris

May 2022

rsa New Contemporaries Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 26 February – 3 April A recent article in The Times had columnist Philip Rodney writing bluntly: ‘It’s time to admit that Glasgow is a dump’. Bemoaning the departure of 37 stores on Sauchiehall Street, he notes how easily Glasgow has metamorphosed into Gotham City – ‘but not in a good way’. Edinburgh’s main drag isn’t faring any better, with Scots comedian Fred MacAulay whining recently about Princes Street on Twitter: ‘Dear oh dear… building after building shuttered and closed’. Even Jenners, the prestigious department store, has gone bust. But one bright spot persists on Auld Reekie’s premier boulevard: the Royal Scottish Academy. This current exhibition of artists recently

graduated from schools across Scotland suggests there are realistic grounds for optimism. The rsa New Contemporaries show highlights work by 58 artists. Dundee-trained Stephanie Dulson gets us off to a zippy start with (Roy Lichtenstein-inspired) digitally manipulated scanned postcards like I am enjoying my food (2020). The strong roster from Edinburgh College of Art includes Tayo Adekunle’s photographic selfportraits that conjoin monochrome imagery taken from Nigeria during colonial times. In her Artefact series (2020) she’s fully clothed, echoing the National Geographic-like poses of the naked figures who stand beside her. The work

Tayo Adekunle, Artefact #5, 2020, giclée print, 18 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

demonstrates starkly how black women’s bodies were objectified and demeaned. These loaded gestures could appear crassly polemical, but there’s coolness in Adekunle’s anger. Her gaze mocks the privileged attitudes of those earlier cameramen: her simple reclamation of dignity for those caught by the original photographs is moving. There’s more reworking of colonial legacies by fellow Edinburgh graduate Hannah Lim. Lim’s sculptures toy with her joint Singaporean and British heritage. Spiky Hanging Stand (2021), made from mdf, Jesmonite and polymer clay, is one of several works that play with the clichés

of chinoiserie, including brightly coloured gates, snuff bottles, a table of fire. Hers is a wry take on cultural inheritance, and as with Adekunle, there’s no sneering; just a confident, knowingly amused view on past errors of politics and taste. History and memory are recurrent themes: Sofia Hallström, also Edinburgh-trained, makes evocative paintings based on family photographs. Kasbah (2022) is a walled cityscape with a mysterious shadow à la Giorgio de Chirico. There’s a window grille in copper blue that quickly conjures the likes of Marrakesh. But it’s Hallström’s frames that grab: here an iron gate-like construction sits in front of the canvas, enhancing the verisimilitude of the scene. Some of the contributors from Glasgow’s School of Art major in conceptual drolleries. Maeve Laurence calls herself a ‘rain collector’. She uses a gizmo made of patchwork

waxed-denim; it looks like a snazzier cousin to Franz West’s Adaptive sculptures. A multilayered plinth holds glass jars filled with water and she’s given these titles like 7/2/22 heavy shower or 15/12/21 a short burst. All are dated, a nod to On Kawara’s games with time. Dylan Esposito likes gags too and makes pithy sculptures that are deliberately unfit for purpose; these reference neurodivergence and his own autism. Round Peg in a Square Hole (2022) does what it says on the tin. Carpet Burn (2021) is an amusingly dysfunctional children’s slide done in Mondrian primary colours. Other gsa trained artists include the Seoulbased painter Jiyoung Kim. Her Monet’s House, 1534 Mound Street (2021) is a superflat acrylic riffing on more Roy Lichtenstein, this time a stage set found in Sarasota; more Post-Pop Pop. There are more candied textures in Gaia Tretmanis’s gloopy installation Neither Running nor Carrying Love on my

Shoulders (no date). This is a floor-based construction (imagine a Sarah Sze/Karla Black collaboration) made from gelatine, royal icing, pvc and Styrofoam. Tealights are linked to a sound-reactive led analogue circuit. We hear background sound from old home videos: voices, an owl hooting, the sea lapping. Is that a buoy dinging? Tretmanis’s synaesthetic work taps into quotidian moments that snag in memory. rsa New Contemporaries hints that, contrary to the ailing retail outlets opposite, Scottish art is in brute good health. J.G. Ballard’s muchattributed link between political/economic turmoil and a consequent flourishing of the arts appears evidenced at the rsa. Speaking of disorder, there’s a metal plaque dedicated to the Sackler family set firmly into the gallery wall. How about this goes the same way as Jenners? John Quin

Dylan Esposito, Carpet Burn, 2021, wood, paint, coir matting, 360 × 187 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist

