ArtReview December 2020 by ArtReview

The collection of unconscious perceptions

uk £6.50

vol 72 no 8

12 >

December 2020

24/11/2020 13:49

AR-Dec-Cover.indd All Pages

Power 100

9 770004 409116

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

AR_LAINT-LAURENT.indd 1

03/11/2020 13:09

AR_LAINT-LAURENT.indd 2

03/11/2020 13:09

Brussels

London

Genesis Tramaine

Different strokes Curated by Marcus Jahmal

Jan 7 – Feb 28

Jan 13 – Feb 20

January 2021 www.alminerech.com

426-427_ALMINE_AR.indd 1

19/11/2020 11:46

Shanghai

Paris

New York

Tursic & Mille

Madelynn Green

Alejandro Cardenas

Jan 15 – Mar 6

Jan 16 – Feb 27

Jan 23 – Feb 23

Marcus Jansen Jan16 – Feb 27

426-427_ALMINE_AR.indd 2

19/11/2020 11:46

AR_KUKJE.indd 1

03/11/2020 12:29

AR_KUKJE.indd 2

03/11/2020 12:29

GERHARD RICHTER Cage Paintings

419_GAGOSIAN_AR.indd 1

Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020) Photo: © Hubert Becker

Gagosian Beverly Hills

13/11/2020 15:59

ArtReview vol 72 no 7 November 2020

Are you looking at me? Despite what you might think (particularly after reading this issue), ArtReview doesn’t spend 12 months of the year fretting about who’s in charge of the artworld, or flailing around and analysing everyone it meets with a sophisticated powerometer, or forcing its contributors to snuffle the floors of art fairs for power nuggets. It doesn’t. Honestly. Most of the year is spent looking at art, thinking about art and, most importantly of all, working out why it values art. Which tends to be, in part, a way of thinking through its own values. In any case, even if it had a powerometer, it can’t get out so much these days. It has a network of contributors around the world who tell it about what they’re seeing instead. And they don’t have powerometers either. ‘Why New York’s Art Scene Will Reign Supreme Post-covid,’ shrieked a recent Artnet headline promoting a podcast and concluding that ‘New York City remains the epicenter for committed art collectors, and will continue to reign supreme across the international landscape’. And there you were thinking that colonial attitudes were on their way out in the artworld. Tsk, tsk. Luckily for you ArtReview is a republican, doesn’t generally consider the artworld to be constituted of subjects and rulers, and – spoiler alert – has results from its annual power survey that rather contradict certain points of view held by some of its American friends. But it’s because such points of view do exist that ArtReview got into the powerometer game in the first place (back in 2002, for you millennials). Because, whether we like it or not, contemporary art is about visibility as much it is about vision, and the artworld is a network of interests that cause light to be shone on some things and not on others. For good as well as for bad. The fact is that many of the issues that have preoccupied us these past 12 months are issues that affect society as whole, among them racial, gender and

Flash

009-010_AR.indd 9

24/11/2020 10:42

sexual equality, and who has the right to say, particularly given that most of us believe in some freedom of speech, which facts and histories are real and which are fake, and how we as a society might care for the many rather than the few (ArtReview could go on, but that’s partly what its power list is for – listing, that is, not going on). And, moreover, that while such issues have been addressed in numerous artworks over the last few years, the real impetus and urgency for dealing with them now has come from outside art, rather than from within. From people on the streets, on social media, and even in old-fashioned newspapers and books, campaigning for various forms of social justice, for the fact that Black lives matter, for the fact that any unnatural death is an unnecessary one, or that it is a duty of the powerful to help the powerless, or that power itself inevitably leads to the advancement and maintenance of both mild and dangerous forms of inequality. (Damn, it’s hard to get out of listing mode once you get into it.) One of the ironies of 2020 is that the more we become disconnected from the global artworld, the more we’ve had an opportunity to look closely at how art connects with real life and to think about how it might be a force that can improve civic discourse and civic society; to analyse the world around us and to imagine alternatives to what is. (Not, as ArtReview mentioned earlier, that artists have not been doing that for some time.) When we face major challenges, as individuals, communities and societies in ‘real’ life, wandering around an art gallery looking at art can seem something of a luxury. In some ways it is. But one way of looking at art and the discourse that surrounds it is as a vehicle through which things that were hidden are made visible, or audible, or readable. And it’s because ArtReview believes that that’s valuable (particularly at a time when art’s value is being questioned) that it takes its annual peek into what’s going on in the background and what forces are shaping and structuring the world of contemporary art. ArtReview

Point

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

Sign up to our newsletter at artreview.com/subscribe and be the first to receive details of our upcoming events and the latest art news

009-010_AR.indd 10

23/11/2020 13:26

The Impressionists, 2020, oil on canvas, 86 5/8 × 118 1/8" 220 × 300 cm © Adrian Ghenie GHE_ArtReview_Dec_111920.indd 1 436_PACE_AR.indd 1

Adrian Ghenie The Hooligans November 20, 2020 – January 16, 2021 New York @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

11/19/20 5:51 PM 20/11/2020 11:30

HÃ©lio Oiticica NEW YORK

AR_LISSON.indd 1

03/11/2020 12:33

CMY

OPENING SOON

ANUNCIO-MUSEO_AR.indd 1

13/11/2020 15:39

GALERÍA

HELGA DE ALVEAR

CMY

James Casebere On the Water’s Edge

10 diciembre 2020 - 6 febrero 2021

413-414_ANUNCIO-CASEBERE_AR.indd 2

13/11/2020 15:45

Tomma Abts Njideka Akunyili Crosby Anni Albers Josef Albers Francis Alÿs Harold Ancart Mamma Andersson Diane Arbus Lucas Arruda Ruth Asawa Michaël Borremans Carol Bove R. Crumb Noah Davis Raoul De Keyser Roy DeCarava Philip-Lorca diCorcia Stan Douglas Marlene Dumas Marcel Dzama William Eggleston Dan Flavin Suzan Frecon Isa Genzken

David Zwirner davidzwirner.com @davidzwirner

417_DAVID-ZWIRNER_AR.indd 1

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Donald Judd On Kawara Toba Khedoori Paul Klee Jeff Koons Barbara Kruger Shio Kusaka Yayoi Kusama Sherrie Levine Liu Ye Nate Lowman Kerry James Marshall Gordon Matta-Clark John McCracken Joan Mitchell Giorgio Morandi Juan Muñoz Oscar Murillo Alice Neel Jockum Nordström Chris Ofili Palermo Raymond Pettibon

Sigmar Polke Neo Rauch Ad Reinhardt Jason Rhoades Bridget Riley Thomas Ruff Fred Sandback Jan Schoonhoven Dana Schutz Richard Serra Josh Smith Al Taylor Diana Thater Wolfgang Tillmans Luc Tuymans Andra Ursuţa James Welling Franz West Doug Wheeler Christopher Williams Jordan Wolfson Rose Wylie Yun Hyong-keun Lisa Yuskavage

New York London Paris Hong Kong

13/11/2020 15:56

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info @ mendeswooddm.com

ArtReview_February_print.indd 441_MENDES-WOOD_AR.indd 11

14/02/19 14:22 20/11/2020 15:06

ISA MELSHEIMER false ruins and lost innocence DECEMBER 6, 2020 — JANUARY 16, 2021 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN www.estherschipper.com

418_ESTHER-SCHIPPER_AR.indd 1

13/11/2020 15:57

Bosco Sodi - Clay Spheres

437_AXEL_AR.indd 1

Axel Vervoordt Gallery www.axel-vervoordt.com

20/11/2020 11:38

415-416_LEHMAN-MAUPIN_AR.indd 2

13/11/2020 15:54

AR_WINSING.indd 1

05/11/2020 10:54

422_GALLERY-BATON_AR.indd 1

17/11/2020 12:52

Justin Williams

442-443_VIGO_AR.indd 1

#vigogallery

23/11/2020 14:25

Bram Bogart

442-443_VIGO_AR.indd 2

#vigogallery

23/11/2020 14:25

31:

Women Abb.: Zanele Muholi, Gamalakhe I, 2018

Exhibition Concept after Marcel Duchamp, 1943

Daimler Contemporary Potsdamer Platz Berlin

until June 27, 2021

art.collection@daimler.com www.art.daimler.com

Accompanying publications can be ordered online

Marcel Duchamp. The Curatorial Work art.daimler.com/en/publication/marcel-duchamp-the-curatorial-work/

Duchamp and the Women art.daimler.com/en/publication/duchamp-and-the-women/

AR_DAIMLER.indd 1

03/11/2020 12:27

Preamble The Interview David Lynch by Ross Simonini 30

ruangrupa Collectivise, Change and Adapt by Annie Jael Kwan 46

Dhaka Art Summit Old Stories, New Experiences by Mark Rappolt 40

page 30â&#x20AC;&#x201A; David Lynch, Eraserhead, 1977. Courtesy the Criterion Collection

December 2020

025-026_AR.indd 25

24/11/2020 16:40

Power 100 Introduction 52

Darren Walker Interview by Tom Eccles 84

The List 54

Sammy Baloji Interview by Louise Darblay 92

The Myth of the Pristine By Kiliii Yüyan 61

Laura Raicovich Interview by Oliver Basciano 94

The Web of Power 68 Bénédicte Savoy Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 72

Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan Interview by Marv Recinto 102

Matthew Burrows Interview by Oliver Basciano 78

I CAN’T BREATHE by Joshua Rashaad McFadden 63

Power in Numbers Power in Numbers 118

025-026_AR.indd 26

Back Page 122

ArtReview

24/11/2020 16:40

AR_COLLEZIONE-MARAMOTTI.indd 1

04/11/2020 11:52

Addie Wagenknecht • Cao Fei • Eva and Franco Mattes • Lee Blalock • Maryam Al Hamra • micha cárdenas • Ramin Haerizadeh • Rokni Haerizadeh • Hesam Rahmanian • Sophia Al-Maria • Zach Blas • curators: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Maya Allison

431-432_NYUAD_AR.indd 2

19/11/2020 12:56

Preamble

Surely has no unity, but nonetheless 29

AR-Dec-dividers.indd 29

19/11/2020 12:36

David Lynch. Photo: Josh Telles

30â&#x20AC;&#x192;

030-035_AR_v2.indd 30

ArtReview

23/11/2020 13:02

The Interview by Ross Simonini

David Lynch

“A good time is coming for us all”

David Lynch speaks in the simple declarative sentences of a man who has spent a lifetime whittling away the inessentials of language. In interviews he often repeats statements he has made before, almost verbatim, as if he had long ago sorted his thoughts and sees no reason to continue fussing with them. On first listen, his statements often seem glaringly obvious, but on hearing them echoed, the phrases start to gleam with deep, perennial wisdom. Since the 1970s, with the release of his first film, Eraserhead (1977), Lynch has refused intellectual forms of analysis surrounding his work. Instead he has become one of the great advocates for the pleasures of intuition and unresolved mysteries in art, forever denying the incessant inquiries of his pop-cult following. Likewise, his career has grown increasingly uncategorisable as he’s aged: in his late filmwork, he’s experimented with technology

(using grainy digital, consumer-grade camcorders on 2006’s Inland Empire), form (conceiving the 2017 television series Twin Peaks: The Return as a film) and distribution (releasing short films on his YouTube channel). As time has gone on, Lynch has also developed the nonfilmic strains of his career, including his first passion, painting, as well as his furniture- and lamp-making practice, his music and, most publicly, Transcendental Meditation (TM), spreading the word through the David Lynch Foundation, which he established in 2005, and travelling the world to lecture about the practice’s benefits. One of his most pointed goals has been encouraging ‘peace-creating groups’ of meditators who can use their thoughts to send ripples of calming love throughout the world. Recently, Lynch’s most public project has been his daily videos, which include narrated

December 2020

030-035_AR_v2.indd 31

weather reports and an unexplained, ongoing lottery, for which he pulls numbered balls from a jar. At the age of seventy-four, he is one of the surprise YouTube breakout stars of the past year, illustrating the repetition we are all enduring in the age of the pandemic, as we watch the day float by and seek meaning anywhere, including in a sequence of random digits. I spoke to Lynch on the phone in November. Already a self-described hermit, he has been quite forthright about his enjoyment of the lockdown and its benefits for his painting. Initially he agreed to talk for only 20 minutes, so as not to overly disturb his work schedule, but somehow the conversation rolled along for over an hour. In spite of my longtime admiration for him, the feeling of speaking to him was immediately easy and natural, as if I were discussing art with a kindly relative I was meeting for the first time.

23/11/2020 13:02

Ideas First ROSS SIMONINI You used to say that interviews were traumatic for you. Are they still? DAVID LYNCH Well, when I was younger I couldn’t even talk in an interview. So they’re not as traumatic as they were, but I still don’t ever talk about the meanings of things. RS Why was speaking hard back then? DL Because I came from the world of painting, which is more of a wordless thing. I was deep into that. And I didn’t even realise that I couldn’t talk until they asked me to do it. But I didn’t want to say anything anyway. So it was OK. RS Do you have a conflicted relationship with written language? DL I write to remember. I always say: write down the idea in such a way that when you read it again the idea comes back in full. So a script is for getting the ideas down, but it’s not the final thing at all. It’s to remind you of the idea, which could be much more full than what the words actually are saying. For instance, the script has no sound to it. It’s just ideas. RS You talk about ideas often – the beauty of them, the danger of them, and how the process of an artist is like fishing for them. For you, what is the definition of an idea? DL They’re thoughts that hold everything: the sound, the mood, all the information.

themselves to be that way. The reason you might see Inland Empire as more experimental, for example, is because of the camera I was using. It seems like an experimental film because it’s a low-res camera, but it’s not, it’s just like every other thing, though the ideas are a bit more abstract. RS So you’re making the distinction between abstract and… DL Concrete. RS It has nothing do with age for you then? DL Just ideas. RS But are the ideas that come to you different based on where you’re at in life? DL They’re always different. It’s like, there are all these different girls, but one of them comes in and you just say, well, man, that’s the one! And so that’s the girl you go with. And it’s love. RS Do you ever conduct research for generating your ideas? DL I’ve gotten ideas from my oral pathology book. It’s the study of the oral cavity.

“You want to find a meaning, but now the world goes so fast. It’s just screaming on the surface loudly”

RS Are ideas more developed than regular thoughts?

RS This is a book you turn to often?

DL Some thoughts are just more interesting than others. I’ll have an idea to go get a cup of coffee, for instance. Or for a scene in a film. Or for making a chair. This is why daydreaming is so important to me. All the thoughts just flow.

DL It’s my number-one book! I’m partway joking, but not really. I love my book on oral pathology. But if you read this and then you get some books on oral pathology, it might not be your cup of tea.

RS Do you ever start working without an idea?

RS Do you read anything else repeatedly?

DL You could do that, but as you go up to a blank canvas, as soon as you pick up a brush, you choose a colour of paint and you think about putting the brush somewhere – those are all ideas. So in a way, you can’t really do anything without ideas.

DL I don’t read. I like to daydream. I have read books, but very few. RS The O.J. Simpson trial had some impact on Lost Highway [1997]. Do you look to the news for ideas? DL Everybody watches the news these days. Normally I wouldn’t watch the news so much, but right now it’s kind of interesting.

RS From the outside, it appears that your film career began with experimental work, then transitioned into the mainstream and then returned to experimentation. Is that how you perceive the trajectory of your work?

RS You’ve often said that artists have to be selfish. Do you think that makes art a morally fraught territory?

DL Well, it all depends on the ideas. Some things are very contained and straight ahead, like The Straight Story [1999], which is not something I wrote. And some things are more abstract. I guess when it’s more abstract, you could say it’s experimental, but it’s not really experimental, in a way. Ideas come and form

DL It’s not just artists. It’s anybody who is into whatever they love. A lot of times people don’t love their profession, but whatever they’re in love with, they want to do it. And you have to have the time and space to do it. And so it precludes a bunch of things. It’s not a sacrifice. It’s just the way it is.

030-035_AR_v2.indd 32

RS How has parenthood related to this selfishness for you? DL Well, man, I got four kids. I never wanted to get married and I never wanted to have children. I’ve been married four times and I’ve got four kids. So it’s a torment. But once you have a child, the second you see them, you’re cooked. You fall in love with them and it’s a different world. And there’s not much you can do about it. But it’s a great thing. And that’s a torment because it does affect the work and it’s definitely a conflict. Definitely. The trick is to be with people who understand, and I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had great wives and great kids.

On The Other Side RS How do you conceptualise a continuing story versus a closed form like a film? DL The closed one has a form, and it’s called a feature film. The open one has no form. It’s got the possibility to go on forever, and it’s thrilling because it allows for magical things to happen. You’re going deeper and deeper into this world. Ideas are flowing and it could go anywhere. And that’s a beautiful thing. RS Which is Twin Peaks: The Return? DL It’s an 18-hour film. You could see it all at once without the opening credits each time. Stick it together and it’d be a long film. RS Does it bother you that viewers feel the need to resolve the mysteries of Twin Peaks rather than allowing them to be unresolved? DL I always say that people are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues. Some people wonder and look around and they take what they see and try to figure out what it all means. And they reach different conclusions. We are all like detectives, trying to figure out the meaning of life. And the same thing goes for film. You want to find a meaning – at least some people do. But now the world goes so fast. It’s just screaming on the surface loudly. And there’s not that much time for people to contemplate things and daydream and ponder. RS I wonder if the pandemic has changed that. DL I think it has. It has slowed things down and people come face-to-face with themselves and it’s scary. People are going nuts and they’re looking for any entertainment or any kind of thing to escape just being by themselves and thinking about things. And we’re all sorta like that. It’s really tough to be on your own. Because it causes something to happen. Things slow down and you find yourself with yourself. But I think something really good is gonna come on the other side

ArtReview

23/11/2020 13:02

Eraserhead (still), 1977, dir David Lynch, 89 min. Courtesy the Criterion Collection

December 2020

030-035_AR_v2.indd 33

23/11/2020 13:02

Squeaky Flies in the Mud, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

34â&#x20AC;&#x192;

030-035_AR_v2.indd 34

ArtReview

23/11/2020 13:02

of this pandemic and all the changes that are going on. A good time is coming for us all. RS It’s a transformation. DL That’s exactly right. It’s a necessary step to get somewhere that makes more sense. RS I’ve been watching your weather reports and ongoing lottery during this time. Do you see these activities as an ongoing performance?

Like Mining Gold RS Painting is more of your solitary art, then. Are you able to fall into a trance while doing that? DL Yeah. You’re in the zone. Time stands still. And when you make a film, you’re just in that zone for a very long time. RS Do you mostly paint outside?

DL I see it as a torment. I have to do this every day. The good news is, there’s a lot of great people on my site, David Lynch Theater. They’re just a good bunch and they like the weather report and the number each day. And I want to give it to them.

DL I’ve painted in different cities, but in LA, my studio is basically outdoors. Painting involves things that are toxic. You want it to be able to do certain things, so it’s better to have an outdoor studio.

RS Can you make it less tormenting for yourself?

DL Different times of the day have different light in LA, but when it’s blinding golden sunshine, it’s not always perfect for painting. I think the place is really important, so I do a certain thing here in LA, but I’ve also done paintings in Paris that are quite different. In different places, all the senses are sensing different things and the painting comes out different.

DL Once you get used to something, it’s hard to give up. I could say, “I’m only going to take care of one every week, not every day,” but then it doesn’t work out for me. RS Are you making music during this time? DL Well, my dear friend Dean Hurley moved to Virginia, so I don’t have an engineer to help me. I can paint on my own, but I don’t know how to run the studio, so I need an engineer. So it’s a quiet time for music. I got a full-blown studio, but I don’t have any money to pay someone to work it, because there’s no work right now. So we’ll see what happens on the other side of this transition. RS So with music, it’s a process where you have the ideas, but somebody else is there to realise them. DL For the technical side, yes. I know a lot of musicians work on their own, but I’ve always worked with other people. And I love it. But when there’s a combo, like when I worked with Angelo [Badalamenti] or with Dean, it comes out different. Music is a magical thing.

RS Does the outdoor light affect how you paint?

RS A lot of your work in television and film bears the mark of your conflict with the medium and the industry. Do you feel a similar struggle with painting and the artworld? DL I struggle like crazy with painting. It’s like mining gold. You hit a vein and for a while, you’re just bringing in the gold. Then the vein runs out and you hope there’s more gold, but you’re digging through rock and there’s just no gold. And you keep digging and then eventually you find it. But it’s tough going from one vein to another. And that has happened many times with a painting, where I burned out that last vein and I’m looking for the next gold. But every medium is different. Every medium is infinitely

deep and every medium will talk to you. Once you start working in that medium, it starts talking to you and it teaches you how it works and what it does. And then ideas start flowing in that particular medium. RS Do you work on multiple projects during the course of a day to keep the ideas flowing, or do you focus on one project for longer period of time? DL It depends. There are days when I would do two or three different things, but when you’re into painting, heavy into it, that’s pretty much it for those days. And that’s the same with anything. When I’m working on a feature film, that’s all-consuming. There’s no room for painting. There’s no room for anything else. And if you’re really into one medium, chances are you’ll be in it, day after day, until you burn it out. RS Do you work continuously all day long? Do you have periods in the day where you don’t work? DL You work all day. I mean, if you were to see me, the actual working-working might not be that much, but the thinking goes on all day long. RS Are all these different mediums part of a single unified artwork, or has it all been a series of individual experiments? DL They’re all experiments. It’s a blessing that there’s so many different mediums for us to enjoy. There’s just so much pleasure in every one of them! And when you get frustrated you go to the next thing, and that’s the only problem ever – that writer’s block. You need ideas. That’s why I always equate it to fishing. You just have to have patience and put the line out there and the ideas will come. The ideas will come! Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast, Subject Object Verb

Today’s Number Is… (still), 17 November 2020, episode from the David Lynch Theater YouTube channel. Courtesy David Lynch Studio

December 2020

030-035_AR_v2.indd 35

23/11/2020 13:02

Richard Mosse, Mineral Ship, 2020 © Richard Mosse. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Fire: the ninth cycle 2020. The year of the pandemic. An emerald spring reminded us of the breath-taking glory of the natural world. Beautiful the days may have been, but they were touched by the deadly march of the coronavirus, which is still with us. Photographers respond to such times with rich imagination. Prix Pictet Space laureate Richard Mosse is one. This year he has spent months in the Amazon making new pictures that chronicle the damage to the rainforest’s fragile ecosystem. Damage caused by the wholesale burning of the forests of Northern Brazil. Mosse’s satellite ‘maps’ of rich tracts of forest lost to flame add to the lexicon of fire images that have become the defining visual chronicle of climate catastrophe. To fly across Africa at night, for example, is to witness a terrible unfolding fire-tapestry. The consequence of slash-and-burn agriculture and the toxic incineration of vast dumps of so-called First World plastic waste. Such images hold great photographic power. As the leading photography prize for sustainability the Prix Pictet has, for twelve years, championed photography that focuses on the critical environmental and social issues of our time.

Over the coming months the Prix Pictet’s global network of over 300 nominators will identify portfolios of work that align with the ninth theme. These portfolios will be reviewed by the independent Jury chaired by Sir David King. The Fire shortlist will be presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in July 2021. The ninth laureate will be announced at the opening of the award exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in December 2021. Prix Pictet Podcast: ‘A Lens on Sustainability’ Listen to the new Prix Pictet Podcast season beginning today with the episode, Fire, featuring photographers Sebastião Salgado, Richard Mosse, Daniel Beltra and the philosopher AC Grayling. Prix Pictet Book: ‘Confinement’ Images by photographers shortlisted for the eight cycles of the award to date appear in the new Prix Pictet book Confinement which will be published in January 2021 by teNeues. Twitter: @PrixPictet Instagram: @Prix_Pictet #PrixPictetFire Facebook.com/prixpictet www.prixpictet.com

As Prix Pictet Chair Stephen Barber explains, the choice of Fire as the theme for the ninth cycle of the award is timely. “Fire has hardly been out of the news since the inferno that consumed Notre Dame in Paris in early 2019. We have seen record rainforest blazes in the Amazon, forest and bush fires in Australia and conflagrations in California. It is the fourth element. Fire destroys and it renews. Fire means survival, renewal, and economic prosperity. Yet our abuse of this most capricious of elements is the source of most of our environmental woes.”

423_PICTET_AR.indd 1 PIC_T20-094_23955_Prix-Pictet_ART-REVIEW_300x235mm_UK_ENGLISH.indd 1

17/11/2020 15:31 17/11/2020 13:43

28â&#x20AC;&#x201C;31.01.2021

10 edition th

artgeneve.ch

Art21_ArtReview2_rz.indd 1 AR_ART_GENEVE.indd 1

30.10.20 09:57 03/11/2020 12:25

Helen Booth

BREATHE 16 January - 20 March 2021

www.orielmyrddingallery.co.uk

OCEAN HIGHWAY N e w Yo r K - Pa r i s - B r u s s e l s

Fine Art Shipping

w w w . o c e a n - h i g h w a y. c o m 100

OCEAN HIGHWAY.indd 1

440_FRACTIONS_AR.indd 1

BOGART STREET

–

BROOKLYN, NY 11206

–

716

442

3776

17/11/2020 22:51

20/11/2020 13:16

NOTE KRITSADA, TRY ME! I SPEAK ART, 2020, CERAMIC, SOUND SYSTEM, PLYWOOD, CLEAR STYRENE SHEET & PAPER

NOTHING PERSONAL BY NOTE KRITSADA 9 JAN - 13 FEB 2021

WWW.NUMTHONGARTSPACE.COM

AR_Numthong.indd 1

NUMTHONGARTSPACE@GMAIL.COM

04/11/2020 12:50

Old Stories, New Experiences Chance encounters and spooky foresight put the Dhaka Art Summit at the centre of key conversations about 2020 by Mark Rappolt

It’s been a long time since the biennial Dhaka Art Summit took place chance encounters with works of art and people that you wander in February this year. In more ways than one. The fact that it was titled into without a plan – even if, when it comes to writing about it, referSeismic Moments, a play on the notion of the summit as being some- encing a well-ordered catalogue, you’re conditioned to make it seem thing geological as much as social and political (or ‘how the world like part of one. Perhaps it’s those elements of chance, or serendipity, is moving and how we move in the world’, as the summit’s chief that enliven everyday experiences, that we miss most while living curator, Diana Campbell Betancourt, put it in her introduction in the with restrictions on our mobility. catalogue – a theme that seemed to be summed up by Bharti Kher’s I’d made a wrong turn on the way to meet a friend when I stumIntermediaries, 2020, two halves of two idols, supersized and stitched bled into a panel discussion that I later found out was titled ‘Collective together to form one Frankensteinian new avatar, parked outside the Practice and Economy’ in an indoor-outdoor space on the Academy’s Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, which hosts the summit), seems ground floor. The event was part of a series of discussions around oddly prescient now in ways that were presumably unintended at the collective working methods convened with input from Raw Material time. That’s both the beauty and the curse of language: it’s a slippery Company in Dakar, Senegal. This session was about how collective and changing thing. practices develop the conditions for independence and reform, something that seemed loosely to connect Part exhibition (divided into nine notionally discrete shows present- Workshops, including a participatory event with a miniexhibition dedicated ing both historical and contemporary on how to form a collective, seem less glib to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the driving force behind work and knotting together themes and superficial now that such ways of workBangladesh’s independence and such as feminism, colonialism, postfounder of the Shilpakala Academy, colonialism and, most dominant, of ing have become an urgent necessity which took place in parallel to the all the potential of grassroots and collective action – bottom up and horizontally structured), part confer- summit itself (this year marks both the 100th anniversary of his birth ence, part moving-image festival (that section curated this year by and the 45th anniversary of his assassination). Someone about whom The Otolith Group), part meeting point, the weeklong summit has I had previously thought little and knew (shamefully, I began to feel) established itself as one of the essential gathering points for people less. But one of the features of this edition of the summit was the involved in contemporary art across Asia (and indeed beyond) to way in which it folded together past and present time with a view to discuss, compare and contrast their practices and the contexts that enabling future agency. shape them (with an emphasis, worth restating now, on in-person Back in the talk, presentations by a local, open-platform visual interaction). There’s naturally a certain dewy-eyed nostalgia that arts collective, Shoni Mongol Adda, and the Hong Kong Artist Union comes with reflecting on those last kinds of encounter – there was were followed by Bouba Touré, introducing a Mali-based agricultural a growing awareness in February that COVID-19 might not be some- collective called Somankidi Coura that he had cofounded in 1977. thing that was totally confined to China (flights were being cancelled Somankidi Coura is a 25-hectare farming project (now evolved into or postponed), but nothing, it seemed (a bit naively) then, to get over- a village of around 300 inhabitants), grounded in attempts to naviexcited about. But there’s also an opportunity to think about what gate issues of migrant returns, self-sufficiency, agency and workers’ makes such encounters important. And much of that lies in the rights. While the collective’s work involves the establishment and

040-043_AR.indd 40

ArtReview

24/11/2020 15:58

Bharti Kher, Intermediaries, 2019â&#x20AC;&#x201C;20 (installation view, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka). Courtesy the artist; Nature Morte, New Delhi; and Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka

December 2020

040-043_AR.indd 41

24/11/2020 15:58

top Otobong Nkanga, Landversation, 2020, installation and conversations from Dhaka. Courtesy the artist; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York & Brussels; and Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka above Kamruzzaman Shadhin, The Fibrous Souls, 2018–20, jute, cotton thread, brass, clay. Courtesy the artist and Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka

040-043_AR.indd 42

ArtReview

24/11/2020 15:58

navigation of archives, discrete photography projects and more to use narrative and storytelling as a medium (which is perhaps where general documentation, the extent to which it can be described as Touré’s presentation most obviously became a form of art). The ultia work of art, rather than a practical solution to immediate problems, mate effect of which is to emphasise that nothing comes from nothing is debatable. And it made the previous presentations feel all the more and that current debates are more rooted in the past discussions than grounded for that, grounded that is in common-sense definitions we might think. of use and function and context, rather than a purely artistic sense of Storytelling, past memories and new experiences also animated these. Other workshops, including a participatory event on how to The Trans-Bangladesh, an eight-page (free) newspaper featuring prose, form a collective (or, more properly, how to connect with and work poetry and photography that was produced as part of a collaboration with other people), led by Gudskul, now seemed less glib and superfi- between the artist-led, Lagos-based Invisible Borders Trans-African cial than they had at the time. They feel even less superficial now that Photographers Organisation, and local entities Drik Network, such ways of working have become a more urgent necessity rather Pathshala Media Institute and the Chobi Mela photography festival. It looks at the relevance of history, the ways in which we than a slowly building trend. The friend had to wait. The experience of the summit is a bit like being in the midst explore other cultures or draw parallels from them to our own, and how generally we connect to the of a whirlwind of ideas, with so unfamiliar and the unknown: the many talks, workshops, exhibitions It’s like being in the midst of a whirlwind kind of exchange that the summit and film screenings going on simulof ideas; you grab onto things that fly by at is all about. Meanwhile, Geographies taneously (collectively featuring the time, but some connections only become of the Imagination, a collaboraaround 500 participants), together with a local and international audition between Berlin-based Savvy apparent once the dust has settled Contemporary and Jothashilpa ence (made up of real people and art people) that numbers in the hundreds of thousands, that you (a Dhaka-based collective of cinema-poster painters), took the form grab onto things that fly by at the time, but some connections only of a pair of banners snaking from past towards present (and being become apparent once the dust has settled. The ‘Collective Practice added to during the course of the summit), charting the nexus of and Economy’ discussion cast a new light on two archival exhibi- geography and political power, collective resistance and transnations: Nobody Told Me There Would Be Days Like These (the title draws on tional alliances, assessed from the vantage points of the 1905 partithe lyrics of a John Lennon song), which examined the work of groups tion of Bengal and the 1884 Congo Conference in Berlin, at which 14 operating in the fields of art, theatre and film in Bangladesh during colonial powers carved up Africa. the 1980s and how they had shifted their disciplines to deal with socioAfter passing by murals featuring national poets Rabindranath political engagement; and Roots, which looked at the ways in which Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam in the Benapole land port in western artists have been at the centre of art education during the 1950s and Bangladesh, Lagos-based writer Kay Ugwuede notes in The Trans60s. One of the most interesting developments of the summit over a Bangladesh that she is ‘intrigued by the country’s elevation of artists, decade of its existence is the way in which talks and exhibitions estab- the idea of such a thing as a “national poet”, and I wonder if this has lish a kind of perpetual two-way feedback loop between the past and carried on till present times or are vestiges of the past’. The summit the present, one context and another, activated by the ability of each advocates both a yes and a first step in articulating a why. ar

Clarissa Tossin, A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky), 2019, laminated archival inkjet prints and wood. Courtesy the artist; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka all images Photo: Randhir Singh

December 2020

040-043_AR.indd 43

24/11/2020 15:58

430_TAIPEI_AR.indd 1

19/11/2020 12:25

Lessons from 2020 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Collectivise, Change and Adapt by Annie Jael Kwan

Its hand forced by the pandemic, ruangrupa accelerates plans to upend Documenta 46â&#x20AC;&#x192;

AR-December-Feature-ruangrupa-PH.indd 46

ArtReview

24/11/2020 13:25

While ruangrupa’s international standing has increased dramat- seen as epitomising the ‘contemporary’ in art practices across the ically since its appointment as curator of Documenta 15 in early Southeast Asian region. 2019 (the exhibition is due to take place in 2022), its practice is longWhile its members have developed individual creative portfolios standing, approaching two decades of existence as this tumultuous across different disciplines, ruangrupa’s collective practice is driven year comes to an end. The initiative to develop ruangrupa in 2000 by the lack of infrastructure support and opportunities for contemwas led by artist Ade Darmawan, architect and designer Hafiz and porary art discourse and practice in Jakarta and Indonesia, the pragwriter Ronny Agustinus, among 20 others from Jakarta, Bandung and matic need to share resources of space and equipment, and the urge Yogyakarta who participated in a fundraising exhibition at Cemara 6 to democratise artistic and social participation by engaging with Galeri in southern Jakarta. Its founding came about two years after broad communities, as well as students and young artists. The results the resignation of Indonesian president Suharto and the end of the include workshops, zines, festivals and exhibitions. It was during New Order Regime (1965–98), during the ensuing Indonesian these intense and expansive community projects that ruangrupa reformasi period that brought about social, political and cultural began to develop their practice of lumbung, a working model based change in the nation, including legislation that permitted some de- on the communal surplus-grain warehouse intended for shared future use. In 2003 ruangrupa centralisation of the government, founded one of the major biennial and more tolerance for dissent and ruangrupa’s collective practice is driven democratic reform. As art historians events in Jakarta, OK. Video – Jakarta by lack of infrastructure support, the such as Thomas Berghuis and David International Video Art Festival need to share resources and the urge to (now called Indonesia Media Art Teh have suggested, this historical moment coincided with a period of democratise artistic and social participation Festival), an ongoing thematic fesincreased international attention tival that presents local and interon contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and experimental art collec- national video and new-media art in various public locations across tives such as Ruang MES 56, established in 2002 by a group of artists the city. One of its founding members, farid rakun, recalled that in Yogyakarta, R.A.P. (Rumah Air Panas), founded in 1997 in Kuala the 2007 iteration of the festival, titled Militia, intended to make a Lumpur, and Green Papaya, launched in 2000 in Manila, to name a tour of more than 30 Indonesian cities in the space of a year or so, an few, were deemed to have played an important part in this develop- endeavour that demanded such effort that it nearly broke up ruanment. Both Berghuis and Teh venture that ruangrupa’s work marked grupa. But the experience brought it invaluable knowledge of the a clear break from post-Cold War art produced under the author- different operations of collectives in Indonesia. Furthermore, in June itarian practices of censorship of the New Order and exhibited 2010 the group presented Fixer, a survey showcase of 21 artist colleconly after obtaining permits from the Department of Culture and tives and alternative spaces from across Indonesia at the JakartaDepartment of Home Affairs, the military and the police. Instead, based North Art Space. While the exhibition lasted only ten days, it ruangrupa’s projects operate using new modes of free circulation and was an important milestone for ruangrupa in gaining insight into currency within its national borders and internationally, an approach different models of collectivising as well as forming strong relational

December 2020

AR-December-Feature-ruangrupa-PH.indd 47

24/11/2020 13:26

all images Ruangrupa’s Gudskul turned into a production workshop for Personal Protection Equipment, 2020. Photo: Jin Panji. Courtesy Gudskul

