ArtReview March 2023

Learning and unlearning since 1949

Photo: Eva Herzog

An education

Did you know that ‘they’ are teaching art writing these days? They teach it! Yes, ArtReview knows – wtf !!!! What exactly is art writing? It was all called ‘art history’ back in ArtReview’s early days. (That’s the late 1940s / early 1950s, in case you were fooled by ArtReview’s youthful good looks.) It wasn’t a ‘discipline’, as they say in schools these days; it was fun! Back then there were no careers in art; or in writing about it; or in ‘curating’ it (glorified ikebana, ArtReview says – and it’s reaching dizzying heights of pretentiousness even in going that far; though perhaps that’s what happens when you start a magazine focused on Asia’s art scene… as if there were one scene… or one Asia… but ArtReview’s not here to confuse you. It’s here to make things simple. You can get more on the Asian nonsense from the source. Details about how to subscribe on the back-but-one page, you losers.) Anyway, art history. Back then, the province of gentleman scholars, the odd lesbian and good old-fashioned spies. Not a profession or a professional in sight.

ArtReview’s chums from the early days, Reyner Banham (never used his first name, that was his thing: like Sebastian Flyte with his teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, although Reyner Banham had a rather thick Norwich accent, so there wasn’t any chance of his being invited to any country piles, which is why, ArtReview remembers, he put his mind to becoming a famous architecture critic – to hide his misfortune, so to speak, although it was best if he didn’t speak), who invented design criticism in ArtReview’s sacred pages, and the new brutalist movement (nothing to do with Stewart Home’s new book btw – see reviews for more on that) and Ed Ruscha in the pages of other, less-good journals, and Lawrence Alloway, who invented Pop art, despite being the most unpopular person in ArtReview’s o ces (the Popsicle, as Reyner Banham called him, used

to get a lot of letters accusing him of being too interested in crap from the supermarket, of desperately reviewing anything and everything that strayed into his path, of trying too hard; and he insisted on not doing Reyner Banham’s ‘thing’ and using his first name, which given consistency is the watchword of the magazine world was rather unsporting and egotistical of him – even ArtReview doesn’t use its first name), came equipped with nothing more than art-history degrees and their friends to recommend them. (Reyner Banham used to get one of his – Nikolaus Pevsner, who invented architectural country guides, known as the Pevsner Architectural Guides, no first names there! – to cover him whenever he felt a little poorly, poor chap.) The point is that none of them had done an art-writing degree. They knew how to write and they knew what they liked. Like all gentlemen did. None of today’s bit of this, bit of that and I hope no one’s o ended by my tastes. Actually, now that it’s writing all this out (ArtReview’s editors are always whanging on at it about reading back over what it has just written, because they find its old-fashioned grammar – which it knows they insultingly refer to as ‘no grammar’ – hard to parse) and, you know, seeing this text in terms of words on paper and not through its rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, perhaps ArtReview might be convinced that there’s something to this education thing after all. ArtReview means that it’s genuinely relieved that the world it invented is no longer such a boys club (after all, ArtReview was always a genderless entity). And that people are a bit more precise with their language and more aware of the power of words to cause potential o ence. (That’s why ArtReview had to get rid of the letters page – it’s not like it was the Popsicle’s secretary or something.) And that maybe some of these education programmes have served to open up the closed shop of art writing to people who didn’t go to school with each other and who have di erent points of view (and not just about the use of surnames). Maybe this education business isn’t so bad after all… ArtReview

Erin Jane Nelson by Emily McDermott

Artwork by Rosalie Schweiker, 2023

School’s Out! by ArtReview

41

Oyindamola Fakeye

Interviewed by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

42

Alernative Art Schools

Africa45

menasa 47

Europe55

East and Southeast Asia61

North America71

South America75

Chus Martínez

Interviewed by Oliver Basciano

49

Doryun Chung

Interviewed by Mark Rappolt

58

The Black School’s Process Deck

63

Candice Hopkins

Interviewed by Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds

65

Undisciplined by Kuba Szreder

79

pages 40–83 Artwork by Rosalie Schweiker, 2023

LI TIANBING

Intrusion: Homage to Francis Bacon

16

New York Miami Bal Harbour Aspen London Paris Madrid Monaco Geneva Dubai Beirut Hong Kong Singapore Seoul

The Galleria, Shop G08-09, 9 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong | T + 852 2810 1208 | hkg@operagallery.com | operagallery.com

exhibitions & books 89

People Make Television, by J.J. Charlesworth

Sigrid Holmwood, by Marv Recinto

Yuri Ancarani, by Martin Herbert

Jumana Manna, by Maddie Hampton

Dance As You Wrestle, by Alice Bucknell

Wynnie Mynerva, by Salena Barry

Mohammed Sami, by Tom Morton

tarwuk , by Alexander Leissle

Christian Marclay, by Digby Warde-Aldam

Sanya Kantarovsky, by Cassie Packard

Zé Tepedino, by Oliver Basciano

Alexis Blake, by Emily May

Freidrich Kunath, by Claudia Ross

Peter Halley, by Terry R. Myers

Georges Senga, by Francesco Tenaglia

Beatrice Gibson, by Caitlin Quinlan

Ming Smith, by Jenny Wu

Dana-Fiona Armour, by Jesper Eklund

Naomi Hawksley, by Alexandra Drexelius

Maximiliano Rosiles, by Gaby Cepeda

Bangkok Art Biennale, by Mark Rappolt

Art Reviewed

Surrealists in New York, by Charles Darwent, reviewed by Brittany Rosemary Jones Set Fear on Fire, by lastesis , reviewed by Naomi Larsson Piñeda

Livin’ Loud: art itation, by Chuck D, reviewed by Martin Herbert

esg ’s Come Away with esg (33 1/3), by Cheri Percy, reviewed by Alexander Leissle Not So Black and White, by Kenan Malik, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth

Art School Orgy, by Stewart Home reviewed by Nirmala Devi

back pag e 122

page 90North West Spanner Theatre Group: Born Free Trapped Ever After, Open Door, bbc 2, 1980

signals … 瞬息

瞬息 ⋯⋯ signals signals … storms & patterns

瞬息 ⋯⋯ 風中序

18 March–28 May 2023, opening 17 March 2023 signals … folds & splits

瞬息 ⋯⋯ 展與接

3 June–30 July 2023, opening 2 June 2023 signals … here & there

瞬息 ⋯⋯ 彼/此

5 August–29 September 2023, opening 4 August 2023

Group exhibition curated by Billy Tang & Celia Ho

策展人：曾明俊、何思穎

22/F,

677 號榮華工業大廈22樓 www.para-site.art

Facebook/Instagram: @parasite.hk

WeChat: parasitehongkong

(Above) Lai Chiu-han Linda, still from 10957 Moons & 30 Elliptical Years (2022). Video Essay. Courtesy of the artist. Para Site

Wing Wah Industrial Bldg., 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15), titled Thinking Historically in the Present, builds on Enwezor’s proposal to critically centre the past within the contemporary moment while reflecting on the Biennial’s cultural and artistic legacies over its 30-year history. SB15 includes more than 300 artworks by 159 artists and collectives installed in 5 towns and cities across the emirate.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne

Abou-Rahme, Maitha Abdalla, Fathi Afifi, Hoda Afshar, John

Akomfrah, Moza Almatrooshi, Marwah AlMugait, Hangama

Amiri, Brook Andrew, Malala

Andrialavidrazana, Rushdi

Anwar, Kader Attia, Au Sow Yee, Dana Awartani, Omar Badsha, Natalie Ball, Sammy Baloji, Mirna Bamieh, Pablo Bartholomew and Richard Bartholomew, Shiraz Bayjoo, Bahar Behbahani, Asma Belhamar, Rebecca Belmore, Black Grace, Diedrick Brackens, Maria Magdalena

Campos-Pons, Cao Fei, Carolina Caycedo, Ali Cherri, Wook-kyung Choi, Maya Cozier, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Solmaz Daryani, Annalee Davis with Yoeri Guépin, Destiny Deacon, Manthia Diawara, Imane Djamil, Anju Dodiya, Kimathi Donkor, Heri Dono, Rehab Eldalil, Ali Eyal,

Marianne Fahmy, Brenda Fajardo, Raheleh Filsoofi, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Coco Fusco, Flavia Gandolfo, Theaster Gates, Malek Gnaoui and Ala Eddine Slim, Gabriela Golder, Gabrielle Goliath, Yulia Grigoryants, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Hassan Hajjaj, David Hammons, Archana Hande, Fathi Hassan, Mona Hatoum, Rachid Hedli and Compagnie Niya, Lubaina Himid, Laura Huertas Millán, Saodat Ismailova, Isaac Julien, Saddam Jumaily, patricia kaersenhout, Robyn Kahukuiwa, Reena Saini Kallat, Hanni Kamaly, Amar Kanwar, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer with Oba, Bouchra Khalili, Naiza Khan, Tania El Khoury, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Ayoung Kim, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Hiroji Kubota, Remi Kuforiji, Lee Kai

Chung, Faustin Linyekula, The Living and the Dead Ensemble, Ibrahim Mahama, Nabil El Makhloufi, Jawad Al Malhi, Waheeda Malullah, Maharani

Mancanagara, mandla, Lavanya Mani, Kerry James

Marshall, Queenie McKenzie, Steve McQueen, Marisol

Mendez, Almagul Menlibayeva, Helina Metaferia, Kimowan

Metchewais, Meleanna Meyer, Joiri Minaya, Tahila Mintz, Roméo Mivekannin, Tracey Moffat, Aline Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Eubena Nampitjin, Dala Nasser, New Red Order, Pipo Nguyen-Duy, Mame-Diarra Niang, Shelley Niro, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Elia Nurvista, Kambui Olujimi, Zohra Opoku, Selma Ouissi and Sofiane Ouissi, Erkan Özgen, Pak Khawateen Painting Club, Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, Hyesoo Park, Philippe Parreno, Ángela Ponce, Prajakta Potnis,

Anita Pouchard Serra, Jasbir

Puar and Dima Srouji, Monira Al Qadiri, Farah Al Qasimi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Michael Rakowitz, Umar Rashid, Wendy Red Star, Veronica Ryan, Doris Salcedo, Abdulrahim Salem, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Varunika Saraf, Khadija Saye, Berni Searle, Mithu Sen, Nelly Sethna, Aziza Shadenova, Smita Sharma, Nilima Sheikh, Yinka Shonibare, Felix Shumba, Semsar Siahaan, Mary Sibande, Kahurangiariki Smith, Mounira Al Solh, Inuuteq Storch, Vivan Sundaram, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Obaid Suroor, Hank Willis Thomas, Akeim Toussaint Buck, Hajra Waheed, Barbara Walker, Wang Jianwei, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, Nil Yalter

Tarek Al-Ghoussein

Patty Chang

Gil Heitor Cortesão

Sharon Lockhart

Taus Makhacheva

Haroon Mirza

Clifford Ross

Thomas Struth

Vivek Vilasini

FEB 22–JUN 4, 2023 | nyuad-artgallery.org

NYU Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, UAE

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Al Sawaber 3268, 2015–2017 Courtesy of The Third Line, Dubai

SPECTROSYNTHESIS III

神話製造者 ——

光·合作用 III

光·合作用 III

MYTH MAKERS— SPECTROSYNTHESIS III

24.12.22 – 10.04.23

探索性／別小眾主題的當代藝術展覽 Contemporary Art Exhibition Exploring LGBTQ+ Themes

香港大館賽馬會藝方

大館當代美術館

Tai Kwun Contemporary

JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong

合辦方 Co-presenter

You’re tired

Photo: Dianna Settles. Courtesy the artist

“We’re having a swamp moment,” Atlanta-based artist Erin Jane Nelson tells me over a video call, referring to the increased presence of the natural landscape in sociocultural dialogues. “Or we’re about to.”

Swamps help protect coastal areas from flooding, they’re home to biodiverse ecosystems that are among the most e cient naturallyoccurring carbon sinks and they’re at the centre of many recently published novels and nonfiction books alike – ranging from one of the bestselling books of all time, Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (2018),to Pulitzer Prizewinning author Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp (2022), a history of wetland destruction. But up until now they’ve largely remained places for mainstream fictional tales or specific scientific

The Interview by Emily McDermott

study; rarely does the swamp enter the public consciousness as a site laden with contested histories, with future potentials. With her forthcoming solo exhibition at Chapter ny, New York, however, Nelson is changing this trajectory, revealing the swamp as a place ripe for excavation and contemplation by way of artistic inquiry.

Specifically, Nelson is examining the histories and potentials of the Okefenokee, an unsung swamp in southern Georgia, through a new body of work encompassing largescale ceramics and silk quilts – materials that have, in the last six years, become central to her practice. The works will be rooted in, and sometimes also feature, photographs she made in the swamp. “In my practice,” she says, “the one constant

is the material expansion of photography and [exploring] what’s possible with it.”

Nelson graduated from New York’s Cooper Union with a bfa in 2011, where she primarily studied photography, but she has not exhibited an image in its pure form for over a decade. Rather, she frequently fixes her photos atop intertwining, amoebalike ceramics with biobased resin, or prints them on silk and sews additional images on top of and below the semitransparent surfaces. Through such material processes, she’s addressed themes ranging from Jewish mysticism to addiction to the incarceration of women deemed ‘insane’, often via images of various natural vistas. Here, she talks about developing an artistic relationship with the swamp – and everything it carries with it.

“I liked the idea of imagining an extraction of my own lifetime of fertility and giving it to the swamp”

Erin Jane Nelson

The Swamp as a Landscape

To begin: What’s the Okefenokee like? Why work with this swamp?

“The Okefenokee is one of the largest blackwater swamps in the world, and it’s a swamp that I’ve known about, that has been in the public imagination and that I’ve fantasised about since I was a kid growing up here,” Nelson says. “I did a project about it in school, but I’d never been until last June. When I experienced it in person for the first time, it completely bowled me over. I became enamoured with close observation – taking a boat and being at eye level with carnivorous plants and surrounded by dozens of alligators, I was immediately obsessed. But it’s quite rural and hard to get to. There are no highways; you’re on backroads for an hour to get there from any direction. If the swamp were in any other part of the country, I think it would be a national treasure. But because it’s in the South, in this backwoods area, it remains underappreciated.”

Landscapes in the American South have inspired Nelson’s works for years. What about the South fascinates you?

“I think the South represents the id of the us,” she says. “It’s the epicentre of our country’s violent history – and current culture war. And yet it’s also this artistically vibrant and fraught, weird place that has been, for better or worse, either written o or essentialised and romanticised for years. Yet it also contains so much potential about how to move forward.”

As an artist working with photography and craft, Nelson also notes how “those are both things that have important traditions in the South. They have become the vessels with which people make romantic imaginations of what the South is and represents.” While she “respects these traditions immensely”, she’s also deeply committed to “breaking out of their confines”.

The Swamp as a Signi er

In previous work – such as Daufuskie Muscat (2018), a ceramic piece created around photographs that the artist made during visits to the titular barrier island o the coast of South Carolina – Nelson has utilised a landscape’s history to explore topics like the policing and

stratification of femme experiences. The swamp, too, is a loaded landscape. So, I wonder, what significance does the swamp hold for you?

“The swamp is a place that has culturally been associated with witches, people evading the law and people trying to hide,” she says. “It has this undercurrent of malevolence and decay. I’m definitely playing with those connotations of the landscape, but the Okefenokee specifically has also been a site of retreat, resistance and transformation. In early colonial-settler times in the us, Indigenous people would lure Europeans into it because they knew the Europeans couldn’t fight in the swamp. Then it became a place for enslaved people to run away to, hide or stay for a few week to rest. There were also many attempts to drain the swamp or extract resources from it. There’s a story about the Okefenokee called Jackson’s Folly: a speculator from the north came down and said he was going to drain the swamp and build a canal. At first he used hired labour, and then he used incarcerated labour; it was one of an early land project done by incarcerated labour. But it eventually bankrupted him, and he couldn’t drain the swamp.”

Daufuskie Muscat, 2018, pigment prints, shells and resin on glazed stoneware, 51 × 76 × 8 cm. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Safeword is Butterfly, 2022, pigment prints, class, silicone and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware, 76 × 98 × 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chapter ny, New York

Have there been any recent debates concerning the swamp?

“The thing that actually brought this swamp back into my consciousness was news about a fight over titanium mining in 2019,” Nelson explains. “A company bought land right next to the swamp and wants to do pit mining that would almost certainly harm the integrity of the ecosystem. There had been an argument about the permits, and then because of Trump’s rollback of environment regulations, Georgia’s conservative state leadership greenlit everything. There has been an ongoing fight that has slowed permitting; recently the Muscogee Nation had everything halted because of its importance in their burial traditions as a sacred land. So, it’s been a site of tension, and its future is still unclear.”

The Swamp as a Site for Speculation

Speculation also plays an integral role in Nelson’s practice, with inspiration often coming from

the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and nonfiction books that she listens to while working. In 2017 she even wrote a short story to accompany Psychopompopolis, an exhibition of her work at Document, in Chicago: it’s set in the year 2020; an ecological collapse arrives on Earth and the story traces the aftermath.

What about sci-fi and fantasy continuously draws you in? And how are the devices of these types of imaginaries used in your new body of work?

“I’ve been really inspired by the way femme sci-fi writers have used their work to warp the reality that we live in – to understand and parse it in ways that are often very erotic, textured and bodily, and about how we find ourselves in relationship to a landscape or world,” Nelson says. “So, I’ve been imagining [this project] as a speculative, queer relationship between me and the swamp. On the one hand, I do really want to

attend to the historical and present violences that we’re contending with as I interact with people and institutions in my daily life. But in my art practice, the thing that feels the most generative and honest comes from a space of abstraction and worldmaking – a space of supposition, a space of inquiry, a space of erotic play.”

After a short pause, she continues: “A lot of this project also comes out of questions and themes I was thinking about when making work for the New Museum Triennial [in 2021] and during the pandemic: new forms of fertility and interdependence between people and environments. There’s been a lot of important art recently about community-making and interdependence among people. But in my practice, I’ve been interested in community-making and interdependence between humans and other subjects – an environment, a plant, an animal – and this project is a continuation of that.”

The Swamp as a Fertiliser

Her work in the aforementioned triennial, Freezing my eggs on a melting planet (2021),

Freezing my eggs on a melting planet, 2021, pigment prints, glass, coral, brass, and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware, 168 × 165 × 15 cm.

Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist and Chapter ny, New York

Freezing my eggs on a melting planet, 2021, pigment prints, glass, coral, brass, and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware, 168 × 165 × 15 cm.

Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist and Chapter ny, New York

Not yet titled, 2023, silk, 106 × 142 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chapter ny, New York

comprised 17 interlocking ceramic pieces arranged circularly on the wall; the individual sections feature images of flowers Nelson grew herself, icelike textured glazes and related motifs, such as spherical protrusions from the amoeba shapes. The piece was, in the artist’s own words, “a weirded version of ovulation”.

What about fertility has kept you hooked on the topic?

“I’m not antinatalist, but I’m phobic about pregnancy and know that I’m never going give birth, in part because of the worsening climate situation,” the thirty-three-year-old explains. “It’s very strange to go through the transition from being at the peak of fertility to opting out. There’s so much art about motherhood and about women who fully reject it, but there isn’t much about this space of the clock counting down, where you’re sitting within your body, with that decision on a constant basis. So I’m thinking about that, combined with what’s happening with Roe [v Wade] and the worsening of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy in the South more broadly.

“There’s also this idea that I have been playing around with in my mind for the last two years

that I call ‘gestational abstraction’, which I think of as ways of abstracting the energy of gestation in an artwork, speculating on other uses for that energy besides human reproduction. You can see a lot of examples in feminist art from the 60s and 70s, like Jay DeFeo’s The Rose [1965] and Lee Lozano’s ‘Wave’ paintings [1967–70]. I used to always talk about collage as ‘cooking’ materials; this idea is somewhat related to that, but with a deeper sense of femme interiority/ageing.”

In her forthcoming project, these themes will be most overtly explored in a silk quilt based on an image of small bisque-fired ceramic domes sitting on the edge of the swamp water and an installation featuring the stoneware domes themselves, each colourfully glazed. Can you tell me about these new works?

“A person generally ovulates between 300 and 400 eggs in a lifetime,” Nelson says, “so the final installation will be 365 [domes] – a countdown

Not yet titled, 2023, silk, 88 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chapter ny, New York

clock of an average human fertility span, or a calendar of a year. I imagine it to be an extraction of my own ‘biological clock’ and giving it to the swamp, with the hope that the swamp in return could help me recalibrate my felt experience of time after the last few years warped it so completely. So I brought the bisque-fired pieces down, set them up along the swamp and photographed them. Then I soaked [the pieces] in the swamp water, as if in an act of queer fertility, of the swamp impregnating the eggs.”

Beyond the limited timespan of a person’s fertility and related choices, the piece also speaks to the ecological crisis: “Now I’ve been glazing [the domes] and making an abstracted calendar with them. In all conversations around climate,” Nelson adds, “there’s also always a countdown clock. I want to bring that anxiety around time as an undercurrent to this work.”

Erin Jane Nelson’s solo exhibition at Chapter ny, New York, is on view 31 March – 6 May

Emily McDermott is a writer and editor based in Berlin and Munich

Chris

Painting,

Parham

PILVI TAKALA

19 MAR–04 JUN 2023

KARA CHIN

29 APR–04 JUN 2023

UNRULY BODIES

30 JUN–27 AUG 2023

ESTEBAN JEFFERSON

OCT 2023–JAN 2024

KARRABING FILM

COLLECTIVE

OCT 2023–JAN 2024

GOLDSMITHS CCA

GOLDSMITHSCCA.ART

School’s Out!

by ArtReview

What does it mean to ‘learn’ to be an artist? And what role do art schools play today, in a fragmented cultural terrain of influencers and ai -illustrated seven-fingered hands? Does education still occur when no schools exist nearby or, as in California and New York in December 2022 and currently across the uk , university art schools are closed due to strikes? As art continues to develop in increasingly bifurcated paths, as both more di use, varied and integrated on one hand, and more commodified and stratified on the other, how will art schools adapt? For this issue’s special focus we take a brief sweep through some of the alternative ‘art schools’ – alternative, that is, to the ‘ocial’ educations that are the mainstay of art training under the university umbrella – that have sprung up across the world in recent years.

In past centuries, training as an artist would entail an apprenticeship. And while some aspects of this survive in teacher-pupil models, where students undertake to learn the style of their studio head, it seems a far cry from Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse, an experimental art course set up in Ealing, West London, in 1961, where students would play elaborate games and pretend to be another personality for three weeks, all with the aim of redefining what art and being an artist could be. At the alternative new school of Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō, set up in Tokyo in 1969, Hijikata Tatsumi, a founder of the Butoh dance form, would start workshops by giving students diagrams and props like glass balls, to enforce di erent forms of interaction; or he might ask students to put a finger in each other’s mouths and then draw the feeling. These weren’t just games; at a point when artists were questioning the role and even disappearance of the art object, art education became part of a wider exploration of knowledge systems. Such gestures are recalled longingly now, in an era in which getting a master’s degree on an oversubscribed, often costly course is then promoted as the only way to realise a sustainable career as a professional artist, complete with gallery representation. But things are continuing to change: formal art-settings can provide the structure and dynamic to grow as an artist; but increasingly, often due to costs and accessibility, the chances for development (both practically and conceptually) are proliferating into smaller, informal projects. Can a strike’s picket line, or a city’s cultural scene itself provide the elements of what used to define a good art school? Sociologist Kuba Szreder picks up the question to locate movements of self-education that have arisen among the failures of formal art institutions.