May 2022

Rebecca Morris #29 Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago 18 March – 23 April Almost every discussion of Rebecca Morris brands her as a hard-line abstractionist – due, in part, to a cheeky manifesto published in 2006 as an Artforum ad, since widely circulated, for an exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss. One wonders if the expectations of that designation ever get tiresome. In her 29th solo exhibition on the matter, Morris discloses that abstraction isn’t really about following rules; rather, it is a vague, occasionally serendipitous and thus insatiable pursuit. The show opens with a sampler. Untitled (#08–21) (2021) is an excavation in progress: amidst a brushy, black background, distinct patterns float in little windows. Sooty dots and dashes; a chamomile network intersecting at lime-green coordinates; various microscopic views of craquelure; and a little nestled triangle of crusted cobalt all appear like fragments of an uncovered mosaic – until one notices the

colourful drips atop the painting. Morris actually painted the black first, set the patterns in like gems with a wet brush – hence the interstitial drips – then sealed off the edges with a knobby, silvered fringe. Of the eight paintings on show, roughly half jigsaw together in the sedimentary vein of Untitled (#08–21), though their parts are not exactly complementary or unified by any agreeable colour scheme. In Untitled (#02–21) (2021) a bare field of coal-coloured squiggles abuts a contained collision of varying green swatches – two of twelve distinct, scaffolded sections. By letting paint pool and dry variously and working between several canvases at once, it’s as if Morris is constantly starting over, allowing each move to be new and discrete. The other works play with self-imposed structures: a chequerboard, an overlaid outline. Untitled (#01–22) (2022) is a saturated red expanse,

within which silver and chartreuse spatters trail and oddly snap to invisible perpendicular lines. Stray footprints signal the painting’s beginning as a drop cloth, recording also the edges of past canvases; Morris garnishes that memento of action painting with her signature silver trim – more oil paint, dried and spraypainted. Though not the most immediate at first, it is Untitled (#11–21) (2021), a chequerboard, that lingers. The pink squares appear diluted and textureless, with no trace of brushwork. The green panes each feature three tones: celadon, moss and seafoam. Blotted and pulling apart to the edges, the marks continually negotiate their clarity. From afar, the painting is still a grid, but the progression falls just short of a logic. Rather, the whole composition shifts like camouflage, momentarily beckoning us towards crystallisation, while keeping its endgame subtly elusive. Alex Jen

Untitled (#11–21), 2021, oil and spraypaint on canvas, 203 × 142 cm. Photo: Flying Studio. Courtesy the artist and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago

ArtReview

Paulo Nimer Pjota Maureen Paley and Studio M, London 11 March – 24 April The São Paulo-based painter and sculptor Paulo Nimer Pjota constructs a bustling archaeology of street life spread across Maureen Paley’s two London locations. His large works on found sheets of metal and unstretched canvases contain small, limpid painted objects surrounded by hazes of scrawls, impasto smears and cursive scribblings reminiscent of Cy Twombly. These markings structure and punctuate the otherwise diffuse monochrome painted surfaces. The objects – creatures, plants, cartoon characters, monsters, ancient artworks – provide sparks of clarity, like stickers on the scratched-up deck of a skateboard or a shuttered shopfront. In Jardim alquímico de noite (2022), in Maureen Paley, a cat poses upon a yellow crescent-moon in

the top left, against a reddish-brown background. The moon has a face, and it is gurning. In the lower right is a cactus in a pot adorned with a painting of blue gums and gritted teeth. Mushrooms, flowers and grasses make a border along the bottom of the canvas. On the floor in front of the painting are nine cabbages and pumpkins, cast in resin. These glossy objects are, amazingly, both realistic and cartoonish, real and unreal. They are icons for mythologies both collective and idiosyncratic, historical and personal. Archaeology and ancient sculpture are ongoing preoccupations for Pjota, and his objects seem to have bubbled up, bright and intact, from beneath the earth. Five out of the six works across both spaces incorporate metal as well as canvas: from

aluminium sheeting (Crânio de bronze, 2022), to bronze-cast objects on the floor in front of the painting (Jardim alquímico de dia, 2022, and Campo-santo de ouro, 2022), to a bronze sculpture of a sphere on a pole (Ballet triadico 2, 2021). The show’s materials – from earthy pigments to scratched-up metal – suggest an immersion in, and love for, the substances and surfaces of cities, but Pjota’s everyday urban materials also contain fantastical possibilities: his ‘alchemic gardens’ (jardim alquímico) burst with weird objects, phantasmagorias that, far from occurring in a dreamworld behind the curtain, stick to the surface, arising and disappearing like doodles and drawings on city walls. Tomas Weber

Jardim alquímico de noite, 2022, acrylic, oil and tempera on canvas plus resin objects, 200 × 256 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