AR-December-Feature-ruangrupa-PH.indd 48

ArtReview

24/11/2020 13:26

networks with collectives across Indonesia – which felt like a polit- possible” – both by itself and by its artistic lumbung partners. However, ical gesture in view of the previous autocratic regime’s intolerance rakun continues, the unfolding of this curatorial vision has to be reconfigured – instead of perceiving the process leading up to the for civilian organising. By 2017 ruangrupa’s networks and insights into how to collec- 2022 exhibition as the primary occasion to present art and engage the tivise across different contexts and sites led them to activate inclu- public, the narrative has now been flipped – ruangrupa is considering sive collaborative projects such as the RURU radio project, an online how Documenta may activate itself and its participants now, in our streaming radio with artists and interdisciplinary creatives that current time. Its take on how this reframes ‘contemporary art’ to fit the discussed everyday issues faced by people in the city of Jakarta. times is pragmatic, says rakun: “Forget about art for a minute, for an Ruangrupa also began to assert its influence via its work with the hour, for a blimp of time, because then maybe you can see the world in Jakarta Biennale, which rakun describes as a process of hacking the a much more useful and fruitful way, much more hopeful. I think we resources of the institution in transforming arts infrastructure and don’t need to fight for the supremacy of art in that sense… the insecudeveloping artistic agendas. Founded in 1968 by the Dewan Kesenian rity of that question to begin with… the existential insecurity of art.” Jakarta (Jakarta Arts Council) as Pameran Besar Seni Lukis Indonesia What this means in practical terms is that Gudskul, for example, has (Grand Exhibition of Indonesian temporarily put aside its art education programme and leapt into the Painting), before its name change in The group challenges the idea of institufray to respond to frontline needs 1975, the Jakarta Biennale had been tions as ‘neutral’ and aims to work as in Indonesia, by transforming its suspended after the fall of the New a double agent: artistic directors for a major space into a production workshop Order in 1998. In 2009 ruangrupa for healthcare and medical appawas appointed artistic director of exhibition pursuing an activist agenda its revival edition, then Darmawan ratus utilising its 3D printers and and rakun undertook various executive and interim directorial duties other materials, and using its artistic networks as a distribution chain for the 2013 and 2015 editions, until 2017, when the Jakarta Biennale to ensure the kits reach the health workers and hospitals that need worked with Melati Suryodarmo to further develop and estab- them most. Instead of art, the onsite ruru Shop has sold pesticidelish the significance of performance art in Indonesia. Most recently, free vegetables when local food supplies were impacted. its work of resource-building and -sharing returned to its homebase Like other projects of institutional critique, ruangrupa chalwith Gudskul, established as a ‘collective of collectives’ with Serrum lenges the idea of institutions as being ‘neutral’, often carrying the (founded in 2006) and the printmaking collective Grafis Huru Hara weight of national and ideological banners, and aims to work as (founded in 2012). Gudskul not only learned how to share land, assets a double agent: a team of artistic directors for a major exhibition and equipment, but also built transparency and mutuality into pursuing an activist agenda. In terms of the global lumbung it is trying to build via Documenta, ruangrupa has already begun dispersing the its financial operations. The shift, then, is that ruangrupa is no longer interested in exhibition’s decision-making process to the collaborative lumbung merely showcasing collectivising and activism, as it had via survey partners, such as the Festival sur le Niger in Mali, and curators Lara projects like Fixer, recognising that the artworld can be quick to Khaldi and Yazan Khalili working in Jerusalem and Palestine. This appropriate cultural capital – as manifested in the inclusion of serves to provide intense local understanding of working contexts as many socially engaged and issues-driven projects in largescale exhi- well as tap into the project budget to sustain local operational costs bitions. Ruangrupa’s intentions run deeper: to harness exhibi- during the current global turbulence. In harnessing the opportunity, tions such as Documenta, together ruangrupa recognises this process with its budget and network, as a “Forget about art for a minute, for an hour, is also one of ‘becoming’ – moving lumbung of shared resources to actifrom what critics deemed ‘contemfor a blimp of time, because then maybe vate transformations in art pracporary’ in the globalised art market you can see the world in a much more useful tices and the material economies to a practice that must instead be of hyperlocalised art organisations, instrumental in ‘futuring’ a more and fruitful way, much more hopeful” with the longer-term vision of sustainable, equitable and diverse building and activating sustainable global networks for the redistri- global art industry to come, one that works less on market competibution of power. How this manifests remains in process. tion and more on collaboration and the sharing of resources. I ask how ruangrupa’s ambitions have been affected by current Ruangrupa is no longer the kid hacking institutions from the global conditions, including worldwide travel restrictions, the loss streets. Rakun acknowledges that ruangrupa has become established of jobs and small businesses, the disruption of life and increased and is in its own process of ‘institutionalising’ by undertaking a role political upheaval. In relation to their operations, rakun describes it such as artistic director of Documenta 15. It holds power that it intends as “winter comes early… we thought we would have time to prepare to wield to construct a new system that allows for other ways of for the crisis, but the crisis came early… we feel the need to accelerate thinking and practice to be sustained. In this, perhaps, the pandemic the process, instead of postponing it”. While the practical implemen- has levelled a common starting point of reckoning – institutions and tation of schedules, travel plans and meetings has been disrupted, players alike now acknowledge that things have to change; they now and currently the ruangrupa curatorial team is split between Kassel, have to figure out how. ar Makassar and Jakarta, rakun is convinced ruangrupa’s Documenta curatorial concept of “lumbung needs to be practised as soon as Annie Jael Kwan is a curator and researcher based in London

December 2020

AR-December-Feature-ruangrupa-PH.indd 49

24/11/2020 13:26

Distance, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be distant artreview.com/subscribe 050_AR.indd 425

20/11/2020 15:19

Power 100

It receives a mental unity 51

AR-Dec-dividers.indd 51

19/11/2020 12:36

THE POWER 100 There was a point earlier this year, as death tolls mounted and various parts of the world lurched in and out of variously strict lockdowns, when it seemed as if the only thing that 2020 had demonstrated was that no human really had any power at all. As exhibitions, biennials and art fairs postponed or cancelled, it started to look as though anyone who made it onto ArtReview’s Power 100 would have been there simply by virtue of being located in a geographical region that allowed them to stay open, or that let them go out, even, or because they had managed, in whatever way, to be involved in putting on an exhibition of some sort. Or, more likely, that this list would consist of a virus, and nothing else. A nonhuman entity, repeated 99 times. (Although that would have been nicely in tune with the highfalutin end-of-artworld thinking.) In that sense, 2020 is the year that showed us how powerless we all are. Under the circumstances, ArtReview would have then made holiday plans for this month. If it could have gone anywhere. The Power 100 has always been an attempt to track the forces that shape art in the contemporary moment. It’s neither about building egos or backslapping, nor is it a manifesto. Its primary function is to track who or what is influencing the art that’s being made today. A snapshot, if you like, that seeks to highlight what’s going on in the artworld and who is providing it with impetus. Part science, part instinct, it operates according to the following criteria: are the individuals on the list influencing the kind of art that’s being produced and being made visible (invariably not the same thing)? To what extent does their influence extend beyond the local to the global? And how active have they been in demonstrating their influence over the past 12 months? And perhaps this year, more than any of the other past 18 years of the Power 100’s existence, how in tune is the artworld with the real world in which it exists? Which, to some degree, might be a reflection, or the sound, of certain bubbles having been burst. But despite what you hear, 2020 has not only been about the effects of covid-19. Things have been in motion, both because of the virus and because of the way in which it has exposed ongoing societal problematics. And so ArtReview’s list has been in motion too. The world of art, like the real one (pop!), has had cause to reflect on its part in the creeping euthanasia of individual and collective identity that has accompanied globalisation (as much as it has, in the past

052-053_AR.indd 52

and the present, fascism, imperialism and neoimperialism of various types), its double standards and structural prejudices in relation to race and gender that have operated for errr… in various ways forever. As economies shrink, workers are furloughed or terminated (to use the American idioms), artists’ revenue sources dry up, galleries go out of business, museums face permanent closure and biennials and art fairs don’t happen, questions have been raised about what and whom art is for. And, on a more basic and individual level, it’s forced many of us to think more deeply about why and to what extent any of us misses going to see it. Now that the airmiles are gone. As for ArtReview, it has always believed that it provides a space in which issues and realities can be juxtaposed, recast, reimagined and debated; a space in which minds can be changed, opinions reshaped. Hopefully safely, without anyone getting beaten, suffocated, shot or imprisoned. As much as the place and role of art is challenged in many ways right now, it provides a potentially perfect forum in which those challenges can be explored and discussed. That it’s not always safe and not always perfect is, of course, something that impacts on ArtReview’s list. And before you hit the keyboard or smartphone, ArtReview’s not saying it’s perfect either. Nor that it’s an ultimate judge. It’s not its fault if people believe that to be the case. Germany’s latest (at the time of going to print, at least) lockdown saw museums shuttered as health hazards while commercial galleries remained open, having been designated retail shops. So much for art for art’s sake. In other parts of the world, galleries have been more closed than open, in some parts a form of normal has returned faster than elsewhere. But despite a welcome embrace of digital distribution, the fact remains that the impact of galleries and institutions in terms of the physical display of art has been markedly less than in the past. Elsewhere, questions were raised about how useful art actually was within societies and nations that were stripping life down to something approaching the bare essentials. A June survey in Singapore’s Sunday Times ranked ‘artist’ as the number one nonessential job. In Europe, Britain’s finance minister, Rishi Sunak, talked in November about only being able to save ‘viable jobs’. Challenged about what this meant for musicians, artists and actors, he replied in a manner that’s normal for politicians, saying everything and nothing: ‘everyone’s having to adapt’.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:23

2020 This list is put together by a network of around 20 artworld insiders and outsiders located around the world. Under normal circumstances their paths would cross, some of their experiences would be shared, but in the current scenario that’s not been the case. Everyone has had to adapt, and it would be fair to say that this list has been put together in a year in which the experiences of contributors to this list have been more divergent than normal. Even as news, both fake and real, seems to circulate in various forms of media faster than ever before. Whether it concerns elections and murders and racial injustice in the us or Europe, extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, border disputes or the suppression of free speech in Hong Kong and many other places around the world. Of course, those of us who can access it keep track of art happenings online, but attention is increasingly focused on art that’s local, that’s to hand, now that we can no longer really chase it around the world. In accordance with that, this year’s list includes a greater emphasis on the circulation of ideas and values (about justice, equality, ways of living, our relationship with the environment and basic human rights, to name just a few), and the way in which they, as opposed to works by individual artists or artist groups, are changing how we think about and engage with art. The old cliché about it all starting with the artist doesn’t really hold; perhaps it never did. The Power 100 has always represented shifting values (and ways of valuing art) and changed points of view. Galleries and museums are, one way or another, and sometime or other, bound to bounce back. The nominations received from ArtReview’s network of nominators are then synthesised into a global list. Perhaps this year, for the reasons given above, that stage in the process has been more synthetic than ever before. A process that’s increasingly an act of translation as much as it is one of quantification. It’s for that reason that this issue includes an alternative way of looking at power: as a network, clustered around shared themes, and interpersonal connections, in which no one is at the top or the bottom. And in a sense, this is a truer portrait of how the artworld functions. Although it might not necessarily be the most blunt depiction of power. After a year in which our realities have become more immediate, in which the focus has been on protecting our bodies from other bodies, any sense of a collective reality is going to rest on an acceptance that there are many realities. A megagallery opening in New York may have little effect on the art

scene in New Delhi. A throbbing art fair in Shanghai may be of little concern to a struggling artist in London. Just as the art history we were taught at school (if we were fortunate enough to be taught it at all) may turn out to be a Swiss cheese of omissions spiced with a heavy dose of spin. One of the things ArtReview gets from each new iteration of its list, as its advisers attempt to whittle down the 400 or more people who were nominated for a spot, is an annual reminder of how much broader its vision could be. There would be no protests, no calls for reform, no argument or debate if power (and the inequalities that come with it) did not play out in shaping the type of art that gets exposed or the way in which it is presented. An artist doesn’t necessarily get a major museum show, simply because they are ‘the best’. Such events tend to be the result of a combination of the social, economic and, at times, political interests of a group of individuals. People with some sort of skin in the game. Whether their interests and networks operate consciously or subconsciously, or for the benefit of the many or the few. Indeed, one of the reasons ArtReview’s power list was initiated, in 2002, was to promote a consciousness of this – to examine the operations of a world that is forever teetering on the brink of becoming a self-sustaining insider chumocracy, or little more than a pantomime commodity exchange. Which is not to say, of course, that the list doesn’t contain people who are worthy of respect and admiration, or who may be acting, producing or thinking in ways that are worth emulating. For ArtReview, at least, it most certainly does. But, like most things in the real world, it contains those we might individually cast as heroes or villains, and in that sense is a driver of discussion and debate. All of which is, perhaps, a longwinded way of saying that the Power 100 attempts to map out power as it is and not as we would wish it to be. That there’s a necessary distancing involved. ArtReview saves the likes for reviews, columns, lovers and Twitter. And when it can get it, for ice kachang. There’s extra love too for all those people (anonymous so as to avoid potential pressure and sanctions – believe ArtReview, those things happen) whose opinions and advice help this list come into being, and to the few on the list and the many unacknowledged here who keep the art and the ideas that come with it flowing and circulating, at times against the greatest of odds. ArtReview

December 2020

052-053_AR.indd 53

25/11/2020 12:23

1 BLACK LIVES MATTER Activist Movement International new The power of the Black Lives Matter (blm) movement, launched back in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, continues to be felt at every level of the artworld and with an increased prominence and urgency in 2020: in the resurgence of statue-toppling in the us and across Europe, as campaigners seek to redress injustices of the historical record; in the visibility of Black figurative painting over the past few years; in awards and appointments; in the rush by galleries to diversify their rosters; in the belated attempts to decolonise collections and in the deaccessioning that might make it possible; in the postponement of Philip Guston Now; or in the Whitneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bungling of an exhibition about the protests. Both an explicit movement and a dispersed idea, blm has come to symbolise a global reckoning on racial justice and a paradigm shift in contemporary culture. What started as a protest against police brutality in the United States has catalysed movements from Britain to South Africa, dramatically reshaping the cultural landscape within which the international artworld operates. And as it spreads around the world of art, it impacts on how everyone makes work, displays collections and exhibitions, and engages with the public. In the process it has triggered a selfreckoning, a consideration of our own biases, complicities and allyships.

054-060_AR.indd 54

Black Lives Matter, and the Movement for Black Lives network of which it is a part, is distinguished from singleissue predecessors like the antiapartheid coalition by the intensity of its attention towards both the obvious and the oft-ignored structures of power that generate inequality. And so, on the principle that the values of a society are enshrined in the culture it valorises, museums have found themselves at the centre of fierce debates around representation, identity and the reproduction of injustice. Operating as a network of affiliated interests rather than a top-down hierarchy, Black Lives Matter also provides a method for a decentralised, decolonised and more equitable artworld. More importantly, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an ongoing working-through of historical imbalances, incorporating discussion, redressal and a recognition that we can change how we all work and structure things. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the promise, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:06

3 FELWINE SARR & BÉNÉDICTE SAVOY Academics Senegalese / French Last Year 6 2 Photo: Jin Panji. Courtesy Gudskul 3 Photo: Megan Medenhall (Sarr)

No single government-commissioned report in recent decades has had such a dramatic impact on cultural debates as that written by economist Sarr and art historian Savoy for French president Emmanuel Macron in 2018. By proposing the unconditional restitution of any object in national collections obtained through colonial-era ‘theft, looting, despoilment, trickery, and forced consent’, the two reignited long-smouldering arguments over the role of Western museums and the artefacts they hold. The repatriation debate has only become more heated in the last year. Savoy has become a de facto spokesperson for repatriation, speaking up for Congolese activist Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza – arrested for symbolically reclaiming an artefact from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris – while embarking on a £700k academic research project into the provenance of European cultural treasures. Sarr, meanwhile, has turned his attention to the urgent issue of Africa’s political and economic response to covid-19 and after. And in October France confirmed that it would return 27 colonial-era artefacts to Benin and Senegal.

2 RUANGRUPA Artist Collective Indonesian Last Year 10

4 © Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

What do you do when a global pandemic interrupts your plans for the world’s largest and most influential exhibition of contemporary art? The answer, if you’re ruangrupa, is to transform your workspaces into emergency kitchens and start fabricating personal protective equipment for the local population. Lumbung, the curatorial concept for the Jakartabased collective’s 2022 edition of Documenta, describes a granary for rice that, once harvested, is shared among the community. Both the action and the principle speak to the nine-strong group’s mission, since its foundation in 2000, to explore alternative models of artistic production to those structured by competition, capitalism and colonialism. It remains to be seen how a mushrooming team of collaborators – nine partner initiatives, five extra members of the artistic team, two design studios – will translate a focus on conversation and assembly into an exhibition on Documenta’s scale. But, in a holding year for ruangrupa, its commingling of work and life puts forward an increasingly influential model for artists and institutions struggling to adapt to a changed world.

4 #METOO Activist Movement International Last Year 21 Three years on from the global reckoning with sexual harassment, catalysed by the crimes of movie producer Harvey Weinstein, but which snowballed to every sector of society, men are still being called to account (and still needing to be called to account). These allegations might be made through the old media (against Dutch artist Julian Andeweg by newspaper nrc, for example – he has not responded to the allegations of rape and assault – or Iranian artist Aydin Aghdashloo, by The New York Times – Aghdashloo denies the misconduct allegations) or through the proliferation of anonymous ‘call out’ new-media accounts such as @surviving_the_artworld and @jerrygogosian. This last triggered the sacking of Gagosian director Sam Orlofsky after it published various allegations against the gallerist (who has not responded). Likewise, after @surviving_the_artworld published claims of misconduct against Jon Rafman (which he denies), the Canadian artist had shows in Hanover, Washington, dc, and Montreal cancelled, and Montreal gallery Bradley Ertaskiran dropped him from its roster.

December 2020

054-060_AR.indd 55

25/11/2020 14:22

5 FRED MOTEN Academic American Last Year 16

6 ARTHUR JAFA

7 GLENN D. LOWRY Museum Director American Last Year 1

Artist American Last Year 34 As America, and the world, convulsed in anger at the killing of George Floyd by police, Arthur Jafa’s videowork Love is the Message, The Message is Death, which propelled the artist to wider prominence in 2016, and which documents the trauma and triumphs of Black culture, resonated. Hence the decision by 14 museums internationally, including the Smithsonian and Hirshhorn in Washington, dc, the Tate Modern in London and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, to simultaneously stream it for one weekend in June on their websites. That work used Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam (2016) as its soundtrack, and the artist and the musician collaborated again this year, with Jafa making the video for Kanye’s new track Wash Us in the Blood (he has previously made videos for Solange and Jay-Z, among others). Jafa was in demand irl too, with solo shows at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto and, this month, at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

054-060_AR.indd 56

The coronavirus shuttered nearly every cultural institution across the United States in 2020, creating a cultural and economic crisis that is still rippling through the sector. Lowry’s moma wasn’t spared the pain. This time last year, its director was celebrating yet another expansion of the country’s flagship modern art museum – the price tag a mere $450m. Yes, there were critics of the museum’s ambitious collection rehang, but there were cheerleaders too. Then covid-19 hit. moma closed its doors and cut 25 percent of its budget – a mere $45m. Through some creative moves (buyouts, delayed hirings), Lowry managed to dodge making permanent layoffs (even if he did allow the education department to cut its contract workers). And at the end of the summer he made the brash move to recall all of the museum’s workers and reopen to the public. Again there were critics, but Lowry seems to understand that, whatever privilege moma might represent, its mission is to serve the people, and you can’t do that from behind closed doors.

5 Photo: Lamont Hamilton 6 Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels 7 Photo: Peter Ross

Whether it is writing an essay on the work of Sam Gillam, providing the rhythm for an opera by long-term collaborator Wu Tsang (The show is over, 2020, used Moten’s text ‘Come on, get it!’) or wading into the Philip Guston debate (he was against the postponement), Moten is a man whose words were listened to this year. More than that, however, his fundamental theory of a decentred society that can operate in the fissures present in the hierarchical one we currently inhabit, detailed in the ever more cited 2013 book (with Stefano Harney) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, is a blueprint for amorphous movements. Most obviously Black Lives Matter. Within the current economic order, Moten now has room to negotiate too: he was made a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellow, receiving $625,000 in unrestricted funds in October, distributed over the course of the next five years.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:07

Fund

FUND 5 Photo: Lamont Hamilton 6 Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels 7 Photo: Peter Ross

What happens to showing, seeing and making art when every place where art usually ends up suddenly closes? What happens to artists and the wider network of related workers when that network of galleries, museums, art fairs, biennials and nonprofits can no longer support them? In 2020, the year of the pandemic, art galleries and museums announced that they would soon go bust, art fairs and biennials were postponed and many, many artists, museum and gallery staff – never the most securely employed at the best of times – suddenly found themselves faced with complete unemployment. This year shows what happens when the complex economy of the artworld – from art galleries turning over millions, to artists working other jobs to pay the rent – comes radically unstuck. At first it was the venues that feared for their future; just a few months into the pandemic, large art spaces were raising the alarm that without footfall, ticket sales and other revenues, they would not survive. Across Europe, state governments under public pressure stepped in with vast sums to support struggling organisations: £1.57bn in Britain, €2bn in France, €1bn in Germany. But while some art venues got a hand to pay staff salaries and cover the overheads, it soon became clear that, for individual artists scrambling to apply for support meant to help the self-employed, the mixed economy of artists’ livelihoods was more complicated than an average treasury minister might ever have realised. And in the background, museums and commercial galleries furloughed or terminated huge numbers of staff and contractors. In the year of recurring lockdowns, the intricate interdependence of private and public money in supporting art and artists has been starkly revealed, and it has meant an explosion of activity to try to keep places and people afloat. Where the state hasn’t been able to keep up, artists have stepped in. Matthew Burrows’s innovative #artistsupportpledge campaign generated an estimated £15m of sales for artists in the first month of the pandemic. Wolfgang Tillmans launched his 2020Solidarity poster auction, supporting projects and publications under threat of closure. As Burrows’s campaign put it, generosity was infectious. But with the public face of the artworld shuttered, the pandemic has also seen other people usually in the background step forward; private patrons and public foundations, those whom the public usually sees only as a list of names on the ‘thanks to’ credits outside an exhibition, have suddenly assumed a key role. In the uk, the Freelands Foundation put £3m into emergency grants for artists and other creative practitioners. In the us, the Ford Foundation took the unprecedented step of issuing ‘social bonds’ to raise $1bn on debt markets and bolster its support of cultural organisations, particularly those ‘serving communities of color’, hit by the covid-19 crisis. Fighting the immediate economic effects of the pandemic, however, is only one part of the story of how art funders have become more proactive to social ends. With the Black Lives Matter protests driving the agenda on diversity, art collectors and philanthropists have made change a priority; in October a group of American collectors and museum trustees formed the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, to use their influence to ‘increase inclusion of Black artists, perspectives and narratives in us cultural institutions’. An unprecedented year for the artworld has demanded unprecedented resourcefulness – and the redirection of its substantial resources. Forced into less prominent positions by lockdowns and cancelled fairs, and with audiences suffering a degree of digital fatigue, galleries nonetheless remain an important part of the artworld ecology and economy. Work continues to be sold, although not at the rate and price of pre-covid-19 times, new networks to pool resources are formed, online platforms are shared and galleries are poised to bounce back.

December 2020

054-060_AR.indd 57

25/11/2020 12:07

8 THELMA GOLDEN

9 SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Museum Director American Last Year 7

Academic American new

10 JUDITH BUTLER

In January, moma ps1 held an event marking the publication of Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which examines the lives of young Black women in New York and Philadelphia during the early twentieth century. It is part of Columbia University’s newly promoted professor of English and Comparative Literature’s ‘very crucial work of expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition’, as Fred Moten told The New Yorker. At moma, her influence on art was made clear in a programme of performances, readings and screenings that featured Garrett Bradley, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Okwui Okpokwasili and Cameron Rowland. Hartman has appeared in Jafa’s films (both as a theoretical influence and physically: a cameo in Jafa’s 2017 video for Jay-Z’s 4:44); she wrote a text for Leigh’s Hugo Boss Prize exhibition last year; and she will speak with Cameron for the ica, London, in December. Her prominence, Jafa says, is ‘a victory dance for the marginal, edgy, weirdo Black nerds’.

11 DARREN WALKER

Academic American reentry (48 in 2017) ‘We are living in anti-intellectual times,’ Butler told the New Statesman in a much-shared September interview. The irony is that Butler’s key themes through three decades as a public intellectual, since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990 – gender, sexuality, queer radicalism – have come to dominate many artists’ thinking and making. This year Butler articulated a role for public intellectuals and artists themselves, in asserting the need, in an interview for thruthout.org, ‘to expand our ideas about why language, literature, visual arts, history, are important for understanding our world. That world cannot be reduced to “the economy” or “the nation” and neither is it fully defined by the pandemic.’ Speaking of her book The Force of Nonviolence, published this year, she said, ‘We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals.’

054-060_AR.indd 58

Philanthropist American

new

8 Photo: Julie Skarratt 9 Photo: Jai Lennard10 10 Photo: Stefan Gutermuth 11 Photo: Justin French

When Glenn Lowry retires from moma (2025, anyone?), Thelma Golden will surely sit at the top of the list of his potential successors. Golden has ably stewarded the Studio Museum of Harlem for the past 15 years, renewing its curatorial and educational programming (Legacy Russell was appointed associate curator in 2018), creating one of the most sought-after residency programmes in the us and updating its physical plant with a $122m purpose-built, David Adjaye-designed building. This year she was invited to join an elite group of Black museum trustees in the creation of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (Golden sits on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), funded by the Mellon and Ford foundations, whose aims are the cultivation of new Black talent at all levels of visual art practice and administration – something Golden knows well, as this has been her mission since beginning her career in the arts in 1987 as an intern at the museum she now leads.

As president of the Ford Foundation, in command of a $13bn endowment, this ex-financier and decorated champion of social justice has long held power behind the scenes. This summer Ford announced the sale of $1bn in ‘social bonds’, which will allow the foundation to double its grant-making this year and next, directing the additional funds to nonprofits involved in racial justice and education. And in September Walker weighed in on the controversial postponement of Philip Guston Now (by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tate Modern, London) on the grounds that paintings caricaturing the Ku Klux Klan risked misinterpretation. Speaking as a trustee of the National Gallery, Walker argued that a failure to adapt the show to the wider reckoning over historic racial injustice in the us ‘would have appeared tone deaf to what is happening in public discourse about art’, and as a consequence was widely held responsible for the decision. Walker now finds himself at the centre of the most emotive topic in contemporary art: who gets to represent what, and how?

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:07

12 ADRIAN CHENG

13 PAMELA J. JOYNER

Collector Hong Konger Last Year 73

Collector American Last Year 35

12 Courtesy K11 Art Foundation 13 Photo: Drew Altizer 14 Courtesy Forensic Architecture 15 Photo: Anna Tsing

As ceo of Hong Kong’s property and services company New World Development, founder of the k11 shopping malls and Art Foundation, and board member of many of the world’s major cultural institutions, Cheng has staked his future on the commercial potential of crossovers between luxury retail, property development and contemporary art. The grandest expression of this ‘art × commerce’ model, the $2.6bn k11 Musea on Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui harbourfront, celebrated its first anniversary with a showcase of works by Keith Haring hosted by Phillips, while Hong Kong’s k11 Art Mall staged an exhibition of Urs Fischer’s sculpture. Meanwhile, Cheng announced a collaboration with former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld and committed to halving his businesses’ carbon consumption by 2030. And at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, Cheng deployed his networks and resources to distribute tens of thousands of medical facemasks to low-income families in both Hong Kong and Mainland China, which led in turn to the #LoveWithoutBorders charitable initiative donating a further 2.5m masks to South Korea, France, Italy and the uk.

No collector in the twenty-first century has done more to change the official narrative of postwar American art than Joyner. The collection, built with her husband Fred J. Giuffrida, has, through influential touring exhibitions including Solidary & Solitary (2019), proven a valuable resource to historians reshaping the canon to accommodate African-American artists. Nor is she content with rewriting recent history, as Joyner’s residency at a studio near her California home has fostered present and future stars including Firelei Báez, Jordan Casteel and Kevin Beasley. A trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Trust and sfmoma, and chairperson of Tate Americas Foundation, Joyner also sits on the steering committee of the newly convened Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums. Having helped to make Black artists more visible, this formidable activist collector has joined those seeking to reform the structures that were responsible for their historic neglect.

15 FERAL ATLAS

14 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Activist Movement International new (Eyal Weizman, 18 in 2019)

Artist Collective International new

While monographic exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, fell victim to shutdowns, the power of Forensic Architecture, founded by Eyal Weizman in 2010, lies way beyond galleries. Its investigations into human rights abuses, employing the skills of architects, artists, journalists and academics, and combining digital simulation, computer analysis and crowdsourced media, appear on the agency’s website and, very often, in the evidence dossiers of legal cases internationally. In 2020 they have included a partnership with Bellingcat to map police violence at blm protests in the us and a reconstruction of the events surrounding the 2011 shooting of Mark Duggan by British police; and in 2019 an investigation into the killing of Turkish human rights lawyer Tahir Elçi that was used as evidence in the prosecution of three Turkish police officers. Forensic Architecture’s creative pushback against the technological surveillance state is not without consequences – in February Weizman was refused entry to the us because, he was told, ‘the “algorithm” had identified a security threat’.

Feral Atlas is a five-year curatorial project by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, involving a collective of over 100 scientists, humanists and artists who seek to examine the ‘un-designed effects of human infrastructures’ and which has culminated with the recent release of the interactive digital platform Feral Atlas: The More-thanHuman Anthropocene. The platform – a playful, political and poetic attempt to draw our attention to the formation of ‘feral’ dynamics (ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures but have developed and spread beyond human control) – combines imaginative mapping systems with scientific findings and artistic representation. While Feral Atlas featured in the 2018 Istanbul Biennial and last year’s Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the Atlas online suggests some of the power of putting diverse thinkers and makers from around the globe on a platform that goes beyond the usual limitations of physical place and intellectual disciplines – a form of networked collaboration that may be key to grasping the age of the Anthropocene and our current ecological crisis.

December 2020

054-060_AR.indd 59

25/11/2020 12:07

17 CECILIA VICUÑA

16 STEVE MCQUEEN Artist British reentry (51 in 2015)

Artist Chilean new ‘Everything that I had been doing for 50 years, it’s been mostly invisible,’ Vicuña told Artsy this year. ‘Then all of a sudden, boom! It comes out like an eruption.’ The artist, who in 1967 formed the radical Tribu No collective that staged political actions across Santiago and spearheaded the Artists for Democracy movement during the 1970s, has long melded, presciently, themes of climate change, deforestation, exile and women’s rights in her sculpture and performance work. Evidently the world is now hungry for art with teeth: this past year she received two retrospectives, at muac in Mexico City and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; she chatted to Hans Ulrich Obrist on environmental justice for Art Basel; and loaned a line of her poetry for the title of Sri Lanka’s next Colomboscope festival, Language is Migrant. Late last year she was also nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and won the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas.

19 HANS ULRICH OBRIST

18 HITO STEYERL Artist German Last Year 4

Curator Swiss Last Year 12

In protest of its relationship with Turkey, and the plight of the Kurds, the Berlin-based artist is currently refusing the German government permission to show her work as part of any external cultural diplomacy; she has however seen the biggest show of her career, I Will Survive, open at the federal K21 museum in Düsseldorf (which has pivoted online during the successive lockdowns; Steyerl’s videos are at home on the web, and she makes most freely available on the dark web). The survey, which moves to the Pompidou in Paris in 2021, comprises two dozen works from the past three decades of the artist’s practice, from which the prescient themes of conspiracy theories, warcraft, police violence, surveillance, artificial intelligence, big data and digital fatigue loom large. If her mix of political statement-making and formal experimentation has precedent, it might be found in the work of the late Harun Farocki, whose estate she made a show with at Thaddaeus Ropac in London in February.

054-060_AR.indd 60

The animals at London Zoo might have seen a little more of huo this year (he likes visiting on his rare downtime), but being grounded didn’t mean that life for the director of London’s Serpentine Galleries was any quieter. (In any case, as part of the institution’s 50th anniversary commitment to the environment, he says he will ‘significantly’ cut his air travel.) He took part in countless online events (talking to artists Marina Abramović and Cao Fei, discussing sustainable economies with academic Kate Raworth); collaborated with k-pop band bts on their global art patronage project; oversaw shows for Cao, Formafantasma and Patrick Staff in London; and curated a big retrospective for the designer Enzo Mari in Milan (Mari died shortly after it opened). With art lovers in lockdown globally, his longrunning do it project added 30 new instructional artworks to be made at home, authored by the likes of Aria Dean, Evan Ifekoya and Arthur Jafa, to a new Google Arts online hub.

16 Photo: John Russo 17 Photo: Jane England. Courtesy the artist. 18 Photo: Trevor Paglen 19 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

McQueen dropped off this list five years ago. Unusually, this wasn’t because the artist’s power had waned but because the sphere of its influence had shifted, after the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), from the gallery into the cinema. He returns after a year in which a retrospective at Tate Modern offered a reminder of the range of his talent. The show was complemented by McQueen’s Year 3 project at Tate Britain, which by commissioning thousands of school portraits made it possible for London’s multicultural youth to see itself represented in the museum. ‘It’s about recognition,’ McQueen told The Guardian, ‘Look! We are here!’ As if this weren’t enough, the first three instalments of Small Axe, a series of five films set among London’s West Indian community, were acclaimed on their New York Film Festival debuts; the anthology was later broadcast to nationwide audiences on the bbc. By shining a light on its hidden histories, McQueen has left an indelible mark on British culture.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:07

THE MYTH OF THE PRISTINE by Kiliii Yüyan

Conjure the quintessential landscape photographer. Chances are it’s Ansel Adams. It’s hard not to have in mind his black-and-white images of the Yosemite Valley, pristine and devoid of people, full of awe and wonder at the natural world. The same qualities dominate nature photography just about everywhere, for in nature, photographers have long seen wilderness as a place protected from people. But photography itself is just a baby in the timeline of history. Not that long ago, people of all cultures and persuasions saw the land quite differently. They saw it as a home, as a place to manage and use, and they felt a responsibility towards it. In short, people saw themselves as caretakers. We remain inextricable from the land. Just turn around anywhere, even in the most remote regions on earth, and the footprints of mankind lead into the distance. What’s changed is our perception of the natural world. Civilised peoples have become so disconnected from it that they no longer recognise their influence on the land, and have likewise forgotten their responsibilities towards it. But that’s not true for everybody. Indigenous peoples worldwide, from the spare Arctic coastlines of Greenland to the inner-city ethnic

districts of São Paolo, continue to steward and manage their local places, much as they have for millennia. They still remain attuned to the direct impacts that they have on their lands. We can have a positive impact as well as a negative one in terms of sustaining land, but we need to stop the collective amnesia and selective perception of nature. The photographs you see here all show a natural world directly impacted by humans in often subtle and unexpected ways. Landfills, as the only non-developed zones, become the last refuges for wildlife. Climate change causes an increase in mosquitoes, carriers of avian malaria, across the north. But the other side of the story is there too: renewable geothermal pipelines cross forests, endangered condors live on carcasses donated by ranchers, and Alaskan peoples harvest whales, while managing to double their numbers over decades. Natural systems are incredibly complex, and likewise our interactions with it are complex. But one thing is for certain – the wilderness that you may believe to be pristine has been managed and altered by humans since we arrived on each continent. It’s time to stop freeloading and time to rise as stewards once again. Kiliii Yüyan is a Nanai (Siberian Native) and Chinese-American photographer. He explores the human relationship with the natural world from different cultural perspectives

pages 62–63 Mosquitoes and Fledgling Gyrfalcon, 2019 Talons of a fledgling gyrfalcon assaulted by mosquitoes during a heat wave across Northwest Alaska. This climate-change induced heat brought temperatures up to more than 80°F in the region near Nome, AK in July. pages 64–65, clockwise Under the shadow of Acatenango, 2015 Feral goats run across a landfill, their home in this region of Guatemala near

the volcano Acatenango. Habitat is scarce in the Guatemalan Andes and even wildlife that does well living alongside humans congregate in landfills. Flora Aiken, Gift of the Whale, 2016 Flora Aiken gives a silent blessing to the first bowhead whale of the spring season. The Iñupiaq have a rich spiritual life which centres around the gift of the whale to the community. Iñupiaq elder Foster Simmonds offers a prayer, saying, “Hide something for me. Look at the

food, the whales. Look at the sea, the whalers. A blessing for them. Take that and hide it in your heart.” The whale here is tied up after being towed to the ice’s edge and is awaiting the village to come and help haul it onto the ice. Geothermal Meadow, 2015 A geothermal pipeline carries water heated from deep within the ground across wildlands of northern Iceland. Iceland is the world’s leader in renewable energy.

December 2020

061-065_AR.indd 61

Spread-Winged Condor, 2015 A California condor spreads its wings as it feeds on a calf carcass near Big Sur, California. Donated stillborn calves are often set out by conservation organisations to provide a source of food free from the contamination of lead bullets. Although condors are one of the conservation world’s great successes, they remain on life support, needing to be purged of toxic lead every few years.