As ArtReview remembers it, most of art school is talk. And here you’ll find interviews with educators and curators who are shaping

approaches to art schools at the moment: from art historian and curator Chus Martínez’s ‘grandmotherly’ approach to running a state art-school in the heart of Central Europe, curator and writer Candice Hopkins’s new role in Native American studies at Bard in the us , museum curator Doryun Chong on museums’ potential to become alternative sites of learning and curator Oyindamola Fakeye discussing the pan-African aims of the Àsìkò Art School. (Yes, none of them, except Hopkins – to a degree – are artists themselves, but sometimes an ‘outside’ perspective is required in these matters.) These are punctuated by two artists projects: works by artist-organiser-designer Rosalie Schweiker, and excerpts from The Black School’s Process Deck, a teaching tool devised by the New Orleans-based experimental art school.

Alongside these, ArtReview has set out to compile an international list of alternative art schools, profiling some of the most interesting ‘institutions’ (even though many of them would not like that label being applied to them) at which to become, continue and develop as an artist. Rather than take part in the competitive name-game of established art schools, this global alternative art-schools list is a gathering of models and experiments. ArtReview’s selection of these projects reflects a variety of approaches. In chasing the informal and experimental, where such spaces exist in tenuous, temporary contexts, this list is inevitably incomplete; but it is also measured to reflect international patterns that are emerging: from strategic occupations (of universities in Texas, Kumasi, Huanzhou and Cork), to more practically minded courses (in Marseille and Johannesburg), to communitybuilding exercises (in São Paulo and outside Manila).

And however much this list may be targeting the ‘alternative’, there are nevertheless some rules: the schools on this list need to be currently active and into at least their second year of programming; they need to be open to attendees and applicants (and not just invitational); they need to have an educational focus (what that is obviously shifts, but mainly that they not be just glorified residencies); and, ultimately, they need to be an ‘art school’, concerned with the making of art, whatever shape that may take (rather than, say, dedicated to critical discussion).

While contexts vary widely, formal art schools are increasingly at an impasse, with common problems arising from increased pressures of privatisation, decreased funding and limited resources. In response to this, what ArtReview o ers here is a handbook of possibilities, to help highlight that new forms of learning ‘to art’ and developing what art will become are already happening. ar

Everyone knows that ‘the establishment ’ is bad, but society runs on certified expertise. So what are the alternatives for those of you planning on a career in the arts?

Not Knowing

Oyindamola Fakeye is artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (cca ) Lagos and curator of the Àsìkò Art School, an experimental art-school project for artists and curators living and working in Africa. Here, she speaks about nonformal art education and professionalisation in Nigeria and beyond

A meeting during the Àsìkò Art School’s eighth programme, Cape Verde, 2022. Courtesy cca Lagos

Interviewed by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

Inaugurated in Lagos in 2010 by curator Bisi Silva (1962–2019), Àsìkò Art School combines models of workshop, laboratory and residency. The five-week programme involves discursive, site-oriented, curatorial and other contingent methods of knowledge production and exchange; such as individual and group critique sessions, guest faculty and speakers (including El Anatsui, Nontobeko Ntombela, Simone Leigh, Teju Cole, Raqs Media Collective, Viye Diba, N’Goné Fall, Eddie Chambers, Zoé Whitley and more), portfolio reviews, film screenings, field trips, visits to local galleries, museums and historical sites, and open-studio exhibitions, among others. Àsìkò also counts as a vital curatorial intervention – a precursor to such pedagogical initiatives as raw Académie, the seven-week programme inaugurated by raw Material Company in 2016 at its Dakar base – in the milieu of artist-run projects speculating on the future of contemporary art practice in Africa and beyond. Since 2013, Àsìkò has been itinerant in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa, taking place in Nigeria (2010 & 2012), Ghana (2013), Senegal (2014), Mozambique (2015), Ethiopia (2016) and Cape Verde (2022). As an Africa-centred project, Àsìkò has trained countless artists and curators while connecting art professionals from all over the world, providing a counter-mainstream and egalitarian pedagogical model.

k wa si ohene-ayeh What is your perspective on art education in Nigeria today? I ask this because Bisi Silva has described Àsìkò Art School as a space that embraces the urgency of ‘learning to unlearn’. Silva wrote, in the 2017 book she put together around the Àsìkò project, ‘the absence of critical theory and the limitations of art history in the [Nigerian educational] curricula coupled with the continued prioritisation of skill over process provided the impetus for cca , Lagos to initiate a curatorial project with a pedagogical focus’.

oyind amola fak eye I would say I am probably not as critical as Silva was at the founding of the programme in 2010. What I have realised is that a lot of the initial premise was from the outside looking in, but over the years we have been able to form much more of an inside perspective. cca is located very close to two prominent schools with art faculties, the Yaba College of Technology and the University of Lagos, which has allowed us to learn more about the educational system, especially in Nigeria. Àsìkò has actually allowed us to develop relationships with many of lecturers in higher institutions, like Yaba and University of Nigeria Nsukka, and what we found was that a lot of the restrictions in art education aren’t limited to the arts. It is more of a systemic problem around access to funding, administrative bottlenecks and

bureaucracy attached to education as a whole. Education budgets are unfortunately really low and schools often face steep cuts that a ect teachers and access to supplies.

Also, unlike most art schools across the globe, which can have smaller class sizes, Nigeria is a country with approximately 200 million people and one of the youngest populations on the planet, the majority of whom are trying to access education. The result is that many of these classrooms are overcrowded and oversubscribed. And so there just isn’t enough funding, there isn’t enough space and oftentimes teachers are not allowed to select their own participants; so they face a mixed bag of people with varying skill levels and who at times don’t even speak English (which is the taught language) fluently. So there are a lot of restrictions that they’re working against.

koa What can Àsìkò do to alleviate that?

of I feel that Àsìkò and cca actually provide an environment in which students who are interested in pursuing art as a profession can then access the resources and opportunities

for each edition, thematised in response to who is basically going to be in that room. We also consulted with Tamar Garb [professor of art history at University College London] and Aura Seikkula [of the Arts Promotion Centre in Finland], longtime collaborators who had worked with Silva from the start of the programme. I think that helped to maintain an element of continuity in the way the programme was delivered. I will say that 2022 was a little bit lighter on readings, after alumni highlighted that there had been quite a lot of reading in previous editions. I’m trying to find the balance. We also planned the programme while cov id -19 restrictions were still in place, so we had no clue if we would have to cancel the programme at the last minute. As such we only ran a three-and-ahalf-week programme compared to the usual five to six weeks. Everything else was true to how Silva had originally curated the project.

koa Silva also wrote, ‘Àsìkò positions itself as a pedagogical project framed within an expanded field of curatorial practice’. What are your thoughts on such a position, and how such approaches to mobilise curating to update art education can be deepened today?

that allow them to experiment. I think developing close working relationships with colleges and universities, navigating actual ins and outs of the art-education system, has helped fill in the gaps of what was missing. I think that it was important for Silva to recognise that there was a problem in the education system and to find a structure that could help to o set some of these issues. Over the years, we’ve had participants in Àsìkò who were already lecturers, or who’ve gone on to lecture. We actually have an Àsìkò alumnus who is now one of the deputy heads of art in one of the art schools, and many who are educators on and o the continent. I think Silva would be proud to see Àsìkò alumni take the learnings back to the higher education institutions.

koa Talk about the structure of Àsìkò, in terms of the syllabus, and what may have changed since Silva’s untimely passing in 2019.

of In a recent internal conversation, we said, ‘Not knowing is our pedagogy’, and we’re thinking about how we can continue to not know in order to learn. Each syllabus is built around the participants and the facilitators, so there is no syllabus per se. It is purpose-built

of Àsìkò launched in 2010, and as of 2023 I still could only find two examples of curatorial education on the continent, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (knust) in Ghana, and Wits University in South Africa. Art education is being updated much slower than the artworld is changing. Curated workshop and residency programmes provided the key to expanding the scope of artistic education on the continent, while more traditional structures struggle with less resources. I think that Àsìkò allows for that space to respond more easily to the changes by providing an opportunity for curators, facilitators and artists to learn together on the continent, to develop their working knowledge of themes, artists, cultures and histories, while providing a platform for them to be able to expand their work network. And I think that one of the most important ways that many creatives learn is through embodied experiences. Àsìkò is positioned to allow for people with di erent backgrounds and levels of experience to come together and to learn.

koa This brings us to one of the legacies of Àsìkò, as an alumnus of the programme (I participated in the 2014 edition in Dakar). Since 2020, colleagues and I in the Exit Frame Collective (Kelvin Haizel, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Ato Annan and Adwoa Amoah, who have all also, at various points, taken part in Àsìkò) have inaugurated an international, peer-to-peer and inoperative art school programme in Ghana called CritLab, designed for artists, critics and curators. We see this, on one hand, as a way of contributing to the broadening critical infrastructure of art practice

“Both facilitators and participants are coming to expand their practice. The premise of this methodology remains at the heart of Àsìkò”

ushered in by the collective blaxtarlines kumasi’s fugitive model of revolutionising art education from its beaux arts status quo within Ghana’s art college at knust, and implementing a generative curriculum which is more responsive to the demands of contemporaneity. CritLab traces its lineage to twenty-first-century antecedents such as Àsìkò, as well as the Independent Curators International (ici ) Curatorial Intensive; Global Crit Clinic – the roaming peer-teaching network cofounded by Kianga Ford and Shane Aslan Selzer; and the O ob Art Residency founded in Ghana by the artist and teacher Dorothy Akpene Amenuke.

With this in mind, the egalitarian thrust of Àsìkò deserves mention. According to Silva, ‘Àsìkò eschews a “master” teacher hierarchy in favour of a changing and diverse roster of facilitators and guest speakers who are invited less to “teach” and more to share, exchange, and in turn, to learn’. How has the programme continued this legacy?

of For Àsìkò, all the participants must be African, although recently we opened up to participation from diaspora as a Pan-African programme. However, our facilitators come from all over the world, as there is very little access to this type of art and curatorial education on the continent and it is important for us to provide world-class, global art education to participants. We’ve also realised that for the facilitators they’re equally coming along to learn. They learn from the participants and what they bring – their knowledge, their experience. This nonhierarchical structure recognises that both facilitators and participants are coming in to expand their practice, and I think that is a very important premise of this methodology, and remains at the heart of Àsìkò.

We’re continuously developing partnerships with various organisations locally and internationally. Most recently we’ve been working with the University of Finland to develop programming and to research the pedagogical framework of the Àsìkò programme in relationship to the Nordic Studio residency programme. I feel that developing institutional partners and potential inroads for research and career development for professors and teachers in universities has the potential to further establish the programme.

koa What are the plans for Àsìkò this year and in the near future? I ask this for two main reasons: firstly, because Silva had determined the Addis Ababa edition in 2016 as the conclusion of the first phase of the Àsìkò programme by the time the 2017 book Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa was published. And secondly, in an interview with Antawan Byrd – curator and programme coordinator for the inaugural edition in Lagos – Silva speculated on a vision for the afterlife of Àsìkò as one that ‘would be with only curators, or maybe a combination of curators and writers’, thus shifting from its artmaking focus, in response to the dearth of mainstream training in curatorial studies in Africa.

of In partnership with the Nordic Studio we will be hosting workshops in Lagos, with a focus on workshop toolkit development. These workshops will take place during our residency at the recently opened Guest Artists Space founded by the artist Yinka Shonibare. Although it will not run as a formal ‘Àsìkò’, the workshop will provide an opportunity for the Àsìkò platform to reengage with Lagos after an 11-year absence. In the past two years we have deepened our connections with our alumni,

and in response to their feedback we have been developing programmes which will be opened to them providing access to partner residency programmes and opportunities to develop exhibition programmes.

The 2017 Àsìkò book you’ve mentioned highlighted the first five editions of the art school. Our goal in 2023 is to reflect on previous editions of the programme through roundtables with a cross section of alumni, facilitators and participants. The discussions will shape the content of a new publication edited by writer and curator Serubiri Moses due to launch later in the year. This book will provide an opportunity to learn from all eight editions held so far. At the moment we are taking time to plan; our hope is that the timeline will allow us to develop a more sustainable financial structure, as the programme can be quite expensive for some potential participants. Establishing a solid plan will enable us to plan in multiyear cycles. Our goal is to launch a new season of Àsìkò in 2024 and we are hoping to identify partner organisations across North Africa, as a region we have yet to run the programme in, to continue developing a cross-continental conversation. ar

Oyindamola Fakeye is the executive and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (cca ), Lagos, where she previously cofounded the Video Art Network (van ) Lagos (2009), and company director for Res Artis, the worldwide professional body for artists residencies

Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana, a member of blaxtarlines and a teacher at the Department of Painting & Sculpture in knust, Kumasi

Àsìkò Art School, Cape Verde, 2022. Courtesy cca Lagos

Alternative Africa

Many of the arts education institutions throughout Africa date to the mid-twentieth century, largely founded as colonial or missionary projects, like the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, or as part of movements towards post-independence nationbuilding, such as the Alle School of Fine Arts of Addis Ababa University. Of the former, the University of Nigeria Nsukka has helped shape contemporary art in West Africa, where Ghanaian artist El Anatsui taught for over four decades; and Michaelis School of Art and Wits University provide many of the graduates for South Africa’s bustling contemporary art scene. Parallel projects like Imbali Visual Literacy Project in Johannesburg seek to provide a more practical training in visual literacy. Questions of access, and the shape and place of African art, have led to the growth in projects during recent years. Some, like the recently formed Cercle Luyalu school aspect of the Le Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise in Lusanga or the Muholi Art Institute seek to cultivate opportunities for a critical local scene; others, like the Àsìkò School explored in the interview in this issue, look towards supplementing this by creating international dialogue, often in the form of pointedly educationalleaning residencies.

blaxtarlines

While founded as part of the colonial Prince of Wales College during the 1920s, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s (knust ) Department of Painting and Sculpture has become the epicentre of a network of collaborative and dispersed art practices. In 2003, then-doctoral student in the department Karî’kachä Seid’ou set out an ‘Emancipatory Art Teaching Project’ with the ‘hope to transform art from commodity to gift’. While o ering both a bachelor’s and master’s programme at a state art school where admission numbers are determined by the government, knust also has fostered Sei’dou’s aim to create an environment that produced artists, not art, prioritising approach over any specific medium. Working with sta members such as artists Edwin Kwesi Bodjawah, Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu and George Ampratwum, this has since evolved into a sprawling coalition of lecturers, students and cross-disciplinary experiments under the title blaxtarlines . As a collective, an incubator and a project space, blaxtarlines has operated from the department since 2014, as both an occupation and transformation of where and how an educational institution might operate, staging largescale exhibitions in Kumasi, Accra and Tamale, of current and former students – including artists such as Ibrahim Mahama – alongside teachers and established artists, with a growing web of associated cooperatives, from related pedagogical experiments in Ghana like CritLab, to Kelas Bareng, an international collaboration between blaxtarlines , Gudskul, the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Nordland School of Arts and Film in Norway that resulted from the groups’ participation in Documenta 15.

Johannesburg, South Africa

Founded 1989

10 weeks – 1 year

Multiple courses, full- and parttime

Market Photo Workshop

The Johannesburg-based photography school was founded by renowned photographer David Goldblatt in 1989, in order to allow greater access to and training in the medium for South Africans from marginalised communities. While the school initially focused its teaching on sociopolitical documentary (Goldblatt is known for his body of work that depicted everyday life in South Africa during apartheid), Market Photo Workshop expanded its remit to include a broader field of photographic education via its foundational, intermediate and advanced photography courses. At foundation level, students are taught the basics in practical digital and analogue photography as well as introduced to visual culture theory, receiving practical advice on career paths within photographic industries. The intermediate and advanced courses allow students to further hone their production skills and creative frameworks, culminating in specific research projects that engage with the ‘commercial and conceptual narratives of African realities’. Not forgetting its founding ethos, Market Photo Workshop also o ers a specialist course, Photojournalism & Documentary Photography, that teaches ‘critical awareness of socio-political issues, cultural contexts, and contemporary media practices and perspectives, as they appear within the African landscape’. In 2005 the school opened a public-facing exhibition space, Photo Workshop Gallery, followed by its second space, Gallery 1989. Former students include Zanele Muholi, Lebohang Kganye, Sabelo Mlangeni and John Fleetwood. Part of the school’s expanded initiative lies in its public programme, which allows students to engage with a broader community, designed around lectures, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, residencies, mentorships and internships aimed at both professionals and those interested in pursuing careers in photography-related industries, continuing to maintain an egalitarian approach.

raw Académie

Founded 2016

Founded in 2008 by curator Koyo Kouoh as a space for exhibitions and residencies, the Raw Material Company has also, since 2016, hosted its twice-annual academy, self-declared as a ‘not-school’. Through seven weeks of discussion, research and making experiments every spring and fall, each session is led by an artist – previous sessions were led by artists such as Tracey Rose, Otobong Nkanga and Linda Goode Bryant – who provide a thematic framework: food; infrastructure; germination. A rotating faculty – including Arthur Jafa, Felwine Sarr, Rosa Barba and Naeem Mohaiemen – supports with talks and events. Such names evidence its international approach, while its structure allows for the possibility of continually remaking itself. According to artist Eric Baudelaire (who led the 2020 session), the sessions’ seven weeks ‘is exactly long enough to find a language in common, but it is not enough time for the academy to dilute itself into lengthy bureaucratic processes when questions of sustainability arise’.

Alternative menasa

When the Misk Art Institute in Riyadh opened in 2017, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater (who leads the government-funded institution) noted that prior to its opening there was ‘nothing o cial to support artist production’. Experimental approaches to art education have richer roots in other parts of the menasa region. In India, polymath Rabindranath Tagore initiated Kala Bhavana in 1919, in Santiniketan, o ering an interdisciplinary and secular approach. In Pakistan, the traditional National College of Arts in Lahore produces innovative artists like Shahzia Sikander and Imran Qureshi. Over the border in New Delhi, a group of artists founded Khoj in 1997 that facilitates workshops, residencies and networking opportunities – a reaction, perhaps, to cofounder Subodh Gupta’s own experience of art education when the art school library was apparently permanently locked. E orts to diversify arts education in the wider region are ongoing through initiatives like the School of Casablanca (modelled on the 1960s Bauhaus-inspired movement within the Casablanca Art School); as well as the nonprofit mass Alexandria, founded by artist Wael Shawky in 2010, dormant since 2019.

Home Workspace Program

In 2011 Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, founded by Christine Tohmé, launched Home Workspace Program, a free yearlong arts course structured around workshops and seminars, overseen by a changing roster of visiting mentors including artists Emily Jacir, Joana Hadjithomas and Kader Attia. With the Lebanese University as the country’s only public institution, the nonprofit established its own programme to support artists with technical and conceptual skills, and as a means to ‘rethink arts education and interdisciplinary modes of knowledge production’. Each year o ers a di erent curriculum, based on the instructors’ practices and interests. Fellows who join also benefit from being part of the wider Ashkal Alwan infrastructure (with facilities that include studios, a library and archive, and an editing suite), which engages with the public via forums and an online publishing platform.

Spring Sessions

The Spring Sessions began as an informal set of collaborative outdoor workshops ‘founded in a time of hopefulness after the Arab Spring, and in response to the lack of education options in the region. “We wanted to create a communal space to learn together, with a hyperlocal framework that took us out of the studio and out on the streets,” say the founders Noura Al Khasawneh and Toleen Touq.

The sessions provide mentoring and theory discussions alongside more exploratory workshops in urban and rural sites. The 2018 meeting was a six-week walk to Mount Sinai in Egypt; the following year featured a desert film festival. After several years’ break, the sessions are returning in 2023, aiming to “continue to explore embodied and experiential ways of learning, in intimate settings outside of institutional pitfalls”.

Spanish curator and art historian Chus Martínez began as head of Basel’s University of Applied Sciences and Arts art department in 2014; she promptly renamed it the Institut Kunst Gender Natur. Here, she speaks about what’s in a name, and the importance of intensity, friendship and providing hybrid models for students

Interview by Oliver Basciano

art r eview Tell me the thinking behind the naming of the Institut Kunst Gender Natur (Institute Art Gender Nature) hgk fhnw

chus m a rtínez When I first arrived at the institute, the new campus was about to open. I thought we needed to decide what substances are really transformative to life. I consider art, normally perceived as the production of an experience, as being one such transformative ‘substance’. Within that, I thought we had a chance here to entangle the transformative power of gender and of nature.

I thought we should create an environment where we put this entanglement at its centre. That doesn’t mean that if you’re a painter dealing with formal questions you must now deal with nature, or with gender; it just reflects that, in 2023, the frame in which your formalism takes place is already within this transformative axis, and that you need to understand what it means to participate in it, even if it is to then ignore it. Because there is no way around it.

ar What does that look like in practice?

cm We started to include science in this discussion. Can we have a nature-oriented technology? Can we have a nonwhite technology? Is it desirable? Yes. Then one day the campus took another form, where all the design schools or design institutes entered a more, let’s say, conglomerate arrangement,

and they needed a di erent description. The director of the campus suggested putting this curricular process into the name of the school, making it the headline. There were some who argued that to do so would relativise the importance of art. But being next to nature and gender is a fantastic honour, I think. If we really want to be one of the only art schools with these ideas at its core, why not announce it? For us, it’s fundamental not to situate art outside those considerations, whatever form the art takes.

ar Since giving the institute its new name, have you seen a shift in the people applying?

c m Many people immediately said, ‘Well, this is only going to attract those really interested in these subjects’, but it didn’t turn out to be true. People who hadn’t related to these issues before found a way of relating to them. Also, to say it again, we are not a nature-studies discipline, and we are not gender studies. We’re not about cultural studies. We practise art. The way that we understand those questions, notions and debates is still practice-based.

Many practitioners are intrigued by it. We have students who apply saying, ‘I was never concerned about questions of gender, but I’m a male painter and I probably should be, I just don’t know how’. They recognise that you cannot avoid these concepts, and we need to accept that. We have less resistance in our groups, but we see resistance growing in wider

society. We still frame many social problems in terms of labour rights. In moments of extreme precarity, people can get super-defensive, and they close down to certain transformations they don’t think are primal to their survival.

ar You mention questions of economy. How does the city or environment of Basel, which is very beautiful and quite close to nature, but also very expensive, a ect the teaching?

cm While it is culturally conservative, it’s a left-oriented city with a strong Green Party. It’s very invested in the arts and has many di erent structural examples for the students, from the Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle, to artist-run spaces that are numerous and varied in nature. It’s a great environment for understanding the systems inside the art system. While the Art Basel art fair is located here, the city has very few commercial galleries. In Zürich there are a few more, but the country as a whole is not flooded with galleries. Many artists here, even very well known ones, don’t have a gallery. There is also a large quantity of subsidised studio space provided by the city. I think students, if we guide them well, will see many di erent models of being an artist that are not entirely dependent on commercial galleries. That there are many hybrids in between. The city provides those case studies.

ar How do the bachelor course and the master’s programme di er in teaching?

cm We are a public school, and in the Swiss system we’re not allowed to have thousands of students. We have only 110 students and around 60 teachers. It means that the environment and the closeness are radical. There are enough of us to take care of you. Classroom teaching is performed by three people at the same time. How these three people work together is varied, dynamic and negotiable. Apart from that, we have immense hours of mentoring. I am a former music student, and as a music student you know that you need to practise every day, but you don’t do it. Then you have the teacher on Friday who tells you how bad this is. I’ve been creating a system of mentoring that is similarly dense. It means that you see a lot of people for one-to-one conversations many times. It provides another field in which to negotiate the big questions we’ve spoken about, where you discuss what you have been reading, listening to, working on, cooking. Then there are thousands of micropersonal and micro-collective levels where these questions are renegotiated, reactivated, reinvented, reimagined all the time.