May 2022

Katie Paterson Requiem Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 9 April – 11 June Undeniably seductive, both in the sweeping scale of its purview and the understated elegance of its presentation, Katie Paterson’s Requiem encapsulates Kathryn Yusoff’s argument that ‘the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality’. From presolar grains of dust at least 4.6 billion years old, to genetic material from a snail that is extinct ‘in the wild’, Paterson has spent several years collecting a range of materials in order to, as the gallery presents it, ‘map the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day’. In a literal flattening of difference and specificity, every material has been crushed into powder using a hydraulic press and presented in one of 364 hand-blown glass receptacles, neatly arranged in chronological order on waist-high shelves around the walls of the perfectly square gallery.

Paterson has described Requiem as her most political work to date. Certainly it asserts her right not only to acquire and destroy but also to decide the fates of some highly charged materials, her engagement with which is fleeting. Paterson reenacts the violence of settler colonialism by crushing a pestle (I hope the irony is accidental) from the Native American Hohokam culture; risks perpetuating extractive capitalism through an online purchase of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo; and continues the nuclear colonialism of the us military by crushing a coconut shell from Bikini Atoll. In the centre of the gallery is a glass urn, into which visitors may pour the contents of one of the vials. A stage-managed experience of deep-time sublime, this process enacts

a secondary destruction, not of the self, as in Romanticism, but of so many others. Upstairs, Paterson presents several related pieces, including Evergreen (2022), a linen wallhanging embroidered with depictions of 351 extinct plants; and Endling (2021), a circular painting of 100 pigments comprising, as in Requiem, ground-up materials such as Native American tool-sets or Second World War barbed wire. Paterson’s work characteristically combines childlike wonder with graceful aesthetics. Her most celebrated project, Future Library (2014– 2114), does so in a manner both generous and generative. But here, in adhering to the extractive logic of geology, the work unthinkingly reaffirms old and ongoing violences, and fails even to notice as it does so. Tom Jeffreys

Endling, 2021, mixed media in 100 pigments ground from the pre-solar dust of five billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku, 92 × 92 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

ArtReview

Books

Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros Ignota, £6.99 (softcover)

A recent scientific study suggested that Lapland longspurs and white-crowned sparrows were having to wait longer for their potential mating partners to come to the Alaskan tundra due to changing climate conditions. When scientists sorted through the sonic data compiled by an ai, they found a void in the soundscape. It recalled the powerful idea, put forward by the writer and environmental activist Rachel Carson, decades ago, of a Silent Spring (1962): what if the changing of the seasons, she wondered, was no longer declared by the sound of birdsong? Sound can clarify what at first seems invisible. The late Pauline Oliveros – American avant-garde composer and hippy theorist – was a keen scholar of how reformulating the act of listening (into ‘Deep Listening’) can conjure timescales beyond conventional comprehension. Oliveros’s life was dedicated to expanding our field of sensory perception via these idiosyncratic philosophies, which she developed from the 1970s onwards, initially as a response to the Vietnam War and the self-immolation of a protester at uscd, where she was teaching at the time. Oliveros found herself turning inward from the horror, sometimes meditating on a single drone, which she would play on her accordion. What even is Deep Listening? Here’s Oliveros, in her 1999 essay ‘Quantum Listening’ (newly reissued as a book by Ignota): ‘listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing,’ she writes. ‘Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.’ Or as Laurie Anderson writes in a new foreword, ‘Deep Listening puts experience before everything else.’ It’s ‘inside your head and empathetic. Both focal and global.’ In an age of increasingly passive listening, Oliveros was concerned to rethink sound as a communal form of activity: not merely a one-sided relationship between the performer and audience, but as an everexpanding project of awareness.

So far, so good. But Oliveros’s prose frequently draws on a grander spiritual ambit. In the essay, her language suddenly becomes incandescent. Quantum Listening – which flows out of Deep Listening – pays attention to multiple realities, she writes. It’s ‘perception at the edge of the new. Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit – creating a new orbit – as an atom occupies both spaces at once one listens in both places at once.’ The Quantum Listener ‘listens to listening’. You could say that Oliveros had been practising her philosophy of heightened listening since childhood. She was born in Houston in 1932. She grew up with a keen interest in soundscapes – the music of crickets, frogs and mockingbirds that filled the world around her. She recounts in Quantum Listening how, on her twenty-first birthday, she was gifted a tape recorder by her mother, which she immediately turned to face the window of her San Francisco apartment. She noticed that the microphone would record sounds that she had not heard before. ‘I said to myself then and there: “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”’ Just so, Quantum Listening is filled with aphoristic provocations about the soundscapes of the everyday, and what happens when we open ourselves up to a listening experience that pays absolute attention to this: reading the world around us almost like a musical score. Some advice is downright practical. ‘Listening is the key to performance.’ (A simpleenough but oft-forgotten principle for all musicians.) Other observations are still refreshing. ‘One hears repeatedly that we live in a “visually oriented society”’, Oliveros writes, ‘even though the ear tells the eye where to look.’ Telescopes allow us to peer at galaxies at the edge of the universe, but what if we could also ‘hear’ them? (Directly, rather than through the radio waves of deep space.) When nasa launched multi-million-dollar Mars probe in the late 1990s, they – as an afterthought – kitted it out with a lousy $15