25/11/2020 10:40

061-065_AR.indd 62

25/11/2020 10:40

061-065_AR.indd 63

25/11/2020 10:42

061-065_AR.indd 64

25/11/2020 10:46

061-065_AR.indd 65

25/11/2020 10:53

20 TITUS KAPHAR Artist American new When Kaphar was commissioned by Time magazine in 2014 to create Yet Another Fight for Remembrance – a painting commemorating the protests and activism coming out of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing by the police – he was well on his way to wider recognition. That commission arose out of a Time editor’s trip to The Studio Museum in Harlem and the viewing of Kaphar’s The Jerome Project, a portrait-based investigation of incarceration and Kaphar’s own family history. In 2018 Kaphar won a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant and mounted a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, dc. Last year he, along with artist Jonathan Brand and financier Jason Price, established nxthvn, an innovative and entrepreneurship-focused incubator and mentorship organisation serving artists, curators and students of colour. And when Gagosian announced Kaphar’s representation in October (his paintings are currently on show at one of the gallery’s New York spaces), the artist made sure it came with an endorsement of his nonprofit.

Museum Director / Museum Director / Curator French Last Year 41 / reentry (18, with Bernard Blistène, in 2016) / 41 The pandemic slowed Lasvignes’s expansion of the Centre Pompidou (far) beyond the 4th arrondissement, but only temporarily. The museum president (whose contract was extended this year, perhaps in recognition of his usefulness in Macronian soft power) was ‘on the point of signing’ a deal to open an outpost in Seoul, he said, now delayed. This follows the second show at the Pompidou in Shanghai, Design and the Wondrous, featuring a hundred objects, all part of the €2.75m the Pompidou will receive yearly, for five years, from China’s state-run West Bund Group. Work will soon begin to transform a former 35,000sqm Citroën garage in Brussels into that city’s biggest art institution (due 2023), where Swiss artist John Armleder took over the raw space to programme a series of events. The Paris institution, headed by Blistène and Macel, this year hosted a retrospective of Christo and Jean Claude, launched a museum-experience videogame and gave Paul B. Preciado free rein on a weeklong conference.

22 MARIA BALSHAW & FRANCES MORRIS

23 WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Museum Directors British Last Year 9 / reentry (5, with Nicholas Serota, in 2016) Tate got more publicity this year for a show it is not staging (at least not for two years) than those that it did. The postponement of a touring Philip Guston retrospective, due to open in London in February, amid sensitivities over the late artist’s use of Ku Klux Klan motifs, caused an almighty furore. Balshaw, director of Tate’s four sites, and Morris, director of Tate Modern, denied self-censorship, claiming in The Times that their institutional partners’ ‘credibility among black and minority ethnic audiences is at stake’. Tate Modern senior curator Mark Godfrey broke ranks, posting on Instagram that the decision was ‘extremely patronising to viewers’. For that he got suspended, as Tate’s corporate machine kicked into gear. It missed a step, however, while navigating another scandal, regarding an ‘amusing’ mural featuring depictions of slavery in Tate Britain’s restaurant. Meanwhile, the galleries manoeuvred between lockdowns to stage exhibitions for Steve McQueen, Zanele Muholi and Bruce Nauman at Tate Modern, Don McCullin at Tate Liverpool and Haegue Yang at Tate St Ives. The covid-19 closure took its toll: 313 restaurant, shop and publishing staff got the chop.

066-067--070-071_AR.indd 66

Artist German Last Year 15 The transition of the German photographer from era-defining documenter of European subcultures into artworld statesman and voice of conscience gathered pace this year. Having ventured into politics with a pro-eu poster campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, and then worked to promote voter participation in the 2019 eu elections, Tillmans became chair of the London’s ica last November, and this year rallied artists including Mark Leckey and Andreas Gursky to support arts venues, in Europe and beyond, threatened with closure due to the covid-19 pandemic. If Tillmans’s perennial high ranking can be attributed partly to his deft handling of social activism, artistic production and identity politics, the influence of his work also continues to grow. His first institutional show in Belgium opened at Wiels in February, and next year Tillmans’s canonical status will be rubber-stamped by a retrospective at moma, New York. Not bad for a club photographer.

20 Photo: John Lucas. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian 21 Photos: Philippe Migeat. Courtesy Centre Pompidou (Blistène); Thibaut Chapotot (Lasvignes); J.C. Planchet (Macel) 22 Photo: Hugo Glendinning 23 Photo: Dan Ipp

21 BERNARD BLISTÈNE, SERGE LASVIGNES & CHRISTINE MACEL

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:46

24 ACHILLE MBEMBE

25 MICHAEL RAKOWITZ

Academic Cameroonian new

Artist Iraqi-American new

24 Photo: Heike Huslage-Koch / Wikimedia Commons 25 Photo: Daniel Asher Smith 26 Courtesy Columbia University, New York

‘Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. If war there must be, it cannot so much be against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing,’ wrote Mbembe this year. A major thinker in postcolonialism since the 2001 publication of On the Postcolony, Mbembe is widely quoted for his ideas on who Western capitalism allows to live and die. Les Ateliers de la Pensée, the annual conference in Dakar he founded with Felwine Sarr three years ago, has become an important intellectual event. In 2019 it took the subject ‘practices of devulnerability’, and this year the pair wrote an open letter noting that Africa had so far weathered the pandemic well and pointing to an alternative history away from racist perceptions of the continent. A thinker whose profile is enough to cause controversy – earlier in the year, several German politicians and public figures sought to have his invitation to the Ruhrtriennale revoked (the festival was postponed in the end), accusing him of relativising the Holocaust.

Rakowitz’s heritage haunts his work. The artist’s recent commission in London’s Trafalgar Square was a recreation of the ancient Iraqi monument of Lamassu, destroyed by isis. Smaller destroyed artefacts were recreated at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York in January. Previously, he’s staged dinners served on plates looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces and run a truck serving food cooked by Iraqi immigrants and American veterans. Last year he withdrew from the Whitney Biennial in protest over board member Warren Kanders’s connections to the arms industry. This year he got into a spat with moma ps1 after the curators of a group show, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991–2011, refused his request to pause his work in protest over trustees Larry Fink’s and Leon Black’s financial links to, respectively, the operation of private prisons and a defence contractor responsible for the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. On being told that he couldn’t remove the work either, Rakowitz took direct action, wandering into the show with a remote and pausing his video himself.

26 GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK Academic Indian Last Year 30 Spivak is one of the most influential postcolonial thinkers and activists, whose work as a theorist and critic has ceaselessly campaigned against intellectual colonisation in a globalised world. Her 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, which tackled problems of representation and agency in formerly colonised countries, continues to be a key point of reference within postcolonial studies, and in recent years her influence has grown beyond academia and into an artworld that is attempting to decolonise its practices and institutions, becoming a lodestone for curators and artists working in the field. Advocating for the importance of the humanities in the redress of the economically dispossessed and marginalised, Spivak also runs the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Rural Education Project, which she founded in 1986 to fund and provide high standards of teaching in primary schools in her home state of West Bengal. She is currently a professor at Columbia University, where she cofounded the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

December 2020

066-067--070-071_AR.indd 67

COLL 67

25/11/2020 12:14

THE POWER 100

2020

1 BLACK LIVES MATTER

FELWINE SAR BÉNÉDICTE SA Academics Senegalese / French Last Year 6 2 Photo: Jin Panji. Courtesy Gudskul 3 Photo: Megan Medenhall (Sarr)

Activist Movement International new

24 ACH LLE MBEMBE

Academic Indian Last Year 30

4 #METOO Activist Movement International Last Year 21

Three years on from the global reckoning with sexual catalysed by the crimes of movie producer Harvey Wei snowballed to every sector of society, men are still bein (and still needing to be called to account). These allega made through the old media (against Dutch artist Juli newspaper nrc, for example – he has not responded t of rape and assault – or Iranian artist Aydin Aghdashl York Times – Aghdashloo denies the misconduct allega the proliferation of anonymous ‘call out’ new-media a @surviving_the_artworld and @jerrygogosian. This l sacking of Gagosian director Sam Orlofsky after it pub allegations against the gallerist (who has not respond after @surviving_the_artworld published claims of m Jon Rafman (which he denies), the Canadian artist had Washington, dc, and Montreal cancelled, and Montre Ertaskiran dropped him from its roster.

“IT’S A MATTER OF JUSTICE”

28 V NCENT WORMS

30 DAV D ZW RNER

COLLABORATE

Spivak is one of the most influential postcolonial thinkers and activists, whose work as a theorist and critic has ceaselessly campaigned against intellectual colonisation in a globalised world. Her 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, which tackled problems of representation and agency in formerly colonised countries, continues to be a key point of reference within postcolonial studies, and in recent years her influence has grown beyond academia and into an artworld that is attempting to decolonise its practices and institutions, becoming a lodestone for curators and artists working in the field. Advocat

December 2020

“I AM A BELIEVER THAT THERE IS NEVER A WRONG TIME FOR ART”

With a background in finance and philanthropy, Darren Walker serves as president of the Ford Foundation, a private us organisation created in 1936 by Edsel and Henry Ford, but now completely separate from the Ford Motor Company, with a mission to advance human welfare. The foundation is the second largest in the us, with an endowment of $13 billion. The Ford Foundation supports a number of arts organisations and states that it is ‘imagining philanthropy to catalyze leaders and organizations driving social justice and building movements across the globe’. tom eccles You came on as the president of the Ford Foundation seven years ago, and since then you have really shifted its mission towards a focus on issues of social justice and equality. How has that shift and focus impacted your thinking about the arts and what you support in the arts? darren walker I think our focus has shifted to addressing inequality in all of its forms. Social justice is a philosophy that we bring to philanthropy and philanthropic practice. It’s why I talk about social-justice philanthropy, which is a particular kind of philanthropy. The focus on inequality has resulted in having an analysis of the ecosystem of art and culture in this country and the way that ecosystem manifests forms of inequality. It does this in the way it does in most other systems in our country, through the lens of race and gender, class, geography. People are often marginalised, discriminated against and have, for generations, been left out of the narrative of art and culture. At the end of the day, one important function of the arts is to tell us who we are as a people, and to playback for us the narrative of America. We know that the arts have not fully engaged in that narrative, that the arts have, in many ways, served to perpetuate partial storytelling of American history and culture. What we are interested in for today is ensuring that the full, rich, vibrant, diverse story of a culture in America is told. In terms of a grant-making strategy that leads us to disproportionately fund organisations that reflect people of colour, indigenous people, people who have historically been marginalised. You can look at our most recent initiative, America’s Cultural Treasures [a national and regional initiative to acknowledge the diversity of artistic expression and excellence in America and provide critical funding to organisations that have made a significant impact on America’s cultural landscape, despite historically limited resources], as a manifestation of that view, our largest arts initiative in over a decade.

Darren Walker, interviewed by Tom Eccles

Artist Collective Indonesian Last Year 10 What do you do when a global pandemic interrupts your plans for the world’s largest and most influential exhibition of contemporary art? The answer, if you’re ruangrupa, is to transform your workspaces into emergency kitchens and start fabricating personal protective equipment for the local population. Lumbung, the curatorial concept for the Jakartabased collective’s 2022 edition of Documenta, describes a granary for rice that, once harvested, is shared among the community. Both the action and the principle speak to the nine-strong group’s mission, since its foundation in 2000, to explore alternative models of artistic production to those structured by competition, capitalism and colonialism. It remains to be seen how a mushrooming team of collaborators – nine partner initiatives, five extra members of the artistic team, two design studios – will translate a focus on conversation and assembly into an exhibition on Documenta’s scale. But, in a holding year for ruangrupa, its commingling of work and life puts forward an increasingly influential model for artists and institutions struggling to adapt to a changed world.

December 2020

29 LARRY GAGOS AN

26 GAYATR CHAKRAVORTY SP VAK

2 RUANGRUPA

ArtReview

27 CAO FE

25 M CHAEL RAKOW TZ

Black Lives Matter, and the Movement for Black Lives network of which it is a part, is distinguished from singleissue predecessors like the antiapartheid coalition by the intensity of its attention towards both the obvious and the oft-ignored structures of power that generate inequality. And so, on the principle that the values of a society are enshrined in the culture it valorises, museums have found themselves at the centre of fierce debates around representation, identity and the reproduction of injustice. Operating as a network of affiliated interests rather than a top-down hierarchy, Black Lives Matter also provides a method for a decentralised, decolonised and more equitable artworld. More importantly, it’s an ongoing working-through of historical imbalances, incorporating discussion, redressal and a recognition that we can change how we all work and structure things. That’s the promise, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

4 © Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The power of the Black Lives Matter (blm) movement, launched back in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, continues to be felt at every level of the artworld and with an increased prominence and urgency in 2020: in the resurgence of statue-toppling in the us and across Europe, as campaigners seek to redress injustices of the historical record; in the visibility of Black figurative painting over the past few years; in awards and appointments; in the rush by galleries to diversify their rosters; in the belated attempts to decolonise collections and in the deaccessioning that might make it possible; in the postponement of Philip Guston Now; or in the Whitney’s bungling of an exhibition about the protests. Both an explicit movement and a dispersed idea, blm has come to symbolise a global reckoning on racial justice and a paradigm shift in contemporary culture. What started as a protest against police brutality in the United States has catalysed movements from Britain to South Africa, dramatically reshaping the cultural landscape within which the international artworld operates. And as it spreads around the world of art, it impacts on how everyone makes work, displays collections and exhibitions, and engages with the public. In the process it has triggered a selfreckoning, a consideration of our own biases, complicities and allyships.

No single government-commissioned report in recent such a dramatic impact on cultural debates as that wri Sarr and art historian Savoy for French president Emm 2018. By proposing the unconditional restitution of an collections obtained through colonial-era ‘theft, lootin trickery, and forced consent’, the two reignited long-sm ments over the role of Western museums and the artef The repatriation debate has only become more heated Savoy has become a de facto spokesperson for repatria up for Congolese activist Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza symbolically reclaiming an artefact from the Musée du in Paris – while embarking on a £700k academic resea the provenance of European cultural treasures. Sarr, m turned his attention to the urgent issue of Africa’s pol response to covid-19 and after. And in October France it would return 27 colonial-era artefacts to Benin and

At the end of the day, we expect that probably $200 million will be raised [as of September, monies raised already totalled $156m]. The board is contributing $81m of that, but the remainder is coming from other foundations around the country. There will be probably 50 to 100 grantees, ultimately. te You spoke at one point about the Ford Foundation being interested in looking at the metrics of its results. What are the metrics you use in terms of thinking about organisations that you will support? dw I want to be really clear, some of the most important things in the world that ensure fairness, diversity, justice, equity, cannot be put on a spreadsheet. I am actually not a proponent of trying to create mathematical equations to understand the value of art. I do, however, believe that we need to understand the impact we’re seeking. One of the changes at the Ford Foundation since I’ve been president is that most of our grant-making is general operating support. We don’t do significant amounts of project support that we can isolate in our grant and track that specific project, that specific exhibition or that specific intervention. We support what I call the three I’s: ideas, individuals and institutions. When you support institutions, with general operating support, you’re supporting the strengthening of the institution. The metrics for that are metrics that measure the quality of leadership, the strength of their board, the financial resilience, and whether those things improve over the life of your grant, and can the improvement be reasonably attributed to your grant? There are ways of measuring that. But I think it was Oscar Wilde who reminded us that many of the most important things in the world cannot be measured. And the things that we measure are often not important. te Around three years ago, the New York City Mayor’s Office initiated Create nyc under Tom Finkelpearl. It’s an initiative that really questions boards of the city’s museums. Who are their audiences? What is the diversity on the boards and in the staff ? They made it clear that they were not going to talk about funding in relationship to that, but it was a red flag that was set out there, indicating that this was going to be looked at over the next few years. Do you think that’s been effective or will be effective? dw Absolutely. First, I commend Tom Finkelpearl for that initiative. I think part of the initiative was to, what I call, surface, name and frame the issue. Because the city had never actually established a dialogue about this with the grantees who received city funds. It put clear strategy requirements in place for every

ArtReview

dw I believe that there’s a recognition of the harm: things that may not have been perceived as harmful by whites in the past are acknowledged now as harmful. Look at the Guston controversy. I am a believer that there is never a wrong time for art. There is never a bad time to show a painting to engage the public. But, for the first time in my life, I agreed with Kaywin Feldman’s [director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc] recommendation to the trustees of the gallery when she raised the issue of the harm and pain of the imagery, irrespective of Guston’s antiracist and courageous engagement with that toxic imagery. Historically, Guston’s words were enough, considered enough by the art intelligentsia to allow what is clearly painful, harmful, toxic imagery to many people, certainly, to many people of colour. That is not to say that Black people cannot absorb and observe imagery that makes us uncomfortable. African Americans and people of colour have lived with imagery that makes us uncomfortable for our entire history in this hemisphere, so it is not that we are snowflakes and unable, it is that context matters. The context of October 2020, is that we are living in a time when at the highest levels of our society, white supremacy is being legitimised and valorised, imagery of lynchings, of clansmen is being appropriated by people who seek to do harm. Black people and others are truly feeling a level of pain that many have never felt. Because it is the compounding vectors of the pandemic that have disproportionately affected African Americans: the economic fallout and those who are most likely to suffer from this – the low-paid essential workers, who are then most vulnerable from having to work in the middle of a pandemic – while the rest of us can sit comfortably in our homes and work virtually; and the political climate, which feels hostile. It is the confluence of all of this that, in my mind, led Kaywin to make that recommendation to the trustees. We, of course, supported it because I think she was bringing us a message, not only from the staff of the National Gallery but from others, particularly, other people of colour who had never been engaged. This was actually less a decision about Guston and more an indictment of the lack

te Does the velocity of the current ‘reckoning’ surprise you? dw I think the velocity has not surprised me. Because the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement sought and successfully achieved an impact in, literally, every dimension of American life. There is no industry, no sector, no domain of American life where a conversation about race isn’t happening. I don’t expect that museums would be immune from that. The velocity is, in part, the intensity and the energy that emerged from the marches in the streets, from the discussions in corporate boardrooms and within museum boards and many other places where influential people gather. For the first time in this country there was a reckoning with the reality of racism. Because before the murder of George Floyd and the Movement for Black Lives this summer, racism in America remained deniable by white Americans. Deniability was an option. The Floyd murder, I believe, took deniability off the table. It is no longer possible to say that there is not some systemic racism in our country rooted in our history of white supremacy and our history of a racialised caste system that we have ignored and, in many ways, sought to erase. This is the work of culture. This is the work of the arts to address the historical erasure of narratives that are unpleasant and challenge the idea of American exceptionalism, and now align with our romanticised view of who we are as a people. te I remember hearing Fred Moten and a number of other great speakers at a talk just days after the election of Donald Trump. What struck me was that

December 2020

of preparedness of museums like the National Gallery to exist successfully in a new future. It was about how old playbooks and old ideas need to be updated and cannot be slavishly adhered to. As I said, most of the criticisms were from people who felt like me, “What do you mean? Right now, we need Guston more than ever. We need art more than ever. There is never a bad time for art.” That’s what I would have said a year ago, but the context matters. While some critics would say that what Kaywin did was cowardly, I would say it was courageous. Because, ultimately, we will be able to map out an exhibition that is seen in the proper context, hopefully, in an environment where racism and the kind of white supremacy that we’re seeing in this moment will have subsided. te It contradicts my thought. Because I was reading about all of this and thinking, “ok, who would actually have the authority to stand up and say no to the show?” Given a consensus around Guston, I thought, “Well, the only person who has the authority to say this is definitely Walker.” dw I don’t have the authority. I’m one person who brings up an opinion. I’m not naive. I understand that I speak from the platform of the Ford Foundation. Therefore, I want to be thoughtful and reflective as I was when I said what I said publicly – a simple statement: that context matters. The context in this country around race has fundamentally required us to excavate this convergence of race and art and representation. Who narrates? Who is the audience? When people say things like, “The audience will understand this” – you’re insulting the audience. Who is the audience? We know who historically has been the audience and if that’s the audience you’re talking about, you’re right – if you’re talking about the audience of white elites, who have traditionally been the gallery’s visitors. Because the reality, sadly, of the gallery’s history is that it has not been a place that has welcomed the people of colour. In the National Gallery’s history, it has staged only three exhibitions by African Americans. Among its staff, most people of colour are the guards, the art handlers, the movers, the porters, the people in administrative support positions. There is not a history of African Americans being in senior professional roles. There is no African American curatorial staff member and yet you are going to put paintings up of black men being lynched that are 96 inches square, in the largest gallery of the museum and you haven’t talked to any Black people in the building about what they’re going to see when they come to work every day. I’m not saying don’t

te If you’re a middle-aged curator, relatively high up in the hierarchy of a museum, you’re going to start to feel very defensive right now… A lot of people are going to feel very defensive right now… dw Yes. I want to be clear and fair. I think there are a good number of white curators who worry that they may not be being seen and treated fairly by their critics, and who may, rather than engaging, withdraw from the journey that we all have to be on. That would be a shame, because we need those curators to be on the journey. We need not engage in a cancel culture or an unwillingness. We progressives shouldn’t be intolerant. Those people like me who want museums to change don’t want to become intolerant of others who don’t see our view. I do want the people who want to be in allyship to see that there is a lot of room to work together. This is not about trying to call out people, at least not from where I sit. I think it’s a mistake to vilify individuals unless they truly deserve to be vilified. I think there is too much gratuitous mean-spiritedness in these discussions. I think we do need to tamp down the incendiary rhetoric.

te So what’s in question is the very structure of the museum? dw Yes. This is my point. This is why I love Guston and I regret that people have conflated the more important question here, which is ‘What is the future of our museums?’ My view is that the future is not bright if museums continue to be the museums of the past. In a more diverse and increasingly sophisticated international multicultural America, museums are challenged. Because the role of museums in society has been to narrate the American story, to narrate American identity and to hold a mirror up and say, “This is who we are.” That’s been the work of museums and not just in America, but in civilisation as a whole. Until recently, there was a pretty wellestablished idea of who we were. It was a Western-European hierarchical, patriarchal etc, society. That idea wasn’t being debated ten years ago. Back then it was demanding to know about the lost African-American modernists who we now know about. No one ten years ago was asking these questions about Alma Thomas and all sorts of artists who have been ‘discovered’ in recent years. Because now the idea of who we are is in the process of changing. That generates a level of contestation and discord and dissonance that makes a lot of museum professionals uncomfortable. Because it highlights their culpability in sustaining a system that reinforced the racism, the exclusion, the patriarchy of the past.

te When you came to the Ford Foundation, you sold a number of works and then replaced them. Right? dw You mean the Ford Art collection? Yes. We sold the entire collection. The history there is that we had the Ford Foundation Art Collection from what Henry and the leadership acquired in the early 1960s. There were over 400 works, all Europeans and some Americas but mostly European, all but one artist, Sheila Hicks, male, and I recommended to the trustees that this collection was not aligned with our value and our mission for the twenty-first century. They agreed. We deaccessioned, we’ve sold that at Christie’s, and took the proceeds and acquired by now about 300 works, mostly by people of colour, women, indigenous, queer, very international. The first piece that we bought was the large Kehinde Wiley portrait of Wanda Crichlow that is in the lobby of our building.

te I was thinking about Garrels, who I should say was not a personal friend. The New York Times called me and they said, “Garrels has made this mistake in a meeting where he was presenting an impressive turnaround for sfmoma in terms of actually committing to buying work and acquiring work and showing work in a very different form than they’ve done historically. He made a comment at the end. Then this accelerated into the notion that he was a white supremacist.” I said to them “Gary Garrels is not a white supremacist.”

te Are you optimistic that mus States will meet the challenges of equity within the next ten years?

dw Let me just be very clear on museums in this country. has been an awakening, unli I have ever seen, among mus and museum boards. While t been sometimes clumsy, and missteps, I believe that most country are led by people wh museum to serve all the peop community, and who are com diversity, to telling the full s art and culture and creativity very optimistic about Ameri

Tom Eccles is executive direc enter for Curatorial Studies Annandale-on-Hudson, New

dw No, he is not a white supremacist. The unfortunate thing is that good people have gotten caught in bad systems. What I mean by that is, we have in this country an ecosystem, a museum ecosystem that has flaws and racism embedded. That is the context through which a remark like that is interpreted, and it can be interpreted in a way that attributes racism to the speaker. I don’t think that Gary is a racist, that’s absurd – I know him. He has operated in a museum system that is racist. We need to understand why the system makes us all vulnerable. Therefore, have to name that

te Two recent cases stand out (but there are more). The chief curator of the Guggenheim [Nancy Spector] has resigned as did the senior curator of the sfmoma [Gary Garrels], both under different circumstances. You’re starting to see a domino effect hitting the people at the very top. When I came to New York, they were gods. Is it in the very nature of this change to call for a radical rethinking of the leadership of our museums?

Christopher Bedford is doin Museum of Art [the plan, inv of works by Brice Marden, C Andy Warhol to raise funds, hold]. I don’t think moma ne Because moma has got a boa selling one piece of art can ab underwrite their budget defi

dw I said that for some, deaccessioning was an appropriate strategy. For others, they have the wherewithal without the necessity of deaccessioning. What I believe is that there is no cookie-cutter formulaic way to approach this question of how to address the operating budget deficits in a crisis like a pandemic. There are some museums that have very little endowment, that have very little operating cash flow, and for them, where they have debts, I have no problem with what

ArtReview

December 2020

“YOU’RE PART OF A LARGER SOCIETY” Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan, interviewed by Marv Recinto

Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan is a multimedia artist and curator, and currently the artistic director of Green Papaya Art Projects, a multidisciplinary platform in Quezon City that was founded in 2000 and is scheduled to close at the end of this year. He has worked at the forefront of cultural artistic practice in the Philippines, having founded the seminal artist group Black Artists in Asia in 1986 (a Philippines-based group focused on socially and politically progressive practice) and initiated the country’s longestrunning biennale, viva excon, in the Visayas region. Roldan’s work offers commentary on the social, political and cultural conditions of the Philippines. marv recinto Art can sometimes be perceived as secondary in Western culture: premodern art; it’s often viewed as mimetic, as a mirror of society and sort of a copy, and in that sense a secondary fact. Do you think art has the ability to facilitate change? Whether it be for workers, for artists or for art itself? norberto roldan I think the role of artists and cultural workers has changed dramatically over the years. It may be true that in the early years of the protest era, artists were just there to mirror society and come up with protest songs and reflect the misery of the people in the form of theatre and all that, but what we’re observing now are artists and cultural workers who are entrenched in organisational work with other organisations in other sectors: taking part

102

75 AARON CEZAR Curator American Last Year 83

Curator Australian new

77 NATASHA GINWALA & DEFNE AYAS

When James Murdoch resigned in July from the board of News Corp, the mindbogglingly powerful media conglomerate built by his father, Rupert, speculation abounded as to what he planned next. Another hip-hop label, perhaps? Hopes were dashed when the board of Art Basel’s parent company, mch Group, approved Murdoch’s appointment as controlling stakeholder (via his private investment vehicle Lupa Systems) a few days later. The global director of Art Basel, Marc Spiegler, publicly welcomed a move that injected approximately $80m into an organisation whose income fell by 55 percent against the first half of the previous year as its flagship trade fairs were cancelled. But given that Murdoch’s experience in media and tech suggests that he might seek to renovate a model endangered by the pandemic, how to read a feature by Spiegler for the Financial Times published just days after news broke of Murdoch’s intentions? Art fairs should be complemented by digital products, he argued, but ‘an Amazon art world sounds more like hell than heaven’. The world will be watching to see how these two get along.

Curator Italian Last Year 92

In the face of intelligent systems – technological or economic – that are in danger of besting us, where might an organic counterintelligence emerge? This is the question Ginwala and Ayas pose in their Gwangju Biennale. Or rather will pose, once we’ve bested covid-19 – the exhibition, featuring Cecilia Vicuña, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Seon Buddhist monk and chef Jeong Kwan, now postponed to February. The answer, not to get ahead of ourselves, is the ‘communal mind… rooted in healing technologies, indigenous life-worlds, matriarchal systems, animism, and anti-systemic kinship’. Big ideas, then, but they have form: Ayas is curator at large for V-A-C Foundation in Moscow and was formerly director of Witte de With in Rotterdam; Ginwala is associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and artistic director of Colomboscope, in Sri Lanka. She has previously curated Contour Biennale 8, in Belgium, and was part of the curatorial team of Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel. If experience alone doesn’t ensure success, Kwan has also administered a blessing, delivered on the occasion of Gwangju’s title announcement: Minds Rising Spirits Turning.

Curators Croatian new

Museum Director American new

An environmental campaign can be an artwork, the curator spearheading the Serpentine Galleries’ General Ecology programme says. ‘By calling something an artwork, you are allowing an institution to support it,’ Pietroiusti said earlier this year. At the London galleries she has kept questions of ecology, interspecies relationships and plant intelligence high on the institutional agenda, through talks, public programming and, this year, a solo exhibition by design duo Formafantasma that tackled the excesses and impact of the timber industry. The Golden Lion-winning Lithuanian Pavilion she curated at the Venice Biennale in 2019, an opera ˙ ˙ ˙ addressing the Anthropocene by Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and ˙ Lina Lapelyte, has toured to Hanover, Zürich and Bergen this year. Meanwhile, she brings this environmentally minded approach to the curatorial team of the Shanghai Biennale, which opened with a summit in November before the main show in 2021; and keeping an eye on innovative practices, she is cocurating (with James Bridle) a section of next year’s Helsinki Festival dedicated to artificial intelligence.

December 2020

Meaning ‘short film’ in French reversed slang, the alternative school was founded in 2018 by awardwinning director Ladj Ly, in the Paris suburbs of Clichy-Montfermeil, where in 2005 some of France’s most violent riots took place. Its model is simple: offer training programmes in film- and image-making entirely tuition-free, in a bid to open up the elitist world of art and cinema to underrepresented voices. The key to its success is the school’s network – Ly has since been joined by street artist jr and actress Ludivine Sagnier, while guest lecturers include George Lucas and Spike Lee – which is there to ensure a smooth professional transition for its students as well as exciting opportunities: this year’s students put on their own group show at Palais de Tokyo, which drew crowds in August, and some of their work is currently on view at Galleria Continua in Les Moulins, east of Paris. A recent partnership with Netflix for the next few years is likely to bolster the school’s ongoing expansion: Kourtrajmé Marseille, which opened this autumn, and a forthcoming school in Dakar.

82 WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM

81 LAURA RAICOVICH

78 LUCIA PIETROIUSTI

Curators Indian/Dutch new

School French new

Art Fair British-American / French-American new / Last Year 38

Since taking up her role as artistic director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City (the first purpose-built space for contemporary art in Vietnam) in 2016, Butt, who last year cocurated the 14th Sharjah Biennial, has been building a network of associated institutions, artists and curators, and ‘fostering dialogue’ among countries across South East Asia, while also managing an exhibition programme promoting local artists and the wider Vietnamese diaspora, including Thao Nguyen Phan and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Alongside the Factory’s regular public programme, Butt and her team have delivered several international programmes and partnerships, such as the long-term initiative ‘Pollination’, a residency offering pairs of Southeast Asian curators and artists the opportunity to work on multicity projects, connecting with organisations across South East Asia – including sam Art and Ecology Fund (Indonesia), maiiam Contemporary Art Museum (Thailand), Fulbright University (Vietnam), Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (hcmc) – and further afield.

‘Neutrality is a fiction’ when it comes to institutions, says Raicovich; it is a guise, as she makes clear in her forthcoming book Culture Strike (2021), for the defence of white male hegemony. In 2018 she left the directorship of the Queens Museum, New York, specifically objecting to the Israeli government hiring the museum for an event featuring us vice president Mike Pence, and more generally in dispute with a board that wanted to quell her political engagement. She is currently interim director at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, dedicated to queer culture, where she has addressed in the programming (albeit remotely) how queerness intersects with race and class. But her real power lies in her readiness to engage in debate, most recently instigating a series of hot-topic Zoom discussions with curator Helen Molesworth – ‘an experiment in talking and listening’ – that kicked off with a conversation on the Philip Guston controversy and included Coco Fusco, Charles Gaines, Nikki Columbus and any of the over 450 people who signed up and wished to chip in.

100

‘Collectivity as a certain trend… often only described as a practicality or a tool; while for us, collectivity is an ideological choice,’ Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović of whw told Ocula on the opening in March of their first show as directors of Kunsthalle Wien. That exhibition, titled bread, wine, cars, security and peace, opened on International Women’s Day and follows a tradition of launching shows on symbolic days. Their first exhibition, back in 2000, the title of which (the three basic questions concerning the economics of societies and other enterprises) in turn gave the collective its name, opened on the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto at the Association of Croatian Artists in Zagreb. The Cold War echoes, and with good reason: a recent conference organised by the kunsthalle, and convened by Kader Attia and Ana Teixeira Pinto, demonstrated the long shadow of ‘free world’ imperialism today. Meanwhile, a fourth member, Ana Dević, continues Galerija Nova, the space whw set up in Zagreb in 2003.

ArtReview

84 Photo: Alexander Steffens 85 Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation 86 Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata

75 Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy Delfina Foundation, London 76 Photo: Lê Thành Tiê´n 77 Photo: Victoria Tomaschko 78 Photo: Joginte Bučinskaite

Much of Cezar’s influence comes from airport hopping, overseeing the Delfina Foundation’s international network of residency and exhibition partners. As airspace closed, the London-based institution got its winter coterie of residents back to their home countries in Latin and North America, Africa, Asia and Europe, and set up a digital near-approximation of the convivial atmosphere the live-in programme has become known for, in which artists, curators and collectors mix, often over what the foundation calls ‘family lunches’. By the autumn things resumed their pace, even if Cezar’s regular appearances on public programmes were still online (for ArteBA in October): a string of sponsored residencies were announced, with new and recurring partners from Delfina’s vast network, including Sweden’s Iaspis, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, the SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation, Coleção Moraes-Barbosa and collector Frances Reynolds. Being grounded might prove fruitful, however: next year Cezar joins the Turner Prize jury, awarded to a uk-based artist.

84 BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG

83 HYUN-SOOK LEE 83 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul

76 ZOE BUTT

80 ÉCOLE KOURTRAJMÉ

79 Photos: nrkbeta, Wikimedia Commons (Murdoch); courtesy Art Basel (Spiegler) 80 jr, Ludivine Sagnier and Ladj Ly. Courtesy École Kourtrajmé 81 Photo: Michael Angelo 82 Photo: Damir Žižić

79 JAMES MURDOCH & MARC SPIEGLER

Gallerist Korean Last Year 60

Curator Cameroonian Last Year 86

Despite South Korea’s goings-in-and-out-of-lockdown this year, Lee’s Kukje Gallery, a stalwart of the Seoul art scene, has managed a regular lineup of exhibitions. It even announced the opening of its newly renovated K1 space (its main exhibition gallery of three), which it likens to ‘an art collector’s house’, offering drinks, food and a space for visitors to exercise and relax. As well as a collaborative public art project with digital experiential design company d’strict (installed in Gangnam), Kukje’s artists continued to show nationally (Na Kim at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art) and internationally, including Kimsooja’s site-specific solo exhibition at Wanås Konst, Sweden; Park Chan-kyong’s presentation at Yokohama Triennale; and Haegue Yang, who took on this year’s mmca Hyundai Motor Series, a sculpture work at The Clarke, Massachusetts, and solo exhibitions at The Bass, Miami Beach, Tate St Ives and Art Gallery of Ontario. Daniel Boyd, new to Kukje’s roster, was announced as the recipient of this year’s act Architecture Awards across four categories.

This summer the curator was supposed to be overseeing the 12th edition of Dutch arts festival Sonsbeek. Titled Force Times Distance, it was going to be about labour. In the end the physical exhibition, featuring Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nástio Mosquito and Laure Prouvost, among others, was pushed to next April; however Ndikung had planned strong publishing, radio and online elements, so not all was lost. The intersection of race runs high in the curator’s dealing with economics, informed not least by his goal to confront Europe with its historic exploitation of Africa: “The extreme violence in the colonial enterprise cannot be forgotten,” he said during one radio broadcast. Postcolonial perspectives underpinned the founding of his Berlin arts space Savvy Contemporary in 2009, its stated mission ‘to reflect on colonialities of power and how these affect histories, geographies, gender and race’; one of the reasons, perhaps, that Ndikung was awarded the Order of Merit of Berlin this year. And he did get to do some on-the-ground curating at the end of 2019: directing Bamako Encounters, Mali’s respected photography festival.

86 PRATEEK & PRIYANKA RAJA

85 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI & SHUBIGI RAO Artists Indian / Singaporean Last Year 99

Gallerists Indian new

Having announced the first list of 25 participating artists in July this year, Rao, artist and curator of this year’s edition of the Kochi-Murziris Biennale, and the biennale’s cofounder, director and president of the board, Krishnamachari, announced its postponement this October from December this year to next November. Despite that, the artist-led biennial remains an influential model for similar largescale shows outside the global north. In the meantime, the biennial distributed works made by artist friends during lockdown on its social media platforms, while the Students’ Biennale (normally concurrent with Kochi-Murziris) will now run online in February – so there’s plenty still to do. Earlier this year, Rao, who won the Singapore Literature Prize for the second volume of Pulp, her ongoing project tracing the history of banned books, wrote that the 5th edition of the biennale will embody ‘the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim’, and now has extra time to mull this over for the 2021 exhibition.