The master’s is a little bit di erent, but the system is the same. In the ma there is a plenum, which is usually conducted by one teacher, but sometimes more. In the Swiss system, which I think is fantastic, the transfer of knowledge is never just from the individual to collective,

group. The Swiss don’t value extraordinary personalities per se. The school is very much designed against that.

ar What did you study at the conservatoire?

cm Premodern singing, early music. You were with other people all the time, you needed to listen to others, to synchronise, to adapt. It was a great training. I wanted to bring that to Basel.

ar What’s the rough international makeup of the students?

but collective to collective. There is collective teaching that’ll collectively transfer to another collective, which is the classroom. It di ers from that kind of more German masterclass where a prominent artist transfers onto the

cm In the bachelor programme we have 60 students, and until now they have been mostly Swiss, because it’s a German-language course. It has been changing though: in 2018, after an organisational shift at Corriente Alterna, which began in 1992 as an alternative free school in Lima and was moving to a more commercial model, some Peruvian students asked us for shelter and to be able to finish their degree here. The existing students on the bachelor programme collectively agreed to switch to English to accommodate them. Since the

“I don’t consider myself a teacher. I am designing the school, together with my team, very much like a curator. It gives me an incredible opportunity to produce art, but also produce a large conversation”

preceding pages Workshops, Basel Academy of Art and Design f hnw, 2022.

Photo: Pati Grabowicz above Master symposium Womxn in Motion, performance by Isabel Lewis, Institut Kunst Gender Natur h gk f hnw, Basel, 2020. Photo: Jennifer Merlyn Scherler

Ukraine crisis began, we have six Ukrainian students in our bachelor programme. The ma , on the contrary, is only in English and is around 60 percent international students and 40 percent Swiss or Swiss-documented students with di erent backgrounds.

ar You are known as a curator. How does that a ect your teaching?

cm I don’t consider myself a teacher. I am designing the school, together with my team, very much like a curator. It gives me an incredible opportunity to produce art, but also produce a large conversation. In a certain way it’s much more rewarding, egoistically speaking. For example, if you are producing public programmes in another kind of institution, your audience is far away, you need marketing to fetch them. Here the community is right there. It’s intense, and I like that intensity a lot.

It’s the same with the exhibitions we do at der tank , a small exhibition space on campus. It’s fed by three types of exhibition.

One is commissions. I’m taking care of those, and they are with artists who are dealing with questions of nature. We’ve invited the likes of Eduardo Navarro, Ingela Ihrman, Cecilia Bengolea, Julieta Aranda. We just published a book about all these commissions. Second is a strand in which we revisit work by former students and teachers from the institution, like Sergio Rojas Chaves and Renee Levi, people who many of the present students didn’t even know were connected to us. Then third are the exhibitions self-initiated by students. It’s a super dynamic mini-institution.

ar How did the pandemic a ect the school, has it left a legacy?

cm I can only say that during the pandemic I became the Spanish grandmother I am. I decided that we were going to take care of everyone here. We divided ourselves into groups, and I assigned teachers to students so that they were checked in with on a weekly basis. I was o ering cooking courses. We were meeting online too, for dance discos

and reading groups. It was like Spanish village life: ‘Did you eat well?’ ‘What are you having?’ ‘Do you know how to cook?’ ‘Are you taking care?’ ‘Do you know that actually eating pasta every day is very bad?’ Everyone played that game; nobody left the programme.

For graduation we staged the only physical exhibition by a Swiss school at that time, in Kunsthalle Basel. I said, ‘You are all afraid, but if we are afraid together, it’s better to exhibit the work than skip graduation. Let’s graduate.’ I’m very old-fashioned. I don’t think that we can really be an art school and not care about each other in a holistic way. I need to know if you’re having a good time. Joy and, let’s say, friendship are very important, and I think I’m very upfront about it. Friendship is probably the most important thing in life. An art school is not only teaching you skills, but also giving you peers who, along with the teachers, will be friends and a community for life. ar

Chus Martínez is director of the Institut Kunst Gender Natur hgk fhnw, Basel

Josefina Leon Ausejo, Asymmetric Psychogeography, 2022 (installation view in Peace or Never, Graduation Exhibition, Kunsthaus Baselland, 2022). Photo: Christoph Bühler

Alternative Europe

The Beaux-Arts de Paris was founded in 1648, a relatively largescale form of art education for its time, and a model that was replicated and exported with European expansions around the world. Such august history provides both structure and restriction to much of what shapes art education throughout Europe, with increasing formalisation and professionalisation in recent decades, often becoming incorporated into universities. Such structures have started to struggle under their own bureaucratic weight, with decreasing funding being o set by taking in larger cohorts, and in places like the uk casual teaching leading to years of ongoing strikes. So while Europe’s established institutions continue to draw in students internationally to renowned places – like the five-year studio-led programme at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, the critical interrogation of London’s Goldsmiths or, for those further down the career path, the two-year residency at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie – such concentrated academicisation has also led to a wide range of projects seeking to sidestep, subvert or altogether evade the structures of the art school. Countless models have arisen and passed in bursts, often in the ripples of art-school city centres, with long-running alternatives like the independent school Maumaus in Lisbon, or the more community-oriented Open School East on England’s southeast coast in Margate; the e orts shown here suggest di erent modes of occupying the existing structures of old, or creating new, separate spaces online.

Conditions

With students having to pay more and more for art education in the uk , but with teaching time and studio space both squeezed in recent years, art school is becoming increasingly una ordable for many who don’t want to look forward to years of debt. Founded by artists Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos, Conditions is an independent studio residency programme committed to fostering the critical conversations between studio holders, and to support ‘those engaged in culture from all disciplines and backgrounds, regardless of any prior qualification’. This has included visual artists with diverse practices as well as performers, glassmakers, fashion designers and writers interested in a broader critical discussion about their work. Turning the often-isolating experience of studio life back into an opportunity for critical engagement and mutual dialogue, Panos and Noel-Tod describe Conditionsas ‘intellectually engaged, while seeking to avoid unproductive or exclusionary academicism in art making, instead placing confidence in formal exploration in art’. Based in the Outer London borough of Croydon,Conditions runs its one-year programme in a studio building housing around 30 artists; the monthly fee o ers participating artists studio space as well as a structured programme of talks, tutorials and workshops from each year’s ‘associates’ and visiting speakers, who range from artists and writers to musicians, performers and

Founded 2018 1 year 30 participants

Croydon (London), uk

Montfermeil (Paris) and Marseille, France

Madrid, Spain

Dakar, Senegal

various locations in the Caribbean

Founded 2018

3–9 months

20–40 students

curators, and have included Alice Channer, Cécile B. Evans, Yuri Pattison and Mark Leckey. A ‘Conditions Lab’ also o ers vr and 3d printing facilities, and every year finishes with a group show for all participating artists.

It’s cheap – compared to mainstream art college – with fees barely a third of what students now pay for ba and ma courses in the uk , and with rates lower than many studio costs. Conditions is above all focused on questioning art as something which is still a material and social encounter, creating a platform for in-person dialogue and multidisciplinary discussions, and retaining an independent, responsive, artist-run attitude.

École Kourtrajmé

Four years ago the alternative film school École Kourtrajmé was launched by awardwinning director Ladj Ly in order to ‘give those who have not had access to higher education schools a chance to acquire the means to bring their artistic intentions to life’. In 2018 the school opened its first site, in the Paris suburb of Montfermeil (where Ly filmed Les Misérables, 2019), o ering young people from under-resourced communities free training in film and image professions – with no prior qualification requirements. Following the success of its Paris school (whose aim is to bring greater diversity to the film industry, and which has trained over 200 students to date), École Kourtrajmé expanded its e orts to Marseille in 2020 and Dakar in 2022, and is about to launch a training programme at a fourth school, running between Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana in September of this year. The school has three main objectives across its sites: to provide audiovisual, technical and artistic training; to help students develop their professional network; and to build students’ confidence and sense of legitimacy. In 2022 that third objective was given a solid foundation when École Kourtrajmé achieved a capcert -certified status recognised by the French Accreditation Committee. The schools deliver courses in film writing, acting, postproduction, film music, serial writing, webseries and more, as well as o er followup sessions with alumni, which include workshops with industry professionals.

Institute for Postnatural Studies

Madrid, Spain / online

Founded 2020

5 months

30 participants

During the past two years, the Institute of Postnatural Studies has taken the form of talks, exhibitions and regular, self-contained six-week seminars, each a di erent view on, as the name implies, aspects of art and contemporary ecology. From virtual landscapes to hybrid bodies, the programme has incorporated regular guest speakers, such as Samaneh Moafi from Forensic Architecture leading a conversation around the concept of the Negative Commons, to Annie Sprinkle speaking about ecosex. Shifting to a more sustained schedule, the institute has this year launched its first year of a Postnatural Independent Programme, with intellectual heavyweights such as Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo speaking alongside longtime collaborators like the American group the Institute for Queer Ecology, shaping modules on mapping multiple presenttenses beyond the human, delivering a five-month course of primarily online seminars, punctuated by two in-person events in Madrid.

Cork Archipelago, Ireland

An inclusive ba in visual art has run on Sherkin, an island o the southwest coast of Ireland, for several years. Two years ago a newer ma began alongside it; while numerous art and ecology courses have sprung up over the past decade, the ma Art and Environment appears to take the implications of both those areas more thoroughly to devise a bottom-up approach, confronting these ideas in a location on the edge of the Atlantic where they might be more acutely observed. Largely based out of the Uillinn Arts Centre in the town of Skibbereen in West Cork, and combined with studio-led and virtual teaching, the course involves extensive travel and research among Sherkin, Cape Clear Island and Whiddy Island in the area’s archipelago, and work with the area’s community centres. O cially part of Technical University of Dublin’s School of Creative Arts for certification, studio resources and sta , with teaching by artists like Mark Garry, Jesse Jones and David Beattie, the course develops from modules themed around ‘mapping’, ‘sensing’ and ‘hacking’ the environment, with workshops that have involved activities like working with islanders to develop a place-specific vocabulary that then informed virtual installations; another strand has focused on developing forms of augmented-reality rural activism.

School of the Damned

Set up as an artist-led free postgraduate programme in London with 14 participants, School of the Damned (sotd ) has since morphed into a freewheeling hybrid of meetings, video conference and chats, with 102 people taking part in this year’s cohort across the uk and Europe. With a mixture of people working in art, film, performance, publishing and fashion, there is no set structure; with a focus on collaboration and consensus decision-making, each incoming year designs it anew. This year, set as its largest ever to increase accessibility, there are four subgroups that meet weekly, while a new group focusing on a special area of interest can be proposed and set up at any time. ‘There is no pressure to attend every meeting to be a part of the collective,’ they wrote in a communal statement, ‘and people are free to step in and out as they please.’ Running regular reading groups, crits and skill-sharing activities, the emphasis has been to ensure that activities take place beyond London, with an exhibition of work in progress in Birmingham School of Art, an exhibition hosted by West Art Collective in Manchester and a zine-making workshop in Moseley, outside Birmingham. ‘Who knows what sotd is but it works somehow! Utopian community vibes,’ as they put it. What it will be can only evolve, as the previous cohort select the next cohort, with part of the application process to propose what School of the Damned should be.

museum

mark r appolt What role does education play at an institution such as m +?

doryun chong It was decided from very early on in the process of setting up the institution that anybody who is creating publicfacing content should be part of the curatorial department. We started from a very flat structure. Education or pedagogy isn’t just the domain of education curators or learning curators at m+ . And we believe that learning is a lifelong activity. It does not take place only during the formal years of schoolgoing. As a brand new institution, we were trying to think about the journey of learning from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and beyond, to provide entry points for people in di erent stages of life, and to stay with them as they age and as they also grow older with us. We opened in the middle of the pandemic, and during our first year there was such a need for an alternative to school learning, especially because kids weren’t able to go to school, so we have developed quite robust children and family programmes. During the pandemic everyone in our field had to go through a process of thinking about how museums can provide spaces of healing and connecting. Maybe what was a little bit di erent for us at m+ is that we were doing this in parallel with opening the new museum at the same time.

Unschooled

as its authority

opened

Interview by Mark Rappolt

mr Sometimes you can have a show that doesn’t have a message, or an exhibition that resists any definitive explanation. Do all the shows have to have a kind of outreach and education programme built into them? Or can something be just what it is?

dc I don’t believe so, philosophically speaking. But as a very new institution, we’re not quite there in confronting that kind of question just yet. We opened over a year ago with a suite of exhibitions drawn from di erent parts of the permanent collection we had built over about a decade, establishing the baseline narrative of what we mean by being a visual culture museum based in Hong Kong with global perspectives. We’re a museum that shows the gigantic neon signs that we have salvaged from the streets of Hong Kong and are going to be keeping and preserving in perpetuity. We are a museum that has also preserved Shiro Kuramata’s Kiyotomo sushi bar (1988) and installed it semipermanently in our gallery. We are also a museum that has a l ed media facade of 66 meters high and 110 across. (Whether you like it or not, you’ll be looking at our artist commissions from across the harbour.) I think that all of these create a new definition of art, as well as what the boundaries of visual culture can be and act di erently than established ways of doing things.

We have a very broad platform at m+ , showing a wide range of artworks and objects:

some are easier and others are very, very challenging. We do a lot of work, especially with our interpretation, on what level to pitch our language and our voice, making sure that our labels and interpretative panels are written in ways that are succinct and accessible, friendly but informed.

mr In a way, whether you like it or not, the role of the institution is partly to argue why art is an essential part of civic culture. Is that something you feel you need to do too?

dc Yes, definitely. During our first year of the museum’s operation, when Hong Kong was practically closed to the rest of the world, most of our visitors were from Hong Kong. That was a blessing in disguise because we were given ample time for our most proximal public to discover us, embrace us and adopt us, as a local institution that is part of their everyday life. The exhibition dedicated to Hong Kong visual culture has been by far the most favoured. But then, a large enough portion of the visitors began to get the picture of how the di erent parts – Hong Kong visual culture, contemporary Chinese art, and then international art, and design and architecture – may fit together into a whole.

mr When it comes to things like captions, labels, catalogues and everything else, how do you get the

Museums have always existed to teach us what’s of significance to a given society and, by omission, what’s not. But today the role of the museum as a centre of learning has become more complex

is increasingly perceived to be contingent rather than necessary. Here, Doryun Chong, chief curator at M+, Hong Kong’s recently

global

of visual culture, speaks of how expectations of what museums are supposed to do is increasingly sliding into aspects of social care and responsibility

balance right, to leave that indeterminacy that maybe isn’t always valued but, in some ways, is also what makes what you show art?

dc It’s a controversial subject among us. Roughly 20 to 30 percent of the works and objects exhibited in our galleries have an extended label. They’re very succinct, no more than 100 words each. Our introductory and didactic panels are never longer than 150 words each. At the entrance of each exhibition, we have just one sentence or one phrase that describes the exhibition. For Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, the entrance graphic says, ‘Discover this visionary artist’s groundbreaking career and witness the power of art to connect and heal’. That’s not just a marketing exercise. We wanted to make sure that the message gets to the public as quickly as possible in the most accessible way.

mr Meanings of works, and their interpretations, can change radically over time. Once you’ve written the object description and interpretation, you’re going to have to update constantly, indefinitely. In a way, this reflects the social context within which the museum exists. How much of that is driven by what’s outside the museum, and the moral and ethical values of the society it’s meant to represent?

dc Do we always move with the wind? I do think that you must do some of that. How do you talk, for example, about the fact that we celebrate and canonise certain artists? But by doing so, we may not be su ciently genderconscious? These kinds of things come up as issues as societies evolve, and museums have to adapt to the changing morals and expectations of the audiences. You have to hold onto certain things, however, and you don’t always just move immediately with the changing winds. We have to have agility as well as sensitivity.

mr How much freedom within that do individual curators have to push their own interpretations?

dc At m+ our learning curators drive the processes related to all the public-facing interpretations. The curators who are experts in their subjects of course have a say in the interpretations, but for us, our learning curators are the experts in our voice, and they are the ones who represent

how we should look from the public side. I think that ping-pong back and forth between our exhibition curators and our learning curators is necessarily what produces the right tone and the right amount of information for us.

when you’re thinking about programming shows, and their outreach and interpretation? In previous eras, most experience of exhibitions in other countries was entirely through catalogues. I’m wondering if today we’re more conscious of that audience because the digital has a di erent immediacy?

mr Does that get more complicated when, in the case of Kusama, you’ve got a living artist who has their own ideas about what their work means?

dc Making the Kusama exhibition involved a very close collaborative working relationship with the artist’s studio. I think of the sta of her studio as the artist’s eyes and ears, but also sometimes her brain as well. I have to really give it to the people in Kusama’s studio. When it came to interpretation, whether it’s labels and didactics in the exhibition or the curators’ essays in the catalogue, the studio sta always maintained a very respectful distance. They seemed to know that the biggest part of their job is to represent the artist’s intentions and wishes and protect her legacy, but you don’t do that by micromanaging and overcontrolling how interpretation happens.

mr With people gravitating more and more towards digital platforms, whether before, after or even instead of the physical exhibition, how do you factor that in

dc From the outset of m+ , it was envisioned that m+ will not just be about the exhibitions in its physical building, but also what happens in our online spaces. Here, we host m+ Magazine and our other digitally-born content, such as our interactive sites and digital commissions. As a twenty-firstcentury museum, I don’t think that you can think of digital as only a supportive function anymore. There has to be a much more porous relationship between what takes place in the museum’s physical spaces and its digital spaces.

For instance, with Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now we created an online swipe show that our digital team has created of her chronology, based on a very extensive visual chronology that we made for the print book and then adapted in digital format. I think it is a useful tool, which we should be immediately archiving as soon as the exhibition is done. There’s a whole infrastructural challenge that we experience, because of the ever-increasing obsolescence of softwares and hardwares. This is really the big challenge that all institutions are facing in terms of resources. As hardware and software go extinct faster and faster, how do you continue to migrate? How do you keep them alive? Again, as a new institution born in the twenty-first century, this is something we think about on di erent levels.

mr Does the digital shift the idea of storage, where works in storage can somehow be present?

dc Absolutely. The m+ Collection Archive has now more than 50,000 items in it. But there is a backlog of work to digitise. We’ve done already quite a bit of it, and this is necessary work to create a continuum between the physical and the virtual. My mantra in establishing this new museum has been that we cannot build a twenty-firstcentury museum without having built a twentieth-century museum, which we haven’t done yet here in Hong Kong.

both Family activities organised during the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, 2022. Courtesy m +, Hong Kong

When the m+ building opened in 2021, we had in our opening displays the latest tv sculpture by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries in one gallery, and just next door we had the complete archive of the rmb City (2007–11) by Cao Fei. Just two galleries over was Ian Cheng’s bob (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–19) generating and regenerating itself. At the point when the museum opened it felt as if the whole building itself was a media space. It felt as if the whole museum was actually embodying, inside and outside, what the twentyfirst-century landscape of digitally generated art and moving image looks like. We can really start to create a genealogy.

mr What do you make of the common view of the museum as a sort of pickling jar, there simply to preserve artworks?

dc In one of our inaugural exhibitions, The Dream of the Museum, we exhibited Marcel Duchamp’s From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise) (1935–41/63–66), which is a case containing 80 miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s works. While this editioned piece has been shown in established museums in major cities, most pieces are laid flat, making most of the works invisible. So we devised a way of installing the work as if it was frozen in motion, like The Matrix, with every single part of the box visible. For our audience, it was important to give a higher level of transparency and visibility than ever before to a work that is canonical in the history of modern art, through an innovative exhibition design. This exhibition design then became the basis for an interactive 3d digital model, which we launched as a simple online game to be played. We have to pickle certain things for preservation, but at the same time, I think that we’re

also trying to push the envelope in new methodologies, new interpretation and new ways that the public can access these often very esoteric things.

mr Is there a mathematics to the pickling? In that, if you carry on preserving an increasing number of objects then how does that a ect resources, environmentally or even simply space-wise?

dc I think our neon signs are a good example. We have a Conservation and Storage Facility, which has a ground-floor gallery that audiences can’t enter, but you can look in and it shows two gigantic neon signs in our collection. We need to show them, as for a vast majority of Hong

mean? After having acquired about half a dozen representative examples of neon signs, this would be what we can commit to preserving in perpetuity; but that’s not what people necessarily think that we should be holding. There are those who think we should have more examples. Those equations of what we can do, and what we should do, are being raised in all areas of the collection.

mr Another aspect of pickling might also be the way the value of objects, say a rice cooker, changes over time.

Kong people, if they knew anything about the museum, it is the neon signs we have in our collection. The signs are big, and structurally damaged; it’s going to take years of conservation for us to be even able to show them. But it was important putting some of them in our visible storage, so that our audiences can already examine what they look like.

That, for me, is a perfect example of a disappearing visual culture in Hong Kong, where questions of resources and sustainability are immediately raised. For a museum, what does a balance between preservation and sustainability

dc The rice cookers in our collection are now out of production. Old cd covers are a big area for our collection as well. We decided very early on that we were going to bring those objects into the collection. It’s a totally di erent kind of conversation then about which ones we should get. Should they be the first printing? Do you source them from eBay or old, respected antique cd shops? There was a lot of discussion around that, but ultimately it was not about financial values at all, but rather about their historic values. Even if each cd costs very little, there’s a value in the fact that our audiences recognise them, because they may even have them still in their own collection. As well as the placement of these objects, putting these cd covers in the same space as other rarefied objects, it gives a di erent sense of value that audiences might have never thought about before. ar

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is on show at m +, Hong Kong, through 14 May

This interview is part of a wider partnership with m + exploring the museum’s collections and programmes

A Kusama-style tattoo design workshop held at m + during Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, 2022. Courtesy Igor Chan

“We have to pickle certain things for preservation, but we’re also trying to push new methodologies, new interpretation and new ways the public can access esoteric things”

Alternative East and Southeast Asia

While institutions such as Tokyo University of the Arts and Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts continue to educate young artists, many emerging from such programmes realised their degrees were founded on uncritical technical practices or were too beholden to Western canon (ironically precisely what Okakura Tenshin was fighting against when he set up Tokyo University of the Arts during the late nineteenth century); this is one of the reasons for the emergence of Tokyo’s Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō, founded in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement – an early example to experiment with art education outside established institutions. Not, of course, that Asia as a whole doesn’t have a history of radical reinvention, famously Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Santiniketan (for more on that, see the menasa section). On mainland China, most artists work their way through the system of established schools, such as the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts; though when artist Huang Xiaopeng was fired from that school after experimenting with its curriculum, he established hb Station Contemporary Art Research Centre, which would go on to be a rare – though now-dormant – alternative educational model for the region. In Southeast Asia, projects such as Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, and artists like Norberto Roldan of Green Papaya Art Projects in Manila or Redza Piyadasa of Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur developed their own educational initiatives to foster a local arts community and help develop visual identities separate from the Global North’s influence. While in Indonesia, Gudskul’s emphasis on collective practice provides a handbook for how to work in places without the North’s lavish art infrastructure.

Linangan Art Residency

Located a few hours outside Manila, Linangan Art Residency operates as an alternative, communal learning and living art school across two sites in Cavite province that seeks to ‘develop and define contemporary Philippine Art and Culture’. At its heart are the Punlaan Artist Residency, Amuyong mentorship programme and Pagsibol outreach programme, a series of art residencies, workshops and educational programmes guided by Linangan’s network of artists, including Manny Garibay, Leslie de Chavez and Alfredo Esquillo. The Punlaan Residency Programme welcomes two artists twice a year for a threemonth residency at the Alitaptap Artist Community, tucked away in lush Amadeo, which culminates in solo exhibitions. The Amuyong mentorship programme in the town of Alfonso, surrounded by tropical nature, hosts eight artists, three times a year, in eight-week programmes. Director Alee Garibay explains that the programmes are focused on three tenets of capacity building: instructional classes on materials, technique and art history; concept development, including critiques, mentor consultations; and community engagement, in which residents cultivate communal living by preparing food, gardening and engaging in environmental cleanup. The Pagsibol programme is a wider educational initiative that opens workshops and classes to the public.