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microphone stripped from a hearing aid, Oliveros laments. Oliveros thought a lot about the distinction between hearing and listening. Hearing, she writes, ‘represents the primary sense organ – hearing happens involuntarily’. But listening is voluntary. ‘All cultures develop through ways of listening.’ Some thoughts are dreamier. ‘What would you want to hear if you had a bionic ear that could let you listen to anything, anywhere, any time?’ she wonders. ‘Would you like to zoom into a waterfall to hear individual sounds of the falling drops?’ Oliveros – caught in rapt attention – appears to be almost, unwittingly, describing a fatal level of abstraction. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. But there’s a temptation – at a time when the idea of attentive listening has never been more easily commodified and co-opted – to ask: so what? After all, Hillary Clinton kicked off her doomed campaign for the 2016 presidential election with a much-hyped ‘listening tour’, full of earnest nodding and note-taking to signal to voters that she was, well, really, deeply, truly listening. (These days, business coaches regularly espouse Deep Listening as yet another leadership skill for their clients.) At this point, the idea seems almost like a form of surrender. I find Oliveros’s pursuit of an enhanced sensorial experience more persuasively formulated in her music than her writing. The consequences of that intensified sense of receptivity can be heard throughout the brilliant 1989 album Deep Listening in which Oliveros on accordion, trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis recorded a sequence of sustained tones within a hulking subterranean cistern, built by the us military in Washington State. A great curtain of sound sweeps through the space – blurred in on itself by the 45-second reverberation time. Slowly, imperceptibly, the concrete cavern becomes a resonating chamber. An instrument in its own right. En Liang Khong

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I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston Penguin Classics, £9.99 (softcover) To what extent, though, did Philip Guston paint what he wanted to see? The answer is, as it always is with him, equivocal. Dialogues were Guston’s chosen form of public speech, several of which, along with other published pieces and talks, are collected in this book, published to coincide with the opening of his rescheduled retrospective in May this year. Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston. ‘I’m trying to think of what to say,’ begins his 1971 lecture on Piero della Francesca. That search – for a subject and its articulation, perhaps – animates Guston’s public persona as much as it does his late turn to a grungy figuration, the emergence and development of which is the hidden story that unfolds beneath these texts. Even the earliest talk included here, his interview with David Sylvester from 1960, which took place during Guston’s abstract

phase, seems to tee up his later practice. His declaration that ‘I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ is borne out in the works he was making at the time, many of which have matterof-fact titles (Table, Vessel, Branch, all 1960) that are worlds away from the highfalutin sublimity of those of his New York School peers. To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them. His repeated (and perhaps willed) endorsement of ‘frustration’ as a crucial artistic ingredient in the mid-1960s gives way, by the end of the decade, to an outpouring of largescale paintings he repeatedly admitted to being baffled by. Figurative painting allowed him to do in art what he’d always loved about talking: to lurch from subject to subject, to butt up against contradictions, to make wisecracks, to repeat himself. When asked about the subjects of these late paintings, he’s as confounded as anyone – ‘I don’t know what the hell it looks like’, he says, of a painting of a shoe – but that’s just what he loved about making them. He wanted to confuse himself, if only to keep the conversation going. The postponement of Guston’s 2020 retrospective, the arguments around which need no further reheating here, cast the artist

as a less nuanced protagonist than either his works or his words suggest, in part thanks to the social media context in which those arguments played out. However familiar Guston’s public statements have become – and nothing in the book is new, since it’s effectively a slimmeddown version of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (2010), edited by Clark Coolidge – it’s worth returning to them in the light of those events. Its lack of introduction or contextual detail, aside from Coolidge’s brief notes carried over from the previous publication, isolates Guston’s statements as aphorisms or nuggets of adaptable wisdom. No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world. His foregrounding of doubt – about what he was painting, which often shifted in the making, or what his own work was about, or what motivated him to do it at all – was what infused his late paintings with the ability to generate new ideas in the heads and hands of others. ‘Ideas about art don’t matter,’ runs a 1978 note found in his studio after his death, itself an idea that launched a thousand painting careers. ‘They collapse anyway in front of the painting.’ Yes, but… Ben Street