Experimenter, founded by the Rajas in 2009, has long been more than a commercial gallery. So while they (in normal times) go to art fairs with work by Raqs Media Collective (who curated the Yokohama Triennale this year), camp (winner of the Nam June Paik prize) and Naeem Mohaiemen (awarded the Warhol Arts Writers Grant), there is more to it. Their annual Curators’ Hub this year featured presentations by Natasha Ginwala, Adam Szymczyk and Reem Fadda; their publishing outlet expands beyond catalogues and artist books, finding room for their first guest-edited, free-to-download book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love, an anthology of romantically inclined art and poetry; and their learning programme features classes and workshops for adults and children. The pair took on the pandemic with energy: establishing an open-application art production fund; a digital space for artists, musicians and choreographers to present projects otherwise cancelled; as well an online platform filled with talks, films, playlists and writing by gallery artists and friends.

December 2020

101

in policy formulation, planning on how to advance a resistance movement against a despotic regime, for example. Artists are no longer there to reflect history or what is happening in the country, but to be active participants in political actions. mr In the Philippines, artist organisations and artist groups have had a long history of this, and I think it’s important to contextualise that in order to talk about the present. Perhaps we could start by talking about some of the most significant art groups during the Marcos era [1965–86]? nr I think the most prominent group during that time was the Kaisahan group [‘Solidarity’ in English, founded 1976], the group that precipitated the Social Realist [sr] movement. I must say that the movement was not just influential during that time, but remains so up to the present generation of young sr practitioners, so to speak. Alongside visual arts during the Marcos era, street theatre was a very, very popular form of resistance. It was made popular by peta, which was able to organise a community of artists and network of theatre organisations all over the Philippines. In fact, alongside the Concerned Artists of the Philippines [cap] in Negros [the Philippines’s fourth largest island], the Negros Theater League was one of the most active cultural organisations at the forefront of the resistance movement. During the 1980s,

cap was organised by a prominent filmmaker, Lino Brocka [who died in a car crash in 1991], and for a time, during the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, cap took a hiatus, but in recent years it was reorganised, and it’s now one of the active organisations alongside other new and younger ones in the cultural front. mr I was just going to name some of the other organisations, like saka, resbak, Simbayan, that have taken a big stance in the current era. nr I mentioned earlier that artists are not just involved in the production of artistic work, but they’re also very active in community work and organising. The work of an artist now is not just contained in producing an artwork, but has gone beyond productions of ephemeral works to encompass rallies and marches. You mentioned saka, for example. saka is basically an alliance of artists aligned with the farmers’ sector. They advocate for a genuine agrarian reform and rural development. They have gone all-out to assist farmers in cultivating idle lands and in leading urban farming even before the pandemic struck in March. This is why I feel that the work of artists and cultural workers has become more important, because our communities have become more responsive to them and have been more open to them, whereas before artists were just looked upon as coming into a particular community to entertain.

ArtReview

“YOU’RE PART OF A LARGER SOCIETY” Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan, interviewed by Marv Recinto

102

ArtReview

cap was organised by a promin Lino Brocka [who died in a car for a time, during the mid-1990 2000s, cap took a hiatus, but in was reorganised, and it’s now o organisations alongside other ones in the cultural front.

mr I was just going to name some organisations, like saka, resbak, have taken a big stance in the curren

nr I mentioned earlier that ar involved in the production of a they’re also very active in comm organising. The work of an arti just contained in producing an gone beyond productions of ep to encompass rallies and march You mentioned saka, for e is basically an alliance of artists the farmers’ sector. They advoc agrarian reform and rural deve have gone all-out to assist farm idle lands and in leading urban before the pandemic struck in why I feel that the work of artis workers has become more imp our communities have become to them and have been more op whereas before artists were jus as coming into a particular com to entertain.

3 RR & AVOY

December 2020

31 IWAN WIRTH, MANUELA WIRTH & MARC PAYOT

Academic American reentry (48 in 2017)

Curators Austrian-Chinese/ American-Taiwanese Last Year 72 / new Since founding Asia Art Archive two decades ago, Hsu has established the nonprofit as a key regional resource centre with an ever-growing collection of over 100,000 records, including books, exhibition catalogues, objects and audiovisual recordings. For a repository of knowledge, its 20th anniversary programming is fittingly themed around different modes of learning. In terms of physical exhibitions, there was Learning What Can’t Be Taught, about art education in China from the 1950s to 2000s. Online, Life Lessons hosted conversations between artists exploring the moments of learning that influenced their practices. And aaa continues to plug the gaps in Asian art history through crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Since joining aaa in 2017, Tain has continued to broaden its international links, through research projects like Connecting Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, which culminated at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit, and further deepened its collecting focus, including the launch of two new archives – the Philippines’ Green Papaya Art Projects and Thailand’s Womanifesto.

37 Courtesy Matthew Burrows Studio 38 Photo: Trevor Yeung

Collector German new While arts institutions raced to find online content during lockdown, the manufacturing heiress was sitting pretty with her collection of over 860 moving-image works by 282 artists from around the world. She already had plans to put her holdings online, having complained that it was only possible to show 15 percent of the collection at any one time in her two physical venues, and the pandemic provided a captive audience for the first 68 streamed videos – authored by the likes of Cao Fei, Elizabeth Price and Wolfgang Tillmans – some personally introduced by Stoschek on her Instagram account. This digital move may have been precipitated by landlord problems at her Berlin space, putting its future past 2022 in doubt. Nonetheless, this year she mounted a solo show for locally based Canadian Jeremy Shaw. Her hometown Düsseldorf premises managed a German debut for American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria. It’s the kind of activity that makes you highly prized by museum boards, and Stoschek is a trustee at kw Institute, Berlin, moma ps1, New York, and moca Los Angeles, as well as a member of Tate’s international council.

35 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

34 CLAIRE HSU & JOHN TAIN

new

Curator Canadian new

Academic American new

Gallerist Swiss Last Year 75

Museum Director American reentry (91 in 2015) Tinari first heard of covid-19 on a ski lift in Davos. This might tell you a little about the circles the director of ucca Center for Contemporary Art keeps. Yet while the pandemic introduced itself on Tinari’s doorstep (well, 1,100km away, in Wuhan), his Beijing museum was able to reopen by May and be one of the first to map the new-normal landscape. Meditations in an Emergency, a group show featuring Forensic Architecture, Yang Fudong and Pierre Huyghe, among others, deftly identified the defining themes of the year: ‘everyday life, the body and biopolitics, the human/animal dichotomy, migration and borders, and the information landscape’. From this followed shows for Elizabeth Peyton (‘adjusted for the Chinese audience’), on machine-made art and, at ucca Dune, the subject of sleep. If there’s been talk of the pandemic bringing an end to the blockbuster, Tinari isn’t buying it: he’s hoping to top last year’s blowout Picasso show (134,000 visitors in the first 15 days) with Warhol next year, and to open ucca’s latest outpost in Shanghai.

mr I wanted to ask you about Joseph Estrada [a former actor who served as president of the Philippines between 1998 and 2001] and his impeachment in 2001. You started Green Papaya in 2000. How was Green Papaya involved with this? nr On the day that thousands of people were massing in front of the shrine during edsa ii [the Second edsa Revolution; the first, also known as the People Power Revolution and commemorated by the shrine, had led to the Marcoses’ departure in 1986], we were supposed to open a solo exhibition by Santiago Bose in Green Papaya. We heard over the radio that thousands and thousands of people were already at the edsa shrine. And Santiago said, “Hey, why don’t we cancel the opening and bring all the food to edsa?” During that time, Surrounded By Water, another independent art space run by a collective of younger artists, was running a space right across the shrine. When we got to edsa, bringing all the food from the opening, artists from our network were already there. Again, that was an action where artists were seen as important participants in that particular rally because artists had started to mobilise the immediate crowd within the perimeter and started to solicit food, gather this food and distribute it to people. These are non-artrelated actions, but nonetheless artists were there to make their presence felt as part of society and of the community. mr Do you think that artists and artist groups have an obligation or duty to be involved with politics or the wider parameters of the world rather than being insulated in the perceived ‘fine-art world’? nr I don’t think there is an argument about whether or not artists, first and foremost, are citizens. You’re a part of your community and you’re a part of a larger society. Society develops. You cannot escape being a part of it. I think it is incumbent on every individual, artist or nonartist, to participate in social transformation. In fact, all the more so if you are an artist. There is a need for artists to contribute creative solutions to the fundamental problems of society. They read things in different ways and they offer solutions like any other. I think it may be sad to note that not all artists are political, but even artists who profess to be apolitical cannot escape the fact that choosing to be apolitical is in effect a political action. Let’s take, for example, resbak, born out of the need to respond to the killings that took place as part of Duterte’s ‘drug war’. What the artists are trying to say is, if you are aware of these killings and if you’re aware that these are extrajudicial killings and you keep silent about them, you either condone the killings and take

Like many Chinese galleries, Shanghart had a conservative year in terms of programming. Its four spaces in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore were closed for months due to public health restrictions. Headquartered in Shanghai, the gallery came out of hibernation ready to dominate the city’s art scene during the last quarter of 2020, with its A-listers getting an impressive airing. Xue Song showed at Powerlong Museum, Yang Zhenzhong at Rén Space, Zhang Enli at Power Station of Art, Zhu Jia at Modern Art Base and Yang Fudong at how Art Museum – all in the same month! But Shanghart is not all about the Chinese-Male-Artistof-a-Certain-Age. At its own M50 space is Under the Sign of Saturn, a group show featuring three young female artists from Guangzhou – Qin Jin, Chen Dandizi and Lin Yuqi – demonstrating its commitment to supporting new voices from outside the typical centres of art production.

65 LIZA ESSERS Gallerist South African new

ArtReview

responsibility for all these crimes, or you take an action against them. There seems to be no middle ground when it comes to something that really affects the whole community, the whole society. And this brings me to how I got politicised. I got married in the early 1980s and I was obliged to go to Negros to cultivate a sugar farm that my now ex-wife had inherited. My ex-father-in-law had said, “You’re crazy if you insist in working in Manila when your wife has a farm.” So I went to Negros, and for the first time in my life I was exposed to what you usually read in papers about the prevailing feudal system – the sugar barons – and the exploitation of sugar workers. I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the reality. It was a moment for me to decide whether I stay there and fight for the rights of these people, or get off the island. That’s how I got involved with cap and got myself into what was part of the resistance movement during the Marcos years, which also led to my leaving the country between 1987 and 89, for security reasons. mr You went on to form Black Artists in Asia after the Marcos years and during the uptime of rebuilding. nr Black Artists in Asia was organised as a way to get the artists out of this dilemma of having been part of cap in Negros. During the early part of the 1980s we visual artists were pretty much involved with the propaganda movement, putting up banners and murals almost every time there was a rally going on in the island. We never had a chance to practice individually as painters. When Cory Aquino took the presidency, most of the members of cap thought, “Hey, Marcos is out. Why don’t we try to invite galleries and kickstart our own individual practices?” Black Artists in Asia was a kind of strategic formation for all the progressive artists to still be together, but no longer part of the larger movement of the National Democratic Movement. mr Let’s jump to 2020 then. Obviously, a difficult year for everyone globally. In the Philippines Duterte still holds the presidency – until 2022. It seems like there was a lot of activity with artist groups and cultural workers, especially with the protests against shutting down abs-cbn [a national independent television network] and the antiterrorism law. Let’s talk a little bit about what influence the arts groups had then and what sort of change they’re able to effect, or continue to effect. nr When there was an attempt to shut down abs-cbn (before the actual shutdown), cap came out into the open to generate support and to resist the closure. Considering that abs-cbn has its own stable of artists, stars, actresses, there were only a few of them initially who actually went out of their way to expose themselves in this way. Eventually, more and more of them

December 2020

66 ARIA DEAN Curator American new

Goodman Gallery was founded in 1966 in Johannesburg during the apartheid era by Linda Givon, who died this year. Essers took over in 2008 and opened a Cape Town space, and last year a gallery in London. Writing on Artnet, Essers noted that while the gallery’s closure during the pandemic makes the business vulnerable, it has weathered worse: for long it was the only place Black artists could show; and in 2012 Essers was sued by Jacob Zuma for showing Brett Murray’s The Spear (2010), which depicts the then-South African president with his penis hanging out. During lockdown, the gallerist – who represents 45 artists, including El Anatsui, Grada Kilomba, William Kentridge and Gabrielle Goliath – threw herself into fundraising for embattled local hospitals and health clinics in underserved communities, and providing sanitation essentials to the homeless. The London space reopened with a show of the late photographer David Goldblatt, while Johannesburg saw a Kentridge exhibition (the artist’s own diy ‘incubator space’, The Centre for the Less Good Idea, took the seventh of its annual performance seasons online).

The artist, writer and curator described herself recently as ‘someone who is all too easily incensed by the art world’s bad-faith political discourse’. Dean, who in December last year was promoted to editor and curator of Rhizome, the New Museum’s digital platform, is a vocal conscience for the artworld, unafraid to delve into whatever culture-war skirmish dominates the art press at a given time. That commentary is underpinned by a thoughtful theoretical framework, summed up during a presentation she gave at the mmk Frankfurt, when she asked, ‘Do we have an adequate politic of looking and being looked at?’ Dean was talking specifically then about digital culture, but her work on Black representation, on structural and economic oppression, parlayed in her sculpture (seen this year at the mit List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, and soon as part of Made in la 2020 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), writing and numerous other public-speaking engagements, encapsulates the same urgent query.

December 2020

87 ALESS O ANTON OLL

mr Like Trump. nr Exactly. mr I guess there’s also a sense of self-preservation, which is entirely understandable.

Artist American new ‘Public art is propaganda,’ the American artist said at the end of last year. ‘White men on horses looking down on us.’ Thomas is pushing marginalised narratives to the fore. In July, at the BeltLine Eastside Trail in Atlanta, the artist installed an 8.5m-tall sculpture of an Afro pick, titled All Power to All People, which then toured Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. In the immediate leadup to the us elections, he launched Wide Awakes, marches characterised by the creativity of costumes and banner art, which encouraged Black voting and rallied against voter suppression. Just as ambitious was a new initiative by For Freedoms, the collective cofounded by the artist, in which more than 70 politically minded peers, including Ai Weiwei, Christine Sun Kim and the Guerrilla Girls, made work for billboards across America to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Indoors, the artist had solo shows at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles.

Curator Romanian new

THE YEAR THATTHAUGHT TAUGHT THAT US HOW POWERLESS WE ARE

There’s art, and then there’s the artworld. There’s the experience of objects, images, installations, performance and whatever else artists have created, and then there’s the institutions, organisations, economies and systems that make all of that possible. If, like ArtReview, you’ve observed the artworld for any length of time, you might notice that it seems to be made up of various combinations of people who appear to be very wealthy, large and slow-moving institutions like museums and public galleries, commercial galleries, both large and small, and faster-moving organisations like nonprofits and artist-run spaces. And, of course, the art fairs, auction houses, art schools and media platforms that connect these up in different ways. In recent years, however, calls to rethink how all of this works together have become a more insistent presence within that landscape. What, after all, are the contradictions of an artworld that on the surface says it’s all for peace, love and understanding, but is often backed by those who, by their actions or sources of wealth, or by the very exclusivity and hierarchy of their institutions, go against these ethics and values? If those voices have grown louder in recent years, they have often met not with outright resistance, but the inertia of a system that is too big, too entrenched and too slow to change very quickly, if at all. One of the talking-point truisms of 2020 is that the pandemic has ‘accelerated trends that were already present before’. There’s something in this when it comes to the artword: without the deadweight of everything happening as it always has done – the big museum shows, the cycle of art fairs, the gallery programmes ticking over, the global circuit of biennials opening, closing, opening – the artworld has suddenly become very fluid, unstable; and those demanding change have suddenly found themselves pushing at an open door. So while artists have radically reformed the focus of art itself, 2020 has seen that urge move further into the question of how the structures of the artworld can themselves change. Indonesian collective ruangrupa, tasked with curating the next Documenta in Kassel in 2022, replaces the top-down hierarchy of all-governing curator, assembling the activity not only of artists, but of practitioners and organisations from other cultural contexts in order to imagine, as they put it, ‘the relations an art institution has with its community by being an active constituent of it’. Altering how hierarchies and inequalities come to take shape has coursed through those hierarchies themselves. So while a philanthropic organisation such as Elisabeth Murdoch’s Freelands Foundation might focus on supporting midcareer female artists through funding their work, it also feels compelled not only to support artists, but to research the professional and institutional issues that women artists face and that lead to their continued underrepresentation in the artworld. And of course, many are no longer prepared to wait for incremental, maybe-later change. So, in a few short months, galleries and museums have moved at breakneck speed to affirm that they need to deal seriously with the historical lack of diversity among the artists they show and the people they employ. The need to shift artworld structures that have been reproducing these more profound and long-standing inequalities is now a key issue, which is why the question of museum restitution – championed on the list by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy – has implications beyond returning historical artefacts to the countries once colonised by European powers. Who gets to say what the museum keeps, what it shows and the story it tells are questions that go to the heart of all museums, and their key place in the artworld’s ‘institutional memory’. That sense that the infrastructure of the artworld needs to change, if it’s to live up to its own ideals, is no longer a pressure coming from below, but is now being felt by those at the very top. The question in the coming months and years, however, might be whether the artworld’s hierarchical systems, with their power and resources, can change things by being proactive; or whether it’s time for the hierarchies themselves to step aside.

67 Photo: Sophie Nuytten 67 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi/Contour, Getty Images

63 PHILIP TINARI

40 HANK WILLIS THOMAS

‘Under what conditions and in which way would life be worth living?’ the philosopher asked himself the day he left his bed upon recovering from the new coronavirus. It is also a question with which he has been addressing themes including identity, gender, body politics, pornography, architecture and sexuality since the 2008 publication of Testo Junkie. At the Centre Pompidou, where Preciado is associated philosopher, he staged a conference titled ‘A New History of Sexuality’ that sought to ‘go beyond the logic of identity politics… to build a revolutionary project of antipatriarchal, anti-racist and social transformation’, bringing in artist Shu Lea Cheang (whose Taiwanese Pavilion Preciado curated at the 2019 Venice Biennale), art historian Élisabeth Lebovici, activist Rokhaya Diallo and anarcha-feminist María Galindo to help. With his column in Libération, a cameo in the new Gucci campaign directed by Gus Van Sant and a plethora of citings by artists globally, Preciado has the confidence and credentials to aim high.

While Costinas, the executive director of one of Hong Kong’s keystone nonprofit art spaces, Para Site, looks forward to opening the next edition of Kathmandu Triennale (for which he is artistic director), he has kept his attention and efforts on supporting the art scene in his adopted home. In October, Para Site (which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year) announced its NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour. Awarded to 25 artists, who will each receive hk$20,000, the grant apparently comes with no strings attached, in an ‘urgent response to the current crisis and a long term effort towards recognising the precarious nature of artistic labour’, says Costinas. It’s a model, like Para Site’s own exhibitions (An Opera for Animals toured to the Rockbund Art Museum, while A beast, a god, and a line went to Trondheim at the end of last year), that’s spreading. Para Site continues its ongoing ps Paid Studio Visit programme, having supported more than 40 local artists with a studio-visit fee.

December 2020

REFORM 65 Photo: Anthea Pokroy 66 Courtesy Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

64 LORENZ HELBLING

Artist Collective International new

Academic Spanish Last Year 62

A political scientist, anthropologist and anarchist thinker, with a specialisation in understanding peasantry, Scott is a professor of political science at Yale University. ‘So what?’ you might think. Much of Scott’s work has involved looking at historical models of how ‘powerless’ or subaltern groups achieve agency and the strategies they use to do it. Weapons of the Weak (1985) examined everyday forms of resistance; Seeing Like a State (1998) argued that state attempts to make a people legible (by categorising them) makes them more easily manipulable; The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) looked at resistance to cultural assimilation in the uplands of Southeast Asia, arguing that minority groups used vernacular knowledge and ‘their culture… to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them’. His work has influenced writers such as Legacy Russell, curators such as Anselm Franke, artists such Liu Chuang and Ho Tzu Nyen, and protest movements worldwide.

Artist British new Alongside his painting, Burrows has long been interested in the fraught economics of being an artist – he has previously run mentoring schemes on just this. So when commissions, sales and teaching gigs were cancelled globally this year, he came up with a simple hashtag and proposal. Under #artistsupportpledge, artists post work for sale on Instagram, priced at under £200/$200 depending on region. If the artist sells five works, they promise to in turn purchase from another artist using the same scheme. From its launch in mid-March through to today, the diy project has exploded, with close to half a million works offered direct from studios, an estimated £60m in sales (as of August) and press coverage stretching from Malaysia to America, Denmark to India. It was, Burrows says, a way of creating a rapid economy based on a ‘culture of generosity’, while also proving that the artworld’s gatekeepers and power structures can be circumvented. For his efforts, Burrows has been awarded an mbe by the British government.

ArtReview

Academic German new South Korea-born Han’s writing (translated from the original German) merges Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to trace the pathologies of the hyperactive, hyperconnected present, often with reference to the Western world’s disconnection from its past and reality in general. It covers subjects such as depression, burnout, adhd, our willing submission to big data and Shanzhai culture as way of thinking through opposing Eastern and Western concepts of originality. For Han the shallow attention caused by overproduction, overperformance and overcommunication needs to be countered by intense contemplative attention. Although for all his critiques there is some irony in the way that his aphoristic, sloganistic writing style so clearly fits the social-media age. The cultural differences between those two hemispheres was also one of the reasons offered in a controversial article by Han, published in Die Welt and El País this past March, to explain the relative success of East Asian countries in combating the virus’s spread. A Chinese version naturally spread like wildfire.

Activist Movement International new (Eyal Weizman, 18 in 2019) While monographic exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, fell victim to shutdowns, the power of Forensic Architecture, founded by Eyal Weizman in 2010, lies way beyond galleries. Its investigations into human rights abuses, employing the skills of architects, artists, journalists and academics, and combining digital simulation, computer analysis and crowdsourced media, appear on the agency’s website and, very often, in the evidence dossiers of legal cases internationally. In 2020 they have included a partnership with Bellingcat to map police violence at blm protests in the us and a reconstruction of the events surrounding the 2011 shooting of Mark Duggan by British police; and in 2019 an investigation into the killing of Turkish human rights lawyer Tahir Elçi that was used as evidence in the prosecution of three Turkish police officers. Forensic Architecture’s creative pushback against the technological surveillance state is not without consequences – in February Weizman was refused entry to the us because, he was told, ‘the “algorithm” had identified a security threat’.

39 PAUL B. PRECIADO

Reform

The curator, a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, has helped push indigenous art and ideas to the foreground. This was evident at the Toronto Biennial, which she curated last year under the rubric of ‘kinship’, and in her work as part of the Canadian Pavilion team at the Venice Biennale (featuring Inuit collective Isuma), also 2019. (Hopkins will return as part of a collective of five curators for the next edition of the Toronto Biennial.) Her touring show Soundings (curated with Dylan Robinson) for the Independent Curators International, which mixes commissioned work, historical objects and performance, went to the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Ohio, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario, over the past 12 months, with two further stops next year. Hopkins is vocal about her opposition to colonial-era statuary, and offers an alternative for what public art can be with Off Lomas – an informal sculpture park she runs with partner Raven Chacon in Albuquerque, which this year featured a kinetic work by Edible Carnival.

15 FERAL ATLAS

14 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

38 COSMIN 37 COSTINAS MATTHEW BURROWS

62 BYUNG-CHUL HAN

61 CANDICE HOPKINS

December 2020

36 JAMES C. SCOTT

No one is better placed than Prada to bridge art, fashion and high society, and few can match her creative flair and intellectual seriousness. She may not have been alone this year in dwelling on questions like ‘What is consciousness?’ but while everyone else gave up and binged on boxsets, the Fondazione Prada organised a conference of neuroscientists, anthropologists and philosophers for a project that will culminate in an exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, while American conceptual artist Alex Da Corte took over the Fondazione’s Shanghai space this November. A landmark partnership with Sotheby’s in October generated more than $500k for unesco by auctioning props from the fashion brand’s A/W launch (note that a third of bidders were forty or under, and two thirds were new to the auction house); the fashion house is also supporting a programme at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan that is investigating gender disparities in the impact of covid-19. Fondazione Prada will miss its revered artistic director Germano Celant, who died of coronavirus complications in April, but its founder shows no sign of diminishing ambition.

Collector American Last Year 35

ArtReview

Collector Italian Last Year 11

It has been hard to gauge Kouoh’s time as chief curator of Zeitz mocaa in Cape Town since her appointment in summer 2019, not least because the world’s largest museum of contemporary African art was shuttered for seven months by the pandemic. The early indications were that she would use her experience as the founding director of Dakar’s Raw Material Company, which continues to operate as a nexus for African artists and critical discussions, to run an extensive public programme of talks and symposia alongside more conventional exhibitions (including Otobong Nkanga’s first museum survey on the African continent). That the not-for-profit institution reopened in October with a vast exhibition of 1,600 works collated by open submission from amateur and professional artists working in Cape Town is another indicator of what Kouoh believes a museum should stand for. Given the resources at her disposal, those decisions can help to set the agenda for contemporary art in southern Africa.

31 Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 32 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town 33 Photo: Peter Rigaud 34 Photos: Wendy Ng (Tain); William Furniss. Courtesy Zolima CityMag (Hsu)

33 JULIA STOSCHEK

Philanthropist American

35 MIUCCIA PRADA

Curator Cameroonian Last Year 56

Gallerists Swiss Last Year 3 / 3 / new

11 DARREN WALKER

‘We are living in anti-intellectual times,’ Butler told the New Statesman in a much-shared September interview. The irony is that Butler’s key themes through three decades as a public intellectual, since the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990 – gender, sexuality, queer radicalism – have come to dominate many artists’ thinking and making. This year Butler articulated a role for public intellectuals and artists themselves, in asserting the need, in an interview for thruthout.org, ‘to expand our ideas about why language, literature, visual arts, history, are important for understanding our world. That world cannot be reduced to “the economy” or “the nation” and neither is it fully defined by the pandemic.’ Speaking of her book The Force of Nonviolence, published this year, she said, ‘We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals.’

13 PAMELA J. JOYNER

Collector Hong Konger Last Year 73

Academic American new

10 JUDITH BUTLER

32 KOYO KOUOH

When New York’s collectors fled to the Hamptons this year, Hauser & Wirth was quick to follow, in a move that felt less like panic than business as usual: the Wirths, along with copresident Payot, have established outposts in resort towns from Gstaad to St Moritz (the couple’s Artfarm hospitality portfolio includes a London pub, a restaurant in la and a five-star hotel in Aberdeenshire). A second exhibition space in Zürich opened in July and a five-storey space in New York in October, with another gallery, in Menorca, set to open next year – even as ArtLab, a ‘technology and research division’, is tasked with extending it into the digital sphere, which accommodates cancelled real-life art fairs and student shows, as well as the gallery’s own online exhibitions (10 percent of the profits from which go to a covid-19 fund at the who). With all this going on, the appointment of Ewan Venters as ceo from royal grocer Fortnum & Mason frees up the copresidents to focus on an increasingly formidable roster, including recent additions Frank Bowling, George Condo, Nicole Eisenman, Avery Singer and the estate of Gustav Metzger.

Museum Director American Last Year 7 When Glenn Lowry retires from moma (2025, anyone?), Thelma Golden will surely sit at the top of the list of his potential successors. Golden has ably stewarded the Studio Museum of Harlem for the past 15 years, renewing its curatorial and educational programming (Legacy Russell was appointed associate curator in 2018), creating one of the most sought-after residency programmes in the us and updating its physical plant with a $122m purpose-built, David Adjaye-designed building. This year she was invited to join an elite group of Black museum trustees in the creation of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (Golden sits on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), funded by the Mellon and Ford foundations, whose aims are the cultivation of new Black talent at all levels of visual art practice and administration – something Golden knows well, as this has been her mission since beginning her career in the arts in 1987 as an intern at the museum she now leads.

12 Courtesy K11 Art Foundation 13 Photo: Drew Altizer 14 Courtesy Forensic Architecture 15 Photo: Anna Tsing

ArtReview

12 ADRIAN CHENG

9 SAIDIYA HARTMAN

8 Photo: Julie Skarratt 9 Photo: Jai Lennard10 10 Photo: Stefan Gutermuth 11 Photo: Justin French

61 Photo: Jason S. Ordaz 62 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han 63 Photo: Wang Jun 64 Photo: Alessandro Wang

rtists are not just artistic work, but munity work and tist now is not n artwork, but has phemeral works hes. example. saka s aligned with cate for a genuine elopment. They mers in cultivating n farming even March. This is sts and cultural portant, because e more responsive pen to them, st looked upon mmunity

Museum Director American Last Year 1

Artist American Last Year 34

5 Photo: Lamont Hamilton 6 Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels 7 Photo: Peter Ross

e of the other Simbayan, that nt era.

7 GLENN D. LOWRY

As America, and the world, convulsed in anger at the killing of George Floyd by police, Arthur Jafa’s videowork Love is the Message, The Message is Death, which propelled the artist to wider prominence in 2016, and which documents the trauma and triumphs of Black culture, resonated. Hence the decision by 14 museums internationally, including the Smithsonian and Hirshhorn in Washington, dc, the Tate Modern in London and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, to simultaneously stream it for one weekend in June on their websites. That work used Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam (2016) as its soundtrack, and the artist and the musician collaborated again this year, with Jafa making the video for Kanye’s new track Wash Us in the Blood (he has previously made videos for Solange and Jay-Z, among others). Jafa was in demand irl too, with solo shows at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto and, this month, at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

FUND

6 ARTHUR JAFA

l harassment, instein, but which ng called to account ations might be ian Andeweg by to the allegations loo, by The New ations) or through accounts such as last triggered the blished various ded). Likewise, misconduct against d shows in Hanover, eal gallery Bradley

8 THELMA GOLDEN

Fund

Academic American Last Year 16

t decades has had itten by economist manuel Macron in ny object in national ng, despoilment, mouldering argufacts they hold. d in the last year. ation, speaking – arrested for u Quai Branly arch project into meanwhile, has litical and economic e confirmed that Senegal.

nent filmmaker, crash in 1991], and 0s and the early n recent years it one of the active new and younger

5 FRED MOTEN

Artist Congolese new

Collector Italian Last Year 55

‘I’m not interested in colonialism as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system,’ Baloji once said in an interview. Based between his hometown of Lubumbashi in Congo and Brussels, Baloji uses photography, installations and video to reveal and map the hidden workings of this ongoing legacy in Katanga, a region profoundly shaped by the colonial mining industry. Aware of the necessity to create new platforms outside the Western ones (he has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and Documenta), Baloji cofounded the Lubumbashi Biennale in 2008 to connect with and exhibit artists from across the African continent and beyond. This year has been busy, with shows at Lunds Konsthall, Aarhus Kunsthal and the gallery Imane Farès in Paris; he also recently unveiled two new installations outside the Grand Palais in Paris and is set to receive a major solo show at the city’s Beaux-Arts museum.

ArtReview

88 PATR CK SUN

91 NAN GOLD N

92 SA LORENZO & RACHEL R LLO

90 AR MANU S MON OX & V CTOR A S DDA

93 MAR O CR ST AN OR NZO ASCH & MAUR Z O RG O

94 BARBARA GLADSTONE & GAV N BROWN

68 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

67 SAMMY BALOJI

When you own more than 1,500 art objects and 3,000 photographs, you need space to house them. Some of them will remain in storage for a little longer, as the breaks were applied to a planned second foundation in Madrid, adding to Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s institutions in Turin and Guarene. Nonetheless she pushed ahead with a Young Curators’ Residency Programme in Spain, mirroring the one she runs in Italy, tapped Hans Ulrich Obrist to curate a show by Ian Cheng at the Fundación Fernando de Castro, Madrid, produced a series of major new works by Berlinde De Bruyckere for Turin, pushed ahead with the recently launched nonprofit art-fashion collection ArtColLab (new sweaters by ethical-fashion designer Stella Jean and painter Michael Armitage dropped last month), remained active on the boards of major museums in the us, Europe and China, and continued to support new productions by a suite of younger artists. Meanwhile, the group exhibition Everything Passes Except The Past, also in Turin, analysed the lingering smell of colonialism and included a conference featuring Bénédicte Savoy.

December 2020

95 M GUEL A LÓPEZ

96 HA NALKA SOMOGY

nr That is the theory offered by analysts on why Duterte still gets a 91 percent approval rating. There’s only one way to answer that kind of survey if you don’t want to endanger yourself. But with the Trump administration out of power soon, I think the climate in the Philippines will change naturally. mr There’s a reverence towards American culture in the Philippines. If they see this is the turn, hopefully it’ll permeate there as well. I think a very important question to ask, because we have been talking about what power artists and artist groups yield, is where they’re perhaps lacking. What could be improved, what are they lacking and where, going forward, do you see power in artistic groups? nr There is an anticipation for the National Commission for Culture and the Arts to become an independent Department of Culture. Still under the government. But what we’re seeing, based on the development of this project, is that there are less artists involved in the discussion and there are more technocrats and people in government who are crafting the structure and the policies of this department. I believe that there should be a substantial participation of artists, since this particular department, after all, will be all about them. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen more sectoral representations in Congress, where the representatives are not elected as personalities but as organisations, like Bayan Muna, where they then elect their own representative. It has not been applied to the arts and culture sector because a sectoral party, up to now, has never been organised. I think the reason for that is also that art communities in the Philippines or in Manila are very, very diverse and have different agendas and schools of thoughts. It’s like dealing with a hundred different barangays [the smallest administrative districts in the Philippines]. I think that is the weakness of the arts sector, because it has not achieved a common vision on how arts and culture should proceed, should be developed and should be supported in this country. I feel sorry for that.

P DMAB P DRO M ND S & MATTH W WOOD

Marv Recinto is a writer based in London

103

104

ArtReview

97 ZEHRA DOĞAN

98 EL SABETH MURDOCH

12 ADRIAN CHENG Collector Hong Konger Last Year 73

Collector American Last Year 35

Artist British reentry (51 in 2015)

15 FERAL ATLAS

14 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Activist Movement International new (Eyal Weizman, 18 in 2019)

40 HANK WILLIS THOMAS Artist American new

Academic Spanish Last Year 62

‘Public art is propaganda,’ the American artist said at the end of last year. ‘White men on horses looking down on us.’ Thomas is pushing marginalised narratives to the fore. In July, at the BeltLine Eastside Trail in Atlanta, the artist installed an 8.5m-tall sculpture of an Afro pick, titled All Power to All People, which then toured Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. In the immediate leadup to the us elections, he launched Wide Awakes, marches characterised by the creativity of costumes and banner art, which encouraged Black voting and rallied against voter suppression. Just as ambitious was a new initiative by For Freedoms, the collective cofounded by the artist, in which more than 70 politically minded peers, including Ai Weiwei, Christine Sun Kim and the Guerrilla Girls, made work for billboards across America to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Indoors, the artist had solo shows at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles.

39 Photo: Marie Rouge 40 Photo: Andrea Blanch

Curator Swiss Last Year 12

THE YEAR THATTHAUGHT TAUGHT THAT US HOW POWERLESS WE ARE

41 Photo: Noor Photoface (the Samdanis); Photo: Myra Ho (Campbell Betancourt) 42 Photo: Jessica Neath 43 Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya 44 Photo: Anna Kucera

39 PAUL B. PRECIADO

19 HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Artist German Last Year 4

December 2020

‘Everything that I had been doing for 50 years, it’s been mostly invisible,’ Vicuña told Artsy this year. ‘Then all of a sudden, boom! It comes out like an eruption.’ The artist, who in 1967 formed the radical Tribu No collective that staged political actions across Santiago and spearheaded the Artists for Democracy movement during the 1970s, has long melded, presciently, themes of climate change, deforestation, exile and women’s rights in her sculpture and performance work. Evidently the world is now hungry for art with teeth: this past year she received two retrospectives, at muac in Mexico City and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; she chatted to Hans Ulrich Obrist on environmental justice for Art Basel; and loaned a line of her poetry for the title of Sri Lanka’s next Colomboscope festival, Language is Migrant. Late last year she was also nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and won the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas.