Hong Kong sar , China

Rooftop Institute

Founded by artists Yim Sui Fong and Law Yuk Mui, and Professor Frank Vigneron (head of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong), Rooftop Institute is a nonprofit group that promotes ‘art learning as a way to engage the social’. ‘Rooftop’ nods to a traditional space of communal learning in Hong Kong, and the concept has guided the institute to organise artist-led educational research and workshops. The Asia Seed programme organised study tours to strengthen pan-Asian connections, while the workshop series Hok Hok Zaap (learning to learn) has collaborated with local artists such as Je Leung and Law Man Lok to develop over 20 ‘learning kits’, centring on family, urban landscape and nature, and experimenting with film. An upcoming workshop led by storyteller and poet Yuen Che Hung will explore emotions, memory and imagination.

School of Improper Education

Central to the School of Improper Education is the question, ‘What is wrong with education?’ The kunci Study Forum & Collective began initially in 1999 as a cultural studies group, founded by artist Antariksa and writer Nuraini Juliastuti, but has gone on to focus on alternative forms of collective study, including establishing the School of Improper Education in 2016. A sprawling set of activities and actions, kunci’s artist-led approach reflects many projects of the region, where the boundaries of artmaking and community activism are indistinguishable. Experimenting with di erent forms of learning, the School of Improper Education aims to challenge Western modes of art pedagogy, authority and individualism, whether through communal writing or collective cooking. Their most recent initiative, Hutan Siswa (Study Forest), consists of multiple clusters modelled after forest ecosystems to encourage ‘inter-clump’ relationships. These clusters – Diverse Community Members; Intersectional Justice and Treatment; Community Education; Solidarity Economy; and Ecological Sustainability – will produce articles, zines, podcasts and public programmes.

T-project

Oldest among China’s art schools, China Academy of Art (caa ) has recently witnessed a plethora of flourishing student art groups that work from within and through the institution. Among them, T-project was started in 2017, in a studio building, as an educational supplement and student community, by Jin Yanan, lecturer at the School of Sculpture and Public Art. The departmental experiment has expanded into a broader enterprise after becoming fully student-led in 2021. Working alongside cca -based curatorial collective insco (Chen Tianqi, Chen Nanxi and Chen Xunchao) and independent film group Mefistofele, T-project is now enriched by a variety of methodologies: the three teams have gathered 15 art groups to stage more than 50 happenings in alternative spaces across Hangzhou in the past year, as part of their citywide curatorial project City Run, started in 2022 and still going. Characterised as a version of nomadic curation (youce), T-project’s City Run and the artistic assemblages it generated are visibly transforming the artistic ecology of Hangzhou and of traditional art schools.

The Black School is an experimental art school based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their Process Deck is a set of Tarot-style cards that draw on ideas of Black radicalism, socially engaged art, human-centred design and curatorial practice, among other disciplines, an interactive tool for brainstorming and creative activism

Relearning

Forge Project Executive Director Candice Hopkins

(Carcross / Tagish First Nation) recently joined the faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies (ccs ) at Bard College, Upstate New York, in the newly established role of Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies. Here, she speaks about Indigenous self-determination and the importance of this new collaboration for Native artists

Interview by Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds

2022 Art Omi Artist Residents visit Forge Project, traditional lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok.

Photo: Frances Cathryn

shanna ket c hum- h eap of bird s What did you think of the Forge programme prior to joining?

candi c e h op k in s I helped design the programme at the Forge Project when I started there in July 2021. There are not very many Native-led organisations in the United States, so to imagine a fresh start was imperative. It is not strictly an arts organisation but also a broader cultural organisation: the Forge supports and collaborates with Sky High Farm, which is located on an acre of land at Forge Project, and both are committed to greater food sovereignty for members of the local and regional community. There are other public programmes dedicated to decolonial and nonor anticolonial learning, as well as a fellowship programme for artists. Forge’s openness means it can take di erent directions depending on the needs of artists (such as those working in ecological development) or even the needs of Fellows. They are also trying to meet the needs of guests and visitors who come, and they have a collection of works by living Native artists, the ultimate purpose of which is that the works are loaned to institutions or for scholarly study. They support artists who are working right now, because so much of what is considered our wealth (as Native people) is held as tra cable objects. Those are our ancestral belongings. So, we are interested in what artists are making at this moment. I consider it to be an activist collection, because many mainstream us art institutions have a terrible record of collecting

contemporary Native art. It is a massive gap in art history. One of the goals of the Forge Project is to help correct that.

sk h The Forge has collected quite a few living Native artists. How does the Forge’s programme implement decolonial or noncolonial learning? Is it based on the artists you invite as fellows?

ch In terms of the collection, Forge currently has over 150 artworks, and it will continue to grow. In terms of programmes, we recently hired Sarah Biscarra Dilley (Northern Chumash) as the Curator of Indigenous Programs and Community Engagement, and she deals with public programming. One programme that recently finished is ‘Gentrification is Colonialism’, which is a series of panel discussions with Indigenous people and local activists and organisers who looked deeply at the history of displacement in the Upper Hudson Valley region, where Forge is located. For example, the Mohican people, who are Indigenous to that particular area, were displaced ultimately to Wisconsin, where they received land from the Menominee people. The Forge sits on the unceded lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok, or Mohican people. So, for the Forge, thinking of the longer history of gentrification and displacement of Indigenous peoples is really predicated on understanding and knowing that history

of the area. Right now there are huge housing instabilities in the region, particularly in nearby towns like Kingston and Hudson. What we are really interested in is taking a broader view of some of these problems, because people do not always think that Indigenous history and perspectives can actually be illuminating in this type of case. We also do a lot of programmes that follow the lead of our fellows. For example, we did a ‘Sovereignty Event’, which was artist Tania Willard’s (Secwepemc Nation) name for a project that focused on locally foraged teas. Our role is not to educate non-Native people; the ‘land back initiative’ events, for example, are only for Native audiences. So, we are really parsing the di erence between decolonial and noncolonial in that sense.

sk h It seems like the Forge Project is taking on a new role in trying to make sure Native people are self-representing while also speaking to issues that are important to the community.

ch Yes, self-determination is the basis for any decolonial movement. It is not just about holding people to account. But we cannot always start at the lowest common denominator. We need people to catch up and we need them to catch up quickly. So we put the onus on the audience to do some of that homework, because we are not going do it for them.

sk h I want to shift to discussing the Bard initiative. How do such issues of Indigenous self-representation figure in shaping the approach at Bard?

2022 Forge Project Fellow Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) performs at Time & Space Limited, Hudson, ny. Photo: Alekz Pacheco

Artist Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné), left, works with Matt Dilling of Lite Brite Neon Studio, Kingston, ny, on a commission for Forge Project’s collection. Photo: Frances Cathryn

ch This has been more than two years of di erent ideas, of institutional accountability – after waves of Black Lives Matter protests and institutions realising, particularly in the us , that they are essentially white-supremacist organisations, or that they at least uphold that. We realised that we could attempt to enact quite radical institutional change through a partnership between Forge and Bard. One of those involved naming: American Studies is now American and Indigenous Studies. There are cluster hires for faculty at all di erent levels, and scholarships (including living expenses) for Native students. There is also support for the recruitment of Native students, because Native students do not always know what opportunities are out there for them. And if they do not know then they are not going to apply. But if they also do not see themselves represented, people are going to feel really alienated when they come to a place. Bard College and Forge Project have announced a $50 million gift that will support transformational initiatives in Indigenous Studies at the college. The gift is a combination of a $25m endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation and a matching $25m from George Soros and the Open Society Foundation. There are funds for acquisitions for the library and archives, both at the Center for Curatorial Studies and at Bard College as a whole. I have not seen funding and initiatives like this that are focused on change and are Indigenous-centred, so our hope is that it can be a template for others. That is why we are trying to be as open as possible in sharing all the di erent initiatives that are bound up in this. I have to say, too, that from the beginning it was also built upon the good work that Bard was already doing with their Andrew W. Mellon grant called ‘Rethinking Place: Bard-onMahicantuck’. At the centre of it was the question of ‘how do we make land acknowledgments actionable?’ because they have become often rote, performative and not based on real collaboration or community engagement.

transformative, especially at a small liberal-arts school. We created a timeline for all the goals we have for every year of the first five years. The intent was for this to be felt right away, and I am already seeing it happening. People are coming here; more Native folks are coming to teach and be engaged with postdoctoral students. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it and what students do, what impact that they make. I am happy that Forge could play a small part in that. Part of that is also thinking of Forge as an extended classroom for Bard and the ccs . When I was a student at the ccs , I did not always have the chance to meet artists in person, to see their work in person, but that is something that Forge can o er, which I think is quite special.

sk h Why American and Indigenous Studies, and not, say, ‘the Native American Studies department’?

ch The broader you can make it, the more di erent departments and areas of studies – like Bard’s Center for Human Rights, for example – find ways of having a relationship to the department. That allows it to be truly cross-disciplinary.

to work with a lot of local organisations right in the Hudson Valley community.

sk h Can you talk more specifically about your role at Bard?

ch Absolutely. I am an adviser for students at the ccs , and I am coteaching an elective class right now in oral history, and then I will teach my first class in the fall. But the biggest project I am working on, at the moment, is an exhibition that is looking at performance and visual sovereignty in Native Art. That exhibition will open at the ccs in the summer. It is partially drawn from Forge’s collection, but the majority of works are loans from elsewhere. The genesis of the exhibition is a document called ‘Credo for American Indian Theater’, written by Lloyd Kiva New in collaboration with Rolland Meinholtz at the iaia . They were trying to define at the time (1969) what New Native Theater was, but I think what they were truly defining was most of the premise for what we understand as contemporary art. I think this is a missing part of Native art history, so this exhibition will start there and then look at not only objects as performative but the way in which performativity is really a line through the development of Native art.

sk h Is the Bard programme going to collaborate with other Native art institutions, like the Institute of American Indian Arts (iaia ) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or places like that?

sk

h In what ways does this initiative promote Native approaches and access to art and education?

ch I was at the ccs from 2001 to 2003. At that time it was a very di erent landscape. It was really me trying to convince people that there are still Native artists. Among the few artists they knew of were James Luna and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, but beyond that there was not a lot of knowledge of art history or the history of the region at all. A lot has changed in 20 years, and that is really great to see, because it makes me want to continue to build on that: going from a place where there was a real lack to a place where we are really generating a community. I think the initiative is deeply

ch Yes, they are starting collaborations with places like the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin. Those are the folks whose land Bard College is on. We are doing more of those collaborations and initiatives at Forge with Native-run organisations.

sk h Do you see this initiative between the Forge and Bard as institutions reaching out to wider networks of Native art-making organisations and schools?

ch I think it already does, through the loan programme that we have, and through all the museums we are engaged with. But we are doing di erent kinds of collaborations, like with the book publisher Dancing Foxes Press in New York, and we did a venture at the Santa Fe Indian Market with the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and the iaia. It is definitely the beginning of those kinds of collaborations. But, you know, one of our first initiatives was

sk h Do you think one of your long-term goals is to develop an Indigenous-centric mode of art pedagogy? ch I would love that. We’re making a book to accompany the exhibition, but not a traditional catalogue. Instead, it’s a reader on visual sovereignty and performance in Native art comprising 13 republished essays, four newly commissioned essays and six oral histories; I want something that has a long shelf life beyond the show itself. From the beginning we wanted something authored by Native folks for all audiences. I think in Native art history most books, articles and essays are written by others, or non-Natives. I think it is time for that to start to shift. We also have so many [Native] artists in their seventies and eighties, and their art histories still are held orally, too, so we need to find ways of documenting them, and I hope this book will be one small step towards getting those histories out into the world. ar

Candice Hopkins is executive director of Forge Project and on the faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard, both in Upstate New York. The exhibition Performance and Visual Sovereignty in Native Art, curated by Hopkins, will open at the ccs this summer

Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds (Diné / Navajo) writes about contemporary Native American / Indigenous visual artists and theatre and performance studies

We need people to catch up and we need them to catch up quickly. So we put the onus on the audience to do some of that homework, because we are not going do it for them

Painting & Sculpture in knust, Kumasi

Alternative North America

‘Chaotic’ was how John Baldessari remembered the beginnings of CalArts during the 1970s, not least the assignments he himself set students, which ranged from ‘disguise an object to look like another object’ to ‘describe the visual verbally and the verbal visually’. Other teachers taught joint-rolling or refused to set specific times for classes and merely roamed the la campus encountering students. The experimental nature slowed New York’s stranglehold on art education, where ambitious students had been flocking to Hans Haacke or Jonas Mekas’s classes at Cooper Union and other colleges. Further up the East Coast, during the 1990s/2000s, the Rhode Island School of Design underwent something of a renaissance, with students including Kara Walker, Do-Ho Suh, Laura Owens and Ryan Trecartin. For those not wishing to saddle themselves with the debt of private universities (such as Jack Pierson, Christian Marclay and Rashid Rana), the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) remains the only public college in art and design in the us ; while, for a couple of years from 2019, Dark Study reacted to this system by initiating a free online study course that took its cue from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). South of the us , La Esmeralda (onetime tutors: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo) and the Faculty of Art Design and the Institute of Aesthetic Research, both colleges of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the capital, are the establishment, while soma , an 18-month study programme, emerged in 2009 from two artist-run gallery initiatives. Heading still further south is the National School of Plastic Arts, Guatemala, and across the sea the extraordinary architecture of the Ricardo Porro-designed Castro-era Escuelas Nacionales de Arte of Cuba. For those searching out the most radical education in the Caribbean, La Práctica, a nine-month postgraduate study programme at BetaLocal in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was a good bet, running for a decade until 2019. What emerges from the projects confronting the high costs of art education across the continent are attempts to relocate the potential of this chaotic past.

Land Arts of the American West, Texas Tech University

The Land Arts of the American West programme is a semester-long ‘field study experience’ that gives an involved and expansive view into what Land art might be. Initially founded at the University of New Mexico by Bill Gilbert, the Texas Tech University programme began in 2008 when then-codirector Chris Taylor started working at its College of Architecture. Students take an extended twomonth roadtrip to see classics of the American outdoor art canon, while also visiting ancient pueblo dwellings, former mines and geological formations. Guided by this direct research, the trip is punctuated with seminars and talks with guests that have included Lucy Lippard, Joan Jonas and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which is then followed by a month of studio work oriented towards a public exhibition.

Mexico City, Mexico

Materia Abierta

Founded by artist Federico Pérez Villoro in 2019 to create a flexible platform for reflection, the curriculum of the four-week summer school is handed over to a di erent artist or researcher each year. The inaugural edition, overseen by Floridabased curator Natalia Zuluaga, harked back to the simultaneously radical and playful atmosphere of Xul Solar’s Pan Klub, conceived by the Argentinian artist in 1939 in Buenos Aires as a ‘collective séance’ summoning ideas and practice to the table. Among the spirits guiding the group of approximately 25 students in 2019, each paying us $1,800, were the Mixe linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil and Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani. Each year, however, Materia Abierta reincarnates with a di erent personality, the guest directors given free rein to pursue idiosyncratic interests. Already postponed a year to 2021, the second edition was held online, the title ‘Neither Apocalypse nor Paradise’ conceived before the pandemic and proving horribly apt: ‘Uncertainty, which we propose as a place of theoretical speculation and propositional action, suddenly became the norm’, one of its programmers, Mônica Ho , noted to Terremoto. ‘The debate we had originally intended was being lived in real time.’ The most recent summer of classes, curated by art historian Sara Garzón, took the banner ‘The Rise of the Coyote’, to explore Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous knowledge and practice, and, with the nearby volcano Teuhtli as something of a mascot, to raise questions of futurity, extractivism and decolonialism. Among those leading the lectures (some of which were public), workshops, tours and field visits were Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Neves Marques, tech theorist Chakanetsa Mavhunga and artist duo Black Quantum Futurism.

School of the Alternative

As a short summer residency that takes place on the campus of the original Black Mountain College, School of the Alternative (sota ) has a history of focusing on experimentation as a means of inspiration. Though its programme also developed as a conscious space away from the formal arts education opportunities in the area. ‘Much of sota’s shape and pace have formed in relief of the restrictive and oppressive tendencies we’ve all experienced in institutional learning,’ cofounder Heidi Gruner has stated. She describes it as a ‘diy all-hands-on-deck community experience’: sta and students live in one lodge, where everyone pitches in to two hours of chores a day, and at the start of each year’s session they collectively discuss a ‘community agreement’ of how to treat one another. Sessions are partially led by the sta , largely volunteer artists, performers and writers, who suggest ‘solid’ lecture themes, which in the past have ranged from slime and food as praxis, to the tarot, moving between performance, film- and printmaking. These are supplemented by ‘liquid’ workshops on cyanotype printing to plein air paintings, and more impromptu ‘gas’ sessions led by the students themselves. After pausing for two years during the pandemic, a one-week session was held in 2022; this year the school returns to its three-week structure. The emphasis isn’t so much on output as on collectivity, discussion and education as an end in itself. Many past participants have gone on to found their own educational projects – from informal discussion groups, to projects like the Ellipsis residency in Portugal.

Alternative South America

If the contemporary art school, with its studio-based learning and peer-to-peer crit sessions, has an origin story, it’s probably to be found in the writing of Paulo Freire. The Brazilian scholar’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) criticised the ‘banking model of education’, in which the student is imagined entering education an empty vessel and leaving only when successfully filled with the knowledge of their betters. Instead, the Marxist writer imagined the student to be a cocreator in their education. The book had an immediate impact, initially beyond Brazil (which was under dictatorship), adopted by any school that thought itself even vaguely radical. Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, a centre of resistance against the autocratic regime, has continued to educate generations of artists in the country, as have Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in São Paulo and the private Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (faap). Elsewhere on the continent, against the perceived conservatism of Peru’s public universities, such as La Escuela Nacional Superior Autónoma de Bellas Artes del Perú, was the establishment of Corriente Alterna, Escuela de Arte y Diseño in 1992, since privatised. A similar impetus catalysed artist Guillermo Kuitca’s establishment of the Studio Program For Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, dubbed the ‘Beca Kuitca’, for 20 young artists, which has been running since 1991 (he once recalled, ‘When I grew up, I was warned not to set foot in an art school’). While many groups have claimed to continually renew this history of radical pedagogy, the dominance of centralised formal education has led to a proliferation of residencies and retreats, such as Más Arte Más Acción on the Pacific coast of Colombia, which has run since 2010 – though, also reflecting the attenuated state of many such projects, taking 2023 as a hiatus and point of reflection.

Casa do Povo

Few art insitutions have the heritage, intellectual ambition and embedded community approach of this São Paulo mainstay. Founded in 1946, the centre is a testament to how much the city gained culturally from early-twentieth-century Jewish immigration, as refugees from the Third Reich poured in from across East Europe. The building itself, opened seven years later, was designed by Ernest Carvalho Mange to provide maximum flexibility for collective actions, meetings, group discussions and classes that viewed ‘art as a critical tool in an ongoing process of social transformation’. Collectives are still invited to apply for studio and event space; anyone can attend free boxing classes or psychoanalysis sessions; there’s currently a residency dedicated to decolonising technology and an open call for a free four-month programme of talking, singing, planting, cooking and Mbyá Guaraní language learning, devised by Guarani ambassadors for nonGuarani people. Now decades old, the administration of Casa do Povo faces the dilemma that many once-upstart organisations experience. ‘Casa do Povo has reached a growth limit’, a recent manifesto of sorts reads. ‘Growing more would mean moving away from the territory, bureaucratising practices, stifling processes, reinforcing the divisions between those who work and those who

São Paulo, Brazil Founded 1946 Various programmes

attend the institution.’ Its answer was Casa Escola, a six-month tutored course developed by artist Luiza Crosman, monthly fees by suggested donation, which aimed to incubate collective practice.

la escuela___

During his time studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and then teaching in his native Venezuela, Miguel Braceli became disillusioned by what art schools had morphed into. Braceli wondered where the radical spirit of Open City – the settlement on the Ritoque dunes in Chile, built with the aim of creating a city-as-school and school-as-city – had gone. Why was art education seemingly modelled towards the market? Braceli penned an essay in 2020, calling for education to once again move beyond the white cube. ‘Schools must be naked, all their walls demolished to keep their structure, leaving only what is essential. They would then be buildings without facades, fully exposed to reality. They would get wet, dirty, and impregnated with their contexts; they would shake without collapsing, they would inhabit experiences that would redefine their meaning.’ laescuela___ grew out of that manifesto, articulating a more freewheeling education, rooted in the South and Central American experience, and now, entering its second semester, taking place at venues across the continent and online. On the free curriculum have been workshops by Ecuadorian artist José Luis Macas Paredes on the subject of water politics in Guadalajara, Mexico; a two-week course on the continent’s ‘retrofuturist’ activism by Chilean Felipe Rivas San Martín; and a lecture on ancient Indigenous and contemporary theatre-making by Peruvian Miguel Rubio Zapata. In February this year Brazilian Eleonora Fabião led a series of walking conversations and actions from Kiosko Galería in Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Bolivia, one of many artist-run spaces with which the school partners.

El Validadero

Started as a set of ‘anarchist studies’ and ‘cultural interventions’, El Validadero established, as the name suggests, its own model of validation, where several dozen students can engage with talks, experiments and laboratories given by almost just as many guest speakers – past faculty has included artists such as Sol Casal and Lucas Ospina, writer Juan Cárdenas and art critic Diana Wechsler. Through a hybrid fee-paying programme, participants can take part in weekly in-person meetings in Bogotá, alongside weekend excursions around the country, or take part entirely virtually from anywhere in the world. The programme o ers a range of outputs, from exhibition spaces within the city to printed projects in its magazine BacatArt, or making use of Erre 4 / Master (a blue 1980 Renault used as a mobile exhibition venue). Last year’s cohort staged its final exhibition in a forest just outside Villa de Laya. The forthcoming session for this year is devised by street artist Street Drug Addict, aiming ‘to generate those black holes of understanding or experience’ under the simple thematic title of ‘sociological and artistic studies in quantum dimensions with emphasis on time machines and parallel universes from economic monopolies of technology, communication and cultural entertainment’.

Undisciplined

Why are alternatives to art schools on the rise?

One answer, argues sociologist Kuba Szreder, is that formal art education simply teaches students how to take part in the art market. Here Szreder, who helped set up the Free/Slow University of Warsaw, a set of discussions, strike actions and publications responding to art and academia’s frenetic pace, explores the potential that lies beyond the traditional institutions of art education

by Kuba Szreder

When we established the Free/Slow University of Warsaw (f/suw ) in 2009 with a group of fellow curators, artists and thinkers, we had a clear agenda in mind. We wanted to wrestle back time that was otherwise wasted on a relentless churn of artistic and academic projects to reflect upon the wider systemic conditions of artistic overproduction. The f/suw existed for almost a decade before it naturally dissolved, its initiators and animators transmuted into other collectives. During its lifespan, f/suw turned out to be – as theorist and one of the founders of f/suw Janek Sowa quipped – an undisciplined, unacademic zone, a series of intensive, self-organised art-workers’ inquiries that addressed the precarity and exploitation rampant in contemporary art and in society at large.