prime: Art’s Next Generation by Phaidon Editors Phaidon, £55 (softcover) prime is the latest in the seemingly never-ending line of Phaidon’s state-of-the-art-now gazettes, previously incarnated as the Vitamin and Cream series initiated at the end of the 1990s. Each volume of the first was devoted to artists who worked in a particular medium, while each volume of the second was about curators tipping you off about which artists they wanted to show. This one features only artists born after 1980. 107 of them to be precise, each of whom is given a page of text and three pages of images through which we’re supposed to get a taste of their careers. ‘What is prime?’ the header on the first page of the book shrieks, and as your eyes descend to the text giving the answer it descends, thanks to some terrible design decisions in relation to background colours, into almost total illegibility (which for a book retailing at this price is an absolute shocker). From what can be made out

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we’re being invited to witness artists who are in the ‘prime’ of their lives; a primer to the art of now (yawn); and a list of people who’ll be populating biennials in the coming years. All of which guff, presumably, the editors have deployed to confirm the importance of the ‘future leaders of the art world: the curators, writers, and academics with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary art and culture’ who’ve selected the artists for inclusion in this book. But it (the guff) is also what makes prime sound like a product developed by hedge-fund managers and the artists on display like the showcase product in a butcher’s shop. Which might be a rather honest assessment of why a book like prime exists: to manufacture a sense of neverending freshness and novelty in contemporary art so that every two years or so a new compendium can appear to replace the old. Everything fresh becomes rotten.

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That said, it is hard to fault the selection here if you’re looking to know which artists, from around the world, are in vogue right now. Although it’s a shame that each artist presentation shows no reflections about what they might have in common other than the coincidence of their dates of birth. Still, what does all this tell us about the state of art right now? Art raises ‘questions’ (Ibrahim Mahama), ‘questions the meaning of fantasy and reality’ (Marguerite Humeau), ‘deconstructs how we imagine the future’ (Ad Minoliti), ‘becomes a palpable trace, left behind, a proof of our passing through’ (Larry Achiampong), ‘takes viewers on a journey of tension and foreboding through ambiguous settings’ (Francisco Rodríguez). It’s sheathed in a wipeclean clear-plastic dust jacket in case you get overexcited. But I imagine you won’t. Right. I’m off to cancel ArtReview’s Future Greats. Mark Rappolt

Conversations: India’s Leading Art Historian Engages with 101 Themes & More by B. N. Goswamy India Allen Lane, ₹990.00 (hardcover) Writings on art for a general readership is, much like a lot of art itself, not as easily accessible in India as one might think. Save for weekend supplements, most daily newspapers deploy exhibition reviews and features on artists as page fillers – the culture beat is often assigned to rookie journalists or interns – rather than as conscious efforts to expand their readers’ knowledge of arts and culture. If one really wants to try and understand the vast sea of the artworld one is obliged either to read specialist art magazines, search the web or rely on essays published (now and then) in general-interest magazines. Given all that it’s pleasantly and genuinely suprising that the art critic B. N. Goswamy has had a column (titled ‘Art and Soul’) on South Asian art running in The Tribune, a daily published from Chandigarh in northern India, for nearly three decades. This book offers up a selection from the more than 600 articles that Goswamy wrote in this format between 1995 to 2020. The collected columns function as a primer on art from South Asia, though heavily tilted toward Indian themes and artforms, and not venturing into the realm of contemporary visual art all too often. The subject-matter of most of the columns is shaped by Goswamy’s personal expertise: he is an authority on Indian paintings and more specifically on the Pahari paintings originating from the Himalayan kingdoms in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Yet there are moments when the geography

expands. European artists such as Man Ray and Rembrandt, whose work had a connection to India – the former made many photographs of the young and fashionable Rao Holkar royal couple in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, while the latter made several drawings inspired by Mughal miniatures – have appeared in the columns as well. But in the main, Goswamy explores what can be classified as ‘traditional’ art forms, from Kudiyattam from Kerala, to Sufi portraiture, the art of calligraphy, to objects like book covers and masks, to research into colours and into the idea of dreams and omens in Indian art. A majority of the columns touch upon paintings of sages, Tagore, Akbar’s portrait, the projecting eye in Jain paintings, the use of beetlewing cases in Pahari paintings and so on. The first of his columns advises his readers to read the writings of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese metaphysician and pioneer in interpreting Indian culture for a Western audience. Indeed, he goes on to assert that every person of ‘some learning’ and in possession of ‘even a faint trace of interest in culture’ ought already to have read at least something by Coomaraswamy (who died in 1947). A column on traditional patachitra, an art form originating in the state of Odisha, ends with a lament about the sorry state of a prestigious library in New Delhi in which Goswamy found himself when suddenly needing to check a reference. Unsurprisingly, the sentiments