18 HITO STEYERL

Artist Collective International new

Artist Chilean new

16 Photo: John Russo 17 Photo: Jane England. Courtesy the artist. 18 Photo: Trevor Paglen 19 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

12 Courtesy K11 Art Foundation 13 Photo: Drew Altizer 14 Courtesy Forensic Architecture 15 Photo: Anna Tsing

THE MYTH OF THE PRISTINE

17 CECILIA VICUÑA

16 STEVE MCQUEEN

13 PAMELA J. JOYNER

ArtReview

41 NADIA SAMDANI, RAJEEB SAMDANI & DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT

42 BROOK ANDREW Artist Australian Last Year 8 1

Collectors / Curator Bangladeshi / American Last Year 47 Over the past ten years the Samdanis, together with Campbell Betancourt (who is chief curator of their biennial art summit and artistic director of their foundation), have put Bangladesh’s capital firmly on the artistic map. Part exhibition, part conference, part meeting point, the Dhaka Art Summit has established itself as one of the essential gathering points for people involved in contemporary art across the continent to discuss, compare and contrast their practices and the contexts that fuel them. This year’s summit had a focus on ecology and independent and collective practice that crossed the strict borders of art to include agricultural, environmental and social concerns to look towards ways in which art integrates with and informs the world around it. Members of Tate’s International Council, the Samdanis, whose collection includes Bangladeshi and international art, operate a series of programmes dedicated to promoting South Asian artists, and their foundation supports grassroots and community art projects and education programmes. Srihatta, a sculpture park and art centre, is due to open in Sylhet, in northeast Bangladesh, in 2021.

Andrew’s artmaking has long been focused on themes of colonialism, race relations and shaking up dominant Western narratives of art history. In his role as curator of this year’s Biennale of Sydney, Andrew, whose mother is a member of the Wiradjuri indigenous people, told gq Australia that he imagined a ‘platform for people of colour and queerness’. The biennale, titled nirin, opened in March, only to close after a week due to the pandemic. Ten weeks later, following a then-groundbreaking virtual collaboration with Google, the show, which featured Nonggirrnga Marawili, Demian DinéYazhi´ and Denilson Baniwa, respectively artists of Australian, North American and Brazilian indigenous origin, as well as the likes of Arthur Jafa, Sammy Baloji and Tania Bruguera among its 68 participants, was able to reopen across its six venues and was praised for upending the historical Eurocentric bias of the biennial system and for foregrounding indigenous knowledge systems. Meanwhile Andrew is working on a theatre script, and in 2022 he will act as an adviser to the Nordic Pavilion, renamed the Sámi Pavilion, for the 59th Venice Biennale.

“THE GATEKEEPERS HAVE LEFT THE GATES”

67 Photo: Sophie Nuytten 67 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi/Contour, Getty Images

67 SAMMY BALOJI Artist Congolese new

Artist American new

ar The hashtag has now been used almost half a million times. mb We think it has generated around £70 million in sales globally, with 50 percent of the market in the uk, then it’s America, and then fairly evenly spread internationally. Some people go on it and sell right away, but normally it takes a bit of time for the algorithms to catch up with you. Once you start generating regular sales on it, we found people were making around £2,000 a month, but that they were also then making an additional £2,000 a month off the pledge. They were selling work that wasn’t on the pledge, work valued over £200, but also directly from the studio.

Museum Director British Last Year 61

Ligon’s latest work, Aftermath, spells out ‘November 4, 2020’ in neon, the day after Donald Trump was voted out of office. Yet lest anyone think the election result was a win for antiracism, Ligon noted in Artforum that ‘the emergency started generations ago for Indigenous people who resided here before the colonizers arrived, and for the enslaved Africans brought to these shores over four hundred years ago’. Ligon has become the go-to chronicler of America in crisis, producing sculpture, painting and writing on Black history, the African-American experience and racial injustice. As the Black Lives Matter protests swept the world, images of his art proliferated on social media (including in posts by several museums, which Ligon criticised for not having asked permission). As well as participating in a dozen group shows, Ligon has been a curatorial adviser for Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (due to open at the New Museum in January), an exhibition conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor and realised posthumously. And, when a doomed exhibition of work by Philip Guston’s art needed contextualising, Ligon was the go-to writer.

When Macgregor joined the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 1999, her first move was to renegotiate a sponsorship deal with telecom company Telstra that would ensure free admissions to the museum. That move, along with Macgregor’s innovative and savvy programming of exhibitions and public events, has made it the most visited contemporary art museum in the world, according to a report published last year. Like most arts institutions the mca’s running was largely restricted by health measures and lockdowns, yet it had time to host the 2020 Brook Andrew-curated Biennale of Sydney and a major retrospective of Chinese-Australian artist Lindy Lee, which Macgregor hopes will attract domestic tourists (so does the government, which backed the show via its tourism and major events agency Destination nsw). Macgregor’s reputation on the national level was further confirmed when the government, after failing to implement the $250m arts bailout package announced in June, brought her in to lead a ‘creative economy taskforce’ to advise on its allocation.

December 2020

“WE ARE CREATING THE SPACE IN ORDER TO EXIST”

ar Generosity is inherent in the pledge, in that artists who sell five works promise to buy one in return.

In March the British painter Matthew Burrows established the Artists Support Pledge, a hashtag that artists could use to sell work directly from Instagram. Each work had to be valued at £200/$200 or less, and if the artist succeeded in making £1,000 or the equivalent in sales, they promised to buy a work from another artist using the pledge. It has now spread across the globe, generated millions in sales and turned Burrows’s life upside down.

Sammy Baloji, interviewed by Louise Darblay

Collector Italian Last Year 55

December 2020

sammy baloji It has to do with my childhood experience of growing up in a city that is entirely organised around the industrial reality and exploitation of mining resources. During the 1990s, we went through a political crisis that stopped the economy, all the production, as well as spaces for culture that used to be provided by different foreign organisations. These were the places where we could connect with the world

96 HAJNALKA SOMOGYI

95 MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ

98 ELISABETH MURDOCH

97 ZEHRA DOĞAN

Collector British-American new

Artist Kurdish new An award-winning journalist and artist (although the distinction is increasingly moot here), Doğan has often been as active politically (among which founding and editing Jinha, a Kurdish feminist newspaper closed by the Turkish authorities in 2016) as in her artmaking. Doğan has served time in prisons in Mardin, Tarsus and Diyarbakır at various points between 2016 and 2019 (most recently a sentence of two years and nine months for sharing a watercolour depicting the destruction of Nusaybin by Turkish state forces on social media). Now, however, her graphic novels, sculpture and drawing, much of which was made while languishing as a political prisoner and snuck out in a variety of guileful ways, received a solo show in Istanbul, under the noses of her state persecutors in Turkey, while a graphic novel, Xêzên Dizî (The Hidden Drawings, 2018–20), depicting the histories of the Kurdish struggle, the horrors of prison life and the stories of fellow inmates, was a star turn at the Berlin Biennale. In November she won the Carol Rama Award.

tv executive Murdoch (daughter of Rupert) has been pouring money into the arts since she set up the Freelands Foundation in 2015. Operating from a gallery space in North London (which in normal times would be hosting the inaugural Freelands Painting Prize exhibition for recent graduates), the grant-giving operation’s activities include sponsoring residencies at Gasworks; supporting the education programme Iniva, which runs an archive of the Black British Arts movement; and providing the backing for a ceramics fellowship at Camden Arts Centre. The foundation also runs an annual prize supporting a show by a female artist at a nonprofit space outside London and has published several reports on the representation of female artists in Britain. In 2019 this amounted to £817,332 in support. Normally Murdoch’s money isn’t available to individuals, however covid-19 changed that, and a whopping £3m in emergency grants was made available. Murdoch was a Tate Trustee, but in 2017 followed Nicholas Serota to Arts Council England, becoming a National Council member.

ArtReview

95 Photo: Daniela Morales Lisac 96 Photo: Marcell Esterházy 97 Photo: Hoshin Issa 98 Courtesy Locksmith Animation

Bard-trained Somogyi is the initiator, leader and cocurator of Budapest’s off-Biennale, a self-styled ‘garage biennale’ founded by a group of local art professionals in order to support and foster an independent art scene as a generative act in the context of an increasingly authoritarian government and a ‘centralised, party-loyal art infrastructure’. Naturally the biennial operates without state support and through self-financed and self-organised infrastructures, with lowkey venues (state-run institutions are also boycotted) that (through necessity as much as choice) tend to include apartments, shopfronts, theatres and public spaces. Having started, in 2014, from nothing, off is now the largest independent art event in Central Europe; its third iteration, titled inhale! and originally scheduled to take place this past April, will now happen in May 2021 and tackle the climate crisis and rise of nationalism and the things that come in between, while continuing to champion the role of art in the establishment of democratic societies.

in terms of artistic practice. From 1992 until 2003 we were in a period of wars, crisis, political conflict and ethnic conflict. For me what became really important in this period was to create a space where we could meet each other as artists, nourishing our aspirations, sharing our experiences. I graduated from the University of Lubumbashi in 2004 and then started to work as a volunteer at the Institut Français, taking photographs and documenting all the cultural activities that were going on there. And because I had access to materials and a lab in which I could develop my films, I also started to produce my own work. From there I had the chance to connect with other places in Europe. I had my first exhibition in 2006 in Brussels. A year later it was Paris, where I had an art exhibition as part of a biennial organised by the Musée du Quai Branly. After that I was invited to Bamako in 2007, and that was one of the most exciting experiences for me, because in Brussels, for instance, I was the only African artist exhibiting. In Paris, while there were a lot of other photographers from different continents in the show, they were not present at the exhibition,

so I didn’t meet any of them. But in Bamako I met all these photographers coming in from Africa, but also from the diaspora. All these people were there trying to connect, and the topics that were addressed in their work were really close to my own reality, to Lubumbashi. From there, myself and Gulda el Magambo Bin Ali (who was also invited to Bamako) decided to create a biennale in Lubumbashi in order to replicate this kind of closeness. The first edition took place in 2008, and it allowed me to meet photographers from Angola and Mozambique, for example, who I didn’t know and had never even heard of. I came to realise that it was a similar experience for them. They were very excited and very open to connect, because we were close in terms of experience, but at the same time geographically far away – travelling in Africa is really expensive, so you rarely get that experience of visiting other countries. ar How do you maintain an event like this without state support? sb The context is important here. We are the second province of a big country, separated from Kinshasa, the capital, by 2,000km and accessible only by plane. That means we are

sb It’s different when you talk about, for example, South Africa, where you have infrastructures and government support. Then you have other countries like Cameroon or Angola, where you have the intention coming from artists and where I know a lot of associations are connecting across Africa. You have, for example, Njelele Art Station, which is in Harare, Zimababwe, or the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (scca), which is Ibrahim Mahama’s space in Tamale, Ghana. We are connecting and collaborating with other initiatives, like the collective Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization, Lagos Photo Festival, cca Lagos in Nigeria, Raw Material Company in Dakar, Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg… And we are all connecting not only to promote, but really in order to exist. ar I was curious to know how the biennale has been received by the people who live in Lubumbashi. sb It’s not possible to compare it, for example, to the Venice Biennale. It’s really about questioning not just the province but the state itself, through all this colonial legacy. What does it mean to have those frontiers that are dividing the same people from both sides of different countries, while having the same local languages, the same separation within an administration, which belongs to the Portuguese, or English,

ArtReview

Organise

Curator Hungarian new

Curator Peruvian new ‘We would like to imagine what a post-pandemic art world can be like, in which young, dissident, feminist, and more inclusive initiatives have the possibility of opening other paths,’ reads a statement on the website of Teor/ética, the Costa Rican off-space López has been the codirector and chief curator of since 2015 (which this year showed the work of the late Sila Chanto). He took on the space having cofounded (and is still involved in) Bisagra, a collective based in Lima (during the pandemic, the group hosted a series of events at the beach). While his interests lie primarily in art from Central America and the Caribbean, his influence spreads further: on a practical level curating the Cecilia Vicuña retrospective, which moved from Witte de With, Rotterdam, last year to muac, Mexico City, this year, but more theoretically through a writing practice (in magazines internationally as well as last year’s essay anthology Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia) that seeks to articulate a queer politic in art from outside the hegemony of North American academia.

106

artreview You’re from Lubumbashi, a provincial city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that since 2008 has been the site of an art biennale you cofounded with other members of the collective Picha. How did this come about and what does it mean to launch such an event in the context of Lubumbashi?

mb It wasn’t as if I thought I was going to help everybody, just myself and my immediate friends and colleagues. It was as ambitious as that really. Overnight I’d made £800, by lunchtime I’d made £1,000 and I was able to buy another artist’s work. So I emailed everyone I could, asking them to take part. By lunchtime, the Instagram notifications on my phone would not stop. A barrage of emails were arriving too. Then I didn’t leave my phone and computer for months. I was getting two messages a second from artists around the world, from Africa, Asia, America, and it went on like that for weeks. In the end, I just turned them off.

Matthew Burrows, interviewed by Oliver Basciano

ar For the last edition, you collaborated with ruangrupa, whose practice has very much been about creating a network within Indonesia and beyond. Is this also something that you’re seeing happening across the African continent?

68 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

ar Not bad for a day’s work.

44 ELIZABETH ANN MACGREGOR

43 GLENN LIGON

Locked down, immobilised, suspended, brought to a halt. The strangeness of a period in which the habitual connectivity of twenty-first-century life simply evaporated is hard to exaggerate. Suddenly the end of the street seemed a long way away. That artificially arrested stopping of circulation was bad enough, but it revealed that most of what we call art and culture only lives by virtue of indoor public spaces – the galleries, museums, cinemas, music venues, theatres, comedy clubs, nightclubs, even shops and shopping malls – that were, for various periods of time, all shuttered. In these straitened circumstances, artists, gallerists and curators have had to think on their feet to keep art going, which has meant a new focus on organising, keeping existing networks functioning, developing new ones or tapping into previously existing grassroots networks that were, in past times, often ignored. It’s been a matter of improvising, and inevitably digital platforms have partly stepped in where physical ones failed. They might have been modest gestures, but blue-chip galleries saw the point of supporting their less secure peers: David Zwirner and Emmanuel Perrotin opened online viewing rooms and physical galleries to smaller galleries, Hauser & Wirth sold donated works to support art spaces in New York while putting on online and physical shows of graduate work. Supporting the more precarious infrastructures of emerging, early-career art that later benefits them was already a preoccupation among blue-chip galleries, but the pandemic forced a transformation of thought into action. Elsewhere, curators had to rethink the organisation of largescale exhibitions from the ground up; curator Ekaterina Degot, faced with

artreview How did you come up with the pledge?

were in a position that perhaps they haven’t faced since the war, facing no income for at least three months. There wasn’t going to be any backup plan from the government anytime soon. I also knew that arts organisations were not in a position to help, because they were fighting for their lives too. We were on our own. I started to think what assets I had that might help me survive. Obviously one thing was art, but a particular type of artwork – the kind artists have lying around their studio that never gets

matthew burrows It was on the morning of 16 March, the first day of lockdown in the uk, and I was sitting at my computer answering emails about forthcoming projects that were all being cancelled. Exhibitions, teaching work – everything was coming to an end. While this was happening, I could see on social media other artist friends who were saying the same thing. It was like a tsunami of disbelief and despair that seemed to ripple across the artworld. Artists

ArtReview

December 2020

107

mb I actually remember thinking this: it’s like the gatekeepers have left the gates. Everyone has gone home, galleries were battening down the hatches and waiting it out, but the artists did not have that luxury. It was as if the industry didn’t care. Not everybody, of course. Yet I think that withdrawal provided this amazing opportunity. I couldn’t have done this two years ago or whatever, people would’ve laughed at me, thought I’d gone mad. I don’t think anyone would’ve been brave enough, especially after you were already established with a gallery, a career. ar You’re represented by Vigo. Did you have any pushback from galleries? mb Given the scale of it, I’ve not really had any problems. I did have a few artists who told me their galleries had told them not to do it, because they’re worried about it affecting their market value. That’s ok, if those galleries can give that artist a living wage for the next six months, fine, tell them not to do it. But you’ve no right to tell them that they’ve got to be poverty-stricken for six months. They’re selling work that you’re never going to sell anyway. Most galleries, however, once they understood it, were understanding. ar Tell me about the mentoring programme this grew from. mb For the past ten or more years I’ve been interested in cultures of trust and generosity. I’ve approached this in quite a critical way, looking for ideas from sports science to neurology and prehistoric societies. Anything that I thought might unravel artists’ relationship to their work and to one another’s community. One of the things that became clear from the research is that if you develop a culture that is about the community, it’s much more effective than a culture that is about the individual. Which is not against individualism, but that

ar This sounds a lot like the atmosphere of the undergraduate crit, though that space is now clouded by the marketisation of education. mb I’ve worked in education and become increasingly disillusioned with the sector. If you turn colleges into a business, you throw out what was good about our schools many years ago. Back then they could be shambolic, but that lack of professionalism allowed a freedom to flourish. Students were allowed to explore and to unravel and to make mistakes. It felt to me like we were pushing that out of the system.

mb We haven’t had anyone from Instagram, but Google Arts and Culture have been very supportive, from fairly early on actually. About two months in, they put me in contact with mit Media Lab in the us. I spent a bit of time working with them, and we’ve come up with a mockup website that we hope to develop going forward, which can actually manage it better. It’ll still be on Instagram, but the site will manage things like the artists’ finances.

sb It’s quite a complex question, one that I have been going through since I started to work on colonial memory and colonial archives. It wasn’t an intention, but when I went to visit a mining company, I came across those archives without a lot of context. And I realised that this history is something that I’ve never learned at school. It was hidden behind a social amnesia. I was trying to understand where it came from and why the story hasn’t been told. But I don’t think that I’m looking back in my work. When you use archives, you are, in a way, rereading a story. You are reading it from the perspective that you have now, so it’s all about the present in a way. At the same time, it uncovers the experience of those who were occupied, but also used in order to produce mineral resources, to produce the economic benefits – the main purpose of the colonial system itself. Those cities were segregated and the autochthones were not allowed to be in the city, they were not part of the city. They were just workers for the city, in a way. They didn’t have the same rights, like the Europeans who were there. I also look at, not the so-called traditional knowledge, but at precolonial organisations, because whenever you have these occupations, you also have a resilience process, you have a reaction or you have an integration of both. ar A form of syncretism. sb Yes, which can be a way of surviving or resisting or even just consuming what is coming, what is part of the new context or the new conditions. For me it’s interesting to look at it that way too. There are many connections that we can find between Congo and other countries. One of them is, for example, the uranium that was used for the atomic bomb. Or the First World War, for example, and its effect on the relocation of colonies. Germany had colonies in Tanzania, in Rwanda, in Burundi, in Cameroon,

sb Yes, these questions are really connected, as I was saying, with the kind of discussions that can take place in a collective. It’s really important because you don’t have infrastructures and you don’t have support. It’s really about having a conversation, a sincere one. Growing thoughts and inspirations and learning from each other, in sharing but also in practising.

ar Have you actually been able to do any painting? mb I hope to get into the studio next week! Currently it’s a fulltime job maintaining the integrity of the hashtag. Obviously, when it went global people didn’t always bother finding out what it really is. Keeping and emanating that level of information and making sure that people know the promise you implicitly make in using it takes a lot of effort and marketing. One of the things we looked into with mit was how we create a technology that embeds in it those preindustrial ideas, a society that’s about sustainability and about equality. So much of our technology is actually not, it’s about silo-ing exclusivity, making a few people very wealthy. What I want to do is try and find technological advances that allow people to share assets rather than just heaping them on the already popular.

“THERE’S SO MUCH THAT WE LACK”

ar I was looking at Les Ateliers de la Pensée in Dakar, run by Felwine Sarr and Achille Mbembe, which I thought had that angle of having different fields, very academic, but also artistic inputs, to generate discourse informed by those different perspectives. I think Sarr was positioning it as a process of decolonising the thinking, the discourse. Perhaps that’s how you might see the Lubumbashi Biennale – as a form of resistance, of deconstructing certain frameworks and building new ones? sb Four years after Mobutu’s coup d’état in 1965, the first demonstrations by students of the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa took place. These events were violently repressed by the Zairian army, and again in 1971, when another student-organised event took place. For the second time, Mobutu forcibly enlisted students into the army. This was done as a form of punishment and discipline. The university was reformed and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities was relocated to the University of Lubumbashi. This led to the emergence of a new class of intellectuals, thinkers, researchers and poets coming out of Lubumbashi, who addressed critical issues related to society. In this respect, these intellectual productions were born out of social experience. I myself studied at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. I remain very influenced and inspired by the writings of philosophers such as Valentin Yves Mudimbe, works on the memory of the industrial city produced by researchers such as Johannes Fabian, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Donatien Dibwe, to name but a few. The Lubumbashi Biennale is intended to be a space in which intellectual thought or research related to social phenomena can be translated through artistic action into the exhibition space or the public space. So everything that you were saying about Felwine Sarr and Les Ateliers, and this idea of mixing disciplines, I believe this is the only way that Africa can rethink itself.

99 GREEN PAPAYA ART PRO ECTS

Laura Raicovich, interviewed by Oliver Basciano Laura Raicovich is a curator and museum director known for her activism. Currently interim director of Leslie-Lohman, a New York museum dedicated to queer culture, she was previously director of the Queens Museum. She left in 2018 after a dispute with the institution’s board and New York City officials became a public controversy, in which she objected to the Israeli government using the museum for a political event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. Her next book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, will be published by Verso in 2021. artreview I’m going to start with a really critical question: what should a museum be? laura raicovich I think you’re referring to the debate from icom [International Council of Museums] about how a museum should be defined. I use a response to that in my forthcoming book to help materialise how this idea of neutrality seeps into our ways of thinking and working and being without really being noticed. What’s poignant about the whole moment is that the new definition proposed by a group of icom members, who were trying to centre it

on ideas of justice and equity, was seen as not neutral, whereas the previous definition, an institution that cares for objects, presents them to the public and functions as an educational body, is considered neutral. Neither of those things are neutral, but that’s ok. What we’re really striving for is a way to look at how stories are told. If we look at museums or any cultural institution as a storytelling agency, the stories being told are by individuals who work inside the museum, by curators, educators and, of course, by artists. I think that the reckoning of this moment has at its core this nonperception of the fact that museums have a point of view. Their unauthored or absolute or neutral positionality is just a profound myth. ar I suppose it’s because the museum has this imagined neutral figure, who turns out to be an ‘old white guy’. You’re still the interim director at the Leslie-Lohman museum, correct? lr That’s right. I was very clear, and so was the board, about the true interim nature of my role. I recognise that I have many queer colleagues inside museums, and very few of them are the

ArtReview

I CAN’T BREATHE

Museu

In August institution essay on cl videos, scr mance and resident ar It was a typ Berlin had Gallery, Lo century-ol in 2018. Ea mance pro project co and when show by Le central, co

47 BR LA

ar Those are two interesting points – how these narratives get made and who the gatekeepers of those stories. Are you trying in a way to challenge that, with your work and the biennale?

ar A lot of the work being shown, including your own work with colonial archives, seems to engage with this idea of looking back to the past to reframe it and retell it. Do you think of the biennale as a space to generate those new stories and histories?

45 ST RO

ar What’s the future for the pledge? Has anyone from Instagram picked up on it?

100 LEGACY RUSSELL

ORGANISE

ar The pledge is a survival mechanism. It’s also profoundly democratic, removing the gatekeepers from the sales process.

December 2020

mb I’ve been thinking a lot about other economic and social systems for years, and got really interested in prehistoric, preindustrial communities and how they evolved, and how they sustained one another. They were substantially more successful at being sustainable than industrial society has been. Hunter-gatherer society specifically had a couple of customs and social ideas that seemed to bind their ability to survive. One was that when you’re on a hunt, and if you get the kill, you don’t keep the meat, but have the honour of disposing of it. You prepare it, butcher it, then divide it out among your family, neighbours and friends. They then do the same, then they divide that up among

directors of their institutions. For me, it was a real priority to say: this is the perfect steppingstone from a smaller museum to a larger one, and so a queer person should really occupy this role. I will say that they’re pretty close to finding a permanent director. ar Many museums have multiple audiences. Yours has a very clear remit, a particular audience and a particular founding story. Is that easier? lr It is and it isn’t. The fact that it’s the only museum in the United States focused on queer art doesn’t mean that there aren’t enormous blind spots, which I think is very much part of the discussions we’ve been having as a staff, particularly after last spring’s murders of Black people by police in the us. Just because you have a particular focus as an institution, even when that focus is on a marginalised group, doesn’t mean you don’t have your own work cut out for you. People are more complex than a singular identity function, and it’s where the intersections of those identities fall that we have to really be able to look into. I think all museums, no matter what flavour they are, have their own reckonings. One of the

Academ

Three year ing on glob has acceler forces he w Martin Gu opening as the exhibi emergency including while ther ‘Driving th essays (‘we put an eco for aoc, tr Sarah Sze

things t protests cultural but in m demand enough To s We wan Y.” That who wo beleagu our perc if we tho could be about w through get som

ar How

lr I do we come position overly e care, and I thi has to re its fund to its ev at ourse tion doe the first slow do momen both thr otherwi inequity

ar I’m said to m every mu extension money fr unsustai idea of lo not flying

lr Thi address late cap in muse massive better, M which I The resonati connect internat could fin in the u the 135 d are spok between

20 TITUS KAPHAR

46 EUGENE TAN

‘We are now in the afterglow of an unfamiliar, viral, and partly unreadable time,’ wrote the three members of Raqs Media Collective in the catalogue, or Sourcebook, for the Yokohama Triennale, which the New Delhi-based group curated this year. The show featured 67 artists attempting to make sense of these confusing times, more than half showing in Japan for the first time. And Raqs remains pioneering in the way that it has apparently seamlessly folded academic research and curating largescale exhibitions (which include iterations of Manifesta and the Shanghai Biennale) into its practice, grounded in a form of ‘kinetic contemplation’ that accepts and exploits the potential of disorientation within the passage of space and time. That made Raqs well placed to produce a new videowork, 31 days, online as part of hkw’s cc: World project examining the shape and form of conversation in the midst of lockdowns and a pandemic.

lr Honestly that hasn’t been my experience, but if it’s happening with certain individuals, I think that’s ok. There are some wealthy patrons willing to put up with the scrutiny, and plenty of other places for patrons who don’t want to be put under that level of scrutiny. I also think that there are different types of funders attracted to the arts at different times, which comes along with a rethinking on the institutional side about how governance, power and financial conditions are intermingled on the board. One of the major advantages that Leslie-Lohman Museum has is that the board is really diverse, and I don’t just mean ethnically and racially even, but diversity of types of people: journalists, writers, artists, people of different class positions. That’s something we’re globally going to see more of, and we will see more of because people will understand the word ‘diversity’ as being about the diversity of experience.

lr On a certain level, you can’t really have a show about Guston’s work and properly address the clan figures with an all-white curatorial team. That said, part of the reason that Helen [Molesworth] and I decided to plan this conversation is that we have unfixed views on the matter. I don’t know how you resolve it, and I also have other questions. I think part of the problem of the pandemic has been that we haven’t been able to really have a conversation beyond the hot take on Twitter or whatever, and I think that that’s really a disservice. That’s putting us at a disadvantage. We have this distant polarisation around questions like this. Let’s talk about it. I really want to hear from people, because I know that people have been thinking about it, but they’re not thinking about it together, out loud.

December 2020

Curator German Last Year 37

Artist Chinese Last Year 24

71 DONNA HARAWAY

ar To what extent should a patron influence an institution? I know you’ve set up a series of Zoom conversations, and that one of the first conversations will be about the postponed Philip Guston exhibition.

‘Can common reference points and collective action be enabled without monopolistic force? How can knowledge be both situated and globally relevant?’ These are the central questions of The New Alphabet, the banner under which Franke, head of the Department of Visual Arts and Film at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, has placed his exhibition programme from 2019 to 2021. The museum has been mostly closed this year, so Franke’s programme, which has a tendency to treat ideas that affect art and art itself on an equal footing, has been disrupted, hkw did manage to stage a largescale exhibition on the legacy of Aby Warburg in shaping Western art history (a neat followup to a 2019/20 show on Hubert Fichte and colonial power relations), and A Slightly Curving Place, a smaller group show catalysed by the work of self-taught acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi. Franke’s own essayistic approach to curating, unafraid to stray far from art and lean on all sorts of other disciplines, has now become the dominant mode of exhibition-making and seems more pertinent than ever.

72 SUNJUNG KIM

Academic American reentry (67 in 2018)

Curator Korean Last Year 77

The philosopher’s motto has long been ‘staying with the trouble’, and since there is a fair amount of trouble around, Haraway’s astute thinking on how humans live with each other, with their bodies and with nonhuman life (and yes, that might include a virus) is more relevant than ever. Her now 35-year-old ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and the more recent Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) find a legacy in the work of artists and curators internationally. She wrote an essay for Bruno Latour’s Critical Zones show at zkm Karlsruhe this year and her thought-dna is laced through Lucia Pietroiusti’s general ecology programme at the Serpentine Galleries in London and Paul B. Preciado’s proposition of the ‘countersexual revolution’. Likewise, the growing interest of art theory in indigenous cosmologies and the often porous relationship between bodies and nature – as Miguel A. López points out in his essay for Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition at muac, Mexico City – owes much to her groundwork.

“The notion of the archipelago is key for Luma Arles,” says Hoffmann in a video introducing her almost-complete private arts centre in Arles. If Hans Ulrich Obrist fans find that analogy familiar, then it is perhaps explained by the fact the curator (who cites archipelagic thinker Édouard Glissant often) is heavily involved in his compatriot’s project, as a member of the ‘core group’ of advisers, alongside Beatrix Ruf, Liam Gillick, Tom Eccles and Philippe Parreno. The Frank Gehry-designed aluminium-clad 56m Arts Resource Centre tower, part of the private foundation Hoffmann has spent £133m on, will open early next year (pandemic-depending), though it has already started welcoming resident artists. Meanwhile the Roche pharmaceuticals heiress (the company is working on one of many possible covid-19 vaccines) managed shows for the likes of Chino Amobi and Gilbert & George at Luma Westbau, her smaller Zürich space, and has continued her global patronage, not least as sponsor of the Bruno Latour-cocurated Taipei Biennial.

58 NICHOLAS LOGSDAIL, ALEX LOGSDAIL & GREG HILTY Gallerists British Last Year 46

Gallerists Mexican / Colombian Last Year 59 The couple’s Mexico City hq , Kurimanzutto, cut normal programming in the face of the pandemic and replaced it with a series of group shows by gallery artists – Haegue Yang, Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Amorales – and guests, not least art space Biquini Wax, a mainstay of the city’s diy scene. Yet while the gallery is a powerful local broker (Orozco is receiving flak currently for his grandiose partnership with the government to transform Chapultepec Park, just as state arts funding is slashed), its influence spreads beyond. Previously the pair have staged events in local markets, parking lots and airports, including a recent billboard project, and in the autumn it launched a show based in New York City’s obsolete phone boxes, ahead of their removal. The idea of artist Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker, director of Kurimanzutto’s New York space (which opened in 2018), it featured Jimmie Durham and Rirkrit Tiravanija (like Ortega, gallery artists), alongside Glenn Ligon, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer and Patti Smith.

Lisson Gallery, founded by Nicholas in 1967, with son Alex and Hilty now acting as trusted directors, might be long in the tooth but has proved remarkably agile in the face of 2020’s challenges. The gallery, one of the founding members of the Gallery Climate Coalition (a nonprofit launched in October with the aim of developing an industry-wide response to the climate crisis) has long been making sales ‘based purely on images’, Logsdail junior told Forbes, and as such the disruption wasn’t going to faze them: an online screening and exhibition programme launched in May. They did however open a galley in the Hamptons, where many monied New Yokers chose to sit out lockdown, and quickly set a sales record for Stanley Whitney, selling a painting for $850,000. Likewise, with the physical Frieze art fair in London cancelled, Lisson opened a new temporary space in Mayfair (leased until March). While London and New York City went in and out of lockdowns, the gallery’s one-yearold Shanghai premises staged shows for Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie, with the latter launching multiple public art projects in the city.

60 MARC GLIMCHER

59 BANKSY Artist British Last Year 14

Gallerist American Last Year 23

Artworld connoisseurs love to hate Banksy, but the anonymous street artist’s power lies in the fact that he doesn’t need their support. Indeed, his market is booming. In October, Show Me the Monet, a take on the impressionist painter’s Water Lilies series, sold for a record £7.5m at auction. Prints Banksy stopped making in 2010 now command six-figure sums. Against establishment antipathy, others have reason to appreciate mystery-man’s success. In the summer mv Louise Michel was launched, a former French Customs boat refitted as a search-and-rescue vessel to assist migrants in peril on the Mediterranean, funded and decorated by Banksy. An exhibition of photographs of the artist’s work in Palestine was unveiled in August, a gesture recognising the diversified tourism to the state his stencil work has brought. One looming problem: in September the artist lost his battle to trademark his designs, in part because of his anonymity.

ArtReview

‘How does my gallery cope with two to six months of little or no revenue?’ That was the stark reality facing Glimcher (and his peers), he told Art News earlier this year. Half of the family-run gallery’s 200 staff (across seven spaces in five countries) were furloughed, 40 ultimately losing their jobs. The next move was to go to where the collectors are, boosting Pace’s digital presence and inaugurating a temporary space in the Hamptons. Then Democrat-supporting Glimcher took things to the (near) top, meeting Ivanka Trump to plead for government assistance for the arts economy. In August, somewhat counterintuitively, Glimcher announced a new business, Superblue, devoted to ‘experiential art’ (teamlab, et al) and aimed at ‘private, corporate, and institutional clients across all industries’. Its first outpost, a new Miami art centre, opens in spring 2021. ‘I don’t expect a dramatic, post-Covid world,’ Glimcher told the Financial Times in April. ‘But things will adjust.’ Given recent allegations of a toxic work environment and a lack of diversity within the gallery, some of those adjustments may need to come sooner than Glimcher planned.

December 2020

70 ANSELM FRANKE

69 AI WEIWEI Ai’s political pronouncements have long eclipsed his studio work (he is now based in Cambridge, having moved with much bitterness from Berlin last year). So while he did make a film during lockdown about Wuhan and the new coronavirus (Coronation, released online), he also produced 10,000 facemasks and raised over £1m for charity. And while he was commissioned to show work on the digital billboards of London’s Piccadilly Circus, he also garnered press, the same week, protesting outside a Julian Assange court hearing. And yes, he is in the Bangkok Art Biennale, but he also signed an open letter decrying state violence against Thailand’s democracy protests. Add to this another movie, Vivos, shown at Sundance, on the 2014 massacre of Mexican students, and an odd invitation to direct Puccini’s Turandot at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. He’s as busy and provocative as ever, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘I am a product of political conditions,’ he told the Financial Times this year.

‘There were some difficult times after the biennale was pushed back,’ said Kim, the president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Postponing the exhibition, curated by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, to February 2021 means organisers will miss the 40-year anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, the brutally suppressed democracy protests the event memorialises. Symbolism is important for Kim, evident not least in her Real dmz project, which has seen art placed within the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and its border area since 2012. A work by Soyoung Chung, presented in collaboration with the Real dmz’s Negotiating Borders 2, had an afterlife at the Curitiba Biennial, which closed in February. Kim got a show by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs up and running at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, and took the reins (with SooJin Lee) of a huge Lee Bul retrospective, Utopia Saved, at St Petersburg’s Manege Central Exhibition Hall.

ArtReview

72 Photo: cho.ok.soo

lr My hope is that people really step up. Certainly, some organisations are going to disappear. There are already, especially, smaller to midsize organisations that are just not going to exist anymore. I also think – and this is not a reflection on the ones that have not been able to sustain themselves – that it’s a moment for new institutions to be born. Anytime that you have the amount of creative energy that’s out there right now, engaged in culture and engaged in protest, things are going to grow out of that, and be profoundly different from what was created in the past. There’s a reason that in New York many of the really cool organisations were founded in the early 1970s. It was a time of fiscal crisis in New York, it was a time when real estate was cheap. There were a lot of factors, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to overly glamorise that period either. But maybe we’re in another moment where the ideals of the protest can be embodied in a new set of cultural organisations that emerge from this moment. I would be really excited to see that. In the us there needs to be a much larger conversation about what culture is, and what people want from it. I think the piece that’s really missing from the funding model in the us, and the reason that private individuals have had this outsize influence on cultural spaces, is because of the lack of federal public funding

ar As you say, the rich are still rich. However, do you feel there’s a reluctance now among patrons to donate to museums, given that their business interests will be scrutinised? Do you feel that museum patrons are becoming wary?

ACTIVATE 73 Photo: Tosh Basco 74 Photo: Liam Gillick

ar With museums and institutions everywhere facing a bleak economic future, is patronage still coming in?

Collector Swiss Last Year 43

This year billionaire art collector Berggruen confirmed that plans for his $500m ‘scholars’ campus’ in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains in California were moving ahead. It will be the new home to the Berggruen Institute, a thinktank project currently based in la whose focus on international relations, democracy and the future of capitalism is certainly high-flying: members of its ‘21st Century Council’ have counted the likes of Arianna Huffington, ex-Google ceo Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger. Rather than see art as a leisurely pastime for the wealthy, Berggruen’s vision has recently started incorporating creative speculation into the institute’s activities. Its ‘The Transformations of the Human’ programme places philosophers and artists in dialogue with technologists to ‘challenge our established conceptions of what it means to be human’ – with current fellows including Pierre Huyghe, Kahlil Joseph, Martine Syms and Anicka Yi. Going beyond the old collector model, Berggruen epitomises a new generation of global influencers, merging art with thought leadership.