An ambition to reappropriate time for the sake of the collective and a desire for critical reflection are characteristics of a plethora of self-organised universities, institutes, research centres and schools (often also referred to as mock institutions, monster institutions, patainstitutions, alterinstitutions or institutions of the common). These informal platforms operate at the fringes of global artworlds, even when they are located at the heart of global artistic circulation. They are often driven by activist agendas and geared towards radical self-education – the results of which are applied in their respective contexts, whether Venice, London and New York, or on the former plantation of Lusanga in Congo. They specialise in really useful knowledge, a historically and politically loaded term, referring to knowledge that, paraphrasing Marx, does not merely describe the world, but changes it. This term first emerged in the nineteenth century in protosocialist debates about workers’ education in the uk and was picked up in the second half of the twentieth century by militant scholars of labour movements. More recently it has been absorbed

into the field of contemporary art, influencing debates about the use value of art and its institutions. Research projects, publications and manifestos of f/suw and other similar outlets for art workers’ selfeducation debunk two socioeconomic and ideological constructs: on the one hand, it disenchants the ideology of artistic autonomy; on the other, it opposes the ongoing neoliberal transformation of contemporary art. I will start with the latter, as neoliberalism sets the strategic stage of these self-organised models of education.

Neoliberalism and the contemporary applications of really useful knowledge

As artist-activist Greg Sholette argues in his 2010 book, Dark Matter, mock institutions often fulfil important social functions, such as research and education, that ‘regular’ institutions are no longer able to deliver due to the detrimental e ects of neoliberalism: economic policies aimed at the marketisation of all spheres of life and the weakening of public control over private capital result in the depletion of social welfare (where it exists) and the extraction of resources (where they are available). In the particular context of higher education in the arts, neoliberal transformation has resulted in lower wages; popularisation of precarious forms of employment; overburdening of workers and institutions with bureaucracy; implementation of quantitative and competitive systems of performance review; budgetary deficits paired with the commercialisation of studying, where lower-quality education is o ered to growing groups of students (positioned as clients) for higher tuition fees that result in rising student debt. Quite often these changes are met with forms of resistance such as unionisation, student and teacher strikes, absenteeism, picketing, occupation and other forms of industrial action. This neoliberal transformation

of the sector of higher education is paired with the identity crisis of artistic education, stuck between lofty ideals of autonomy, romantic trappings of studio practice, aspirational delusions of meritocracy and the delirious reality of a winner-take-all economy. Here, earnings are symbolic, precarity is rampant and the means of exhibiting work are dominated by commercial interests while thousands of debt-ridden graduates are churned out annually. In this context, the usefulness of knowledge is measured against its capacity to support resistance to the market forces at play.

Against artistic exceptionalism

Really useful knowledge might then be a tool to subvert the conventions of artistic exceptionalism so essential to the field of contemporary art. This ideology of exceptionalism is a practically operational and socially grounded system of collective beliefs centred on the figure of the artist-genius who creates discrete collectable art objects, and whose studio practice – even if entrenched in the art market and systems of class privilege – is based on the denial of its own economic and social underpinnings. Art schools are integral to promulgating these tenets of contemporary art. Most teachers and students agree that art is an exceptional calling, deserving commitment and justifying personal sacrifices. Furthermore, art schools naturalise the division of social labour, which is founded on the rift between time needed for daily concerns and time freed for the pursuit of art and knowledge. The problem is that the reality of the contemporary-art sector diverges tremendously from these lofty ideals, and soon after graduation young artists must turn out one project after another, while many are stuck in vicious cycles of precarious, poorly paid jobs at the same time. The only exceptional element of this system is an ideology of artistic exceptionalism that justifies shitty jobs as sacrifices.

At least in theory, artistic autonomy should be oppositional to the neoliberalisation of contemporary art and artistic education, as it enshrines an alternative value system: art is important because it is art and not because it sells well, embellishes class distinctions or decorates nationalist identity. In practice, however, artistic exceptionalism is structurally convergent with the neoliberalisation of contemporary art. This social illusion obfuscates the reality of exploitation in the arts, justifying the self-precarity of artists and pushing their hyperindividualisation. The romantic ideals of singular genius promote a winner-take-all economy while undermining e orts at collective organisation. For this reason, the really useful knowledge of contemporary-art workers contests romantic ideals, and many of the groups presented below are animated by selfdescribed art workers, a cohort labelled as the artist-precariat by British theorist Angela McRobbie, and whom I tend to discuss as the ‘projectariat’. Below, I would like to discuss three distinctive features of art worker inquiries that aim at reclaiming time, imagination and resources to generate knowledge. The usefulness of which is defined by its capacity to foster new, intersectional and cross-class alliances geared towards social transformation on both micro- and macroscale.

f/suw : reclaiming time

f/suw adopted its cheeky motto, wolny bo powolny (free because slow), to underline an urge to reclaim time, and to spend recuperated time on collective reflection about the conditions of artistic production. Hence, many of the activities and research projects of f/suw originated in situations that weren’t your typical academic settings: picnics, summer camps or walks that often fed into published readers, podcasts and web entries. Imagine a picnic organised in July 2009 in front of the Ujazdowski Castle – a main Polish centre for contemporary art – where a few dozen artists, curators and academics discussed

These informal platforms specialise in really useful knowledge, a historically and politically loaded term, referring to knowledge that, paraphrasing Marx, does not merely describe the world, but changes it

Art for ubi Assembly, Madrid, September 2021.

Photo: Román Lores Riego

ways of organising their work–life balance. There they listened to a lecture by the late Martin Kaltwasser, an artist from Berlin, who climbed a ladder as an impromptu stage, describing how he tried to match his obligations as a parent to freelance artistic practice. An array of books about art and care labour would testify that this is not an easy feat; this thread of unequal gender hierarchies in contemporary art, which stem from an unequal distribution of care labour that largely pushes women artists to focus on caring for others ahead of their own pursuits, would recur as a focus in f/suw s tudies, spearheaded by Joanna Figiel. When f/suw organised a summer camp in Northern Poland in 2011, an international cohort of art workers responded to an open call and came together to make bonfires, take walks, cook, eat and talk about the conditions of artistic labour and the systemic critique of cognitive capitalism. The idyllic setting served as a backdrop for inquiries that eventually led to a string of research projects and publishing activities.

Importantly, the art workers’ inquiries of f/suw were part of a larger cycle of labour struggles in contemporary art in Poland. These actions took place in the wake of a post-1989 ‘shock therapy’, the neoliberal transformation of Poland that resulted in the impoverishment of large swathes of society and lasting class divides. f/suw participants partook in the collective e orts of Citizens’ Forum of Contemporary Art and has engaged in unionising, wage negotiations and protests against censorship. One of the most performative forms of self-education was an ‘art strike’ organised by artist Kasia Górna and other activists at the Citizens’ Forum for Contemporary Art in dozens of cities across Poland in 2012. On this occasion the artistic community at large reflected on its own precarious condition and lack of access to social welfare, contextualising it in wider debates about precarious labour.

The Citizens’ Forum published The Black Book of Artists in Poland in 2015, a textbook denunciating poor labour conditions in contemporary art.

The forum’s strike and collective research prompted wider e orts at unionisation in the sector of contemporary art. Over the last decade, cells of the radical trade union Workers’ Initiative have been established in major art institutions (for example, Ujazdowski Castle, Museum of

Modern Art and Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art, all in Warsaw), and art academies (such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, University of the Arts Poznan´ or the Academy of Art in Szczecin). The workers of these institutions try to self-organise to resist various forms of exploitation, while partaking in the wider alliance of trade unionists and activists of precarious labour. For this to e ectively happen, the ideological tenets of artistic exceptionalism and neoliberal fixations with individual success need to be revamped, if not entirely discarded. And really useful knowledge, engendered through the process of such a range of art workers’ inquiries, serves this function.

Art for ubi : reclaiming social imagination

Establishing such cross-class and intersectional solidarities is not an easy feat in the current landscape. In this dog-eat-dog world, solidarity is hampered and social imagination is limited by what late theorist Mark Fisher labelled capitalist realism – an ideological construct organised around the old Thatcherite slogan: there is no alternative. In this context, the usefulness of knowledge is defined by its capacity to move beyond narrow ideological horizons, to reclaim and reinvigorate social imagination. An interesting example of such intervention is provided by the published manifesto Art for ubi (art for universal basic income, 2022), spearheaded by the School of Mutation (som ), an o shoot of the Institute of Radical Imagination (iri ). iri operates between autonomous art centres and institutions – mostly in Italy, Greece, Spain and Russia. Its peer-led investigations are dedicated to the notion of the commons in contemporary art and beyond, propagated in theory and action. Here, really useful knowledge is directly interwoven with the practice of occupations and working within autonomous art centres, such as s .a.l.e ., Venice. The discussions and seminars of som , organised online between 2020 and 2021, were directly embedded in labour disputes – and subsequent occupations – organised during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic in Italy and Spain. som contributed to these e orts with online seminars, public assemblies, performances and teach-ins. The results of these self-educational activities, summarised in Art for ubi , proposed

Congolese Plantation Workers Art League member Irene Kanga working on a sculpture in Lusanga, Congo. Courtesy Renzo Martens

the implementation of a universal basic income, not just for artists but for everyone. This multisectoral approach informed the educational performance One Income, Many Worlds, orchestrated by members of som and iri in Madrid in 2021 and Milan in 2022. Ri ng on the forms of didactic, militant theatre developed by Brazilian Augusto Boal during the 1970s, the scripts of these collective public readings are based on group discussions and interviews conducted with a cohort of precarious workers, whose testimonies are then publicly performed by the interviewees themselves. Precarity is unearthed as a condition shared between people of di erent classes and walks of life – artists, designers, activists, cleaners, illegal workers – who not only dissect their conditions but also discuss ubi , among other, more pragmatically inclined remedies. The multivocal script of these performances does not gloss over di erences between forms of oppression, such as those based on race, class, gender and identity, but proposes a unifying and intersectional (even if utopian) platform for those struggles. Advocating for ubi for everyone as something to aim for in the future, their models of participatory and militant self-education prompts solidarity here and now.

Le Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (catpc , the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League): reclaiming resources

In the context of several former palm-oil plantations in Congo, the usefulness of art worker inquiries is defined in more pragmatic terms, measured against their capacity to reclaim resources and reinvest them to build a collective farm, research centre and art centre in Lusanga. The radical pragmatism of the Institute for Human Activities (iha ) and catpc is informed by a sober assessment of the global chains of artistic value, mapping the relations between the poverty of plantations with the a uence of the global metropolis. As iha’s argument goes, the extraction of resources from plantations in Congo subsidises metropolitan infrastructures in the North, including art centres and academies, while depleting resources for local people so that even primary education remains a luxury. Despite these systemic conditions, catpc and iha have managed to create platforms for self-education and former plantationworkers’ inquiries – facilitated by Kinshasa-based artists Michel Ekeba, Eléonore Hellio and Mega Mingiedi, as well as Dutch artist and iha initiator Renzo Martens. Together they have helped former plantation workers find means of self-expression and acquire knowledge of the global chains of artistic value. Such knowledge is useful if one wants to recuperate resources by securing a footing in the ultracompetitive art industry.

The intrinsic relation between self-education, militant research, artistic practice and economic operations is exemplified by the Balot nft, catpc ’s most recent project. Inspired by an idea from Congolese historian Charles Sikitele-Gize, this nft is a digital edition of the indigenous Congolese sculpture of Maximilien Balot, a colonial agent killed in the course of the Pende uprising in Congo in 1931, currently in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond. The museum has refused repeated requests from the catpc to loan the Balot sculpture and present it in the place of its origins in Congo.

Challenging this decision, the catpc recuperated the image of this sculpture to mint a limited nft, sold to buy back plantation land. This conceptually charged and economically e ective action does not reproduce the conventions of artistic exceptionalism in the Western guise, but rather twists and subverts aesthetic conventions regulating authorship, usefulness, spectatorship, ownership and expert assessments of artistic quality. The Congolese art workers collectivise the results of their cooperative production, reclaiming resources from the global chains of artistic value to buy back land and establish a centre for art and research that will contribute to actual, and not just rhetorical, decolonisation.

Radical pragmatism of really useful knowledge

The ambitions and manifestos of the self-organised collectives mentioned here are quite often strategic in scope and radical in rhetoric, from decolonising the global artworld to demanding ubi for everyone. The daily operations of engendering really useful knowledge, however, are embedded in the practical ethos of radical pragmatism. These organisations piggyback on existing institutions, grants, opportunities, infrastructures and knowledge. But they are not merely reformist or opportunistic. They move between o cial, artistic and academic institutions and communities of struggle extrinsic to the field of art. The emergence of really useful knowledge is a pragmatically situated endeavour: self-organisation, campaigning and commercial activities are interwoven with researching, reflecting, studying together. This should not be mistaken with neoliberal instrumentalisation; instead, knowledge here emerges following the withdrawal of art workers’ productive forces, who now strike against the exploitive systems they were meant to reproduce to reclaim time, imagination and resources.

The usefulness of the knowledge generated is defined by its placement in wider social struggles, as the self-educational collectives discussed here work against social and political currents of global proportions. The magnitude of these challenges (neoliberal capitalism, precarisation of labour, colonialism) exceeds individual agency, artistic or otherwise. Hence the political edge of these inquiries, which transgress the conventions of artistic exceptionalism and contribute to the construction of wider social fronts. The ideas of autonomy, freedom and self-realisation are applied beyond the domain of art, recontextualised as shared faculties of radical social imagination, helping people to view the world di erently and – potentially – act on this collective vision. Getting to understand the systems of oppression and exploitation is not enough to change them, but ignorance is bliss only for people who can a ord it. Struggle or perish, as the saying goes; and here really useful knowledge may prove its benefits. Just as former plantation workers need to cognitively map the global value chains to recuperate resources, art workers in Warsaw or Venice – instead of running on mills of individualistic aspiration – will need to stop, think and unionise to break the vicious cycle of precarity and exploitation. ar

Kuba Szreder is an academic, researcher and curator. His book The abc of the Projectariat was published in 2021

Precarity is unearthed as a condition shared between people of di erent classes and walks of life – artists, designers, activists, cleaners, illegal workers – who not only dissect their conditions but also discuss ubi , among other, more pragmatically inclined remedies

Olajide Mayor Peter Sheherazade Thenard Olayikanmi Olawale

17. 2. – 16. 4. 2023

Christine Sun Kim

Kresiah Mukwazhi

Jordan Strafer

28. 4. – 18. 6. 2023

Vivian Suter

Margaret Salmon

Karrabing Film Collective

30. 6. – 3. 9. 2023

Lazar Lyutakov

Delaine Le Bas

Chen Chieh-Jen

15. 9. – 12. 11. 2023

SoiL Thornton

Mai Ling

Mykola Ridnyi

1. 12. 2023 – 28.1. 2024

Tishan Hsu

Charlotte Prodger

Agencyof Singular Investigations

secession Friedrichstraße12, 1010 Vienna www.secession.at

Image: Joey Holder, Khthon

People Make Television

Raven Row, London 28 January – 26 March

Exhibiting an archive is always a potentially radical act. The past either disappears, or ends up in some unlighted store, waiting for someone to come looking for it, to find its usefulness in the present. Then, it might illuminate how we got here, remind us of past struggles that have faded from memory and urge us to rethink what to do in the present. People Make Television isn’t an art exhibition, it’s an archival display. But it makes the case for how e ective the ‘artworld’ can be by creating a space in which archives can be revisited. It’s a singular experience, winding back 50 years to the broadcasts made out of groundbreaking experiments in public and community broadcasting that took shape in Britain during the 1970s. Focused mostly on programmes produced by the bbc’s Community Programming Unit – the series Open Door, which ran from 1973 to 83 – as well as the more fragmentary recordings of a group of mostly shortlived community cable-tv stations (born, ironically, out of the then conservative

government’s desire to open up broadcasting to the free market), the exhibition o ers an alternative view of Britain during this uncertain, conflicted and often gloomy decade. And those views develop from the wildly divergent viewpoints of various community associations, single-issue campaigners, pressure groups, ex-hippies, anarchists, trade unionists, black rights activists, feminists, racists, punks and a fair number of cranks and weirdos. All of it presented in a galleryful of crt monitors, in side galleries and in an on-demand viewing space that collectively contain more than 50 hours of programming.

Open Door was the bbc’s response to a growing debate over a more democratic control of broadcast media – inspired by the earlier examples of public broadcasting that had emerged in the us and Canada. It aired a hundred programmes in total, chosen from an open call that attracted hundreds of applications. Though editorial judgement was handed to the groups

making the programmes, the bbc ’s anxiety about handing over that authority is manifest in the rules it imposed to contain it: that makers should not represent or promote a political party, or pursue an industrial dispute; that they should not incite ‘racialist feeling’ or ‘violent or unlawful action of any kind’.

So, while in People Make Television the archive is presented as a neutral fact, in the background is the constant presence of editorial power, emanating from the monolith that is the state broadcaster. Nevertheless, that filter, despite itself, draws our attention to the emerging character of the new cultural and political forms that, seeded during the 1970s, have come to define and dominate politics and culture now.

Because, if there’s more here than merely a vicariously enjoyed retro vibe in seeing 1970s men’s weird beards and flared jeans and shirtcollars, and 1970s women’s hairstyles and jangling earrings, alongside hessian studiobackdrops, dingy pubs, earnest discussion

People Make Television, 2023 (installation view).

Photo: Marcus J. Leith

groups, Aran knitwear, clapped-out Austin Leyland cars, old-school policemen’s uniforms and incessant on-camera smoking, then it lies in the shock of realising how the once-marginal views of the 70s have become the dominant views of the 2020s.

Most remarkable here is the episode made by the Transex Liberation Group (4 June 1973); presented by four trans women, it’s an unprecedented demand for better recognition of transsexuals (the term current at the time), and for a more sympathetic treatment of the problems faced by men and women who understand themselves and want to live as the other sex. Harbinger of pretty much all the points at stake in current gender debates – of the male and female brain, of gender fluidity, of the demand for the state’s formal recognition – it’s also weirdly prophetic of the conflicts now raging: in the closing moments of the studio discussion, one guest, a male clinician, wonders why there are “no women” in the discussion, and recognises that “Women’s Lib will be very angry”.

Elsewhere, there are shows by environmentalist designers complaining about overproduction and overconsumption, warning that we should conserve the resources “we’re currently

expending at a rapid rate”; by black teachers castigating the white educational establishment for framing black schoolchildren as “problems”; by Central London neighbourhoods fighting the encroachment of a property developer whose buy-up-and-run-down strategy has destroyed their communities; by the Work and Leisure Society, advocating for the economic good-sense of everyone working only a thousand hours a year; by the anarchist Albion Free State collective, whose groovily spaced voiceover heralds its communitarian utopia of “dancing, and music, and nakedness, and workshops and crafts and food co-ops” – though with the strangely time-warped coda that we “take back control, from capitalists, corporations and the Eurocrats in Brussels”.

If the progressive ideas seeded in these little groups of the 1970s now shapes the mainstream, what remains unchanged is the political urge to centralise control over the media. Unsurprisingly, the one episode to cause ructions was that of the Campaign Against Racism in the Media, a knife-sharp analysis of the overt and covert racial bias in the bbc ’s own output led by a sardonic Stuart Hall in 1979. Similarly, by 1983, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom was skewering the

bbc ’s veiled side-taking as Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government took on union strikers. It’s not hard to suspect that such embarrassments to the national broadcaster’s supposed ‘impartiality’ had something to do with Open Door finally shutting, on 30 March 1983, a few months before Thatcher’s landslide reelection.

For all the exhibition’s optimism about the prospect of ‘a participatory and civic television’, it was always the power of the establishment that was at stake. Meanwhile, the identity politics that took root during the 1970s threatened that power perhaps less than the militant workingclass politics that met its defeat in the same period. Indeed, so little was the threat, identity politics has in some real sense become the establishment. To this we could add that the ‘participatory and civic television’ that People Make Television suggests never quite happened is in fact here – only it’s on the little screens in our pockets, networking people together, all talking about what they want to talk about. Sure, social media may now be poisoned by capitalism, but it frightens the political establishment to its core. Which is why mainstream politicians of all stripes are desperate to contain, regulate and censor it.

J.J. Charlesworth

Street Farmers, Open Door, bbc2 , 1973

Sigrid Holmwood A Terrible and True History

Annely Juda Fine Art, London 26 January – 3 March

The painting Ale wife (all works 2022) greets you as you turn into the gallery – except the peasant woman it depicts doesn’t acknowledge you. Instead, her back is turned as she faces a red wall of Blackletter text (a form of script widely used during the medieval and early modern periods). She lifts two wooden tankards up in a powerful gesture while red scrawls suggesting indignant energy emanate from her. Sigrid Holmwood’s solo exhibition is at once a commemoration, reclamation and celebration of the proverbial witch.

Holmwood looks to the 1590 North Berwick Witch Trials of Scotland and Denmark in which mostly peasant women were scapegoated as witches and burned at the stake. They were blamed for Anne of Denmark’s storm-hit sea journey to Scotland (to marry King James VI), which had instead marooned her in Norway. James blamed witchcraft and tortured its supposed practitioners to extract false

confessions, such as the devil’s execution plan for the king. Women are notably mostly absent in Holmwood’s canvases; instead, texts, pyres, ships and devils are depicted as symbols of the witch’s destruction – both her own and that which she allegedly causes.

Texts appear either as tomes, like in Burning heretical books, or in the background as written word, as in Burning log. The artist even reproduces excerpts of accounts of these trials from the 1591 pamphlet Newes from Scotland on a long cotton scroll that hangs from the gallery ceiling, diachronically anchoring this misogynistic inquisition in both past and present.

The abundance of text here references the polarising e ect inventions like the Gutenberg Press or the internet have had by making information more widely accessible. These innovations, usually lauded for radically and positively widening access to knowledge, exaggerate and exacerbate the supposed dangers women pose

on larger scales. Indeed, this exhibition’s timeliness makes clear that women were, and still are, a threat: governments everywhere continue to diminish women’s rights in contemporary versions of the witch hunt, such as in the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran or the overturning of Roe v Wade in the us .

In Burning heretical books, however, the ignited papers are witchy texts that curiously refuse to burn. In fact, nothing here is actually damaged. Holmwood’s harmless fires indicate a defiance of the witch’s persecutors in keeping with the recent popular rehabilitation of the witch that has turned her from villain to symbol of feminist empowerment. The title of A Fire used to burn women in Dernburg indicates the depicted bonfire should be torturing women and yet their absence in the composition makes me imagine Holmwood’s witches as unscathed, watching from outside the infernos that should have been their demise.

Marv Recinto

En förskreckelig oc sand beskrivelse (A terrible and true description), 2022, madder, caput mortuum, Maya blue, green earth, weld, red ochre, indigo in egg tempera on calico mordant printed with madder, 120 × 130 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Yuri Ancarani Works 2002–2022

Kunstverein Hannover 5 November – 8 January

Yuri Ancarani is known for feature-length and mostly dialogue-free art films, so a retrospective collecting nine of his moving-image works – plus photographs – might daunt. Fortunately, here the Italian artist has edited his films to between two and 25 minutes long. (There was, for the dedicated, a tier of full-length screenings in the institution’s cinema.) And if there’s always an unseen portion of these works, that neatly counterpoints Ancarani’s penchant for illuminating our world’s shadow side: he chooses subjects that most people, for better or worse, don’t get to witness in real life, but that speak articulately about our species.

The opener, Il Capo (2010), for example, observes the chief of a marble-quarrying squad in Carrara as he directs, with a conductor’s precision, two digger trucks, as their drivers shear o a huge block of the fabled Italian stone.