expressed in many of the older columns feel dated when read in a world in which Wikipedia exists. While there is a great variety in the tones that Goswamy has adopted over the long period of ‘Art and Soul’s existence, every other column nevertheless feels like a teaching moment. This is not, however, to suggest that Goswamy treats his readers as anything but intelligent; he seems to be writing for an audience who might not be serious connoisseurs of art, but who nevertheless have sufficient cultural knowledge not to require explanations of, for instance, who Ghalib was (a nineteenth-century Indian poet, in case you do), or why M. F. Hussain’s paintings were controversial (because of his, a Muslim’s, depictions of nude Hindu deities, in case you do). Given the preachy-teachy vibe and the monologic format of a newspaper column, you may be wondering, as did I, how all this connects to the notion that these essays constitute some form of ‘Conversation’. Yet Goswamy’s facility with words makes each text seem like a story being narrated in your living room. Nevertheless, this is not a book one might read in one sitting or continuously, or if one’s looking to become an expert on any particular artform. But by giving just enough of detail here, a nudge there, a related story and maybe a casual suggestion, Goswamy’s columns are sufficiently inspiring to encourage readers to seek further reading and become something of a connoisseur themselves. Deepa Bhasthi

Night Bus by Zuo Ma, translated by Orion Martin Drawn & Quarterly, ca$39.95 / us$34.95 (softcover) In this debut collection, Chinese comic artist Zuo Ma takes us on a deep dive into the inky depths of his subconscious. Eleven tales drawn between 2009 and 2013, which broadly cover national issues of rural urbanisation, the economic migration of young people towards cities and environmental pollution, but which are told through the personal accounts of an aspiring comic artist named Xiao Jun, are an exercise in magical realism. Characters and motifs blend throughout (Xiao Jun and his acquaintances, beetles, his family members and their pet dog Niu Niu), just as tendrils from one tale find their way into the next: for instance, a mysterious figure in ‘Walking Alone’ reappears much later,

in ‘Iwana Bouzu’ (a retelling of a Japanese myth about a giant trout) and in ‘A Story of Fireworks’ (about a village’s ban on lighting rockets on New Year’s Eve). That the collection is often disorienting, slipping between reality and dream states, is made particularly moving by Ma’s central story, ‘Night Bus’. Upon returning to the family home, Xiao Jun is confronted by his grandmother’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He draws her as a young woman with huge round glasses, beginning the story in colour as she searches for the titular bus. A parallel narrative blends throughout, in which Xiao Jun and his little brother join her on a similar journey; but while,

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having reached her destination, the young woman wanders observantly, often alone, through an unfamiliar realm populated by fantastical and monstrous creatures, Xiao Jun and his brother try desperately to untangle and understand this strange world in which teachers turn into angry axolotls, children turn into fish, ufos make a base in their village and giant elephants move around with houses on their backs. The night bus is a tender tribute to Ma’s own grandmother, a metaphor for the neurological disease and the ways in which reality, the imaginary and memory can be equally lucid, and a journey that is ultimately taken alone. Fi Churchman

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Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde 4th Estate, £14.99 (hardcover) Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel is a collection of stories centred in the demimondes of Lagos that explores the push and pull of how its residents see and are seen, and, by extension, how their identities are constructed through the clash of choice and compulsion. The ‘vagabonds’ of the title are the queer, the ‘unbelonging’, those who are ‘in the city but not of it; ie. Unforgettably unloved by it’. Their transgressions and deviations from what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour are punished by law – both religious (Christian) and secular (Osunde quotes extracts from the latter at the beginning of the book) – and by social ostracisation. Othering. Osunde’s Lagos is a site of corruption and greed, misogyny and abuse; it’s also a site of magic (which puts the novel in the tradition of magical realism), governed by the malicious city-spirit Èkó who wills the city to grow while nevertheless maintaining its disparities and inequalities, willing it to be ‘the poverty capital of the world and be a megacity all at once’. But it’s also a place of love, parties, compassion, companionship and solidarities, particularly among the vagabonds who come out at night. And even more particularly among the women vagabonds. But during the day and in public they are forced to wear ‘masks’ and ‘skins’,