Muholi does not describe themselves as an artist. It’s easy to understand why they would not want their photography, which addresses Black, female and queer trauma, to be understood purely on aesthetic terms. Instead Muholi’s work, born out of lived experience growing up in apartheid-era Durban, is a mode of ‘visual activism’. The portraits of the South African lbgtqi subjects do more than just present a history of violence, however: assembled en masse, as was planned for a survey at London’s Tate Modern (postponed) and as achieved at this year’s Sydney Biennale, the images expose a community forged in adversity but not defined by it. More recently Muholi, who is also honorary professor at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, has turned the camera around to produce self-portraits (seen at Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, Harvard University), in which the darkness of their skin is heightened, raising questions about self-representation, the performance of blackness and our own gaze. This political attitude won the photographer the Stiftung Niedersachsen’s Spectrum International Prize this year.

December 2020

56 MAJA HOFFMANN

Foundation Director German-American new

Artist South African reentry (95 in 2016)

ArtReview

55 NICOLAS BERGGRUEN

52 ZANELE MUHOLI

Artists Indian Last Year 89

Curator Russian new Since Degot took over the annual Steirischer Herbst in 2017, the Graz festival (founded in 1968 in opposition to nationalist rhetoric gaining traction at the time) has become a point of reference for how art can interact with a city and its politics. This year’s edition was speedily reworked in the light of the pandemic. Paranoia tv, launched in September, is a slick online operation, packed with binge-worthy works that lived up to the curator’s promise of ‘Netflix but less lonely’. Ingo Niermann’s Deutsch Süd-Ost (2020), tracking a fictional future far-right coup, unfolds over 25 parts; Brazilian artist Tamar Guimarães (collaborating with Luisa Cavanagh and Rusi Millán Pastori) created an ‘antiBolsonaro-WhatsApp-Soap’ running for four episodes. The Graz public experienced physical works also, integrated into the public realm, from newspaper interventions (obituaries for outdated notions) by Sung Tieu, a soundwork by Lawrence Abu Hamdan hidden in crisp packets at local supermarkets and a broadcast on taxi radios by Janez Janša that imagines the European Football Championship if it hadn’t been postponed.

57 Photo: Pia Riverola 58 Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai 59 Courtesy banksy.co.uk 60 Axel Dupeux

51 JEEBESH BAGCHI, MONICA NARULA & SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA

69 Photo: Gao Yuan. © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy Ai Weiwei and Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai 70 Photo: Silke Briel/hkw

is is an interesting question, and it ses two things. There’s the question of pitalism, and its complete embodiment eum culture as capital campaigns, e building projects, faster, stronger, Marlboro-man style directorship, have to say is toxic. en, and it’s something that’s really ing right now for me, there’s the tion between the hyperlocal and the tional. At the Queens Museum, we nd somebody of every nationality un within the borough, never mind different languages and dialects that ken. At Leslie-Lohman, the relationship n the hyperlocal and the international

The curator of the next Venice Biennale would normally be zigzagging across the globe in the year prior to the show. Alemani, appointed in January, managed trips to Scandinavia and Los Angeles from New York – where her day job since 2011 has been artistic director of the High Line – before air travel became impossible. As it turned out, the Italian will have another 12 months, as the art biennale has been shifted back to 2022 so that the architecture biennale, meant to have been staged in 2020, can take the 2021 slot. The eventual exhibition will seek to ‘absorb the anxiety of the moment, but not in an illustrative way’, the curator says. Meanwhile, New York’s former elevated railway turned linear park, which normally welcomes 8 million visitors annually, reopened in June after a three-month closure. Following the inauguration of an annual plinth commission last year with a monumental sculpture by Simone Leigh, this year’s 12-strong shortlist includes proposals by Nick Cave, Banu Cennetoğlu and Mary Sibande.

Curator Emirati Last Year 32 The sheikha has shaped Sharjah’s reputation as the home of cutting-edge contemporary art in the Gulf, identifying it against Qatar’s and Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster museum projects and Dubai’s burgeoning commercial gallery scene. In November last year she launched the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial, adding to her responsibilities as director of the Sharjah Biennial and founder of the Sharjah Art Foundation. The sheikha has been decentring the artworld for two decades, so it’s apt that the 2021 biennial will feature the hotly anticipated exhibition Thinking Historically in the Present that Okwui Enwezor had been working on at the time of his death in 2019 (posthumously realised by his longtime collaborators Chika Okeke-Agulu, Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Ute Meta Bauer and Salah M. Hassan). If a newly woke artworld is to walk the decolonisation talk, its institutions will draw on the sheikha’s experience: she sits on the boards of moma ps1 in New York, the kw Institute in Berlin, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut; is on the advisory boards Khoj Workshop, New Delhi and Darat al Funun, Amman; and is president of the International Biennial Association.

The past year may have marked the 30th anniversary of Perrotin’s first gallery in Paris, but the onetime enfant terrible shows no sign of having lost his sense of mischief. When fiac was cancelled in October he partnered with Paris’s Grand Palais to present Wanted!, a treasure hunt for works by artists from Perrotin’s roster, including Takashi Murakami, jr and Bharti Kher, hidden around the otherwise empty exhibition hall (if you found it, it was yours). The democratic spirit was also in evidence after the first lockdown, when he gave over his Marais space to 26 Paris galleries to show their artists in two-week rotations, in what he described as an expression of ‘solidarity and positivity’. Perrotin now oversees a global empire spanning New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong (where this year he moved to the cultural district forming around Adrian Cheng’s k11 Atelier development), but he continues to see himself as a disrupter, nimble enough to adapt to changing circumstances. He will need all of these qualities in the year to come.

ArtReview

57 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO 53 Photo: Sebastian Böettcher 54 Photo: Mathias Völzke 55 Courtesy Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles 56 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh

rs ago Latour retired from university teaching, but his thinkbal warming, geopolitics, biotechnologies and, yes, pandemics, rated in urgency. He could have been thwarted by the very writes of, but the Taipei Biennial, which he cocurated (with uinard), was one of the few major art events to go ahead, s this goes to print. Titled You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet, ition examines how political polarisation and the climate y intersect through a series of ‘planets’ inhabited by artists Yao Jui-Chung, Cooking Sections and Pierre Huyghe. Meanre were further shows and conferences (Critical Zones and he Human’ at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe), viral e have actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to onomic system on hold everywhere in the world’, he wrote ranslated into at least 12 languages) and artist talks (with at the Fondation Cartier in Paris).

‘There really aren’t any large-scale public representations of Black women or African American women’s history on the campus,’ said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania. She might as well have been talking about art history at large, but Leigh, who in November installed an almost-5m-high bronze bust at the college, is changing that. An edition of the bust took the inaugural High Line plinth commission last year, on show through March. In 2022 she will be the first Black woman to represent the us at the Venice Biennale. This year, Leigh had a solo show at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; joined Hauser & Wirth; and hit an auction record when a sculpture sold for $403,200 at Sotheby’s in October. ‘I feel like I’m a part of a larger group of artists and thinkers who have reached critical mass,’ Leigh told The New York Times. ‘And despite the really horrific climate that we’ve reached, it still doesn’t distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now.’

54 EKATERINA DEGOT

53 SHEIKHA HOOR AL-QASIMI

Gallerist French Last Year 52

Artist American new

49 Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis. © Simone Leigh. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 50 Photo: Claire Dorn 51 Photo: Kato Hajime. Courtesy the artists, Yokohama Triennial and Frith Street Gallery, London 52 Courtesy the artist

Curator Italian reentry (84 in 2018)

mic French reentry (9 in 2017)

reminded of something that Michael Rakowitz me in an interview about how pretty much useum he’s ever shown in seemed to be building ns, engaging in big capital projects, accepting rom dubious sources to fund ever more inable growth, shows by global stars… Has the ocalism become more resonant now that we’re g or whatever?

45 Photo: Mathias Voelzke 46 Courtesy Singapore Art Museum 47 Courtesy Assouline 48 Photo: Liz Ligon. Courtesy the High Line

A key institution for modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, National Gallery Singapore (ngs) turned five this year amid its pandemicdashed celebratory programme, which included a Nam June Paik retrospective. But Tan, still Singapore’s top art administrator, took the occasion to look homeward and let ngs nurture the Singapore art scene – which was a nice change from its blockbustery ways. It partnered with 11 other art spaces in Singapore for a festival called Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, supporting young artists and curators, and created an online journal, out of isolation, featuring texts written by Singaporean artists and writers about how the pandemic has affected their practices. Meanwhile, renovations of the Singapore Art Museum (sam), the other half of Tan’s portfolio, are delayed till 2023. Time will tell how he manages this hat – three sam curators have quit since he was appointed in 2019 – but so far, the museum’s programming engine is quietly humming along, in the form of Time Passes, a group exhibition at the ngs that’s part of the Proposals… initiative, and a ‘Mini Mobile Museum’ travelling through various venues.

48 CECILIA ALEMANI

7 RUNO ATOUR

50 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

49 SIMONE LEIGH

Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 53

the director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin unplugged her n to stage Down to Earth (the title taken from Bruno Latour’s limate change), a show without electricity, loudspeakers, reens, air travel or spotlights, but with sculpture, live perford talks (this ecological bent was continued by this year’s rtist Zheng Bo, researching ‘how plants practice politics’). pically innovative experiment by Rosenthal, who before d the 2016 Sydney Biennale and a curatorial role at the Hayward ondon, to her name; an approach which has reestablished the ld institution’s relevance on the German scene since her arrival arlier this year, Rosenthal cocurated a very prescient perforogramme exploring ‘rituals of care’, as part of the global onnect, bts by K-pop band and international sensation bts; the pandemic came, she found innovative ways to make a solo ee Mingwei, at which visitor-activation and tactility were ovid-19-safe.

w do you stop this becoming a culture war?

23 WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Museum Directors British Last Year 9 / reentry (5, with Nicholas Serota, in 2016)

um Director German new

on’t really know, but it’s important that e at these questions from a collective n of discussion. At the risk of sounding earnest, I think we need real spaces for d culture can do that. ink that, fundamentally, cultural space einvent the way that it functions, from draising models to its staffing models verything. We have to be willing to look elves and understand that transformaesn’t happen overnight. I think that t thing that we have to do is radically own. In some senses, this particular nt with the pandemic has forced that, rough budgetary constraints and ise. It’s also brought out all of the y that we knew existed.

22 MARIA BALSHAW & FRANCES MORRIS Tate got more publicity this year for a show it is not staging (at least not for two years) than those that it did. The postponement of a touring Philip Guston retrospective, due to open in London in February, amid sensitivities over the late artist’s use of Ku Klux Klan motifs, caused an almighty furore. Balshaw, director of Tate’s four sites, and Morris, director of Tate Modern, denied self-censorship, claiming in The Times that their institutional partners’ ‘credibility among black and minority ethnic audiences is at stake’. Tate Modern senior curator Mark Godfrey broke ranks, posting on Instagram that the decision was ‘extremely patronising to viewers’. For that he got suspended, as Tate’s corporate machine kicked into gear. It missed a step, however, while navigating another scandal, regarding an ‘amusing’ mural featuring depictions of slavery in Tate Britain’s restaurant. Meanwhile, the galleries manoeuvred between lockdowns to stage exhibitions for Steve McQueen, Zanele Muholi and Bruce Nauman at Tate Modern, Don McCullin at Tate Liverpool and Haegue Yang at Tate St Ives. The covid-19 closure took its toll: 313 restaurant, shop and publishing staff got the chop.

Artist American new When Kaphar was commissioned by Time magazine in 2014 to create Yet Another Fight for Remembrance – a painting commemorating the protests and activism coming out of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing by the police – he was well on his way to wider recognition. That commission arose out of a Time editor’s trip to The Studio Museum in Harlem and the viewing of Kaphar’s The Jerome Project, a portrait-based investigation of incarceration and Kaphar’s own family history. In 2018 Kaphar won a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant and mounted a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, dc. Last year he, along with artist Jonathan Brand and financier Jason Price, established nxthvn, an innovative and entrepreneurship-focused incubator and mentorship organisation serving artists, curators and students of colour. And when Gagosian announced Kaphar’s representation in October (his paintings are currently on show at one of the gallery’s New York spaces), the artist made sure it came with an endorsement of his nonprofit.

5 TEPHANIE OSENTHAL

that I’ve really come to around the s and the demands that are being made of l institutions – institutions of all kinds, my case the focus is cultural – is that, these ds are being made by publics that care h about these spaces to protest. say, “We want to be treated differently. nt this. We want that. We want X. We want t’s a form of extreme care. For those of us ork within institutions, and often feel uered by those protests, we need to shift ception of how those hit. I think that ought more broadly about how protest e an entry into a far deeper conversation what culture is, and how it is shared h cultural space, that we could really mewhere.

21 BERNARD BLISTÈNE, SERGE LASVIGNES & CHRISTINE MACEL

Activate

73 WU TSANG

74 TOM ECCLES

Artist American new

School Director/Museum Director British-American Last Year 76

In addition to her performance and videowork, Wu Tsang makes stained glass, most recently for her solo show There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody, which closed in January at Gropius Bau, on which was etched a poem written with Fred Moten, and again at her show in Paris in October at Lafayette Anticipations. The connection to churches is no coincidence. ‘It’s a place of worship and gathering. Our definitions of religious practice, communal practice, radical spiritual practice, and hermetic practice are folded into the work,’ she told the Art Basel website. As well as Moten, joining her choir is artist boychild, as well as others who share her interest in the fluidity of identities, performativity and marginalised histories. Now based in Zürich, Wu Tsang has taken up residence as director of the Schauspielhaus theatre. It’s a long way from The Silver Platter, the immigrant gay bar in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, where she coorganised a weekly club night during the 2000s, but its spirit remains.

Peru’s best-known art critic, the curator at cca Tel Aviv, the curator of public programmes at malba in Argentina and the chief curator of the Reykjavík Art Museum: what do they have in common? They all had Eccles as their teacher in 2007, after he became director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and number among an expanding network of established and geographically farflung alumni. Also a student that year was Ruba Katrib, who now teaches at the faculty alongside the luminous likes of Lauren Cornell and Nana Adusei-Poku. As well as the curriculum (with its focus on ‘black studies, decolonial theory and history, queer and feminist studies, ecology and infrastructure, media theory and technology’), Eccles steers the Hessel Museum of Art; is visual arts curator at the Park Avenue Armory; is part of Maja Hoffmann’s ‘core group’ of advisers; is Public Art adviser to Qatar Museums; and is on speed-dial for journalists seeking quotes pertaining to whatever controversy is raging in the artworld.

December 2020

In a bygone century, the slogan for the purpose of art might have been ‘art for art’s sake!’ In the twenty-first century, art has never been more aware of its relationship to the society it inhabits, and artists never more sensitive to whether their work can – and by extension should – not only reflect what’s going on, but actively try to change it. That means that what counts as art and what counts as politics has become a two-way street – never has culture in the broadest sense been more politicised, after all – and whether it’s a question of artists using their position to make political statements about the workings of the artworld, or of turning their activity into a direct intervention into social and political life, events of the last year have pushed artists to centre stage. So multidisciplinary group Forensic Architecture has been busy with its crowdsourced digital investigations into police violence and police killings in the us and uk. In the runup to the us presidential election, artist Hank Willis Thomas was organising marches to get out the vote, while rallying international artists to contribute to billboards marking Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And on the perilous waters of the Mediterranean, street-artist Banksy financed the fit-out and crewing of a search-and-rescue vessel to assist migrants attempting the crossing to European shores, when European governments have refused to honour the principle of rescue at sea. With the usual venues for artists often shut by lockdown, artists have turned the street and public space into their (political) canvas. None of this would be possible if it weren’t for the way that contemporary art has come to be a form of cultural currency. Regardless of their art, artists are public figures, and able to mobilise quickly in response to events, as was the case when Ai Weiwei partnered with eBay to sell editioned facemasks, raising over £1m for aid and relief charities. It’s not only artists, of course, who increasingly see their role as a form of activism. Art, culture and politics now interact, more often than not, in the curated space of the gallery, evidenced by an emerging generation of curators unafraid to integrate these discourses into the fabric of their programmes – such

as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s postcolonial perspective at his gallery, Savvy Contemporary, in Berlin (and spanning out to the 12th Bamako Encounters and the Sonsbeek sculpture exhibition), Hajnalka Somogyi’s leadership of the off-Biennale in Budapest, the largest state-free international art project in Central Europe, and a key activator for an independent, freethinking art scene in Hungary, or Laura Raicovich’s focus on queer culture at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum. (Raicovich is no stranger to controversy when it comes to the line between presenting art and social activism – in 2018 she stepped down from her previous directorship, at New York’s Queens Museum, over conflicts with its trustees, including Raicovich’s decision to close its doors on President Trump’s inauguration day and plans to use the premises as a ‘sanctuary space’ for immigrants.) This changing ethos means that bigger galleries, institutions and patrons have become more self-conscious about what their role might be in terms of social justice issues and wider political debates: witness megagallerist David Zwirner’s decision to inaugurate a new space run by a Black staff, its programme focused on Black artists; or, from a different angle, the inauguration by a group of London galleries of their own ‘Gallery Climate Coalition’. In the volatile context of the events of the last year, the desire to change things and have an impact has never been more acutely felt. But it wasn’t only the bigger social justice and environmental issues dominating the headlines that mobilised the artworld; underpinning these was a tentative sense of trying to work out – in a world usually defined by power and exclusivity – what solidarity might mean; awkwardly perhaps, but it prompted bigger gallerists to find ways to support the less well resourced levels of the artworld – Emmanuel Perrotin giving over one Paris space to 26 smaller galleries to show in rotation, or Hauser & Wirth hosting art graduate exhibitions cancelled by shuttered art colleges. Will the changes prompted by pandemic and protest fundamentally reorder the way the artworld works and understands itself? At the very least, it seems hard to imagine how things might simply wind back to how they were before.

ArtReview

A clear day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is quickly clouded with the evening’s portion of smoke from local fires as protestors line the streets demanding justice for another unarmed Black man killed by a police officer. More than anger, the death of George Floyd spurs a level of despair that is tangible within the city of Minneapolis and across the country

The heartbroken community of Minneapolis pays their last respects to the lives lost as a result of police violence. The local ‘Say Their Names Cemetary’ is a symbol of honour, unity, and resilience while sending a message of unwavering determination for justice for Black lives

Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, stands strong in front of her daughter’s makeshift memorial at Jefferson Square on July 14, 2020. The local park in Louisville, Kentucky, remains the place of continuous protests against racism and police brutality in the name of Breonna Taylor

Protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, march in unity to protect their very existence against a police system too often claiming their lives

Atlanta protesters encounter a heated faceoff with local law enforcement at the cusp of the police killings of both George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks

Friends of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman unjustly killed in a police raid, stand at the water’s edge in Louisville while painfully reflecting on her life and the impact she made on theirs. Left to right: Shadai Parr, 27, Elysia Bowman, 25, Erinicka Hunter, 26, Shatanis Vaughn, 27

A memorial for Daniel Prude sits near the site of his death. Prude, 41, was suffocated by police in Rochester, New York, only two months before the police killing of George Floyd set off protests across the United States. Mourning community members added candles to the site

following page Unnerving climates surrounding social unrest in African-American communities reveal the scarcely discussed enigma of the Black law enforcement officer

Collaborate At first glance, most cultural scenes – whether it’s moviemaking, fashion, music or indeed the artworld – appear intensely hierarchical: the big corporations and institutions at the top, the high-net-worth-individual collectors, the $1m-plus selling artists, the uber-curators, with the metaphorical pyramids and pecking orders below them. After all, isn’t the Power 100 a top-down list? But look more closely and it becomes clear that influence isn’t just about concentrated, exclusive power, but something that comes out of connecting with others, not just in a career-networking sort of way (although that is definitely a thing). This year in particular, however, when once mighty institutions have wobbled and businesses have found themselves suddenly exposed as the structures we took for granted in the artworld have become more less solid and less stable – thanks to all the usual connectivity and flow seizing up – the value of more flexible connectivity has moved to the fore. Or maybe call it collaboration, which is to say the facility to work with others in ways that are temporary but mutually beneficial and that don’t rely on already established structures but on inventing new ones. Of course, that approach has, for some time, been of particular importance to artistic contexts that haven’t previously been supported by the traditional centres of artworld activity, which has naturally brought people who operate that way more to the fore. So, with the emergence

of communities of artists and art scenes globally, new concentrations of collaboration have formed. Canadian curator Candice Hopkins has focused on bringing indigenous art and thinking into the exhibition mainstream of international biennials, working as part of teams of curators. In Hungary, curator Hajnalka Somogyi is the initiator of off-Biennale, a do-it-yourself coming-together of artistic activity in Budapest, pointedly independent of state institutions and government influence, at a time when the Hungarian government is becoming increasingly antagonistic towards the arts sector. Art and intellectual inquiry is itself an important form of collaboration; Bangladesh’s weeklong Dhaka Art Summit, founded by Nadia Samdani and Rajeeb Samdani, and headed up by Diana Campbell Betancourt this year mounted its most ambitious edition yet, bringing together over 500 artists, curators, historians, thinkers and others, through a constellation of contributing organisers. It’s a relationship that cuts both ways – at the end of last year, thinkers Felwine Sarr and Achille Mbembe assembled the third iteration of their talks festival Les Ateliers de la Pensée [‘The Workshops of Thought’) in Dakar. Alongside academics, political commentators and activists assembled to explore the ‘present and future of the world, starting from Africa’, there were also artists, including the likes of Sammy Baloji, Kader Attia and filmmaker Mati Diop. Art only thrives in an intellectual climate that is itself energised.

COLLABORATE 70

066-067--070-071_AR.indd 70

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:14

28 VINCENT WORMS

27 CAO FEI Artist Chinese Last Year 17

Collector French Last Year 54

27 Courtesy the artist and Audemars Piguet Contemporary 29 Photo: Roe Ethridge. Courtesy Gagosian 30 Photo: Jason Schmidt.

The global lockdown may have interrupted Cao’s solo exhibition Blueprints at London’s Serpentine Galleries, but it didn’t slow her artistic production. Stranded in Singapore with her family when the borders with China closed, she transformed the experience of exile and confinement into a new multimedia installation commissioned by the luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet that debuted at Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design fair. Her trademark application of cutting-edge digital techniques to everyday lived experience continues in works such as The Eternal Wave, which incorporates elements from the artist’s Beijing studio and the former Hongxia Theatre into an augmented-reality experience. Cao’s focus on the impacts of rapid media and technological change on people and their communities, and the intersections of technology, identity and reality in Blueprints, has earned her a place on the shortlist of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021. A major retrospective at Beijing’s ucca in March 2021, delayed but not derailed by the pandemic, is a homecoming for one of the most important artists of her generation.

The venture capitalist (whose company Tekton invests in everything from fintech to molecular-drinks startups) runs Kadist, a private foundation with more than 1,200 artworks by over 800 artists. While it is his cash, Worms relies on a global network of international curators, including Cosmin Costinas of Para Site in Hong Kong and Fernanda Brenner of Pivô in São Paulo, to add a hundred new works annually. Kadist’s exhibition network is just as wide, having this year coproduced Not Fully Human, Not Human, a potent look at nationalism at Kunstverein Hamburg, and the anthropology-tinged Things Entangling at mot, Tokyo, and programmed screenings of artist films from its collection on the facades of art spaces in Cali and Bogotá. Meanwhile, the residency programme continued, with Aslı Çavusoglu in Paris and Jeamin Cha in San Francisco. Worms also commissioned lawyer Laurence Eisenstein to draw up a contract for artists (downloadable from the website) that includes a resale royalty clause, stipulating 15 percent of profit from flipping a work goes to charity – actively leading the way for structural change in the artworld.

29 LARRY GAGOSIAN

30 DAVID ZWIRNER

Gallerist American Last Year 27

Gallerist German Last Year 5

When a pandemic ripped up the events-based models on which rivals had staked their futures, Gagosian’s long-term investment in online strategy came to fruition in six-figure sales for Mark Grotjahn and Jenny Saville through the gallery’s Artist Spotlight programme (the director responsible for developing the strategy, Sam Orlofsky, was dismissed in November after allegations of serious sexual misconduct). The initiative – followed by the video-led Gagosian Premieres – was the online continuation of what the gallery magazine, Gagosian Quarterly, had been doing for years: building momentum and conversation around his artists’ work, by contextualising it through custom multimedia content and editorial features by some of the most relevant writers, critics and personalities in the artworld and beyond (in April, Gagosian signed a partnership with Antwaun Sargent, one of New York’s hottest art critics). Nor did the pandemic interrupt the expansion of the bricks-and-mortar franchise, with Brice Marden inaugurating a ritzy new space in Athens and a second Los Angeles outpost to open in early 2021.

The gallerist was more prepared than most for lockdown, having established Platform, his ‘seventh gallery space’ – online viewings rooms – in 2017. With a dedicated sales director for digital, and with his physical properties in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong closed, Zwirner was still able to mount 30 cybershows. He also loaned that digital real estate to smaller galleries who don’t have the same resources, mounting a series of showcases of ‘friends and neighbors’ that deftly placed him at the centre of a nexus of galleries. Of course, he did not come out totally unscathed from the economic slowdown. The gallerist laid off 20 percent of his workforce and did not draw a personal salary. He did however announce a new space in New York, directed, with a degree of autonomy, by Ebony L. Haynes, which will be staffed by Black employees staging shows by Black artists. Nor did the gallery roster shrink: new additions include Dana Schutz, Shio Kusaka, Andra Ursuta and the estate of Juan Muñoz.

December 2020

066-067--070-071_AR.indd 71

25/11/2020 12:14

“IT’S A MATTER OF JUSTICE” Bénédicte Savoy, interviewed by J.J. Charlesworth

Bénédicte Savoy is professor of art history at the Technische Universität Berlin and at the College de France in Paris. In 2018 she and the Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr were commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron to write a report on the restitution of objects brought to France during the colonisation period. The resulting document, published in November 2018, controversially concluded that approximately 90 percent of the cultural heritage of sub-Saharan Africa lies in Western collections and called for a timely restitution of those objects held in France and a more general reset of relationships regarding cultural heritage between Europe and Africa. artreview Two years on from the report’s publication, how do you think it has been received? What do you think has been successful, and what less so? bénédicte savoy The reception of the report was a bit like a billiard ball: Emmanuel Macron sent a ball rolling that Felwine Sarr and myself pushed. This moved other balls on the table. While the French ball may have come to a halt, other balls have been set in motion because of it. So, I think that one has to see how the report was received in an international perspective. I live in Berlin, Felwine Sarr was, until last summer, living in Dakar and we have seen how this report, originally written for a French context, has had an enormous effect in Germanspeaking countries: in Germany itself, Germanspeaking Switzerland, Austria and also the Netherlands. As well as in a number of countries on the African continent.

072-073_AR.indd 72

It also initiated a debate in the us: a year and a half after the report was published, we were invited to New York for discussions with curators and museum directors at Columbia University, and were struck by how our discussion connected with subjects long discussed in the us – dealing with the history of Black people in America – that are not directly tied to colonial discourse. In The New York Times and elsewhere we found some very interesting responses put forward by our African colleagues, for example by [Senegalese philosopher] Souleymane Bachir Diagne… It’s extremely interesting to see how all that plays out differently. But your real question was what has worked and what hasn’t worked. What has recently been most satisfying was the passing of the law at the Assemblée Nationale a few weeks ago [in early October lawmakers voted to return a series of artefacts to Senegal and the Republic of Benin]. Not so much because the law passed, or because 26 or 27 objects will be restituted. What was incredibly satisfying was the fact that there was not a single voice in the Assemblée raised in opposition to the law’s passing. One might have thought that in France there were considerable psychological obstacles to restitution – an ideological opposition, backed by strong, mostly political lobbies. The fact that there was no opposition made me realise that those voices you could hear in the French press, who were shouting very loudly against the initiative, and took up a lot of space to protest and criticise our report, turned out to be quite isolated, and that the people’s representatives – if you want

to use that rather dated term – were in agreement with the project of restitution. To answer the other part of your question, what didn’t work so well? I’d say that what Felwine Sarr and I were proposing was a change in the legal status of artefacts in general. We wanted to avoid a situation in which each restitution would require passing a new law. Just a few weeks ago the law returning these 27 objects was voted on, and only a few days ago the Army Museum restituted some very important objects to Madagascar. But it needed another law to be passed, and obviously the idea that each restitution will require a new law to be passed can become absurd. Still, I think that once the idea is accepted in principle, parliament will in the long run say to itself that they should change the general law. For me it’s not a matter of personal satisfaction that these issues are shifting; it’s more a matter of justice – what Felwine Sarr and I call the putting in place of a new relational ethics. That’s what drives us. And on the whole, what has worked is greater than what hasn’t. ar The report has become something of a beacon for many discussions in the uk and the us. Would you say that the report’s effects were not completely predictable or controllable? I wonder also if you see that the argument for restitution is won at the level of institutions, rather than at the national level? bs It’s a really important question. It’s true that those voices in opposition were isolated, but they were also very loud. At first I thought they represented something, but I see now that they

ArtReview

25/11/2020 11:57

represent nothing. If we look at the effect of the report on institutions, I’m not sure that in France institutions are completely in agreement. At the Musée du Quai Branly I think there’s a generational thing going on, in Berlin too. I’m not familiar with what goes on in British institutions, but I don’t think I’m mistaken in saying that there’s a new generation of curators and keepers who sympathise. Many of them are women, and I think there’s a gender issue too. In Berlin and in the wider German scene you see a lot of female directors who are strongly engaged in the issue, like Nanette Snoep at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museums in Cologne or Barbara Plankensteiner at the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg. I think that inside institutions there isn’t a monolithic position but rather something that is evolving, and what seems to me very evident is that many institutions have understood that they are ‘too white’, that’s to say not diverse enough to be able to represent effectively the objects in their care. I think that this is evident even in the uk; it’s clear at least that there’s an awareness of this. At the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer recently took the bold step of moving the bust of its slave-owning founder, Hans Sloane, to a less prominent location. The bm also just announced a major archaeology partnership project at the site of the new museum in Benin City. If you look at the work of Dan Hicks at Oxford [Pitt Rivers Museum] – an elite university collection – there’s a lot going on. So from the point of view of institutions, my reply would be that the generation that is in charge – the generation of the president of the Musée du Quai Branly, Stéphane Martin – the generation that is on its way out, has found it difficult to accept the report, while the generation under it was well prepared for it. As to whether the report’s effect was something we could control, I like to compare it to opening a can of Coca-Cola that you’ve shaken a lot! Let’s say that the can is the debate that has existed since the 1980s, or even earlier, which has been reactivated in the 2010s, by activists, by militants and by a couple of academics like me and Felwine Sarr. Just by making this small gesture – pschh! – it explodes. The power of the report is only the pressure that had built up but that had been suppressed. Since the report’s publication and because of the work we did on it, I’ve started to research the debates on restitution that took place during the 1970s and 80s. In fact, it’s a bit like debates over climate change, which were already happening then. When Felwine Sarr and I were working on the report, we found reports similar to ours in the French archives, from 1980–81. Between 1960, the start of the independence period, and 1982, there was a very big discussion

of these issues, and museums were very opposed to restitution; but public opinion, in the uk for example, is different: one finds letters in The Times, from readers (often women) saying things like ‘we should return the gold to the Ashanti people because they must have a future’, and that’s already during the 1970s. What I’m pointing out is that public opinion, in France or in Germany, is very favourable to the idea of ‘heritage justice’, if we can call it that. We talk a lot about social justice, but we can talk also of heritage justice, and all we did with the report was to say to people that it’s good that we can talk about this, that we don’t have to avoid it. So I think that the effect is, as you say, political, and institutional, but it’s also more generally to do with a kind of psychological unblocking, and in particular being free to speak about it. A few years ago I visited the British Museum with some colleagues. When we used the term ‘looted art’, one of the keepers said, “No, no, we don’t use that term”. But now everybody accepts that there is a negative history to these objects. ar In the uk we’re seeing a great preoccupation with reinterpreting and recontextualising artefacts. An issue that is in some ways substituting itself for the restitution project, leaving objects where they are. bs Absolutely. For our part, we’ve launched a project with Dan Hicks called ‘The Restitution of Knowledge’, where we’re saying that there are other forms of restitution than the restitution of the object. There is also the restitution of the knowledge of the object’s provenance, and other issues. I’m by nature optimistic, so I wouldn’t agree that there’s any malice or ‘substitution’ here. I see it instead as complementary. For myself, I’ve always pleaded in the years preceding the report for being totally transparent about the history of collections. I think that, when you have that transparency, the idea that one should restitute the objects that are claimed follows. If we don’t know how objects have come to us, that step doesn’t follow. That’s why one has to keep talking about restitution, not because we necessarily only want restitution. It’s interesting to see that it’s the military museums – not the art museums – that find it easiest to return objects: France’s Military Museum returns objects more easily than the Musée du Quai Branly. It’s obvious – the military museums know, have always known, that what they held were trophies of war. ar The report is very interesting for showing that this debate has been around for a long time. I wonder if the difference now that this is coming from the top – that it’s the president of the republic who initiated it, rather than it being a debate forced on European states that were resistant to having it imposed on them, either by

December 2020

072-073_AR.indd 73

African states or by outside agencies (unesco, for example). What do you think has changed at this high political level? Emmanuel Macron is after all responding to what has changed politically between say the 1980s and 2018… bs I see it as a sort of boomerang effect; it’s a debate that has been had, that was thrown out there and was forgotten, and now comes back with a lot of force, and hurts a lot. What I think has changed in particular is how Europeans view what they used to call, during the 1970s and 80s, the ‘Third World’. Which is to say that there was something in the discourse of that period that was still about condescension, as if restitution was like giving something to a beggar. It’s not surprising that when Macron made his announcement, he was thirty-nine years old, still a young man, and not so politically experienced. I think there’s a real and authentic need among a certain generation to get to a society that is on one hand postracist, and on the other much more careful about the issue of resources, of where one’s wealth and riches come from. That wasn’t part of the debate during the 70s and 80s; my students, in this case young Berliners, straightaway ask themselves where their clothes and furniture are made. The question of ethical consumption has become very present, and this has rubbed off on the ethics of cultural consumption. I know a lot of young people who enjoy going to museums, and who have very strong responses, particularly to sacred objects, which speak to them imaginatively, but the question of the enjoyment they get at the museum is very quickly linked to the question: ‘I enjoy this, but where does this pleasure come from? Who is speaking to me? How did this get here? Do I want to enjoy this at the cost of some other suffering?’ I think that what has changed a lot, and this is of course linked to social media and the generation of net-natives, is that they think in terms of networks. They see this object in its case, but they see all that it links to. To the point that they might see an item of clothing in a supermarket and they all know that this item has probably been made in Myanmar, for example. We think in terms of links in the present, but we also think much more easily in terms of relational ethics – what links we want in the future. Observing the young people I’m in contact with – these are the same people that one sees on climate-change demonstrations, or who topple statues, who are for a society that is for climate justice and is antiracist… and in Berlin, those who are involved in issues of gender and sexual diversity, and so on – all this goes together. I would say that our report, which appears to speak of art collections, evidently speaks of many issues of justice and equity.

25/11/2020 11:57

31 IWAN WIRTH, MANUELA WIRTH & MARC PAYOT

32 KOYO KOUOH Curator Cameroonian Last Year 56

Gallerists Swiss Last Year 3 / 3 / new

33 JULIA STOSCHEK

34 CLAIRE HSU & JOHN TAIN

Collector German new

Curators Austrian-Chinese/ American-Taiwanese Last Year 72 / new

While arts institutions raced to find online content during lockdown, the manufacturing heiress was sitting pretty with her collection of over 860 moving-image works by 282 artists from around the world. She already had plans to put her holdings online, having complained that it was only possible to show 15 percent of the collection at any one time in her two physical venues, and the pandemic provided a captive audience for the first 68 streamed videos – authored by the likes of Cao Fei, Elizabeth Price and Wolfgang Tillmans – some personally introduced by Stoschek on her Instagram account. This digital move may have been precipitated by landlord problems at her Berlin space, putting its future past 2022 in doubt. Nonetheless, this year she mounted a solo show for locally based Canadian Jeremy Shaw. Her hometown Düsseldorf premises managed a German debut for American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria. It’s the kind of activity that makes you highly prized by museum boards, and Stoschek is a trustee at kw Institute, Berlin, moma ps1, New York, and moca Los Angeles, as well as a member of Tate’s international council.

074-077_AR.indd 74

Since founding Asia Art Archive two decades ago, Hsu has established the nonprofit as a key regional resource centre with an ever-growing collection of over 100,000 records, including books, exhibition catalogues, objects and audiovisual recordings. For a repository of knowledge, its 20th anniversary programming is fittingly themed around different modes of learning. In terms of physical exhibitions, there was Learning What Can’t Be Taught, about art education in China from the 1950s to 2000s. Online, Life Lessons hosted conversations between artists exploring the moments of learning that influenced their practices. And aaa continues to plug the gaps in Asian art history through crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Since joining aaa in 2017, Tain has continued to broaden its international links, through research projects like Connecting Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, which culminated at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit, and further deepened its collecting focus, including the launch of two new archives – the Philippines’ Green Papaya Art Projects and Thailand’s Womanifesto.