Several of Ancarani’s diagnostic concerns are capsuled here, under the sign of extraction: work itself as a component of control societies; and human dominance, via tools and tech, over the natural world. Yet our stewardship of the planet is fragile and limited, obviously, and our contemporary hubris great. Ancarani frequently suggests as much with a visual economy that can border on bluntness. Ugarit (2007) features deer running freely in front of a power station, indi erent to progress, industrial or otherwise, and though the film appears to be shot in Europe, its title refers to a Bronze Age port city in Syria where the first alphabet is thought to have been invented, and whose ruins were not excavated until a century ago.

Not infrequently, Ancarani comes across as an anthropologist who finds humans somewhat ridiculous and self-hobbling, if intermittently

inventively so. Wedding (2016) drops us into a marriage ceremony in Qatar – where samesex relations are illegal – focusing only on the turbaned male sheikhs, who nevertheless ceremonially kiss each other repeatedly while female guests are quartered elsewhere. San Giorgio (2019) observes the middle-aged bureaucrats who deal with a Swiss bank vault’s gold. The show’s emotional gut punch, though, comes with the closer, San Vittore (2018), where we ‘see’ inside the eponymous, notoriously tough Italian prison mostly through art-therapy drawings made by inmates’ children: castellated architecture, guards, the occasional screaming, disciplined-and-punished detainee. By that point, it might become doubly clear why Ancarani’s films work best either singly or as edits: there’s only so much unvarnished reality one can take.

Martin Herbert

Il Capo (still), 2010, 35mm film, colour, sound, 16 min Courtesy the artist

Jumana Manna Break, Take, Erase, Tally

moma ps 1, New York 22 September – 17 April

Concerned with how politics are enmeshed in ecological preservation, Jumana Manna’s exhibition becomes a setting for the artist to explore the thorny contradictions knotted into modern environmental policies. Situating her work at the intersection of ecology and law, Manna is most e ective in her films, which juxtapose ways of living harmoniously alongside the land with structures of modern statehood, entities that in her telling often appear clunky, laborious and ine ectual.

The star of the exhibition is Foragers (2022), a film blended from documentary footage and scripted scenes thatbuilds a portrait of the ongoing struggle between Palestinian foragers and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority over the right to pick wild-growing za’atar and ’akkoub. For decades, the Israeli government has banned foraging these herbs under the pretext of protecting them from overpicking and extinction. In reality, development and construction pose much more of a threat to ’akkoub – a plant that won’t grow in turned-over soil – than the studied cuts of foragers who, for the most part, know how to crop the plants to ensure regrowth. More salient is the fact that foraging only carries cultural significance for the Palestinian population; Israelis simply purchase their za’atar from local farmers. Thus, Manna cleverly underscores how conservation has been retooled as a method for continued cultural suppression. Foraging ’akkoub and za’atar is punishable by prison time and severe fines, yet the Palestinians keep at it.

Quiet shots of Manna’s own parents wandering the lush, springtime valleys, bags and secateurs in hand, turn Foragers into a story of resistance. They persist not only in the practice of foraging, but also in their connection to a land of which they have been dispossessed.

Scripted court scenes make it more explicitly a film about protest, with fiction providing the foragers – both found and cast – a secure venue for rebellion. In front of the camera, the foragers speak their minds. They evade questions and refuse guilt. These scenes are unexpectedly lighthearted and funny, showing o Manna’s deft feel for the absurd; you might think the prosecutors were talking about drug tra cking, rather than a benign green picked by grandmothers and eaten to bolster the immune system. This fiction allows Manna to hone her thesis, shifting the film from mere documentary to a defiant call to action.

Humour also plays a vital role in Manna’s earlier film, Wild Relatives (2018), which follows icarda (the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas) as it replicates seed stores once held in Aleppo. After the outbreak of war in Syria, seeds were taken from the global storage facility in Svalbard, Norway, to facilitate the construction of a new seedbank in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. Watching the seeds be weighed and vacuum-sealed, handled all the way by rubber-gloved fingers, it is hard not to see a kind of comical futility to the whole routine. The film asks what is being preserved in this physical catalogue of biodiversity.

Removed from the soil, the growing techniques, the cultural contexts and the cuisines that prize such plants, what is left for the seeds to represent? Manna is evasive, providing no clear answers. Her film neither glorifies nor condemns the project, but seems to hint at the opportunity to preserve a culture alongside its seeds.

Across the exhibition, Manna’s work is strongest when it foregrounds her interest in how food systems serve as vectors of culture that can both clash with and transcend the structures of a nation-state. Her sculptures, though, are less successful. In their staging, the stylised ancient meets a limp representation of the modern in what ultimately becomes a slightly-too-obvious condemnation of the industrial. Manna’s objects are themselves beautiful, but arranged in space they lack the nuance of her film critique. In this instance, the cultural specificity of the agricultural practices she highlights cannot justify her reverence for them, which at times reads as an over-innocent idealisation of the bucolic, the rural and the preindustrial.

Where Manna’s work shines is in her ability to hold the complex and contradictory. The openended questions of Wild Relatives and the precise critical incision of fiction in Foragers transform her films into living, expandable documents. Presenting alternate plotlines to our accepted understanding of agricultural modernity, Manna’s films remain her most compelling countermove against the tendency for dominant narratives to ossify into law. Maddie Hampton

Wild Relatives (still), 2018, hd video, colour, sound, 64 min. Courtesy the artist

Foragers (stills), 2022, hd video, colour, sound, 64 min. Courtesy the artist

Wynnie Mynerva Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh Gathering, London 24

Enter the bloodbath. Bodies, alive, dead and somewhere in between, merge with and cleave from each other in the two paintings that open Wynnie Mynerva’s exhibition. The scale and composition of these works, Violated Bliss i and ii (2022), is on a par with art-historical juggernauts like Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents (1610). The Peruvian artist’s paintings present a similar violence. However, instead of discernible human figures in combat, Mynerva directs colours – browns, pinks, taupes, crimsons – to strike and bleed out onto each other with vicious force. A stereotypically masculine ferocity is paired with the soft, presumably feminine curves of boulderlike mounds of flesh from which hands, breasts, buttocks and feet are birthed and swallowed. Mynerva depicts a struggle between the demolition of an oppositional femininemasculine hierarchy, with its historical baggage, and the creation of a fluid category that melds the two.

January – 4 March

The feminine takes the lead, but does not dominate, as most of the figures have breasts, flowing locks of hair or extralong nails. The masculine presents itself in the form of phalluses oozing with desire, either attached to these otherwise female bodies or floating in space, possibly severed. This reverses the hierarchy suggested by the show’s title, a quotation attributed to Adam in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, at the moment that Eve is created from his flesh by God. This passage suggests the feminine’s fundamental indebtedness and subservience to the masculine. Mynerva subverts this order but holds on to the fact that the two are inextricably linked.

There is a slitlike passage into the next room that separates the curved walls on which the two Violated Bliss canvases hang– a gate taking us further into Mynerva’s world. The lone painting in the show’s second room depicts an androgynous, winged figure that bends towards the

foreground with open arms. It is as if it has just released something into the space beyond. Opposite the painting is a metal staircase leading downstairs, possibly to the thing it has liberated.

The third and final room, subterranean, houses two large unmounted canvases that mirror each other as they hang from the ceiling and curve down to rest on a bright red floor. In the dimly lit space, forms continue to meld into each other, but now with a harmonious energy. Amid the crowd of bodies, scenes of fornication and masturbation are clear. In the blur of Mynerva’s works, sex, with its own potential to create and destroy, is as visible as violence. These paintings, with their deep reds, pinks and oranges, are the most visceral of the lot. They are like bloody seeds, raw and ready to blossom. Together they blend masculine and feminine into a heterogeneous mass, at peace with itself and undesirous of label or rank.

Salena Barry

Two Bodies Touch on the Same Shore I, 2023, oil on canvas.

Photo: © Grey Hutton. Courtesy Gathering, London

Agne · Jokše · , Anastasia Sosunova Dance As You Wrestle Cell Project Space, London 8

In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, 19 January marks Epiphany: believers across Russia and Eastern Europe plunge themselves into frigid oceans, lakes and rivers. They bottle and consume this often-polluted water, ostensibly rendered ‘holy’ on this day, sometimes becoming ill from its ‘healing’ properties. Lithuanian artists Anastasia Sosunova and Agne Jokše take this paradoxical ritual as the framework for Dance As You Wrestle, which explores queer love as a counter-relic to the imperial residue of a religious practice followed primarily by ethnic Russians, with all the cultural tensions that implies.

Across videos, etchings and sculptural installations that span both gallery floors and spawn synthetic puddles on its rooftop, the artists create personal reliquaries that host unsettled histories. In Sosunova’s Express Method (2022), crushed cans and warped cardboard legs prop up an ever-greenifying plastic husk filled with water from the River Lea, one of the uk ’s

December – 26 February

most polluted waterways. The tangled copper belts and burnt styrene mass of The Visitation (2022), meanwhile, cradles a cellphone that streams Sosunova’s video surveying ghosts of Russian colonial monuments. On the other side of the sculpture, a copper plate etching of two embracing saints emerges coated in temporary tattoo stickers. Conflicts between personal and familial love and the political ideologies embedded in religion abound, peaking in the collaborative sculpture Dance As You Wrestle (2022). A pile of sandbags becomes a barricade against painful family conflict: letters from Sosunova’s mother condemning her queer relationship appear here too, encased in a block of resin that humorously props up a pink sandal.

Jokše’s two videos, Unconditional Love Extended (2022) and Dear Friend (2019), articulate both feelings of the everyday miraculous and the anxious space left between letters. The former chronicles time spent with her grandparents

while helping her uncle recuperate from an injury in London. As the group sit down to watch a drag queen perform on Lithuanian tv, Jokše · starts recording, as if shielding herself from what her family might say next. Instead, the device captures a confused softness: the grandparents pose gentle questions and sing the drag queen’s praises.

Working through such tentative and tender explorations of love and faith, the artists find an uncertain home in the meeting point of conflicting ideologies and algae blooms. On Epiphany, the murky waters of Express Method were poured out into takeaway Sprite bottles, inviting the audience into a shared ritual endorsed by saint and sinner alike. Across the exhibition, these paradoxes create a productive rift: by rewiring a ritual tethered to an antilgbtq faith, Jokše and Sosunova open up space for a queer Eastern European futurism to take its place.

Alice Bucknell

Dance As You Wrestle, 2022, installation view. Courtesy the artists and Cell Project Space, London

Mohammed Sami The Point 0

Camden Art Centre, London 27 January – 28 May

In Mohammed Sami’s painting Weeping Walls iii (2022), a nail pierces a stretch of abstracted floral wallpaper, casting a clock-hand shadow over its drab teal and khaki pattern. While the periphery of the wallpaper appears grimed with time, it frames a paler rectangular area, as though a picture that once hung from the nail has been recently removed. What remains – what persists – is Sami’s extraordinary handling of pigment, with its hazy di usions, its clogs and scrapings, its queasy wet-dry quality that recalls a scabbed wound.

If this is a work about the burdens of representation and the weightless dream of ‘pure’ painting, then it’s also one that speaks obliquely to Sami’s biography. Born in Baghdad in 1984, he was enlisted as a youth by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime to produce propaganda murals and portraits of the dictator – the latter a mandatory presence in every Iraqi home. Fleeing

in 2003 following the us -led invasion, he fetched up first at a Swedish refugee camp and later settled in London, where he enrolled on the mfa programme at Goldsmiths. Sami’s show is not a straightforward document of this history, but it is a form of testimony, both to lived experience and to how it reprises and reshapes itself in the theatre of memory.

People are conspicuously absent here. Instead, we’re o ered empty garments, eerily hushed interiors and items of furniture that feel like they still retain the warmth of departed bodies. Ten Siblings (2021) recasts its titular human subjects as a teetering stack of mattresses, grimly summoning the poet Thomas Sackville’s observation that ‘sleep [is] the cousin of death’. Similarly, Study of Guts (2022) might depict a bank of sandbags, or military shirts slumped in a quartermaster’s store, or (given their necrotic tinge) a pile of spilled intestines. Horror haunts

the most innocuous of scenes. In Electric Issues (2022) the slack cables of a looming telephone pylon cast a shadow that resembles a giant arachnid. We get to thinking of electrodes applied to tortured flesh, and of the ‘spider hole’ in which Saddam famously hid, like some mythic monster, in the days before his arrest.

The largest work in the show, One Thousand and One Nights (2022), is also its most ambiguous. Before us lies a murky, green-toned nocturnal landscape. Amid great billows of cloud, or smoke, scores of white lights illuminate the sky. Too big to be stars, perhaps they’re an aurora borealis-type phenomenon above a dark Nordic forest, or the explosions of a ‘shock and awe’ bombing o ensive over a blacked-out desert city, glimpsed through the lenses of nightvision goggles. Either way, it’s a vision of a past on perpetual replay, a story without end.

Tom Morton

Electric Issues, 2022, mixed media on linen, 225 × 155 cm. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London

tarwuk Posadila sam kost u zimskom vrtu

White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 1 February – 18 March

Artists Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić, working together as tarwuk , came of age during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Land was razed and borders redrawn; acts of ethnic cleansing scarred generations and many sought refuge around the world. The figurative paintings and sculptures of Posadila sam kost u zimskom vrtu (I planted a bone in the winter garden) bear the spectre of it all.

As is often the case for art made after periods of war, the combination of past trauma, prevailing uncertainty and tentative utopianism make their mark on much of tarwuk ’s work. They’ve been pursuing something transformative in their idea of posthistory: figures are sculpted, often at a large scale (but dainty and small here), with both an uncomfortable tactility and in a state of elusive metamorphosis; dramatic and almost psychedelic paintings capture expansive scenes yet with a muted approach to colour. Two figures embrace under an archway in mrtisklaah droW_eht_fo_esnecnI_eulb_A (all works 2022; their titles can be read backwards – ‘A blue

Incense of the Word’), and in the painting’s composition tower above a somewhat crosssectional imitation of landscape. Both land and humanoid shapes are rendered in earthy tones, the surrounding (or intervening) space a byzantine blue. One face seems masked while the other melts away into surrounding figures and ornate detailing. Theatricality and romantic grandeur are dulled, riven by a protruding fold where the canvas is sewn together. In mrtisklaah _yrteop_fo_lliH_a_ma_I (‘I am a Hill of poetry’), silhouettes, Alemannic masks and Greek patterning adorn two canvases, but the eye is drawn towards a deathly figure more at home in a William Blake, all skull and muscular sinew, outstretched palm beckoning the figures below. It’s as if the dissonance has pulled the two canvases apart, vertically separated by a couple of centimetres.

The artists’ magpie instinct for European art history – often harking back to Croatia’s Austro-Hungarian period, piecing together what they can – is a dominant mode.

mrtisklaah _droW_eht_fo_esnecnI_eulb_A

and mrtisklaah _emit_ot_neht_tneidebo_eb_ su_teL (‘Let us be obedient then to time’) recall Gustav Klimt; the flow of certain linework bears traces of art nouveau, even elements of Aubrey Beardsley’s dark languor; harlequin visages recur throughout, lending a dissonant sense of festivity. A series of sculptures evoke ruinous figures and structures in epoxy clay and plaster (among other materials). They’ve a metaphysical air, and while directed at a no-doubtpowerful notion of antimonumentalism, feel conceptually light – and no more texturally nuanced than discoloured plasticine.

There’s a nagging sensation to be fought when you leave. For its moments of both seductive halcyon and a ecting ominosity, many of these works draw no strength from retreating into dreams, nor find catharsis in pain. The title evokes a mourning, but also a frustrated – or paradoxical – attempt at renewal; and so attempts at raw emotion in the wake of war and su ering disappear into art history – and feel somehow flatter for it.

Alexander Leissle

evitisoP_elbuoD, 2022, acrylic, epoxy clay, steel, wood, aluminium, polyurethane foam and plastic, 100 × 126 × 58 cm.

Photo: David Westwood. © tarwuk . Courtesy White Cube, London

Christian Marclay Centre Pompidou, Paris 16 November – 27 February

For the past 40 years, Christian Marclay has been using his work to explore the afterlife of redundant technology and vintage pop-cultural imagery, and his evident a ection for the material detritus of the late twentieth century – from vinyl records and dial-up telephones to comic books and B-movies – carries with it a distinct air of hobbyist enthusiasm. Over the course of this partial retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, encompassing a dozen galleries and more than 200 works, it’s an attribute that grates as much as it charms.

Marclay is not strictly a nostalgist: his earliest use of records and tapes as a medium predates their commercial decline. Record Players (1984), for example, is a video in which the artist scratches, wobbles or bangs vinyl lp s against each other; The Beatles (1989) takes the form of a cushion-shaped object knitted from tape ribbon pulled from cassettes of the titular group’s albums; Body Mix (1991–93) sees album covers depicting the human physique arranged on the wall in a kind of rock’n’roll take on the Surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’.

While Marclay’s work has become ever more formally ambitious since, it still carries the same spirit of teenage nerdishness and late-night stoner humour. For all its technical accomplishments, even his most celebrated work, 2010’s

The Clock – a 24-hour compilation of clips from film and tv in which clock faces display the actual time of the place in which the artwork is screened – can be read the same way. That work is not present here (small wonder: Marclay describes it as ‘the albatross’) but we do get Doors (2022), a new video installation that follows much the same formula: we glimpse clips from films in which characters open and shut doors, cutting to a di erent cinematic source every time one closes.

The one work here that presents an obstacle to judging this exhibition on its own, carefree terms is Guitar Drag (2000), a film created in response to the murder of James Byrd Jr, an African-American man who was attacked by a group of white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998. The assailants tied the stricken Byrd to the back of a pickup and dragged him at high speed over rough ground for five kilometres. According to coroners, he remained alive for at least half of the ordeal. Marclay repeated the death drive nearby, with an amplified electric guitar standing in for Byrd’s body. The grainy footage gives it the air of a home video, but the horrendous din that screams from the soundtrack denies it the comforting familiarity that marks much of Marclay’s work. Evoking a wealth of pivotal twentieth-century musical

references – John Cage, electric blues, Jimi Hendrix mangling The Star-Spangled Banner –it’s as visually and sonically thrilling as it is upsetting, and tearing one’s eyes away is a challenge. Yet there is never any real crescendo: indeed, the piece appears edited specifically to defy any sense of narrative or structure, delivering its kick at gut level. For all that this show as a whole is is enjoyable, not much here feels anywhere near as vital.

Nevertheless, there’s frequently a real beauty to what we see: consider, for instance, the collage series Imaginary Records (1987–99), for which Marclay cut up dozens of old album sleeves to create entirely new combinations of typeface and imagery. In Rhythm (1997) this process gives way to a kind of archivist concrete poetry: in this instance, the eponymous title, in bold red capitals, hovers above a square photograph of cracked earth; the collage’s implied ‘rhythm’ encourages the viewer to interpret a pattern in the zigzagging lines in the patch of ground depicted in the image. Like so much here, it is fun and inventive and touchingly homespun. What the show’s more middling moments demonstrate, however, is just how easily these qualities can start to seem winsome.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Allover (Céline Dion, Dvorˇák, Mozart, and Others), 2009, cyanotype, 131 × 254 cm. Collection Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol. © the artist. Courtesy Second Ward Foundation, Hudson, New York

Face (Skinned), 2020, collage of cutout comic strips on paper, 75 × 59 cm. Collection Joachim Bechtle and Nancy Hellman-Bechtle. © the artist

Sanya Kantarovsky is best known for his paintings, which tap into the cruelty and contradiction of everyday life with cartoonish types that become screens for our own pathetic and shameful projections. This show’s only work, a rare video installation from Kantarovsky, revolves around a monkeylike protagonist who has a fixation with another type of painting: Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793). David’s canvas famously made a martyr of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical French politician who was murdered in his bath. A Solid House (2022) opens by panning over a printed reproduction of the painting, which is awash with the creature’s fingerprints.

A Solid House explores, a bit circuitously, the ways in which we obsessively align ourselves with external phenomena – flattering images, tasteful objects, laudable ideologies – that declare us to be wholly just, disciplined, cultivated or good: an ego-driven undertaking that is absurd in light of reality’s complexities and incongruities.

Sanya Kantarovsky A Solid House

Aspen Art Museum 9 December – 2 April

Museumgoers follow a path of battery-operated tea lights in a dark enclave to a preposterously long couch. From there, they encounter the 12-minute video, which intercuts 16mm film depicting tranquil nature scenes with HD video of a bourgeois home with aspirational trappings such as luxury-brand candles and coffee-table books. Its lone occupant, a hirsute computergenerated simian, plays with a raw egg, runs his finger along a water glass’s rim and presses his snub nose against the window.

“He is a captive monkey in an empty house,” says a voiceover. “It is a solid house.” The narration comes from Chögyam Trungpa’s lecture series given in Boulder during 1970–71. The scandal-ridden spiritual teacher allegorised ego development by describing a primate who, in attempting to form a coherent picture of himself and his world, ‘attach[es] values to things and events which they do not necessarily have’. Eventually, Trungpa declares, this

monkey enters a disturbed state in which mere acknowledgement that his reality is fabricated enrages him.

Late in the video, the creature, presumably galvanised by The Death of Marat, turns an expensive camcorder onto himself and slips into the bathtub, where he watches air strikes (US actions in Afghanistan, the exhibition text explains) on an iPad. This jarring scene highlights the violence regularly deployed to sustain constructed, frequently delusional worldviews and concomitant illusions of moral superiority – an impulse that also underlies The Death of Marat (David’s idealising depiction of Marat advanced the brutal Reign of Terror) Acknowledging this truth is unbearable; the simian’s domestic fictions cannot hold. We watch the built world of the film – a world perhaps not so different from the viewer’s – splinter into abstract closeups and screeching sounds, its fundamental flimsiness exposed as it falls apart.

Cassie Packard

A Solid House, 2022, installation view. Photo: Carter Seddon. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

In Gênios da pintura 1 (Geniuses of Painting 1, 2021) – a framed geometric collage of layered pages from a cheaply illustrated art-history book of the same title – a detail from a religious painting can be partially seen. A cherub holds a weighty-looking jewel-encrusted crown, preparing to place it, we presume, on the obscured head of Christ. It’s a tiny moment in Zé Tepedino’s exhibition of sculptures and sculptural wall works that signals its running theme: the weight of history; how heavy the passing of time can sit; death, and perhaps even resurrection.

The pages of the book are water damaged and stained, a feature of Avesso (Reverse, 2020) and Avesso iii (Reverse iii , 2021), two other wall works on a much larger scale in which the Carioca artist has sewn old and frayed parasols (the former an array of faded colours, the latter white and with the letters of a beer brand faintly

visible). The stitching is haphazard, matching the sun-bleached material and the rust shadows where the salt-corroded metal frames of the sun shades have rubbed over many years of use. Similar notations of time, stains ingrained through use, are evident in Ascensão (Ascension, 2022), box-framed compositions made from assembled sections of di erent coloured discarded Havaianas flipflops, worn ubiquitously in the artist’s home city. Available in a range of summery colours, their treads are soon a uniformity of street soot and sand. Here, art historical allusions to Concretism and Geometric Abstraction are nodded to in how Tepedino has sharply cut and juxtaposed the small elements of the rubber. Loja A (Shop A, 2019) features a pile of used receipt books stacked on a workman’s desk, a totem to a lifetime of labour. To the old torn underlay fabric of Mangaratiba (2022), the artist has

attached slices of husked coconut, all moisture and life sapped out.

Tepedino appears undaunted by the grand existentialism with which he plays in these otherwise seemingly e ortless gestures. While one can make allusions to various strands in the art-historical canon, it is perhaps Robert Smithson, who once wrote that ‘a great artist can make art simply by casting a glance’, to whom the Brazilian is most indebted in finding the sublime and sacred in the smallest of details: a video documents Projeto Boate (Nightclub Project, 2021), an action in which Tepedino covered a concrete jetty with a large sheet of dark material. Shot in black-and-white from a fixed position, the fabric ripples in the wind, barely distinguishable from the surface of the sea beyond. It possesses, like much of the work here, a meditative, romantic beauty; a little thread pulled to reveal the big ideas of life. Oliver Basciano

Untitled, from the series Ascensão, 2022, rubber and wood, 43 × 30 cm.