to appear to conform and fit in. Wear a skin too long and you become that other self. The city’s aim is to alienate you from you. Amid all this stands Tatafo, once Èkó’s favourite spirit servant, now a fallen angel who, in chapters that weave through the various individual stories throughout the book, speaks truth to power. ‘How can you make a thing in your image and then ruin it for functioning by your design?’ Tatofo asks. ‘Can a person be disobedient if the ability to do so is not already built into them? Isn’t the power of choice a thing bestowed upon a person by their creator?’ Osunde’s writing pulsates, switching between regular and pidgin English through tales that feature the devil raising the dead, dreamweavers weaving fates, women who willingly vanish in a communal rapture in order to escape oppressive and abusive husbands, secretly homosexual drivers and lesbian maids, and a stridently anti-vagabond politician who fucks robot boys because he can’t stand real ones who are ‘like that’. Because he’s clearly not. It’s one of the strengths of Osunde’s novel that both the oppressed and the oppressors are equally hypocritical, equally failing to be true to themselves. Though the former do it by compulsion, the latter by choice, the end result of this

repression is the same: the city gets by because no one is permitted to see anyone for who they are. Except, of course, if they are in love. And those quiet moments of true connection are something that the author handles with some aplomb. Even if, all too often, repression kills those moments too: same-sex partners split to please families or God; everyone hides for fear of the consequences of being found out. Although in Osunde’s hands even the act of letting go can seem an act of love, connection and empathy as well. Throughout Vagabonds! Osunde, who is a multidisciplinary artist as well as a writer, privileges art (in the widest sense – from writing, weaving and musicmaking to fashion design) as a means of escape from the reality of Lagos and of taking control of your own narrative. ‘It was wild to her’, she says of a fairy character who has learned that the spirit of a dead musician is about to transform the city, ‘that someone dead could live forever if they wanted to, if they made something vital, something that people loved’. And yet, ultimately, survival here, for vagabonds and their oppressors alike, comes about through being comfortable not just with what’s around you or what you put out in the world, but with the true image of yourself: ‘Do you like you? Can you survive you?’ a fairy spirit asks. Mark Rappolt

Carnival Strippers by Susan Meiselas Steidl & c/o Berlin, $95 / €85 (hardcover)

It’s been 46 years since photographer Susan Meiselas first published Carnival Strippers, the result of a three-year immersion documenting ‘girl shows’ in small-town fairs and carnivals across New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Yet, as this third revised edition (issued as part of a two-volume slipcased edition alongside an illuminating ‘making of’ book) makes evident, the issues raised by Meiselas around power, gender and social inequalities, violence and desire remain burning ones and, in the post-#MeToo era, have finally taken centre stage. Carnival Strippers attests to Meiselas’s ethnographic approach – ‘I learned to merge listening and looking’, she writes in a new introduction – juxtaposing some 70 grainy, black-and-white photographs with excerpts from hours of interviews conducted with her subjects, including the strippers, the men in

the audience and the various show workers. The photographs are striking documents of a repressed underworld, in which desires are let loose (‘The men were acting grossly but it was a festival situation and it was understood that it was appropriate’, says one man in the audience), and communicate this lurid euphoria via dynamic shots taken from backstage via high-angle views or from the audience at a low angle, highlighting the power dynamics at play in the act of looking (only in the intimate photographs of the strippers offstage does Meiselas level her lens). But the real tension stems from the relation between these images and the subjects’ raw and honest testimonies, which complicate these dynamics further: describing a place in which performing is seen both as a form of emancipation and exploitation, with women grappling with the contradictions of internalised gender

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inequalities and their desire for freedom (and power); where men also perform, with varying degrees of awareness on the monetisation of their desires and of empathy for the strippers; where moments of solidarity and care offer respite from ones of abuse and shame; and where class relations intersect with gender issues. The book finishes on a series of traditional and somewhat sweeter portraits, in which the strippers pose against the tent, some in costume, others in plain clothes, all of them returning the viewer’s gaze with confidence, playfulness and defiance. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes in a new essay written for this book, it’s in the agency Meiselas grants her subjects – working not only as witness but as collaborator, allowing their voices to shape or contradict her images – that the enduring legacy of Carnival Strippers lies. Louise Darblay

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Image by anothermountainman.