31 Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 32 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town 33 Photo: Peter Rigaud 34 Photos: Wendy Ng (Tain); William Furniss. Courtesy Zolima CityMag (Hsu)

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:19

35 MIUCCIA PRADA

36 JAMES C. SCOTT

Collector Italian Last Year 11

Academic American new

35 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 37 Courtesy Matthew Burrows Studio 38 Photo: Trevor Yeung

37 MATTHEW BURROWS Artist British new

38 COSMIN COSTINAS Curator Romanian new

Alongside his painting, Burrows has long been interested in the fraught economics of being an artist – he has previously run mentoring schemes on just this. So when commissions, sales and teaching gigs were cancelled globally this year, he came up with a simple hashtag and proposal. Under #artistsupportpledge, artists post work for sale on Instagram, priced at under £200/$200 depending on region. If the artist sells five works, they promise to in turn purchase from another artist using the same scheme. From its launch in mid-March through to today, the diy project has exploded, with close to half a million works offered direct from studios, an estimated £60m in sales (as of August) and press coverage stretching from Malaysia to America, Denmark to India. It was, Burrows says, a way of creating a rapid economy based on a ‘culture of generosity’, while also proving that the artworld’s gatekeepers and power structures can be circumvented. For his efforts, Burrows has been awarded an mbe by the British government.

December 2020

074-077_AR.indd 75

25/11/2020 12:20

39 PAUL B. PRECIADO Academic Spanish Last Year 62

074-077_AR.indd 76

THE YEAR THAT TAUGHT US HOW

39 Photo: Marie Rouge 40 Photo: Andrea Blanch

40 HANK WILLIS THOMAS

25/11/2020 12:20

41 Photo: Noor Photoface (the Samdanis); Photo: Myra Ho (Campbell Betancourt) 42 Photo: Jessica Neath 43 Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya 44 Photo: Anna Kucera

41 NADIA SAMDANI, RAJEEB SAMDANI & DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT

42 BROOK ANDREW Artist Australian Last Year 8 1

44 ELIZABETH ANN MACGREGOR

43 GLENN LIGON Artist American new

Museum Director British Last Year 61

December 2020

074-077_AR.indd 77

25/11/2020 12:20

“THE GATEKEEPERS HAVE LEFT THE GATES” Matthew Burrows, interviewed by Oliver Basciano

078-079_AR.indd 78

artreview How did you come up with the pledge? matthew burrows It was on the morning of 16 March, the first day of lockdown in the uk, and I was sitting at my computer answering emails about forthcoming projects that were all being cancelled. Exhibitions, teaching work – everything was coming to an end. While this was happening, I could see on social media other artist friends who were saying the same thing. It was like a tsunami of disbelief and despair that seemed to ripple across the artworld. Artists

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:01

into the mainstream market because it’s too small a value to make enough profit for a gallery to bother with. The other asset was a network I’ve had since 2008, when I set up a peer-mentoring programme. I played around with the economic model for the day, trying to figure out the £200–£1,000 relationship. I wrote it up, posted it on an Instagram account and asked people to join the hashtag. I think it was about eight o’clock in the evening or something, and before I went to bed I had sold a few works. ar Not bad for a day’s work. mb It wasn’t as if I thought I was going to help everybody, just myself and my immediate friends and colleagues. It was as ambitious as that really. Overnight I’d made £800, by lunchtime I’d made £1,000 and I was able to buy another artist’s work. So I emailed everyone I could, asking them to take part. By lunchtime, the Instagram notifications on my phone would not stop. A barrage of emails were arriving too. Then I didn’t leave my phone and computer for months. I was getting two messages a second from artists around the world, from Africa, Asia, America, and it went on like that for weeks. In the end, I just turned them off. ar The hashtag has now been used almost half a million times. mb We think it has generated around £70 million in sales globally, with 50 percent of the market in the uk, then it’s America, and then fairly evenly spread internationally. Some people go on it and sell right away, but normally it takes a bit of time for the algorithms to catch up with you. Once you start generating regular sales on it, we found people were making around £2,000 a month, but that they were also then making an additional £2,000 a month off the pledge. They were selling work that wasn’t on the pledge, work valued over £200, but also directly from the studio. ar Generosity is inherent in the pledge, in that artists who sell five works promise to buy one in return. mb I’ve been thinking a lot about other economic and social systems for years, and got really interested in prehistoric, preindustrial communities and how they evolved, and how they sustained one another. They were substantially more successful at being sustainable than industrial society has been. Hunter-gatherer society specifically had a couple of customs and social ideas that seemed to bind their ability to survive. One was that when you’re on a hunt, and if you get the kill, you don’t keep the meat, but have the honour of disposing of it. You prepare it, butcher it, then divide it out among your family, neighbours and friends. They then do the same, then they divide that up among

their family and friends. The assets of the kill spread across the community and everyone gets fed. Now it might not be perfect, it doesn’t always work, so they have another custom, which is that if you end up without any food, all you’ve got to do is go to the fireside of another family who’s eating and they are obliged to feed you. What if we can create an economy for artists that has implicitly bound into it an obligation to support one another, and to spread your assets? It wasn’t about getting rich, because at £200 a time it’s quite hard to get rich. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a few people doing really well on it, but it’s limited. ar The pledge is a survival mechanism. It’s also profoundly democratic, removing the gatekeepers from the sales process. mb I actually remember thinking this: it’s like the gatekeepers have left the gates. Everyone has gone home, galleries were battening down the hatches and waiting it out, but the artists did not have that luxury. It was as if the industry didn’t care. Not everybody, of course. Yet I think that withdrawal provided this amazing opportunity. I couldn’t have done this two years ago or whatever, people would’ve laughed at me, thought I’d gone mad. I don’t think anyone would’ve been brave enough, especially after you were already established with a gallery, a career. ar You’re represented by Vigo. Did you have any pushback from galleries? mb Given the scale of it, I’ve not really had any problems. I did have a few artists who told me their galleries had told them not to do it, because they’re worried about it affecting their market value. That’s ok, if those galleries can give that artist a living wage for the next six months, fine, tell them not to do it. But you’ve no right to tell them that they’ve got to be poverty-stricken for six months. They’re selling work that you’re never going to sell anyway. Most galleries, however, once they understood it, were understanding. ar Tell me about the mentoring programme this grew from. mb For the past ten or more years I’ve been interested in cultures of trust and generosity. I’ve approached this in quite a critical way, looking for ideas from sports science to neurology and prehistoric societies. Anything that I thought might unravel artists’ relationship to their work and to one another’s community. One of the things that became clear from the research is that if you develop a culture that is about the community, it’s much more effective than a culture that is about the individual. Which is not against individualism, but that

December 2020

078-079_AR.indd 79

hypercompetitiveness tends to close down ideas and close down discourse rather than open it up. The programme started with friends. We would meet up three or four times a year, slowly developing a community and an environment in which people can be robustly honest about their reality and work. For that to happen, you have to have a context of generosity. You have to give a bit more than is expected of yourself and allow somebody else to be honest, even if you don’t like what they’re saying. Then, probably about two years ago, I started getting people asking me about it, so I decided to show other people how we operate so that then they could go off into their groups and create these dialogues among themselves. ar This sounds a lot like the atmosphere of the undergraduate crit, though that space is now clouded by the marketisation of education. mb I’ve worked in education and become increasingly disillusioned with the sector. If you turn colleges into a business, you throw out what was good about our schools many years ago. Back then they could be shambolic, but that lack of professionalism allowed a freedom to flourish. Students were allowed to explore and to unravel and to make mistakes. It felt to me like we were pushing that out of the system. ar What’s the future for the pledge? Has anyone from Instagram picked up on it? mb We haven’t had anyone from Instagram, but Google Arts and Culture have been very supportive, from fairly early on actually. About two months in, they put me in contact with mit Media Lab in the us. I spent a bit of time working with them, and we’ve come up with a mockup website that we hope to develop going forward, which can actually manage it better. It’ll still be on Instagram, but the site will manage things like the artists’ finances. ar Have you actually been able to do any painting? mb I hope to get into the studio next week! Currently it’s a fulltime job maintaining the integrity of the hashtag. Obviously, when it went global people didn’t always bother finding out what it really is. Keeping and emanating that level of information and making sure that people know the promise you implicitly make in using it takes a lot of effort and marketing. One of the things we looked into with mit was how we create a technology that embeds in it those preindustrial ideas, a society that’s about sustainability and about equality. So much of our technology is actually not, it’s about silo-ing exclusivity, making a few people very wealthy. What I want to do is try and find technological advances that allow people to share assets rather than just heaping them on the already popular.

25/11/2020 12:02

45 STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL

46 EUGENE TAN Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 53

In August the director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin unplugged her institution to stage Down to Earth (the title taken from Bruno Latour’s essay on climate change), a show without electricity, loudspeakers, videos, screens, air travel or spotlights, but with sculpture, live performance and talks (this ecological bent was continued by this year’s resident artist Zheng Bo, researching ‘how plants practice politics’). It was a typically innovative experiment by Rosenthal, who before Berlin had the 2016 Sydney Biennale and a curatorial role at the Hayward Gallery, London, to her name; an approach which has reestablished the century-old institution’s relevance on the German scene since her arrival in 2018. Earlier this year, Rosenthal cocurated a very prescient performance programme exploring ‘rituals of care’, as part of the global project connect, bts by K-pop band and international sensation bts; and when the pandemic came, she found innovative ways to make a solo show by Lee Mingwei, at which visitor-activation and tactility were central, covid-19-safe.

48 CECILIA ALEMANI

47 BRUNO LATOUR

Curator Italian reentry (84 in 2018)

Academic French reentry (9 in 2017) Three years ago Latour retired from university teaching, but his thinking on global warming, geopolitics, biotechnologies and, yes, pandemics, has accelerated in urgency. He could have been thwarted by the very forces he writes of, but the Taipei Biennial, which he cocurated (with Martin Guinard), was one of the few major art events to go ahead, opening as this goes to print. Titled You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet, the exhibition examines how political polarisation and the climate emergency intersect through a series of ‘planets’ inhabited by artists including Yao Jui-Chung, Cooking Sections and Pierre Huyghe. Meanwhile there were further shows and conferences (Critical Zones and ‘Driving the Human’ at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe), viral essays (‘we have actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world’, he wrote for aoc, translated into at least 12 languages) and artist talks (with Sarah Sze at the Fondation Cartier in Paris).

080-083_AR.indd 80

45 Photo: Mathias Voelzke 46 Courtesy Singapore Art Museum 47 Courtesy Assouline 48 Photo: Liz Ligon. Courtesy the High Line

Museum Director German new

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:28

50 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

49 SIMONE LEIGH

Gallerist French Last Year 52

Artist American new

51 JEEBESH BAGCHI, MONICA NARULA & SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA

52 ZANELE MUHOLI

Artists Indian Last Year 89

Artist South African reentry (95 in 2016)

December 2020

080-083_AR.indd 81

25/11/2020 12:28

54 EKATERINA DEGOT

53 SHEIKHA HOOR AL-QASIMI

Curator Russian new

The sheikha has shaped Sharjah’s reputation as the home of cutting-edge contemporary art in the Gulf, identifying it against Qatar’s and Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster museum projects and Dubai’s burgeoning commercial gallery scene. In November last year she launched the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial, adding to her responsibilities as director of the Sharjah Biennial and founder of the Sharjah Art Foundation. The sheikha has been decentring the artworld for two decades, so it’s apt that the 2021 biennial will feature the hotly anticipated exhibition Thinking Historically in the Present that Okwui Enwezor had been working on at the time of his death in 2019 (posthumously realised by his longtime collaborators Chika Okeke-Agulu, Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Ute Meta Bauer and Salah M. Hassan). If a newly woke artworld is to walk the decolonisation talk, its institutions will draw on the sheikha’s experience: she sits on the boards of moma ps1 in New York, the kw Institute in Berlin, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut; is on the advisory boards Khoj Workshop, New Delhi and Darat al Funun, Amman; and is president of the International Biennial Association.

Since Degot took over the annual Steirischer Herbst in 2017, the Graz festival (founded in 1968 in opposition to nationalist rhetoric gaining traction at the time) has become a point of reference for how art can interact with a city and its politics. This year’s edition was speedily reworked in the light of the pandemic. Paranoia tv, launched in September, is a slick online operation, packed with binge-worthy works that lived up to the curator’s promise of ‘Netflix but less lonely’. Ingo Niermann’s Deutsch Süd-Ost (2020), tracking a fictional future far-right coup, unfolds over 25 parts; Brazilian artist Tamar Guimarães (collaborating with Luisa Cavanagh and Rusi Millán Pastori) created an ‘antiBolsonaro-WhatsApp-Soap’ running for four episodes. The Graz public experienced physical works also, integrated into the public realm, from newspaper interventions (obituaries for outdated notions) by Sung Tieu, a soundwork by Lawrence Abu Hamdan hidden in crisp packets at local supermarkets and a broadcast on taxi radios by Janez Janša that imagines the European Football Championship if it hadn’t been postponed.

55 NICOLAS BERGGRUEN

56 MAJA HOFFMANN

Foundation Director German-American new

Collector Swiss Last Year 43

080-083_AR.indd 82

53 Photo: Sebastian Böettcher 54 Photo: Mathias Völzke 55 Courtesy Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles 56 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh

Curator Emirati Last Year 32

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:28

57 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO

58 NICHOLAS LOGSDAIL, ALEX LOGSDAIL & GREG HILTY Gallerists British Last Year 46

Gallerists Mexican / Colombian Last Year 59

57 Photo: Pia Riverola 58 Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai 59 Courtesy banksy.co.uk 60 Axel Dupeux

The couple’s Mexico City hq , Kurimanzutto, cut normal programming in the face of the pandemic and replaced it with a series of group shows by gallery artists – Haegue Yang, Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Amorales – and guests, not least art space Biquini Wax, a mainstay of the city’s diy scene. Yet while the gallery is a powerful local broker (Orozco is receiving flak currently for his grandiose partnership with the government to transform Chapultepec Park, just as state arts funding is slashed), its influence spreads beyond. Previously the pair have staged events in local markets, parking lots and airports, including a recent billboard project, and in the autumn it launched a show based in New York City’s obsolete phone boxes, ahead of their removal. The idea of artist Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker, director of Kurimanzutto’s New York space (which opened in 2018), it featured Jimmie Durham and Rirkrit Tiravanija (like Ortega, gallery artists), alongside Glenn Ligon, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer and Patti Smith.

60 MARC GLIMCHER

59 BANKSY Artist British Last Year 14

Gallerist American Last Year 23

December 2020

080-083_AR.indd 83

25/11/2020 12:28

“I AM A BELIEVER THAT THERE IS NEVER A WRONG TIME FOR ART” Darren Walker, interviewed by Tom Eccles

084-087_AR.indd 84

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:53

December 2020

084-087_AR.indd 85

organisation to have a conversation with the board to demonstrate a plan of engagement. To actually conduct a census of their staff to understand the demographics, some census of their audience. These were important interventions for the city to encourage. I think the initiative has been successful to the extent that it has helped change the conversation. I think some organisations were already on the journey and this just helped; I think others have gotten on the journey. As you know, so much has changed in the last few months, I think that there are many other vectors of pressure that boards and leadership of museums are feeling and that it’s not really the city that is putting the heat under these institutions anymore. Those other vectors include, most prominently, the staff, artists, stakeholders who are patrons and supporters and who have an interest in the museum. These are the people who are really publicly and on social media challenging museums to do better. te Does the velocity of the current ‘reckoning’ surprise you? dw I think the velocity has not surprised me. Because the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement sought and successfully achieved an impact in, literally, every dimension of American life. There is no industry, no sector, no domain of American life where a conversation about race isn’t happening. I don’t expect that museums would be immune from that. The velocity is, in part, the intensity and the energy that emerged from the marches in the streets, from the discussions in corporate boardrooms and within museum boards and many other places where influential people gather. For the first time in this country there was a reckoning with the reality of racism. Because before the murder of George Floyd and the Movement for Black Lives this summer, racism in America remained deniable by white Americans. Deniability was an option. The Floyd murder, I believe, took deniability off the table. It is no longer possible to say that there is not some systemic racism in our country rooted in our history of white supremacy and our history of a racialised caste system that we have ignored and, in many ways, sought to erase. This is the work of culture. This is the work of the arts to address the historical erasure of narratives that are unpleasant and challenge the idea of American exceptionalism, and now align with our romanticised view of who we are as a people. te I remember hearing Fred Moten and a number of other great speakers at a talk just days after the election of Donald Trump. What struck me was that

25/11/2020 12:53

the speakers felt that there’d been violence done to their own body, through attacks rooted in language. It made me feel that I needed to rethink this in terms of the difference between violence and harm. Do you think that in this moment the definitions, liberal definitions of what offense is, what harm is or what violence is have changed? dw I believe that there’s a recognition of the harm: things that may not have been perceived as harmful by whites in the past are acknowledged now as harmful. Look at the Guston controversy. I am a believer that there is never a wrong time for art. There is never a bad time to show a painting to engage the public. But, for the first time in my life, I agreed with Kaywin Feldman’s [director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc] recommendation to the trustees of the gallery when she raised the issue of the harm and pain of the imagery, irrespective of Guston’s antiracist and courageous engagement with that toxic imagery. Historically, Guston’s words were enough, considered enough by the art intelligentsia to allow what is clearly painful, harmful, toxic imagery to many people, certainly, to many people of colour. That is not to say that Black people cannot absorb and observe imagery that makes us uncomfortable. African Americans and people of colour have lived with imagery that makes us uncomfortable for our entire history in this hemisphere, so it is not that we are snowflakes and unable, it is that context matters. The context of October 2020, is that we are living in a time when at the highest levels of our society, white supremacy is being legitimised and valorised, imagery of lynchings, of clansmen is being appropriated by people who seek to do harm. Black people and others are truly feeling a level of pain that many have never felt. Because it is the compounding vectors of the pandemic that have disproportionately affected African Americans: the economic fallout and those who are most likely to suffer from this – the low-paid essential workers, who are then most vulnerable from having to work in the middle of a pandemic – while the rest of us can sit comfortably in our homes and work virtually; and the political climate, which feels hostile. It is the confluence of all of this that, in my mind, led Kaywin to make that recommendation to the trustees. We, of course, supported it because I think she was bringing us a message, not only from the staff of the National Gallery but from others, particularly, other people of colour who had never been engaged. This was actually less a decision about Guston and more an indictment of the lack

084-087_AR.indd 86

do it. I’m saying, we need a process that is more consultative and we need curatorial sensibility that understands that it is not just the curator’s idea that matters. That is a new phenomenon. Because most curators were not trained to believe that the views of other people really matter that much. Now, I’m generalising a bit, but curators have been rewarded for being the singular force behind the idea and the relationship to the artist. Not for bringing a group of African American staff into the auditorium and having a conversation with them about what they think about this painting, and how to best present the painting, and how to best engage people like them. te So what’s in question is the very structure of the museum? dw Yes. This is my point. This is why I love Guston and I regret that people have conflated the more important question here, which is ‘What is the future of our museums?’ My view is that the future is not bright if museums continue to be the museums of the past. In a more diverse and increasingly sophisticated international multicultural America, museums are challenged. Because the role of museums in society has been to narrate the American story, to narrate American identity and to hold a mirror up and say, “This is who we are.” That’s been the work of museums and not just in America, but in civilisation as a whole. Until recently, there was a pretty wellestablished idea of who we were. It was a Western-European hierarchical, patriarchal etc, society. That idea wasn’t being debated ten years ago. Back then it was demanding to know about the lost African-American modernists who we now know about. No one ten years ago was asking these questions about Alma Thomas and all sorts of artists who have been ‘discovered’ in recent years. Because now the idea of who we are is in the process of changing. That generates a level of contestation and discord and dissonance that makes a lot of museum professionals uncomfortable. Because it highlights their culpability in sustaining a system that reinforced the racism, the exclusion, the patriarchy of the past. te Two recent cases stand out (but there are more). The chief curator of the Guggenheim [Nancy Spector] has resigned as did the senior curator of the sfmoma [Gary Garrels], both under different circumstances. You’re starting to see a domino effect hitting the people at the very top. When I came to New York, they were gods. Is it in the very nature of this change to call for a radical rethinking of the leadership of our museums?

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:53

dw Yes. It does call for that and it calls for we progressives to not be so arrogant as to think we don’t need to change, and that we don’t contribute to the problem by our own arrogance and our own insularity. We progressives are also culpable in creating this system that has excluded far too many people and far too many artists and far too many stories. te If you’re a middle-aged curator, relatively high up in the hierarchy of a museum, you’re going to start to feel very defensive right now… A lot of people are going to feel very defensive right now… dw Yes. I want to be clear and fair. I think there are a good number of white curators who worry that they may not be being seen and treated fairly by their critics, and who may, rather than engaging, withdraw from the journey that we all have to be on. That would be a shame, because we need those curators to be on the journey. We need not engage in a cancel culture or an unwillingness. We progressives shouldn’t be intolerant. Those people like me who want museums to change don’t want to become intolerant of others who don’t see our view. I do want the people who want to be in allyship to see that there is a lot of room to work together. This is not about trying to call out people, at least not from where I sit. I think it’s a mistake to vilify individuals unless they truly deserve to be vilified. I think there is too much gratuitous mean-spiritedness in these discussions. I think we do need to tamp down the incendiary rhetoric. te I was thinking about Garrels, who I should say was not a personal friend. The New York Times called me and they said, “Garrels has made this mistake in a meeting where he was presenting an impressive turnaround for sfmoma in terms of actually committing to buying work and acquiring work and showing work in a very different form than they’ve done historically. He made a comment at the end. Then this accelerated into the notion that he was a white supremacist.” I said to them “Gary Garrels is not a white supremacist.” dw No, he is not a white supremacist. The unfortunate thing is that good people have gotten caught in bad systems. What I mean by that is, we have in this country an ecosystem, a museum ecosystem that has flaws and racism embedded. That is the context through which a remark like that is interpreted, and it can be interpreted in a way that attributes racism to the speaker. I don’t think that Gary is a racist, that’s absurd – I know him. He has operated in a museum system that is racist. We need to understand why the system makes us all vulnerable. Therefore, have to name that

issue of the systemic and that we are all a part of that, and we all have a role to play. I think what happens is, museum leaders are often unwilling to engage in that higher order recognition, and focus on initiatives like, “We’re going to buy more African American art,” which we do need. That’s right. But there has to be something bigger and more important than simply saying, “We’re buying more African American art.” Museums have bought African American art before. We’re familiar with the idea of putting the work of Black people and objectifying and fetishising the creativity of African Americans and Africans since Picasso. I mean, this is not a new phenomenon, so you’re not going to necessarily win a lot of friends by just saying, “We’re going to sell this important painting and buy some Black art.” That is not, alone, a reason for exhortation. te When you came to the Ford Foundation, you sold a number of works and then replaced them. Right? dw You mean the Ford Art collection? Yes. We sold the entire collection. The history there is that we had the Ford Foundation Art Collection from what Henry and the leadership acquired in the early 1960s. There were over 400 works, all Europeans and some Americas but mostly European, all but one artist, Sheila Hicks, male, and I recommended to the trustees that this collection was not aligned with our value and our mission for the twenty-first century. They agreed. We deaccessioned, we’ve sold that at Christie’s, and took the proceeds and acquired by now about 300 works, mostly by people of colour, women, indigenous, queer, very international. The first piece that we bought was the large Kehinde Wiley portrait of Wanda Crichlow that is in the lobby of our building.

te Are you optimistic that museums in the United States will meet the challenges of social justice and equity within the next ten years? dw Let me just be very clear. I am very bullish on museums in this country. Because there has been an awakening, unlike anything I have ever seen, among museum leadership and museum boards. While the response has been sometimes clumsy, and there have been missteps, I believe that most museums in this country are led by people who want their museum to serve all the people in their community, and who are committed to true diversity, to telling the full story of American art and culture and creativity. Yes, I am very, very optimistic about America’s museums. Tom Eccles is executive director of the enter for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

te I thought it was interesting that you also pushed back on a current trend, given the covid-19 situation and financial difficulties, that museums have been given a green light to sell artworks in order to fund operating costs. You were quite a lone voice in saying, “I think there are other ways of doing this, without deaccessioning to pay for operating costs.” Am I right? dw I said that for some, deaccessioning was an appropriate strategy. For others, they have the wherewithal without the necessity of deaccessioning. What I believe is that there is no cookie-cutter formulaic way to approach this question of how to address the operating budget deficits in a crisis like a pandemic. There are some museums that have very little endowment, that have very little operating cash flow, and for them, where they have debts, I have no problem with what

December 2020

084-087_AR.indd 87

Christopher Bedford is doing at the Baltimore Museum of Art [the plan, involving the sale of works by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol to raise funds, is currently on hold]. I don’t think moma needs to do that. Because moma has got a board that without selling one piece of art can absolutely underwrite their budget deficits.

25/11/2020 12:53

62 BYUNG-CHUL HAN

61 CANDICE HOPKINS Curator Canadian new

64 LORENZ HELBLING

63 PHILIP TINARI

Gallerist Swiss Last Year 75

088-091_AR.indd 88

61 Photo: Jason S. Ordaz 62 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han 63 Photo: Wang Jun 64 Photo: Alessandro Wang

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:31

REFO 65 Photo: Anthea Pokroy 66 Courtesy Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

65 LIZA ESSERS

66 ARIA DEAN

Gallerist South African new

Curator American new

December 2020

088-091_AR.indd 89

25/11/2020 12:31

Reform

FORM

088-091_AR.indd 90

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:31

US HOW POWERLESS WE ARE 67 Photo: Sophie Nuytten 67 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi/Contour, Getty Images

68 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

67 SAMMY BALOJI Artist Congolese new

Collector Italian Last Year 55

December 2020

088-091_AR.indd 91

25/11/2020 12:31

“WE ARE CREATING THE SPACE IN ORDER TO EXIST” Sammy Baloji, interviewed by Louise Darblay

Sammy Baloji is an artist and photographer based between Brussels and Lubumbashi. His work mines the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo through the use of archives that he manipulates to highlight the legacy and ongoing impact of the colonial system. He is a cofounder of the Lubumbashi Biennale, which had its sixth edition last winter. A solo exhibition of his work is meant to open at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in December. artreview You’re from Lubumbashi, a provincial city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that since 2008 has been the site of an art biennale you cofounded with other members of the collective Picha. How did this come about and what does it mean to launch such an event in the context of Lubumbashi? sammy baloji It has to do with my childhood experience of growing up in a city that is entirely organised around the industrial reality and exploitation of mining resources. During the 1990s, we went through a political crisis that stopped the economy, all the production, as well as spaces for culture that used to be provided by different foreign organisations. These were the places where we could connect with the world

092-093_AR.indd 92

ArtReview

25/11/2020 11:47

really separated from all those people who are in power. In terms of support for the arts, you don’t really see it, even in Kinshasa. In the whole country, we have very few museums. The biggest one is in Kinshasa, and then you have the second one in Lubumbashi, maybe one in Kasai. The only place we can show works is at foreign cultural centres, but there are very, very few of these. In terms of commercial galleries in the country, I would say we have probably four or five. This is one of the reasons I was saying that being in a collective is necessary. Otherwise, we can never talk about being artists and share our work. One of the reflections that [writer and curator] Simon Njami had when he came to Lubumbashi was that actually, us as artists, as local artists, we’re supposed to be those who take part in the biennales, but it’s bizarre that we are also the ones who are creating the space in order to exist. So, it really comes from a need, it’s about surviving, in a way. We are really aware of that situation. That’s why we’re not really expecting any support. ar For the last edition, you collaborated with ruangrupa, whose practice has very much been about creating a network within Indonesia and beyond. Is this also something that you’re seeing happening across the African continent? sb It’s different when you talk about, for example, South Africa, where you have infrastructures and government support. Then you have other countries like Cameroon or Angola, where you have the intention coming from artists and where I know a lot of associations are connecting across Africa. You have, for example, Njelele Art Station, which is in Harare, Zimababwe, or the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (scca), which is Ibrahim Mahama’s space in Tamale, Ghana. We are connecting and collaborating with other initiatives, like the collective Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization, Lagos Photo Festival, cca Lagos in Nigeria, Raw Material Company in Dakar, Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg… And we are all connecting not only to promote, but really in order to exist. ar I was curious to know how the biennale has been received by the people who live in Lubumbashi. sb It’s not possible to compare it, for example, to the Venice Biennale. It’s really about questioning not just the province but the state itself, through all this colonial legacy. What does it mean to have those frontiers that are dividing the same people from both sides of different countries, while having the same local languages, the same separation within an administration, which belongs to the Portuguese, or English,

or German, or French? What does it mean to be an artist or to produce art from all this legacy? Those realities are not questioned. We’re talking about colonisation, but it’s not part of the educational programmes. Most of the time people tend to look at Africa or even Lubumbashi from a northern perspective, but it’s also interesting to look at the world from a Lubumbashi perspective. Through all those connections that link different countries and continents from 1885 to now, through the movement of mineral resources and through many other things. ar A lot of the work being shown, including your own work with colonial archives, seems to engage with this idea of looking back to the past to reframe it and retell it. Do you think of the biennale as a space to generate those new stories and histories? sb It’s quite a complex question, one that I have been going through since I started to work on colonial memory and colonial archives. It wasn’t an intention, but when I went to visit a mining company, I came across those archives without a lot of context. And I realised that this history is something that I’ve never learned at school. It was hidden behind a social amnesia. I was trying to understand where it came from and why the story hasn’t been told. But I don’t think that I’m looking back in my work. When you use archives, you are, in a way, rereading a story. You are reading it from the perspective that you have now, so it’s all about the present in a way. At the same time, it uncovers the experience of those who were occupied, but also used in order to produce mineral resources, to produce the economic benefits – the main purpose of the colonial system itself. Those cities were segregated and the autochthones were not allowed to be in the city, they were not part of the city. They were just workers for the city, in a way. They didn’t have the same rights, like the Europeans who were there. I also look at, not the so-called traditional knowledge, but at precolonial organisations, because whenever you have these occupations, you also have a resilience process, you have a reaction or you have an integration of both. ar A form of syncretism. sb Yes, which can be a way of surviving or resisting or even just consuming what is coming, what is part of the new context or the new conditions. For me it’s interesting to look at it that way too. There are many connections that we can find between Congo and other countries. One of them is, for example, the uranium that was used for the atomic bomb. Or the First World War, for example, and its effect on the relocation of colonies. Germany had colonies in Tanzania, in Rwanda, in Burundi, in Cameroon,

December 2020

092-093_AR.indd 93

but then it all changed when it lost the First World War. Looking at those connections, for me, has to do with the question of what history means and who’s allowed to speak about history. History versus stories. ar Those are two interesting points – how these narratives get made and who the gatekeepers of those stories. Are you trying in a way to challenge that, with your work and the biennale? sb Yes, these questions are really connected, as I was saying, with the kind of discussions that can take place in a collective. It’s really important because you don’t have infrastructures and you don’t have support. It’s really about having a conversation, a sincere one. Growing thoughts and inspirations and learning from each other, in sharing but also in practising. ar I was looking at Les Ateliers de la Pensée in Dakar, run by Felwine Sarr and Achille Mbembe, which I thought had that angle of having different fields, very academic, but also artistic inputs, to generate discourse informed by those different perspectives. I think Sarr was positioning it as a process of decolonising the thinking, the discourse. Perhaps that’s how you might see the Lubumbashi Biennale – as a form of resistance, of deconstructing certain frameworks and building new ones? sb Four years after Mobutu’s coup d’état in 1965, the first demonstrations by students of the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa took place. These events were violently repressed by the Zairian army, and again in 1971, when another student-organised event took place. For the second time, Mobutu forcibly enlisted students into the army. This was done as a form of punishment and discipline. The university was reformed and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities was relocated to the University of Lubumbashi. This led to the emergence of a new class of intellectuals, thinkers, researchers and poets coming out of Lubumbashi, who addressed critical issues related to society. In this respect, these intellectual productions were born out of social experience. I myself studied at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. I remain very influenced and inspired by the writings of philosophers such as Valentin Yves Mudimbe, works on the memory of the industrial city produced by researchers such as Johannes Fabian, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Donatien Dibwe, to name but a few. The Lubumbashi Biennale is intended to be a space in which intellectual thought or research related to social phenomena can be translated through artistic action into the exhibition space or the public space. So everything that you were saying about Felwine Sarr and Les Ateliers, and this idea of mixing disciplines, I believe this is the only way that Africa can rethink itself.

25/11/2020 11:50

“THERE’S SO MUCH THAT WE LACK” Laura Raicovich, interviewed by Oliver Basciano Laura Raicovich is a curator and museum director known for her activism. Currently interim director of Leslie-Lohman, a New York museum dedicated to queer culture, she was previously director of the Queens Museum. She left in 2018 after a dispute with the institution’s board and New York City officials became a public controversy, in which she objected to the Israeli government using the museum for a political event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. Her next book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, will be published by Verso in 2021. artreview I’m going to start with a really critical question: what should a museum be? laura raicovich I think you’re referring to the debate from icom [International Council of Museums] about how a museum should be defined. I use a response to that in my forthcoming book to help materialise how this idea of neutrality seeps into our ways of thinking and working and being without really being noticed. What’s poignant about the whole moment is that the new definition proposed by a group of icom members, who were trying to centre it

094-095_AR.indd 94

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:51

things that I’ve really come to around the protests and the demands that are being made of cultural institutions – institutions of all kinds, but in my case the focus is cultural – is that, these demands are being made by publics that care enough about these spaces to protest. To say, “We want to be treated differently. We want this. We want that. We want X. We want Y.” That’s a form of extreme care. For those of us who work within institutions, and often feel beleaguered by those protests, we need to shift our perception of how those hit. I think that if we thought more broadly about how protest could be an entry into a far deeper conversation about what culture is, and how it is shared through cultural space, that we could really get somewhere. ar How do you stop this becoming a culture war? lr I don’t really know, but it’s important that we come at these questions from a collective position of discussion. At the risk of sounding overly earnest, I think we need real spaces for care, and culture can do that. I think that, fundamentally, cultural space has to reinvent the way that it functions, from its fundraising models to its staffing models to its everything. We have to be willing to look at ourselves and understand that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. I think that the first thing that we have to do is radically slow down. In some senses, this particular moment with the pandemic has forced that, both through budgetary constraints and otherwise. It’s also brought out all of the inequity that we knew existed. ar I’m reminded of something that Michael Rakowitz said to me in an interview about how pretty much every museum he’s ever shown in seemed to be building extensions, engaging in big capital projects, accepting money from dubious sources to fund ever more unsustainable growth, shows by global stars… Has the idea of localism become more resonant now that we’re not flying or whatever? lr This is an interesting question, and it addresses two things. There’s the question of late capitalism, and its complete embodiment in museum culture as capital campaigns, massive building projects, faster, stronger, better, Marlboro-man style directorship, which I have to say is toxic. Then, and it’s something that’s really resonating right now for me, there’s the connection between the hyperlocal and the international. At the Queens Museum, we could find somebody of every nationality in the un within the borough, never mind the 135 different languages and dialects that are spoken. At Leslie-Lohman, the relationship between the hyperlocal and the international

has really come to a very fine point during the pandemic, because as we moved a number of our live programmes to virtual spaces, we made contact with an international audience that I don’t think we’ve really imagined. We did an incredible programme with an artist named Shannon Finnegan called AltText as Poetry in May, and over 500 people signed up for it. We had people in Uganda and Australia tuning in, never mind from all over the United States. That’s an audience that the museum has never plugged into, because those people couldn’t necessarily come to the museum, right? Until confronted with this crisis moment, we just had no idea that somebody would log on in the middle of the night from Uganda to tune into one of our programmes. That has shifted our thinking about how we connect with audiences, not only hyperlocally in New York by doing collaborations with local schools etc, and the work that we do with local artists, but also virtually, connecting us more profoundly on an international level, even without getting on a plane. ar With museums and institutions everywhere facing a bleak economic future, is patronage still coming in? lr My hope is that people really step up. Certainly, some organisations are going to disappear. There are already, especially, smaller to midsize organisations that are just not going to exist anymore. I also think – and this is not a reflection on the ones that have not been able to sustain themselves – that it’s a moment for new institutions to be born. Anytime that you have the amount of creative energy that’s out there right now, engaged in culture and engaged in protest, things are going to grow out of that, and be profoundly different from what was created in the past. There’s a reason that in New York many of the really cool organisations were founded in the early 1970s. It was a time of fiscal crisis in New York, it was a time when real estate was cheap. There were a lot of factors, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to overly glamorise that period either. But maybe we’re in another moment where the ideals of the protest can be embodied in a new set of cultural organisations that emerge from this moment. I would be really excited to see that. In the us there needs to be a much larger conversation about what culture is, and what people want from it. I think the piece that’s really missing from the funding model in the us, and the reason that private individuals have had this outsize influence on cultural spaces, is because of the lack of federal public funding

December 2020

094-095_AR.indd 95

for culture in the us. There’s a rebalancing that has to happen. There’s so much that we lack in terms of government infrastructure on the federal level when you compare it to times culture was actually prioritised, like during the wpa [Works Progress Administration, founded under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1935]. The equivalent that was spent on culture during those few years of the wpa would be like a billion dollars a year in today’s dollars. That would be transformative. ar As you say, the rich are still rich. However, do you feel there’s a reluctance now among patrons to donate to museums, given that their business interests will be scrutinised? Do you feel that museum patrons are becoming wary? lr Honestly that hasn’t been my experience, but if it’s happening with certain individuals, I think that’s ok. There are some wealthy patrons willing to put up with the scrutiny, and plenty of other places for patrons who don’t want to be put under that level of scrutiny. I also think that there are different types of funders attracted to the arts at different times, which comes along with a rethinking on the institutional side about how governance, power and financial conditions are intermingled on the board. One of the major advantages that Leslie-Lohman Museum has is that the board is really diverse, and I don’t just mean ethnically and racially even, but diversity of types of people: journalists, writers, artists, people of different class positions. That’s something we’re globally going to see more of, and we will see more of because people will understand the word ‘diversity’ as being about the diversity of experience. ar To what extent should a patron influence an institution? I know you’ve set up a series of Zoom conversations, and that one of the first conversations will be about the postponed Philip Guston exhibition. lr On a certain level, you can’t really have a show about Guston’s work and properly address the clan figures with an all-white curatorial team. That said, part of the reason that Helen [Molesworth] and I decided to plan this conversation is that we have unfixed views on the matter. I don’t know how you resolve it, and I also have other questions. I think part of the problem of the pandemic has been that we haven’t been able to really have a conversation beyond the hot take on Twitter or whatever, and I think that that’s really a disservice. That’s putting us at a disadvantage. We have this distant polarisation around questions like this. Let’s talk about it. I really want to hear from people, because I know that people have been thinking about it, but they’re not thinking about it together, out loud.