Photo: Filipe Berndt

Zé Tepedino Tudo é a forma que fala Casa Triângulo, São Paulo 4 February – 18 March

Alexis Blake Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 27–29 January

Wearing a disparate assortment of upcycled sportswear – some of their trousers’ knee-panels are replaced with transparent plastic, mirroring the installation of rectangular sheets of glass that hang and stand around them – six women assume stereotypically feminine poses in unison. With an empowered, confrontational energy, they spread their legs, place their hands on the smalls of their backs and recline with heads tilted, as if sitting for portraits, in time to a rhythmic electronic score by dj mobilegirl. Within moments, they’re marching militarily around, stamping, clapping, exhaling heavily like charging bulls and sidling up to the glass panels, fists raised like boxers. This is the opening phase of CrackNerve Boogie Swerve (2019–),

Amsterdam-based artist Alexis Blake’s German debut. Blake, 2021 winner of the Prix de Rome, combines visual art, dance and performance to address how bodies – those of women and queer people in particular – are represented. Crack Nerve…,reworked and developed here, explores questions of resistance and liberation in a visceral display of female power.

Alongside the aforementioned dj tracks, there’s also a score of low-frequency sounds created by researcher Stefanie Egedy, one of a team of contributing sound artists. Issuing from subwoofers, these blasts of sonic power impose a physical pressure on the audience’s bodies: I feel as if my internal organs are contracting, my head placed in a tightening anvil. The glass sheets

shudder, and the whole room vibrates perilously. The sound, in this context, might be considered as both an oppressive entity and an agent for breaking out of preexisting structures. The installation the dancers inhabit is less oppressive, however. According to the performance text, Blake intends for the panels to have agency. (Reading this recalls Czech choreographer Veˇra Ondrašíková’s Witness, 2021, in which darkclothed dancers manipulate two leafless trees; as the performers disappear into the darkness, the swirling branches appear alive.) The glass in Crack Nerve…, however, is at the performers’ mercy. A suspended pane is mercilessly attacked with a hammer at the outset, shattering, while those mounted on rolling steel structures depend

Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve, 2023, performance view, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Photo: Frank Sperling

on human manipulation to move around. Even when they confine the project’s percussionist Sofia Borges, who pounds them with drumsticks, the stakes don’t feel that high: she’s working herself into an artistic trance rather than a state of claustrophobic panic or rabble-rousing defiance. It’s also clear she could escape her imprisonment by rolling them away at any point.

The glass’s presence, nevertheless, creates other visual metaphors that illuminate Blake’s themes. Often vanishing due to its transparency, it seemingly alludes to the covert yet omnipresent reality of those barriers faced by many social groups. At one point, two performers attach suction cups to raise a sheet of glass above their heads – a physical if literalist representation of the ‘glass ceiling’ perhaps? – before lowering it horizontally and pulsing it repeatedly towards the audience like a riot shield. At other times the dancers don’t interact with the glass, pulling focus instead to the varying

styles they perform. Ranging from hip-hop and voguing to contemporary dance, ballet and Afro-fusion, these genres, as Blake asserts in the programme note, arose from challenging historical contexts and are well known for their potential for protest and resistance.

Towards the end, the dancers position five glass panels in an asymmetric configuration before systematically cracking every last one. One performer dons metal-plated shoes for a hunchbacked, defiant tap solo on the sheets; another, sporting crampons, jumps up and down on them. It’s unclear, though, what message should be taken away from Crack Nerve… Without a clear ‘oppressor’, the dancers’ performances feel unspecific, the literal imagery they conjure somewhat surface-level as a result. This said, the simplicity of a cast of six powerful female performers executing increasingly hostile choreography interestingly frames destruction as cathartic and hopeful, juxtaposing femininity

and violence, confronting gender stereotypes in the process. It’s reminiscent of Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is All Over (1997), which featured a video of the artist, dressed in a summer dress and red high heels, grinning as she systematically smashes car windows on the street with a large floral sculpture.

The dancers’ final celebration of conquering the glass panels, suggesting their destruction is symbolic of triumph, also activates a surprising degree of empathy for these inanimate objects. In context, the glass feels more oppressed than oppressor, the violence it endures pointing to the duality of fragility and resilience. No matter what the panels go through, they never shatter completely, keeping their form, just like those groups and individuals who keep going despite the barriers they are forced to break down. Perhaps, when Blake talks about imbuing the glass with agency, this emotional and empathetic activation is what she means.

Emily May

Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve, 2023, performance view, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Photo: Frank Sperling

Peter Halley

Karma, Los Angeles 14 January – 4 March

It didn’t seem possible that ‘unbalanced’ would ever be used to describe a set of Peter Halley paintings, but – wait, just kidding, it still doesn’t apply, not in the case of these ten new paintings shown at Karma’s flawless space in Los Angeles. They may be the most balanced unbalanced paintings out there today. In them Halley’s signature conduit and prison-cell geometric motifs have been reconfigured into shaped canvases that bring to mind the careful yet playful joinery of Memphis-style furniture, not to mention videogames like Tetris or, better yet, Tricky Towers. (Strikingly, the conduits have been removed, suggesting that the structural fitting-together of the paintings is now where all the connectivity operates.) Many of these

new paintings may be top-heavy, but surely none of them will topple. Some of them look like they’re levitating, but they are still heavy, no matter how flamboyant their colours and configurations may be.

Writing in 1993, I marvelled at Halley’s ability to shake o , but not totally abandon, the 1980s ‘endgame’ death-of-painting trap of the geometry-as-prison mantra by changing his titles from, for example, Black Cell with Conduit (1986) to Teen Dream (1992). His titles have always mattered, and in the case of the new paintings (all 2022) they seem to relate to recent mainstream, but not blockbuster, movies: Babylon, End of the Road, Slumberland. (I have a feeling the titles could be the best thing about

these films.) It’s a bad joke that the paintings could be called literal block busters, but I’m making it because despite the literal reshaping of their supports they continue to prioritise and power up form as the tool to manifest Halley’s symbolic content of architectural and social circulation and containment. That content is extended to the legacy of monochromatic painting itself by two especially jerry-rigged works – Brazen and White Noise –that forgo the cell image and stick to squares and rectangles (and right angles) of various solid colours, some of which are particularly resplendent in Halley’s classic, often called ‘suburban’, Roll-A-Tex paint. They bring the entire show home. Terry

R. Myers

White Noise, 2022, acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, Flashe and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 216 × 151 × 10 cm

Friedrich Kunath I Don’t Know The Place, But I Know How To Get There

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 14 January – 25 February

In a large canvas at Friedrich Kunath’s newest exhibition, the distended wing of an airplane hangs over an orange and pink sunset. It is a painterly articulation of a photograph made ubiquitous by social media, a shot taken by travel influencers to announce their journeys. Kunath is as prolific as the ‘creators’ he parodies: on view are 24 new paintings and one installation, all created in the last year, each of which wryly comments on a world defined by user-generated content. Beneath the artist’s humour is an enduring critique of aesthetic experience; his paintings capture an oversaturated visual landscape marked by boredom, irony and exhaustion.

The paintings on view recall those of Kunath’s Romantic forebears, but here modern technology mediates evocations of the sublime. Romantic Times (2022), a recreation of Caspar

David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808), features the same dark-cloaked figure as the original, this time hunched over an iPhone, taking a picture of the familiar seascape. In In Memory Of My Memories (2022), a black-and-white postcard of a figure hanging limp on a tree completes a lakeside scene; a cartoon pu n weeps in front of a vivid sunset in I Need Solitude But I Also Need You (2022). These referential canvases anticipate – and mourn – their own reproduction, envisioning Romanticism through the lens of contemporary media.

Words occasionally emerge from dense networks of brushstrokes and marks, forming phrases that connote an overworked, overstimulated subject. ‘I’m O cially Tapping Out’, reads one canvas, its letters buried in an orange cloud marred by the painter’s textural swatches. In Looking Back, I Should’ve Been Home More (2022),

the titular phrase breaks apart across a stippled skyline. This first-person speaker oscillates between regretful and morbid: in I Could Easily See Myself Spending A Whole Month This Way (2022), an unmoving swimmer lies facedown in the water, seemingly drowned. Under Kunath’s hand, images of relaxation become depictions of burnout.

In Ugly Feelings (2005), cultural theorist Sianne Ngai describes the experience of ‘stuplimity’: a combination of ‘shock and boredom’ that accompanies present-day encounters with the sublime. Such a word is apt for Kunath’s artwork, where scenes of lush beauty pair with statements of alienation and disa ection. When humour emerges from these juxtapositions, it feels appropriately stupefying. Leaving the gallery, I thought to myself just one weak expression of commiseration: haha, so true.Claudia

Ross

Coming Home Was As Beautiful As Going Away (detail), 2022, acrylic and oil on canvas, 274 × 211 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist

Georges Senga Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique

Museo delle Civiltà, Rome 26 October – 5 March

The Congolese artist Georges Senga has long been interested in themes of identity and memory. Perhaps this is why, when he was given access to an archive of photographic slides summarising the life of Bonaventure Salumu, he temporarily halted his own photographic activity to follow the path of the alsoCongolese ‘pagan hunter’, born during the mid-1930s, who became a Catholic priest in his teens and travelled through mainland Europe and Tunisia as a missionary. Senga researched in the Pères Blancs (White Fathers) Missionaries of Africa and Jesuit archives in Rome to devise this exhibition. It cuts across nationality and individual and collective histories by conceiving a presentation that initially appears determined to recover and make visible the geography and chronology of Salumu’s life – like the title of a late-1960s missionary bulletin from which the

exhibition takes its name (‘How a little pagan hunter becomes a Catholic priest’ in English) –but turns into something more like a whodunit.

The artist, operating as unreliable narrator, has arranged around 120 images to follow the chronology of places Salumu visited and portrayed over the years, together with documents presented in display cases that help the visitor reconstruct his life’s trajectory. The apparent linearity of the itinerary, though, is complicated by the realisation that some of the images presented as places visited and photographed by Salumu were taken, vicariously and retrospectively, with Senga’s own camera. Further widening the gap between fiction and biography are texts commissioned from three young writers from Lubumbashi, collected in the exhibition catalogue, that produce a speculative account – pseudo-diaristic, first-person –

of di erent moments in Salumu’s life based on the photographs on display in the exhibition. But there is another level: the exhibition is housed in what was formerly the Luigi Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography (today part of the promising Museo delle Civiltà), where holdings from collections once used to support the Fascist regime’s racial agenda – by presenting ‘fetishes’ from the colonies and asserting Italians as an Aryan race – had ended up. Senga’s exhibition, reminiscent of appropriation art and institutional critique, seems to echo these materials presented nearby, and the storytelling power of a display: it highlights the friable nature of indexicality, authorship and the value of objects in a museum, while also asserting that in the absence of definitive, nonsubjective truth there’s at least the possibility of producing engaging fictions. Francesco

Tenaglia

Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique, 2022, installation view.

Photo: Margherita Villani. © Museo delle Civiltà, Rome

French-British artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson borrows the title and ethos of American poet Alice Notley’s ‘Dream Gossip’ column from Scarlet – the magazine Notley edited with partner Douglas Oliver during the early 1990s – for her first solo exhibition in Italy, where Gibson now lives. The column invited writers to submit their dreams for publication, spurred on by Notley’s interest in their potent, productive power. Black walls and an absence of lighting, other than what is provided by the video projections, create a dream-room in the gallery, its contours lost in the darkness. Commanding much of the largest space is Dreaming Alcestis (2022), Gibson’s newest work here and the most explicit articulation of Notley’s theme.

The video is back-projected through an otherwise-transparent ‘Hologauze’ screen, which creates an ethereal visual e ect. The work’s pared-back colour images of Gibson and codirector Nick Gordon asleep, of their children playing with a pet snake and of their domestic

Beatrice Gibson Dream Gossip

Ordet, Milan 12 January – 15 February

space are conventionally visible, but are also cast, enlarged, onto the floor, the room engulfed by each scene. A layered soundscape of voices, drums and a motorbike engine, symphonic and loud, is equally consuming. As Gibson sleeps, her voiceover adds detail to what is seen and heard. She calls out to Alcestis, the Ancient Greek princess who sacrificed herself for her husband and who appears as a figure in the dream leading Gibson into the underworld on a Ducati. Formally, Gibson attempts to construct an experience of a dream through sound and images that flutter through the gauze like the motion of eyes during rem sleep. Thematically, Alcestis’s sacrifice is positioned as an act of giving and journeying much like Gibson and Gordon’s experience of bringing their family to a new country.

Elsewhere, Gibson’s Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (2019) and Dear Barbara, Bette and Nina (2020) play on separate screens. The latter is a particular highlight, a short work consisting of

a simple shot of resting hands as Gibson narrates a letter to important figures in feminist film culture (Barbara Loden, Bette Gordon and Nina Menkes), eloquently expressing kinship and inheritance through art. Deux Soeurs… explores similar ideas around solidarity in womanhood, but its more opaque associations between kitsch images – poodles traversing a city, a crying beauty queen, car thieves – are a more challenging experience than Dreaming Alcestis, the dreamlike looseness of which is more absorbing.

Such a looseness brings its di culties, and as a standalone work Dreaming Alcestis initially feels somewhat impenetrable. In conversation with the other films on display and the legacy of Notley’s work, however, it breaks free from the constraints of legibility or narrative to evoke Gibson’s interest in refuting the binaries between the domestic and the productive. The gallery dreamworld becomes an inviting space for questions of creativity, individuality and one’s position in a collective lineage to be explored. Caitlin Quinlan

Dreaming Alcestis, 2022, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Ordet, Milan

Clouds roll across a sky besieged by bands of light and shadow in a photo hanging in the back corner of the single-room gallery. The intimately scaled black-and-white print by Ming Smith, one of 52 on display as part of the museum’s Projects strand, seduces with a sense of depth and motion. Its title, James Baldwin in Setting Sun over Harlem, New York (1979), alludes to one of the many artistic luminaries Smith has photographed over her 50-year career, which began in the Kamoinge Workshop during the Black Arts Movement, and which has received renewed interest in the current decade. Look closely and Baldwin’s round eyes and three-quarter profile emerge from the overcast, not once but eight times. The uncanny e ect of this multiple

exposure is strange enough to make you laugh out loud.

Smith’s work walks the line between humour and restraint. She often shoots in low lighting, merging the conventions of abstract and documentary photography to create blurry, layered subjects, which in turn tell us something about herself. Woman in Kitchen (1991) shows the interior of a diner kitchen, with a serving hatch that looks out onto the co ee bar, where a woman stands smoking a cigarette. The woman in the kitchen is Smith with her camera. Even within this straight shot is a sense of doubling between figure and figurer, with the latter being the focus. Again, in Womb (1992), Smith’s then-husband, David Murray, and their son strike fighting poses

in front of the Pyramid of Giza. What appear at first to be traces of their hand gestures captured with a long exposure turn out to be the folds of Smith’s white headscarf and sleeve – a selfportrait superimposed on the scene.

Smith has, in interviews, referred to herself as a shy person – a loner – especially when she was starting out as a photographer, splitting her time between modelling jobs – how she supported herself – and fiery critiques at the Kamoinge Workshop with the likes of Anthony Barboza and Louis Draper. But her images are not exactly shy. They exhibit radical intuition, an assertion of personal preference. Even in her subtlest prints, the artist insinuates her worldshaping presence.

Jenny Wu

Womb, 1992, gelatin silver print, 31 × 46 cm (image). Courtesy the artist

Dana-Fiona Armour A Tale of Symbiogenesis

Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm 12 January – 4 March

A genetically modified tobacco plant is the protagonist of Dana-Fiona Armour’s latest show. During a residency at the Paris-based biopharmaceutical company Cellectis in 2021–22, the young French artist inoculated the plant, Nicotiana benthamiana, which is normally used as a host in experimental virology, with a human gene responsible for skin colour. Documenting this speculative and ethically challenging process through a variety of modalities – photography, video, sound, glass objects – Armour seeks to explore the hybridisation of art and biotechnology through the concept of symbiogenesis (a merger of two separate organisms into one).

Three large glossy prints, Vue Microscopique Numéro 4–6 (NicotianaBenthamiana Transgénique) (all works 2022), dominate the gallery space, visualising microscopic views of the plant’s surface during stages of genetic transformation.

In the centre of the room, the video Scan Micro ct Nicotiana Benthamiana – Pre Transgenesis act ii is shown on loop, taking the viewer through a simple 3d rendering of the plant’s venous system. The play on life-science storytelling is evident and sets the overall tone; one almost expects an overlaid corporate logo. Any irony embedded in these works is so subtle as to be unintentional. Contrarily, and seemingly accidentally, Armour lays bare the naive positivism inherent in collaborations between art and biotech: it rarely reaches beyond the illusion of visionary thinking. Behind the intricate, conceptual framework lies a simple dynamic: the plant’s main purpose, in this show, is to inspire the creation of objects.

Yet the emphasis on form has some compensations elsewhere, as Armour’s glass pieces are imbued with restrained ecstasy and ambiguous sensuality. The triptych Nervures

Secondaires1–3 consists of three large works cast in crystal, opaline and coloured glass: their pointy, fossillike shapes also emanate from the veins of the plant. Transcending the pseudoscientific agenda of Armour’s project, these works hover on the wall like prehistoric ghosts, oscillating between organic otherness and sophisticated ghoulishness. Another set of glass works, Pneumatophore#2–4, is based on the rhizome of the plant and has been shaped as if to dramatise primitive a ects – these elongated forms variously slump despondently or rise up hopefully – or mimic human limbs. These mouth-blown pieces also engage, but they ultimately fail to transgress the merely representational, a symptom of the exhibition’s general inconclusiveness. Unfortunately, here, Armour’s style of speculation too often results in a dead end.

Jesper Strömbäck Eklund

Vue Microscopique Numéro 6 (Nicotiana Benthamiana Transgénique), 2022, digital print, fine art paper, mounting on dibond, 150 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm & Paris

In Naomi Hawksley’s drawings, looks can be deceiving: despite their halcyon content, be it sleek canines or jejune figures, her compositions impart unease. Precariously situated between modes of self-reflection and self-absorption, her fanciful imagery crafts a disquieting picture of introspection. If her Surrealist forerunners sought to draw out the fantasies of the unconscious, then Hawksley surfaces a mind allconsumed by self-awareness.

A recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hawksley refined her nascent motif of anonymous ingenues over the past year. Nine graphite drawings from 2022–23 are on view in this, her first solo exhibition, in an apartment gallery located in Chicago’s Printer’s Row neighbourhood; the compact space opened in September 2021 and has presented the work of emerging and established artists across nine exhibitions since.

Intricate three-strand braids enhance Hawksley’s otherwise austere heroines forged

Naomi Hawksley Hedera Helix Sulk Chicago 10 February – 17 March

from negative space. These tightly woven locks detail an unwieldy method of maintaining one’s image: even carefully plaited hair has knots, strays and split ends. Coquettish and vain, the trims convey surface-level concerns, and yet Hawksley’s pictures hinge on the illusion of depth. Her backgrounds – constructed from sinuous, faux-bois slats – summon conventions of trompe l’oeil in which inanimate props lie atop convincingly rendered wood surfaces. However, Hawksley supplants objects with subjectivities. In Untitled (Girl) (2022) the larger image of a girl’s panelled countenance lacks facial features. In lieu of eyes, mouth or nose, Hawksley inserts a wood-inlay of a girl and dog in embrace. This image enacts a kind of solipsism in which self e aces self; in the absence of defined features, her figurative veneers seem to retort that there is no sel ood to be made out. It is this refusal of definition that lends her drawings psychological complexity. A profound lack has resulted in the quest for self-discovery.

One work gives language to these mouthless subjects: atop the outline of a crumpled form, an italicised script fashioned from plastic beads reads, ‘How will I be myself today’. Absent a question mark, the dewy phrase is more of an acknowledgement than an inquiry. The utterance does not dictate answers; instead it contends with the myriad actions that could transpire in a day.

A vacant protagonist in Hawksley’s latest drawing, Untitled (Girl iii ) (2023), entertains these potentials. Stripped of ornament, a hollow figure rests o -centre on her back with legs raised and head craned inwards. A rogue upside-down shadow fills the upper half of the frame. It’s an image of looking down on looking inwards. This relatively blank portrait espouses a kind of contemplation unmarred by looking alone. Instead, Hawksley suggests that coming of age is about sitting with the emptiness and ine ability of the unknown.

Alexandra Drexelius

Untitled (Girl), 2022, graphite on paper, 56 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist

Maximiliano Rosiles Exuvia

Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City 29 October – 5 March

Maximiliano Rosiles grew up during the 1990s and 2000s, moving back and forth between the Rio Grande Valley area in Texas and the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Returning to the Guanajuato town of Uriangato more recently and discovering that it had been overrun by drug cartels, he moved once again, to Mexico City, where he lives today.

Exuvia, his first major solo show in an institution, is visually seductive. In El Chopo’s tall, light-filled atrium he has hung a series of tubular sculptures in almost symmetrical patterns. Though the pieces are soft and squiggly, made of white nylon netting filled with discarded textile materials to the point of bulging, they are arranged in the space in a clean, deliberate manner. They’re sensual and intriguing, rubbing lightly against each other on air currents as they

hang from the ceiling. Against the back wall are more-uniformly-sausagelike grey sculptures, resting on semicircular shelves and spilling down to the floor in wavy formations. Behind that wall hangs a surprisingly colourful arrangement of more discarded materials, mostly hand-knitted, in a pattern that looks conspicuously fashionlike, as though taken from old display walls at American Apparel.

The work looks fabulous, and as formal exercises I thought it impressive, yet I was taken aback to learn that it was meant to represent the tired, lurching bodies of migrants, or so it says in a text written by the artist and suggested by Chicano poet Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘Reincarnation’ (1974), printed in English on one of the walls. The poem, an allegory of skin-shedding and rebirth, resonates in the exhibition’s title, a word

referring to moulted skin or the casto remains of a creature’s exoskeleton. It is disorienting to go from thoroughly enjoying wonderful shapes and an elegant installation to realising that these are meant to be abstracted forms of the heavy burdens that people forced to migrate must carry with them. Yet as much as didactic political work can get annoyingly prescriptive, I become suspicious of Rosiles’s drastically aestheticising gesture of such a history of violence, his ‘snake husks’ managing to be both literal and decorative. The work is soft and powerful, yet the discursive side of it is, well, prescriptive, didactic, mismatched. Hard to tell if it is the demands of the art market that beautiful work must also espouse ill-fitting discourse, or if it is simply a young artist’s understanding of what’s expected of them.