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 36 Ibrahim Mahama, photographed by Carlos Idun-Tawiah, in Tamale, Ghana, April 2022

Words on the spine and on pages 17, 35 and 71 are from Mahasweta Devi, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’, in Imaginary Maps, trans Gayatri Spivak, 1995

on pages 52–59 artist project by Tabita Rezaire, text and design by Naomi Moonlion, works, in order of appearance, Inner Fire, 2016–17, Ultra Wet Recapitulation, 2017–18, Orbit Diapason, 2021, Peaceful Warrior, 2015

May 2022

The words on the cover of the April edition of ArtReview are an adapted quotation from Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

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No one in their right mind would find any sympathy for the character of Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988), that terrifying, violent and cruel headmistress of Crunchem Hall Primary School who frightens her pupils and punishes them for ‘misdemeanours’ – like the wearing of pigtails or the eating of liquorice during lessons. For the last few months I’ve been thinking about the chapter on the student Bruce Bogtrotter. Bruce is caught stealing a slice of Trunchbull’s ‘personal’ chocolate cake from the kitchen, and when he denies it he is forced to either eat the rest of the 18-inch cake in front of the entire school – or be locked in the Iron Maiden-style cupboard known as ‘The Chokey’; he steadily scoffs it down mouthful after mouthful as his peers watch with a mixture of horror and awe, cheering him on till the last bite. That picture of simultaneous gluttony and punishment keeps popping into my head while I try to digest the socioeconomic events that have been unfolding in the uk since the last quarter of 2021: Brexit-related supply issues, welfare cuts, increases to the National Insurance tax, the upward spike in fuel and energy costs, the war in Ukraine and how that’s affecting global food security, rates of inflation at 7 percent and rising. All of which will threaten the already precarious living standards of the uk’s poorest households. That image of Bruce doggedly stuffing his face with chocolate gateau keeps swimming into focus and then warping out of its original context, his hair a straw-coloured mop in my mind’s eye. Because it all seems to have something to do with cake. From the recent ‘Partygate’ scandal – the numerous in-person celebrations that took place at and around 10 Downing Street while the uk was in lockdown and such activities were prohibited, and one nonwork-related gathering Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s supporters were defending on the basis that he had been ‘ambushed by a cake’ – all the way back to the cake-related metaphors for implementing Brexit (“My policy on cake is pro-having it and pro-eating it,” Bru… Boris, has said numerous times). Both that metaphorical European cake and its literal manifestation as a birthday ‘surprise’ have come to symbolise a culture of denial, lies, greed, disrespect and contempt. Immediately after that ‘ambush’ defence was given, Ian Blackford (the Scottish National Party’s House of Commons leader) said during Prime Minister’s Questions, “Tory cuts, Brexit and the soaring cost of living have pushed millions of families into poverty. The impending National Insurance tax hike hangs like a guillotine, while [the Tories] eat cake”. Boris, naturally, tried to deflect this statement by suggesting that

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Aftertaste

Eat ’n’ Mess by Fi Churchman

Blackford had been eating all the cake. Which sort of worked because the pm was then accused of fat-shaming his colleague. But let’s take a moment to unpack that part about poverty: households supported by Universal Credit payments rose from 3 million at the start of 2020 to 5.6 million in January 2022. Just before the covid-19 pandemic struck the uk, it was predicted that of the 14.5 million people earning a low income (less than 60 percent of the median uk household income), 11.7 million households were living in absolute poverty (meaning one or more essentials, such as food, heating or a home, falls outside a person’s budget). The Resolution Foundation, a living-standards thinktank, predicts that a further 1.3 million people (including 500,000 children) will be pushed into these conditions by rising costof-living prices. According to The Trussell Trust, an ngo that operates a network of over 1,300 foodbanks across the uk, reliance on the community-run charity has increased by 75 percent in the last six years. Now, recent government policies such as cuts to Universal Credit, coupled with the inflated cost of living, mean that many more people on the lowest incomes will have to choose between heating and eating. Even if some people manage to access foodbanks, there are reports that certain foods (like root vegetables) are being turned down because they take too long, and therefore too much fuel, to cook. But who cares about statist… err, people, when there’s cake to be had and eaten?

Blackford’s reference to Marie Antoinette isn’t exactly original (though it’s curious that he never explicitly stated over whom today’s guillotine hangs): it recalls the story that upon being told France’s starving peasants were unable to buy bread, the French queen responded with the infamous retort, ‘Let them eat cake’. (Or rather, ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’, which doesn’t translate to cake, but describes a bread enriched with butter and eggs.) Whether or not the queen did indeed say this – and many historians contest the attribution – the phrase has nevertheless come to symbolise the ruling class’s disregard and ignorance of how the real cost of living affects society’s poorest. And we all know what happened in the end. Little Bruce Bogtrotter seemed to be able to consume an unending amount of cake, in part because he had the support of his mates. But Boris is looking at the largest drop in public confidence since taking up the role and increasing hostility from his own party. For how long will he be able to scoff his way through his (for which read ‘our’) problems? Boris may be having and eating all the cake for now, but at some point he might get his just desserts. In the meantime, what we’re really facing is a big fucking Eton Mess.

UGO RONDINONE

BURN SHINE FLY

SCUOLA GRANDE SAN GIOVANNI

EVANGELISTA DI VENEZIA

APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 17