25/11/2020 12:51

70 ANSELM FRANKE

71 DONNA HARAWAY

72 SUNJUNG KIM

Academic American reentry (67 in 2018)

Curator Korean Last Year 77

096-101_AR.indd 96

72 Photo: cho.ok.soo

69 Photo: Gao Yuan. © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy Ai Weiwei and Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai 70 Photo: Silke Briel/hkw

Curator German Last Year 37

Artist Chinese Last Year 24

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:37

ACTIV 73 Photo: Tosh Basco 74 Photo: Liam Gillick

73 WU TSANG

74 TOM ECCLES

Artist American new

School Director/Museum Director British-American Last Year 76

December 2020

096-101_AR.indd 97

25/11/2020 12:37

TIVATE Activate In a bygone century, the slogan for the purpose of art might have been ‘art for art’s sake!’ In the twenty-first century, art has never been more aware of its relationship to the society it inhabits, and artists never more sensitive to whether their work can – and by extension should – not only reflect what’s going on, but actively try to change it. That means that what counts as art and what counts as politics has become a two-way street – never has culture in the broadest sense been more politicised, after all – and whether it’s a question of artists using their position to make political statements about the workings of the artworld, or of turning their activity into a direct intervention into social and political life, events of the last year have pushed artists to centre stage. So multidisciplinary group Forensic Architecture has been busy with its crowdsourced digital investigations into police violence and police killings in the us and uk. In the runup to the us presidential election, artist Hank Willis Thomas was organising marches to get out the vote, while rallying international artists to contribute to billboards marking Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And on the perilous waters of the Mediterranean, street-artist Banksy financed the fit-out and crewing of a search-and-rescue vessel to assist migrants attempting the crossing to European shores, when European governments have refused to honour the principle of rescue at sea. With the usual venues for artists often shut by lockdown, artists have turned the street and public space into their (political) canvas. None of this would be possible if it weren’t for the way that contemporary art has come to be a form of cultural currency. Regardless of their art, artists are public figures, and able to mobilise quickly in response to events, as was the case when Ai Weiwei partnered with eBay to sell editioned facemasks, raising over £1m for aid and relief charities. It’s not only artists, of course, who increasingly see their role as a form of activism. Art, culture and politics now interact, more often than not, in the curated space of the gallery, evidenced by an emerging generation of curators unafraid to integrate these discourses into the fabric of their programmes – such

096-101_AR.indd 98

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:37

75 AARON CEZAR

76 ZOE BUTT

Curator American Last Year 83

Curator Australian new

75 Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy Delfina Foundation, London 76 Photo: Lê Thành Tiê´n 77 Photo: Victoria Tomaschko 78 Photo: Joginte· Bučinskaite·

77 NATASHA GINWALA & DEFNE AYAS

78 LUCIA PIETROIUSTI

Curators Indian/Dutch new

Curator Italian Last Year 92

December 2020

096-101_AR.indd 99

25/11/2020 12:37

80 ÉCOLE KOURTRAJMÉ School French new

Art Fair British-American / French-American new / Last Year 38 When James Murdoch resigned in July from the board of News Corp, the mindbogglingly powerful media conglomerate built by his father, Rupert, speculation abounded as to what he planned next. Another hip-hop label, perhaps? Hopes were dashed when the board of Art Basel’s parent company, mch Group, approved Murdoch’s appointment as controlling stakeholder (via his private investment vehicle Lupa Systems) a few days later. The global director of Art Basel, Marc Spiegler, publicly welcomed a move that injected approximately $80m into an organisation whose income fell by 55 percent against the first half of the previous year as its flagship trade fairs were cancelled. But given that Murdoch’s experience in media and tech suggests that he might seek to renovate a model endangered by the pandemic, how to read a feature by Spiegler for the Financial Times published just days after news broke of Murdoch’s intentions? Art fairs should be complemented by digital products, he argued, but ‘an Amazon art world sounds more like hell than heaven’. The world will be watching to see how these two get along.

82 WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM

81 LAURA RAICOVICH

Curators Croatian new

Museum Director American new ‘Neutrality is a fiction’ when it comes to institutions, says Raicovich; it is a guise, as she makes clear in her forthcoming book Culture Strike (2021), for the defence of white male hegemony. In 2018 she left the directorship of the Queens Museum, New York, specifically objecting to the Israeli government hiring the museum for an event featuring us vice president Mike Pence, and more generally in dispute with a board that wanted to quell her political engagement. She is currently interim director at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, dedicated to queer culture, where she has addressed in the programming (albeit remotely) how queerness intersects with race and class. But her real power lies in her readiness to engage in debate, most recently instigating a series of hot-topic Zoom discussions with curator Helen Molesworth – ‘an experiment in talking and listening’ – that kicked off with a conversation on the Philip Guston controversy and included Coco Fusco, Charles Gaines, Nikki Columbus and any of the over 450 people who signed up and wished to chip in.

100

096-101_AR.indd 100

79 Photos: nrkbeta, Wikimedia Commons (Murdoch); courtesy Art Basel (Spiegler) 80 jr, Ludivine Sagnier and Ladj Ly. Courtesy École Kourtrajmé 81 Photo: Michael Angelo 82 Photo: Damir Žižić

79 JAMES MURDOCH & MARC SPIEGLER

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:37

84 BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG

83 HYUN-SOOK LEE 83 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Gallerist Korean Last Year 60

Curator Cameroonian Last Year 86

84 Photo: Alexander Steffens 85 Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation 86 Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata

86 PRATEEK & PRIYANKA RAJA

85 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI & SHUBIGI RAO Artists Indian / Singaporean Last Year 99

Gallerists Indian new

December 2020

096-101_AR.indd 101

101

25/11/2020 12:37

“YOU’RE PART OF A LARGER SOCIETY” Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan, interviewed by Marv Recinto

102

102-104_AR.indd 102

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:48

December 2020

102-104_AR.indd 103

started to feel, “Hey, this is our home, we need to protect it”. But on the other side of the line are pro-Duterte stars and celebrities who kept to their lines and loyalty to Duterte. Now we have seen them moving to other networks. Loyalty to Duterte is not so much on ideological grounds, but more on personality… mr Like Trump. nr Exactly. mr I guess there’s also a sense of self-preservation, which is entirely understandable. nr That is the theory offered by analysts on why Duterte still gets a 91 percent approval rating. There’s only one way to answer that kind of survey if you don’t want to endanger yourself. But with the Trump administration out of power soon, I think the climate in the Philippines will change naturally. mr There’s a reverence towards American culture in the Philippines. If they see this is the turn, hopefully it’ll permeate there as well. I think a very important question to ask, because we have been talking about what power artists and artist groups yield, is where they’re perhaps lacking. What could be improved, what are they lacking and where, going forward, do you see power in artistic groups? nr There is an anticipation for the National Commission for Culture and the Arts to become an independent Department of Culture. Still under the government. But what we’re seeing, based on the development of this project, is that there are less artists involved in the discussion and there are more technocrats and people in government who are crafting the structure and the policies of this department. I believe that there should be a substantial participation of artists, since this particular department, after all, will be all about them. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen more sectoral representations in Congress, where the representatives are not elected as personalities but as organisations, like Bayan Muna, where they then elect their own representative. It has not been applied to the arts and culture sector because a sectoral party, up to now, has never been organised. I think the reason for that is also that art communities in the Philippines or in Manila are very, very diverse and have different agendas and schools of thoughts. It’s like dealing with a hundred different barangays [the smallest administrative districts in the Philippines]. I think that is the weakness of the arts sector, because it has not achieved a common vision on how arts and culture should proceed, should be developed and should be supported in this country. I feel sorry for that. Marv Recinto is a writer based in London

103

25/11/2020 12:48

87 ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI

88 PATRICK SUN Collector Hong Konger new

Curator Italian new

89 FELIPE DMAB, PEDRO MENDES & MATTHEW WOOD

Gay rights in Asia has a patchy record – same-sex marriage in Taiwan became legal in 2019, but gay sex is still criminalised in many countries and punishable by death in Brunei. Patrick Sun hopes to make a difference through art. With his self-funded Sunpride Foundation, the property developer and art collector has been a formidable driving force behind lgbtq activism in Asia. Based in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Bangkok, he has bankrolled a series of high-profile queer-focused exhibitions, Spectrosynthesis – Asian lgbtq Issues and Art Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei in 2017, and its second iteration, Spectrosynthesis – Exposure of Tolerance: lgbtq in Southeast Asia, at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, in 2019. The expository titles reflect his matterof-fact ethos: to him, art is a vehicle to raise public awareness of queer communities and to engender respect for them. Is this too straightforwardly instrumentalising art for activism? Perhaps. But in a polarised world, his support for communities that are still marginalised in many places is a breath of fresh air.

90 ARI EMANUEL, SIMON FOX & VICTORIA SIDDALL

Gallerists Brazilian/Brazilian/American Last Year 97 Running a gallery during a pandemic is hard; harder if your galleries are in São Paulo, New York and Brussels, the first two of which suffered very badly indeed, and the last little better. No wonder one associate director of Mendes Wood DM told The Art Newspaper they’d all been ‘dreaming of getting out to the countryside’. Dreams come true if you have agility and friends: in October the gallerists opened a show at the idyllic Villa Era, in the Piedmontese hills, and in August another at a seventeenth-century church in the Dutch village of Retranchement. Sonia Gomes and Marina Perez Simão, two gallery artists, showed at Pace’s temporary space in the Hamptons (Pace now represents Gomes in the us and Asia); and with Blum & Poe, also regular business partners, and the art and design fair Objects & Things, they programmed an exhibition at the modernist Noyes House in Connecticut (which quickly booked up). Among the artists were Paulo Nazareth, who has become a major figure in his own right, and Lucas Arruda (who also opened a solo at the Pond Society, Shanghai, in November).

104

104-108_AR.indd 104

Art Fair American / British / British Last Year 93 (Emanuel and Siddall, with Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp) / new (Fox) Since an aborted stock market flotation last year, 20 percent job cuts and a reported $5.1bn in debt, rumours have circulated on the health of Endeavour, Emanuel’s talent and events agency, which owns a majority stake in Frieze. ‘Fiction’, an Emanuel lieutenant insisted to the Los Angeles Times. But while Frieze is a small part of the juggernaut, the cancellation of its three art fairs this year, in London, New York and Los Angeles – of which Siddall was global director before joining the board in November – will dent confidence, despite a strong online presence reproducing some of the tent-based excitement. In January Fox was brought in from Daily Express publishers Reach as ceo. This perhaps marks a final pivot by the British-born company to America as its centre of operations. Indeed, from next year Frieze New York moves from its out-of-the-way Randall’s Island location to The Shed in the heart of Manhattan.

87 Courtesy Gasworks, London 88 Courtesy Sunpride Foundation 90 Photos: Billy Farrell (Siddall and Emanuel); courtesy Frieze (Fox)

Above the exhibition space (which managed solo shows by Lauren Gault and Eduardo Navarro this year), the residency studios at nonprofit Gasworks have been unusually filled with uk-based artists and writers. In more normal times the institution, which Antoniolli has directed since 2005, hosts 16 artists a year from all round the world. Indeed, a stint in South London has become something of a rite of passage for artists from the global south on the up. Currently, for example, Gasworks is advertising an open call for those based in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe to come next year. Yet it is as director of the Triangle Network that Antoniolli makes most of his global inroads, a network of over 90 artist-run spaces across 41 countries, from Britto in Bangladesh to Capacete in Brazil to Thapong in Botswana to Rybon in Iran, with whom he collaborates on secondments, fellowships and discussions, and generally shares knowledge.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:43

92 ISA LORENZO & RACHEL RILLO

91 NAN GOLDIN Artist American Last Year 2

Gallerists Filipino new

92 Courtesy Silverlens, Manila 93 Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith 94 Photo: Sharon Lockhart (Gladstone)

87 Courtesy Gasworks, London 88 Courtesy Sunpride Foundation 90 Photos: Billy Farrell (Siddall and Emanuel); courtesy Frieze (Fox)

The artist’s campaign to highlight the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis in the us, responsible for the death of 450,000 Americans, reached its denouement. Purdue Pharma, the drug company run by the patrons, whose names adorned museums and galleries throughout America and Britain, was hit with over 2,000 lawsuits. This year the firm pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges, and the philanthropists will personally pay $225m in civil penalties as part of a $8.3bn settlement. Goldin herself was addicted to OxyContin, the brand name opioid marketed by Purdue, so the battle was personal. Its impact in the artworld was game-changing too, bolstering a wider movement against ‘artwashing’ through institutions. Since then, arts organisations stopped accepting money from the Sacklers, and now many, including the Met, are looking to remove the name from their sponsored spaces. Goldin herself hasn’t had any shows this year, but donated to various covid-19-related auctions and sales, with one print selling out in aid of the Urban Survivors Union, which works with drug users, a group particularly susceptible to the new coronavirus.

“Now is the time to reach new civility, a deeper respect, deeper appreciation for the artists and what they do,” said Silverlens cofounder Lorenzo during a conference this summer. Since opening their Manila space in 2004, Lorenzo and Rillo have built it into one of the Philippines’ leading galleries – increasing the visibility of local Filipino and artists from the diaspora, including the estate of the late Pacita Abad, Pio Abad, Maria Taniguchi and Martha Atienza. As well as finding ways to adapt their gallery to the current climate early on in the pandemic (their #AtHomeWith series resulted in their first online exhibition in June), Lorenzo – who is a medical doctor by training – worked with The Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service Foundation and the University of the Philippines Medical Foundation to coordinate deliveries of ppe to medical centres around the country. A little late but worth the wait, Silverlens recently started live and recorded walkthroughs of its exhibitions (the latest, Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan), and has just launched a permanent online platform that will host digitally exclusive projects.

93 MARIO CRISTIANI, LORENZO FIASCHI & MAURIZIO RIGILLO

94 BARBARA GLADSTONE & GAVIN BROWN

Gallerists Italian Last Year 94

Gallerists American /British reentry (64 in 2017) / Last Year 48

Galleria Continua has built a reputation for operating outside the epicentres of the artworld: exhibitions this year by Michelangelo Pistoletto and jr, Daniel Buren and Nedko Solakov required the effort to visit, respectively, the Italian town of San Gimignano and the French commune of Les Moulins, where the now 30-year-old gallery has spaces (the latter also hosted a show organised by Kourtrajmé, the school run by Ladj Ly). In January, however, adding to the Beijing gallery (which celebrated its 15th year with a group show titled To Be Continua) and a project in Havana (which staged an exhibition on the theme of obsession), Continua opened in Rome, at the St Regis Hotel. The venue chimes with Italics, a digital sales and lifestyle platform cofounded by Fiaschi to promote and support Italian galleries, while also offering food and accommodation tips in Italy. Equally conventional, with a twist, is the choice of São Paulo for the planned sixth space, albeit one that will occupy the historical currently-under-refurbishment Pacaembu sports complex, part of a controversial privatisation plan.

‘It was clear that the economy of the art world was so different, and that conversation became very concrete.’ That’s Brown, one of New York’s most cultish art dealers, reflecting on how the cancellation of Art Basel in Basel crystallised the economic storm facing dealers, accelerating the closing of his eponymous space in Harlem this past July and his new partnership with veteran dealer Gladstone (he retains his Rome gallery). Moving with him to Gladstone’s three spaces in New York and one in Brussels is big-money painter Alex Katz (he opened a show at the Italian space in November), as well as – at the time of writing – a handful of Brown artists including Joan Jonas, Ed Atkins, Mark Leckey, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Arthur Jafa and the Jannis Kounellis estate. These cool ‘kids’ will join the tony stalwarts of the Gladstone gang, who include Thomas Hirschhorn, Anicka Yi, Shirin Neshat and Matthew Barney, the artist who put the gallery on the map at the beginning of the 1990s. Whether this new alliance is a sign of consolidation to come remains to be seen, but it creates an intriguing and powerful new force in the New York scene.

December 2020

104-108_AR.indd 105

105

25/11/2020 12:43

96 HAJNALKA SOMOGYI

95 MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ

Curator Hungarian new

Curator Peruvian new

98 ELISABETH MURDOCH

97 ZEHRA DOĞAN

Collector British-American new

106

104-108_AR.indd 106

95 Photo: Daniela Morales Lisac 96 Photo: Marcell Esterházy 97 Photo: Hoshin Issa 98 Courtesy Locksmith Animation

‘We would like to imagine what a post-pandemic art world can be like, in which young, dissident, feminist, and more inclusive initiatives have the possibility of opening other paths,’ reads a statement on the website of Teor/ética, the Costa Rican off-space López has been the codirector and chief curator of since 2015 (which this year showed the work of the late Sila Chanto). He took on the space having cofounded (and is still involved in) Bisagra, a collective based in Lima (during the pandemic, the group hosted a series of events at the beach). While his interests lie primarily in art from Central America and the Caribbean, his influence spreads further: on a practical level curating the Cecilia Vicuña retrospective, which moved from Witte de With, Rotterdam, last year to muac, Mexico City, this year, but more theoretically through a writing practice (in magazines internationally as well as last year’s essay anthology Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia) that seeks to articulate a queer politic in art from outside the hegemony of North American academia.

ArtReview

25/11/2020 12:43

Organise Locked down, immobilised, suspended, brought to a halt. The strangeness of a period in which the habitual connectivity of twenty-first-century life simply evaporated is hard to exaggerate. Suddenly the end of the street seemed a long way away. That artificially arrested stopping of circulation was bad enough, but it revealed that most of what we call art and culture only lives by virtue of indoor public spaces – the galleries, museums, cinemas, music venues, theatres, comedy clubs, nightclubs, even shops and shopping malls – that were, for various periods of time, all shuttered. In these straitened circumstances, artists, gallerists and curators have had to think on their feet to keep art going, which has meant a new focus on organising, keeping existing networks functioning, developing new ones or tapping into previously existing grassroots networks that were, in past times, often ignored. It’s been a matter of improvising, and inevitably digital platforms have partly stepped in where physical ones failed. They might have been modest gestures, but blue-chip galleries saw the point of supporting their less secure peers: David Zwirner and Emmanuel Perrotin opened online viewing rooms and physical galleries to smaller galleries, Hauser & Wirth sold donated works to support art spaces in New York while putting on online and physical shows of graduate work. Supporting the more precarious infrastructures of emerging, early-career art that later benefits them was already a preoccupation among blue-chip galleries, but the pandemic forced a transformation of thought into action. Elsewhere, curators had to rethink the organisation of largescale exhibitions from the ground up; curator Ekaterina Degot, faced with

the radical constraints on the physical presentation of the annual festival Steirischer Herbst, quickly morphed the event into an extensive online channel – Paranoia tv – mixing video screenings and inconversations into a monthlong online schedule, projecting the festival, ironically, to wider audiences than it had reached before. As, in a similar but less digitally native way, did Brook Andrew with his iteration of the Biennale of Sydney. Digital networks, previously seen as distinct from or sometimes even antagonistic to the interests of the in situ artworld, have become the locus for reorganising and sustaining relationships between artists, organisations and audiences. But reorganising networks isn’t simply to do with hybridising online-offline structures. For some, it is changing the way things work. In Hong Kong, not-for-profit art space Para Site quickly shifted to support artists for whom a lack of exhibitions and commissions had led to a loss of revenue, instituting a series of paid virtual studio visits and a series of no-strings grants. Over in Australia, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, is using her new role as chair of the Creative Economy Taskforce, which will advise the government on how to deploy an aus$250m arts bailout fund. In places without such structures, however, arts collectives, such as ruangrupa, who opened food stalls and manufactured medical supplies, or Green Papaya Art Projects, who mobilised artists and audiences against an increasingly authoritarian regime in the Philippines, are using their own forms of networking and organising to do things themselves.

ORGANIS December 2020

104-108_AR.indd 107

107

25/11/2020 12:43

99 GREEN PAPAYA ART PROJECTS Artist Collective Filipino new

100 Photo: Mina Alyeshmerni

Metro Manila’s oldest artist-run space and an influential model within the region, Green Papaya had always intended to shut its doors in 2020, having celebrated a 20-year run as a centre supporting and organising ‘actions and propositions that explore tactical approaches to the production, dissemination, research and presentation of contemporary practices in varied artistic and scholarly fields’. Founded by Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan and Donna Miranda, its programme of artistic experimentation and development of critical discourses has, in recent years, been directed by Merv Espina. In June, while it continued to organise protests against state attempts to clamp down on civic freedoms during the pandemic, a fire tore through its archives (which, alongside documentation of exhibitions, included more than 300 artist-donated works on canvas and paper, photographs and objects) . What remains will now be held at Asia Art Archive and made available digitally too. As Roldan once explained: ‘Green Papaya will not become a self-perpetuating non-institution… working towards its death, Green Papaya is investing in possible futures.’

100 LEGACY RUSSELL

NISE 108

104-108_AR.indd 108

Curator American new Russell is a writer, artist and associate curator of exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Last year Russell co-organised Nigerian-American artist Dozie Kanu’s first museum solo exhibition and worked with Thelma Golden on Projects 110: Michael Armitage (shown at moma, New York), among other shows, and was supposed to take a spot as one of this year’s Rauschenberg Residency fellows – now postponed until next year. Part autobiography, part manifesto, and located within the experience of the internet, Glitch Feminism appeared in book form this year, a more developed analysis of a term Russell coined back in 2013 that later formed a performance evening and a series of digital film shorts as part of Post-Cyber Feminist International at ica, London, in 2017. Broadly speaking, Glitch Feminism explores the socio-techno construct of gender and sexuality, and the generative potential of glitches, malfunctions or errors in the social machine. Within it all, identity is both fugitive and multiple, with representations of this provided by artists such as boychild, Sondra Perry and American Artist. The book’s parting shot: usurp the body! become your avatar!

ArtReview

25/11/2020 14:21

I CAN’T BREATHE

Unrest in America by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

Along with the rest of the world, I was coping with the effects of social isolation during New York’s shutdown in response to COVID-19. Since then, the pandemic has changed our lives as we know it, yet for Black Americans this virus hasn’t been the only trial we’ve faced. Racism and police brutality seem to lie in wait for our lives. Much of my photographic work aims at shedding light on these and other issues within the Black diaspora. On 25 May 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by Minneapolis police in the street. Outrage, protests and social media all erupted as the video footage circulated of a police officer forcing his knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, sequentially choking him to death while three other officers aided the act, with bystanders watching. “I CAN’T BREATHE” escaped Floyd numerous times during the confrontation as he called out to his already deceased mother, straining for his final breaths. These words became an outcry, a plea and a question of whether police can see humanity. It’s a phrase we’ve heard before and it echoes, reminding us of the lack of compassion and empathy, and the brutal nature that policing Black bodies foregrounds. Eric Garner and countless others cried out, “I can’t breathe” as police officers took their lives. When Floyd’s life was stolen, the entire world’s heart broke. I felt it, too. For so long, white America has drawn upon reasons to feel impartial towards law enforcement’s killing of Black people. However, with no other distractions during a pandemic, the world watched as police officers again revealed an undeniable act of racism to the masses. American citizens had no choice but to watch and choose what side of history they would be on. After hearing the news of Floyd, I was compelled to travel from Rochester, New York, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, not only to document the protests but to bear witness to the stories of this community and see its truth. Unfortunately, my time on the ground didn’t stop with Floyd’s death. I drove to Atlanta, Georgia, and the very night I arrived, word began to circulate about the police killing of Rayshard Brooks. I followed Breonna Taylor’s case in Louisville, Kentucky, and the revelation of the murder of Daniel Prude in my hometown. I witnessed firsthand the stories of these communities, families of the deceased and protesters laying it all on the line. The summer of 2020 overlapped with what seemed like war zones and standoffs between police and the demonstrators who just wanted justice. Fires, tear gas, rubber bullets, riot gear and curfews appeared to burn America’s illusion of justice and an intact democracy. As this year closes, I can’t help but reflect on the nation’s notion of progress and what remains to be done. This year has been a worldwide acknowledgment of the Black Lives Matter movement, an admission that there’s a problem of degradation of Black people worldwide, especially in the United States, and that it’s a systemic and historic one. Joshua Rashaad McFadden is an American visual artist whose primary medium is photography. His solo exhibition I Believe I’ll Run On opens at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, on 9 July

AR-Dec-McFadden-resupplyP109.indd 109

25/11/2020 16:17

A clear day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is quickly clouded with the eveningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portion of smoke from local fires as protestors line the streets demanding justice for another unarmed Black man killed by a police officer. More than anger, the death of George Floyd spurs a level of despair that is tangible within the city of Minneapolis and across the country

Protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, march in unity to protect their very existence against a police system too often claiming their lives

109-113_AR.indd 110

25/11/2020 11:15

The heartbroken community of Minneapolis pays their last respects to the lives lost as a result of police violence. The local â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Say Their Names Cemetaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is a symbol of honour, unity, and resilience while sending a message of unwavering determination for justice for Black lives

Atlanta protesters encounter a heated faceoff with local law enforcement at the cusp of the police killings of both George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks

following page Unnerving climates surrounding social unrest in African-American communities reveal the scarcely discussed enigma of the Black law enforcement officer

109-113_AR.indd 111

25/11/2020 11:15

109-113_AR.indd 112

25/11/2020 11:15

109-113_AR.indd 113

25/11/2020 11:16

THE 2020 POWER 100

1 Black Lives Matter

35 Miuccia Prada

68 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

2 ruangrupa

36 James C. Scott

69 Ai Weiwei

37 Matthew Burrows

70 Anselm Franke

4 #MeToo

38 Cosmin Costinas

71 Donna Haraway

39 Paul B. Preciado

72 Sunjung Kim

6 Arthur Jafa

40 Hank Willis Thomas

73 Wu Tsang

41 Nadia Samdani, Rajeeb Samdani & Diana Campbell Betancourt

74 Tom Eccles

3 Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy

5 Fred Moten

7 Glenn D. Lowry

8 Thelma Golden 9 Saidiya Hartman 10 Judith Butler 11 Darren Walker 12 Adrian Cheng 13 Pamela J. Joyner 14 Forensic Architecture 15 Feral Atlas 16 Steve McQueen 17 Cecilia Vicuña 18 Hito Steyerl 19 Hans Ulrich Obrist 20 Titus Kaphar 21 Bernard Blistène, Serge Lasvignes & Christine Macel 22 Maria Balshaw & Frances Morris 23 Wolfgang Tillmans 24 Achille Mbembe 25 Michael Rakowitz 26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 27 Cao Fei 28 Vincent Worms 29 Larry Gagosian 30 David Zwirner 31 Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth & Marc Payot 32 Koyo Kouoh 33 Julia Stoschek 34 Claire Hsu & John Tain

114_AR.indd 114

42 Brook Andrew 43 Glenn Ligon 44 Elizabeth Ann Macgregor 45 Stephanie Rosenthal 46 Eugene Tan 47 Bruno Latour 48 Cecilia Alemani 49 Simone Leigh 50 Emmanuel Perrotin 51 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta 52 Zanele Muholi 53 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi 54 Ekaterina Degot 55 Nicolas Berggruen 56 Maja Hoffmann 57 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto 58 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty 59 Banksy

75 Aaron Cezar 76 Zoe Butt 77 Natasha Ginwala & Defne Ayas 78 Lucia Pietroiusti 79 James Murdoch & Marc Spiegler 80 Kourtrajmé 81 Laura Raicovich 82 What, How & for Whom 83 Hyun-Sook Lee 84 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung 85 Bose Krishnamachari & Shubigi Rao 86 Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja 87 Alessio Antoniolli 88 Patrick Sun 89 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood 90 Ari Emanuel, Simon Fox & Victoria Siddall 91 Nan Goldin 92 Isa Lorenzo & Rachel Rillo

60 Marc Glimcher

93 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo

61 Candice Hopkins

94 Barbara Gladstone & Gavin Brown

62 Byung-Chul Han

95 Miguel A. López

63 Philip Tinari

96 Hajnalka Somogyi

64 Lorenz Helbling

97 Zehra Doğan

65 Liza Essers

98 Elisabeth Murdoch

66 Aria Dean

99 Green Papaya Art Projects

67 Sammy Baloji

100 Legacy Russell

25/11/2020 15:02

The Botanical Mind Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree 23 Sep / 28 Feb

For opening hours and booking information please visit camdenartcentre.org Image Credit: Steve Reinke and James Richards, When We Were Monsters, 2020. Courtesy the artists.

439_CAMDEN_AR.indd 1

20/11/2020 11:41

424_UNESCO_AR.indd 1

18/11/2020 11:17

Power in Numbers

From the different relations that are being exerted 117

AR-Dec-dividers.indd 117

19/11/2020 12:37

27 GALLERISTS 25 ARTISTS 23 CURATORS 13 MUSEUM DIRECTORS 12 ACADEMICS 12 COLLECTORS 5 ART FAIR DIRECTORS 3 ACTIVIST MOVEMENTS 3 ARTIST COLLECTIVES 2 PHILANTHROPISTS 2 SCHOOL/SCHOOL DIRECTOR 118-119_AR.indd 118

24/11/2020 15:50

46 EUROPE 34 NORTH AMERICA 31 ASIA 6 AFRICA 5 SOUTH AMERICA 4 MULTIPLE 46 NEW 11 REENTRY

118-119_AR.indd 119

24/11/2020 15:50

433_CROMWELL_AR.indd 1

20/11/2020 11:19

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising & Partnerships

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Publisher Carsten Recksik carstenrecksik@artreview.com

UK and Americas Morenike Graham-Douglas Associate Publisher morenikegd@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Finance

Mainland Europe Moky May Associate Publisher mokymay@artreview.com

Editors David Terrien J.J. Charlesworth Director of Digital En Liang Khong Editor-at-Large Oliver Basciano

Financial Controller Ying Liu yingliu@artreview.com

Managing Editor Louise Darblay Senior Editor, Art Review Asia Fi Churchman Associate Editor Martin Herbert

Asia / Asia Pacific Angela Cheung Media Sales and Partnerships angelacheung@artreview.com Fashion and Luxury Charlotte Regan charlotte@cultureshockmedia.co.uk

Special Projects Ben Eastham Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn Chris Fite-Wassilak Laura McLean-Ferris Jonathan T.D. Neil

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications T 44 (0)1778 392038 E art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk ArtReview Ltd ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH T 44 (0)20 7490 8138 E office@artreview.com

Design Art Direction John Morgan studio Designers Isabel Duarte Pedro Cid Proença

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? Power 100

ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by PHMEDIA, part of The Logical Choice Group.Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, ISSN No: 1745-9303, (uSpS No: 21034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne PE10 9PH, United Kingdom. Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent.

Art and design credits

Text credits

on the cover and foldout Design by John Morgan studio

Words on the spine and on pages 31, 59 and 121 are from Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Le pli – Leibniz et le baroque, 1988), trans Tom Conley, 1993

December 2020

121_AR.indd 121

121

19/11/2020 12:43

Hello!! And can we just say – wow!! OK, we haven’t been around for very long, and to be honest, we don’t really remember a great deal beyond the end of last year – just something to do with being inside a bat, we think – but hey, wow, this is great! Anyhow, before we start, we have to admit that we’re not sure what we’re doing here by the way. (Yeah, you might want to grab some gloves if you’re squeamish.) Someone, somewhere seems to have proposed that we’re ‘colonising’ your bodies, but as far as we are concerned, we’re the guests and you’re the hosts. For as long as you are able, at any rate. Although we do get the fact that that’s how a number of Europeans used to style themselves while they were oppressing and exploiting… well, people pretty much everywhere else in the world. We don’t think one type of person is better than any other type, we just get a bad rap because we might have made you aware that many of you people do think this way, or at least that you like to keep some people in their place. That’s a shame, because your world is sooo cool, and we’ve already been everywhere, China, America, India, all those little European countries… we’re dizzy from all the new experiences. You should try it sometime. Sure, we get it, you’re not keen to have us in you, and we’re really sorry about all the trouble we’re causing, but what can we do? Your respiratory tracts and water droplets – it’s how we roll! And there’s so much interesting stuff in your world. You know, we’ve just made friends

122

122_AR.indd 122

Back Page

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists explain themselves, COVID-19 has a go

with Influenza – they’ve been around for aaaages, and they told us all about what you DNA-based things have done with the place. Soo much cool stuff! We RNA-types feel a bit humble. Society, economics, philosophy, culture, art! We really like the art things, we saw a lot of that in what we overheard being called ‘the Armory Show’ – such a great air conditioning system, all those ducts and fans! Influenza told us that’s the best thing about art fairs – weirdly the Armory wasn’t quite as medieval as you’d think. Although people were beginning to armour-up with masks back then. We heard about another place called ‘Freeze’, where there are all the tubes you can whoosh through in a big tent – and then all the people get on ‘jet planes’ and go home all over the world! And we go with them! We feel like we missed out, though. Influenza tells us Freeze is just happening in some little shed next time, which doesn’t really sound fun. We like art, you see. We got our game plan from an article called ‘7 steps to becoming a full-time artist’ on lifehack.org (we like to think of ourselves as lifehackers): decide what you want to do as an artist (tick); define your future audience and patrons (tick); build your portfolio (tick); gain recognition (couldn’t have gone better); fine-tune your brand (tick, tick, tick); revise your pricing strategy (no price too high, we thought); think about sales and information channels (gold star there). But we get it. We’ve heard how you art people loathe success. We can see that on your ‘power’ list. You want to keep us out, exclude us… Yeah, we know! WE KNOW! When all you sanctimonious pricks in the culture industry are constantly banging on about inclusion. Hypocrites. We don’t think you’re being totally fair, because, you know, we’re mostly benign, we don’t kill you. Mostly. Still, we get to watch a lot of TV; what with all the lockdowns, you’ve been staying in a lot, and we’ve been learning about all your great old movies. (We don’t like watching the news, because it’s mostly about us, us, us… and also it’s about this enormous orange guy, who we got to meet, briefly, but the security there was really tough! Urgh!) We particularly like your actor Dennis Hopper. He’s dead now. (It wasn’t us!) We like him in Blue Velvet, because he wears an oxygen mask all the time – we can relate to that! We also like him in Speed, where he acts as a guy who wants to blow things up. We really like his little speech to Keanu Reeves: “You still don’t get it, do you, Jack? The beauty of it,” he says. “A bomb is made to explode; that’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming. And for what? For who?” That’s us, see?! We just want to become. That’s our purpose! Anyway, see you soon…

ArtReview

20/11/2020 16:51

13 16 Maio 7 11 Jul Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporรกneo International Contemporary Art Fair arco.ifema.es

420_ACRO_AR.indd 1

21 16/11/2020 12:02

Flora Collection Frivole creations and Rose de Noël clips.

Haute Joaillerie, place Vendôme since 1906

9 NEW BOND STREET - HARRODS - SELFRIDGES www.vancleefarpels.com - +44 20 7108 6210

AR_VAN-CLEEF.indd 1 VCA_UK_ART REVIEW_DEC03_FLORA_BREEZE_2020_SP_235X300.indd 1

03/11/2020 12:35 26/10/2020 15:01