Gaby Cepeda

Exuvia, 2022 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

Bangkok Art Biennale Chaos: Calm

Various venues, Bangkok 22 October – 23 February

Yee I-Lann’s single-channel video Pangkis (2021) features echoing screams, chants and seven dancing barechested men wearing woven hats conjoined by a series of branchlike tubes. Needless to say, they dance in sync. Indeed, given that they’re also barefoot and wearing black jeans, you might easily mistake them for a boy band. Except for that hat (a sculpture in its own right, titled 7-headed Lalandau Hat, 2020), which is based on the traditional ceremonial headdresses worn by men of the Murut ethnic group (mainly found in the artist’s home state of Sabah, in Borneo). And the fact that the men are performing a take on a traditional warriors’ dance. It’s a clash of tradition and modernity, and the particular and the general, that’s echoed by the two works hung either side of the long white mat in front of the video on which the audience is invited to sit – one (hello from the outside, 2019) a woven bamboo mat bearing the full lyrics to Guns N’ Roses’s Sweet Child O’ Mine (1988), the other a mat with the lyrics to a popular Thai song (rendered in Thai): น้ำ�ก็นอง

เต็มตลิ่ง (Water floods the riverbank, 2022). The weavers of such mats are primarily female and they present a di erent aspect of community – simultaneously quiet and loud – to accompany that o ered by the prancing, shouting men who have been physically ‘tied’ together. Located in the Sermon Hall of Wat Prayoon, a nineteenth-century temple complex in the Kudeejeen district of Bangkok that is, appropriately, another form of community centre, the work functions as a world inside a world, carefully choreographed and subtly immersive. The nearby stupa houses the Buddha’s relics; and for all the screams, Yee’s display as a whole also o ers a kind of serene calm. A kind of sacred karaoke hall.

For the most part, however, the third edition of the Bangkok Art Biennale is more a reflection of chaos than calm, spread across 11 venues (and one virtual space) and featuring the input of a five-strong curatorial team (founding director Apinan Poshyananda and curators Nigel Hurst, Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani,

Jirat Ratthawongjirakul and Chomwan Weeraworawit) and the works of 73 artists, which often collide with each other rather than conversing side by side. Though a generous person might say this is a true reflection of our times. Or as the exhibition text puts it, a reflection of ‘the zeitgeist of the confusing world we live in’. Which isn’t, let’s face it, much to go on.

Epitomising this is the overstu ed presentation at the jwd Artspace, where Ukrainian Zhanna Kadyrova’s Shots (2014–15), ceramic paving slabs featuring the impact of bullets that create a weblike abstraction, and Palianytsia (2022), a documentary video and sculptures made of found river stones that look like bread (the Ukrainian word for which – a word Russians struggle to pronounce – gives the title), awkwardly sandwich Nengi Omuku’s hanging paintings on Nigerian Sanyan fabric (traditionally moth silk woven with cotton) of moments of crisis and chaos in her homeland. While Omuku’s work chimes with some of the

Yee I-Lann, hello from the outside, 2019, split bamboo pus weave, black natural dye and matt sealant, 225 × 364 cm. Courtesy the artist and Silverlens Gallery, Makati City

themes proposed by Yee, here her’s and Kadyrova’s overlap to the extent that they confusingly and chaotically almost blend into one. That’s followed by painter Jarasporn Chumsri’s live open studio, in which she paints the locales of the artists that she has been influenced by, using Google Earth as a kind of magic carpet in order to get to her source material (which includes lots of views of Notre-Dame, Paris). Why the painting is necessary, other than for reasons of nostalgia, given the digital tools used to access the imagery, is anyone’s guess. All of which distracts somewhat from Cian Dayrit’s crazed, humorous and dazzling mixed-media (wooden puppets, denim jackets, cloaks, walking sticks, military patches and embroidered prayers) commentaries on militarism, repression and colonialism in his native Philippines. While there are some obvious connecting threads, the ways in which those threads are spread tends more towards a tangled yarn. Or the metaphor provided at the end of the room, in the form of Jompet Kuswidananto’s shattered chandeliers (Terang Boelan, 2022). Given the geography travelled in this one clutterbox of a room, you’re left feeling unsure as to whether the curators are suggesting that all the world’s

problems are somehow the same, or that the biennial format simply requires the covering of a lot of ground. Whichever is the case, the experience here is like that of entering a hoarder’s attic.

That’s not to say that the biennale as a whole doesn’t have space to truly present work that’s intriguing, powerful and moving, and to make some clear connections between them. Over at its main venue, the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (bacc ), Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute epic video Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), chronicling the triumphs and the brutality of the Black American experience through found footage and a Kanye West soundtrack, chimes eloquently with Sophia Al Maria’s single-channel video Beast Type Song (2019), a metafictional meditation on scripting, rescripting, erasure, revision and the enduring legacies of colonialism, performed through the movements of a string of performers. The retelling, erasing and reclamation resonates, in a di erent, more straightforward way with the largescale paintings of the apy Art Centre Collective, comprising ten art centres in South Australia, owned and run by the people of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and featuring the collective practice of up to 500

First Nation artists (not all of whose work is on show here), most of it telling stories related to the land. The collective simultaneously generates income for its generally deprived communities, and o ers the Anangu the opportunity to tell their stories in a public space. Along the spiral ramp that runs through the bacc , Vasan Sitthiket’s painted shadow puppets of figures who have shaped modernity (from Karl Marx to Donald Trump) adds a more straightforwardly political critique to proceedings. But, in a darker way, all of these connect with Collective Absentia’s (a necessarily mysterious artist research group currently focused on the e ects of political violence in Myanmar) disturbing and powerful performance Again and Again (2022). It consists of a barefoot man, dressed in black, wearing a black hood, sitting silently on a chair in a brightly lit but easy-tomiss alcove on the top floor of the exhibition space. As the performer sits there, without food or drink, for the duration of the exhibition’s opening hours, unmoving – no drama, no action – you’re unsure as to whether or not this is chaos or calm. Proof, perhaps, that sometimes the best art comprises the simplest of gestures, because, amidst the general havoc, it feels the most real. Mark

Rappolt

Yee I-Lann, Pangkis, 2021, single-channel video, 9 min 30 sec. Courtesy the artist and Silverlens Gallery, Makati City

Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

by Kenan MalikHurst, £20 (hardcover)

‘Race did not give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race,’ British commentator Kenan Malik declares at the start of his original and ambitious rethinking of the history of the politics of race, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. In contrast to much contemporary antiracist thinking that is fixed on the seemingly eternal presence of ‘whiteness’ to understand racism’s persistence, Malik argues, one needs to understand the shifting fortunes of the politics of class, within the epoch-defining claims of the Enlightenment – its assertion of universal human rights and human equality – and the decline of its ideals over the last two centuries.

The modern concept of race only exists, paradoxically, Kenan asserts, because of the appearance of the concept of equality, born out the social and intellectual revolutions of the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Yet as Malik points out, even while the American Founding Fathers declared that ‘all men are created equal’, ‘those same revolutionaries wished also to limit the claims of equality, denying the most basic of rights to slaves, free blacks, women and workers’. While eighteenth-century white Europeans paid lip service to equality, social and economic reality would suppress it in practice.

Key to Malik’s account is that, for the most radical among the Enlightenment revolutionaries (he distinguishes between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ Enlightenments), ‘the abolition of slavery, universal su rage, uplift of the working class and diminution of property rights were all wrapped together’.

Malik brilliantly surveys the ensuing century of reaction by Western ruling classes against this potentially combined threat. Race was ‘invented’, to become ‘the medium through which many of the contradictions of modernity came to be understood’. Capitalist societies could not return to the feudal and hierarchical orders they had themselves abolished, so ‘racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of di erences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality.’

Malik shows that ‘race’ was, at the outset, not simply about skin colour. As he points out, the idea of ‘racial’ inequality would be applied interchangeably to working-class people, and to the grotesque pseudoscientific stratifications of what would now be seen as ‘white’ groups. And while slavery was formally abolished, and America fought its Civil War over the issue, the

ideology of race would be reworked to justify the West’s imperial conquests.

‘Scientific’ racism led to global imperial slaughter, Jim Crow and eventually, back in the home of the Enlightenment, to the Nazi gas chambers.

The ‘radical’ Enlightenment’s real champions in the twentieth century, Malik argues, were the organised working classes in the West, and the anticolonial movements in the South and East. But in recent decades, the ghosts of racial thinking have reappeared in ‘cultural’ guise. We may reject the idea of biological di erence, but Malik argues that people see themselves increasingly as attached to their racial ‘identity’, understood as their ‘culture’. Malik perceptively frames the left’s recent turn to ‘stay in your lane’ identity politics as an unwitting echo of the nineteenth-century right’s ‘cultural identity’ arguments against universalism, since ‘for many today, the only form of collective politics that seems possible is that rooted in identity’. ‘To transcend race, to break the bounds of identity politics,’ Malik concludes, ‘requires us to resurrect radical universalism not as an idea but as a social movement.’

J.J. Charlesworth

Set Fear on Fire: The Feminist Call That Set the Americas Ablaze

lastesis , translated by Camila ValleVerso, £ 8.99 (softcover)

In November 2019, on the streets of Valparaíso and amid social uprisings throughout Chile, the collective lastesis, accompanied by other women, sang a rallying cry to end patriarchal violence in Chile and Latin America. Their performance, Un violador en tu camino (A rapist in your path, 2019), went viral and accrued millions of views across international platforms, indicating that their message resonated worldwide. The lyrics – translated as, ‘It wasn’t my fault, not where I was or how I was dressed. The rapist is you, it’s the cops, the judges, the state, the president’ – call out gendered violence and hold systems of power accountable.

In the aftermath, lastesis published its feminist manifesto ¡Quemar el Miedo! (Set fear

on fire) in 2021. This compact English translation introduces lastesis ’s angry, galvanising and feminist vision to the Global North –an ‘extractivist’ region their compañerxs flee to for survival, but that nonetheless ‘rejects, excludes, persecutes, tortures, deports, kills’. lastesis also hopes this edition will unite English and Spanish speakers’ awareness of shared adversities. The collective addresses intersectional topics such as state violence, capitalism and body rights throughout seven chapters, grounding its ideologies in real, lived experiences in Chile through a collective ‘we’. From stories of unpaid household labour, illegal abortion, sexual assault, to political asylum,

lastesis demands its voices be heard, because ‘To speak is an everyday act… [but] women and dissidents in the streets fighting for and from their bodies, through performance, still disturbs people’.

lastesis is mad: ‘Mad against age-old oppression. Mad against historical impunity. Mad and fearful of being assaulted, murdered, forgotten.’ Reading Set Fear on Fire transforms the readers’ own patriarchal terror into feminist rage, joining the growing voices of indignant bodies desperate for a di erent reality – one free from the patriarchy. After all, as lastesis says, ‘everything the patriarchy touches goes mad’.

Naomi Larsson Piñeda

Thirty-six years on from Public Enemy’s debut album, the rap pioneers’ frontman Chuck D might appear increasingly to be in legacy mode; winding-down mode, almost. His band is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; he recently presented a history of hip-hop on the bbc . Now he’s inviting us to see his sketches. Livin’ Loud: art itation, a co eetable book whose punning, brow-furrowing subtitle clearly flowed from the same pen as album titles like Muse Sick-nHour Mess Age (1994), showcases approximately 250 examples of his predominantly greyscale pen-and-wash art, accompanied by enough annotation and reminiscing to constitute a compact autobiography, though also enough polemic to situate it in the present. This is the sort of enterprise that accumulates through downtime on the road, in sketchpads and notepads; in his introduction, Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist Tom Morello, who performed with D in the rap-rock ‘supergroup’ Prophets of Rage, notes that he saw his bandmate drawing every day on tour. Morello’s not-entirely-unbiased assertion that Chuck D is ‘as gifted a visual artist as he is a microphone master’ turns out to be pushing it somewhat, but he’s fluent and Livin’ Loud is additionally a multidirectional surprise, riding not only on political consciousness and Black pride but also qualities one might not immediately expect

Livin’ Loud: art itation

by Chuck DGenesis Publications, £35 (hardcover)

from this famously stentorian rapper, not least intimacy, tenderness and nostalgia.

Before forming Public Enemy in 1985 at twenty-five, the erstwhile Carlton Ridenhour studied to be a commercial artist. (He’d later design the band’s iconic gunsight logo, of which he notes that ‘my influence was what Iron Maiden were doing, what the Rolling Stones were doing with their tongue’.) Before that, he grew up on Long Island, obsessed with the New York Knicks and Motown – though to judge from this book’s opening salvo of musician portraits painted in a confident, appealingly scribbly hand, he had his ears wide open: to Nina Simone, free-jazzer Archie Shepp, blues meister Taj Mahal and hobo folkie Woody Guthrie. (The man who famously rapped that “Elvis was a hero to most/but he never meant shit to me” allows that Presley, who doesn’t get a portrait, was ‘a gamechanger’.) The approximately chronological Livin’ Loud hits its stride, naturally, when it reaches the goldenage hip-hop era, with quick-draw portraits – from photographs, most likely – of artists ranging from turntablist pioneer dj Kool Herc to a brattish and slumped Beastie Boys and, of course, Public Enemy themselves: Chuck’s longtime compatriot / foil Flavor Flav, who’s been somewhat o the rails lately, is painted small. Writing alongside his sketches, D laments the decline of collectives in hip-hop, recounts

esg ’s Come Away with esg

by Cheri PercyBloomsbury Academic, £ 9.99 (softcover)

recording sessions with Ice Cube et al and reminisces about Prince holding garage sales and, in the studio, ‘tossing tape around like a chef’.

As the book progresses, its author weighs in increasingly on latter-day societal ills. He paints a frazzled-looking Trump, a rifle sight hovering by his jawline, and compares him to a haunted house, terrifying but tempting to voters. He draws digital shut-ins ringed by screens and, ready with the wordplay as usual, calls social media ‘when “the masses” get transformed into “them asses”. He drags ‘Citizen Kanye’. Livin’ Loud is a su ciently loose and inclusive project that, not far away from this, D is ruminating on – and sketching – a nice bit of cityscape he found in Oslo. But all of this seems in the service of giving a rounded portrait of its author: working musician, political orator, visibly grateful to those who inspired him and people he’s worked with, in some ways mellower than the firebrand listeners first encountered during the late 1980s, in other ways remarkably unchanged. As such, this book is di erentiated somewhat from the hobbyist daubs of so many ageing, bored musicians: one suspects that Chuck D views everything from rapping to writing and drawing along the axis of communication, and Livin’ Loud arguably communicates more than any Public Enemy album has in recent years. Martin Herbert

esg ’s album Come Away with esg (1983) boasts a minimalist, relentless funk born from the embers of a punk scene gone stale. Stripped of glamour and ornamentation, tied to a motorik pulse of drums, bass, chant vocals and spare lead hooks, it’s the latest subject of the series 33⅓, each compact volume of which, covering everything from Pink Floyd and Prince to Sleater Kinney and Slint, is a scholarly study of a single music album.

The band’s original members were sisters Renee, Valerie and Marie Scroggins, Black musicians raised in New York’s South Bronx. esg , an initialism of Empire, Sapphire and Gold, was at the heart of a creative community perceived, at that time, as a melting-pot of economic struggle and racial conflict. Much of

Cheri Percy’s book revels in the 1980s as a period of limitless opportunity for indie labels with a diy approach, though esg ’s story is not unbounded, su ocated as they were by bad contracts, uncleared samples and label closures that forced a rift between some of its members and soured their youthful ebullience (Come Away With esg was released when its authors were teenagers). In many ways, this book is haunted by the figure of their first producer, Ed Bahlman of 99 Records, who gave them their break then disappeared behind his collapsed label while holding onto their masters for years with a vicelike grip.

It took esg the best part of a decade to release their next record, Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills! (1992), to little fanfare. But their

influence seeped into the noughties: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs channelled esg ’s spirit into their debut album, Fever to Tell (2003), and more recently in Cool It Down (2022), while lcd Soundsystem’s James Murphy dipped their sound in ennui and masculine yearning.

Nevertheless, and despite Percy’s diligent research, there is an odd staleness here. While dedicated in its portrayal of a world that created an album – and a musical landscape the album helped to create – the story feels starved of the band’s perspective, which Percy empathetically imagines though rarely gets close to animating, save via a handful of anecdotes. We’re left appreciative but unenthused, informed but hungry for genuine critical insight.

Alexander Leissle

Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism

by Charles DarwentThames & Hudson, £25 (hardcover)

It is an open secret that the roots of Abstract Expressionism’s virile, hyper-Americanised vernacular lay in the movement it would come most vocally to deride: Surrealism, the supposedly decadent, bourgeois and ‘feminised’ European genre. In his ambitious group-biography that builds on Martica Sawin’s landmark tome Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (1997), art critic Charles Darwent situates Stanley William Hayter’s legendary print studio Atelier 17 as the unlikely epicentre of this momentous cultural transfer. His account contributes significant biographical detail to the downtown network that saw midwar Manhattan supersede Paris as the artworld capital.

Named after its Paris address at 17 Rue Campagne-Première, Hayter’s original workshop built a reputation as a home to radical formal experimentation. Falling into a largely Surrealist avant-garde, the English artist encouraged his studio’s regulars to break printmaking conventions and welcome the unexpected.

This dynamism came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Hayter found himself in exile in New York by 1940, with the rest of his Parisian circle not far behind. He reestablished Atelier 17 downtown at the New School for Social Research on 12th Street, drawing to it some of the original members – Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy –

while attracting eager young Americans including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Darwent positions Hayter as the era’s grand mediator, liaising between the Old World and the New with ease. However, his centring of Hayter, whom Atelier 17 member Louise Bourgeois later claimed ‘hated women’, does little to challenge impressions of Abstract Expressionism as a ‘boys’ club’ (even if roughly half of the studio’s membership were women).

Atelier 17 remained open to members at all hours, as what Darwent asserts was a creative forum that facilitated conversation between the two generations. This argument is tenuous at times – not a lot of the studio’s major American names actually executed many plates there. Considering a vast number of those that were produced in Atelier 17 were lost or discarded before they were documented, it is di cult to determine what the supposed visual dialogue even looked like. While Darwent admits that artistic evidence of the workshop’s role as an intellectual nexus is ‘curiously sparse’, he maintains that the few plates that do exist attest to its midwar significance as ‘an arena for cultural exchange’.

To craft a cohesive vision of such a discursive and complex exchange unfortunately necessitates reliance on some hackneyed and reductive tropes. Characterised not by its spirit of revolt

Art School Orgy

by Stewart HomeNew Reality Records, £15 (softcover)

Here’s Stewart Home with some background on David Hockney, the hero of his new novel: ‘His parents had not told him about the birds and the bees. He had gone to a school where sado-masochism and a love of the same sex were not widely practiced. So Hockney had yet to discover the ways and joys of 90% of the world.’ Art School Orgy – written in a style somewhere between Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories (1922–70) and Walter’s 4,000-page, Victorian London account of his sexual awakening in My Secret Life (1888) – set in the fictional ‘Republican College of Art’ (get it?), where David studied at the end of the 1950s into the early 1960s, is an account of the voyage of discovery, or ‘education’, that followed.

The book is populated by a host of characters with whom any self-respecting historian of the

British art scene of the era will be familiar; although most of them are captured showing o , again and again, their not-strictly-artistic talents. Art dealer Robert Frazer ‘sucks cock like a demon’, Viennese actionist Hermann Nitsch (somewhat incongruously relocated by Home to London), ‘one of those Sunday spankers who do a good stroke of work in the bdsm world without getting much credit for it’, is working on his ‘phallic sculptures and butt plug pottery’, Derek Boshier is looking forward to the invention of Viagra, R.B. Kitaj is beating David Hockney senseless (inside and out) in the school common room and Richard Hamilton is rendering everyone else senseless with lengthy speeches on the subject of prostrate stimulation. (Like all good art students, his

but as a Jungian, oneiric movement, Surrealism appears in Darwent’s account to have o ered the New York School little beyond formal and psychoanalytical influence. Moreover, Darwent bookmarks his history with temporal markers of Surrealism that recent scholarship has questioned – namely, that the movement met its conclusive demise in midwar New York. He claims that by 1946 ‘to be identified as [a Surrealist] was to count as yesterday’s man’. But while anti-Surrealist sentiment had certainly arisen within the School of New York, art historian Joanna Pawlik’s studies have demonstrated that Surrealism was very much alive in postwar America, repurposed time and time again for di erent political and artistic ends.

The strengths of Darwent’s account lie in its direct, clear prose as well as original archival and oral-history research that supplements preexisting knowledge of this pivotal moment. While he is not the first to identify the transcultural interchange that occurred in 1940s Manhattan, his study certainly sheds much light on Hayter’s role within the Surrealistabstractionist dialogue. His consistently engaging narrative paints a fuller portrait of the conversations that propelled some of the seismic shifts in canonical modern art: from automatism to formalism, Surrealism to abstraction, Paris to New York. Brittany Rosemary Jones

audience would much rather be indulging in practice than theory.)

In between the deep-throatings, the thrashings and the sodomy, Art School Orgy is also a meditation on the sinister and continuing influence of class and chumocracies on British society, with additional digressions on the use of the whip in naval discipline, how to safely practice cbt (cock and ball torture), Edmund Dene Morel’s late-nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery in Congo and more modest jabs at people like disgraced twenty-first-century banker Fred Godwin, whose shame is used as a simile for David’s embarrassed nudity in an early sex scene. Proof, if you like, that sex, in addition to simply figuring fantasies of artistic excess, can be weaponised. Nirmala Devi

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief

Mark Rappolt

Editors

David Terrien

J.J. Charlesworth

Editor-at-Large

Oliver Basciano

Senior Editor

Fi Churchman

Managing Editor

Marv Recinto

Assistant Editor

Yuwen Jiang

Associate Editor

Martin Herbert

Contributing Editor

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Editor, China edition

Lai Fei

Digital Director of Digital

En Liang Khong

Assistant Digital Editor

Alexander Leissle

Design Designers

Pedro Cid Proença

Michael Wallace

Original design concept

John Morgan studio

Publishing Publisher Carsten Recksik carstenrecksik@artreview.com

Finance

Financial Controller

Sheila Dong sheiladong@artreview.com

Accountant Ning Cao ningcao@artreview.com

Advertising & Partnerships

Associate Publisher Moky May mokymay@artreview.com

Media Sales and Partnerships

Olimpia Saccone olimpiasaccone@artreview.com

Media Sales and Partnerships Amy Morell amymorell@artreview.com

Media Sales and Partnerships

Angela Cheung angelacheung@artreview.com

Production & Circulation

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Production Managers

Alex Wheelhouse

Hannah El-Boghdady production@artreview.com

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam@icanps.co.uk

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 o ce@artreview.com

ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by The Logical Choice. 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, (u sps No: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1yoth , England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne p e10 9 ph, United Kingdom.

Art credit On the cover Rosalie Schweiker, London Art Economies for Company Drinks / Centre for Plausible Economics, 2018/2023 on pages 17, 18, 40, 48, 54, 77, 78 and 83 artwork by Rosalie Schweiker

Text credit

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 37 and 89 are by Jalāl al-Dīn Muh˙ ammad Rūmī, from The Essential Rumi, 1995, translated by Coleman Barks

Art school… what’s it for?

What did you get out of art school?

A pop band; auto-didactic tendencies; solitary and intense working habits, some good friends, a willingness to embarrass myself; a more sardonic sense of humour

The sense that everything regarding my career as an artist is dependent on myself completely

The opportunity to meet people from di erent places with di erent thoughts. Also, I started to be much more aware about di erent aspects of the constitution of space

A mess to untangle

As long as art school is teaching a rarefied few to produce gestures, while cushioning them against the functions of these gestures in relation to global formations of capital, it will train influencers within a diminishing field of influence

Art school is like a flea market or garage sale. There is nothing new

What would be a feature of your ideal art school?

A structure and pedagogy that facilitates a noncompetitive working and learning environment. Less judging and more thinking together. To put it in other words, did European art schools make you a bad person?

I long for an art school where spatiality is not privileged over temporality

Tutors with permanent contracts and no whitesplaining crits. Oh, and tutorials on how to do your taxes

A trampoline

It’s not a sprint, it’s a lifetime marathon. Believe in failure, go through your practice without fear

Free bar! And lots of visiting artists! The more the better

Renzo Martens

Ruth Proctor

Vuk C´ uk

Elizabeth Price

Peng Zuqiang

Alicia Frankovich

Pio Abad

Marianna Simnett

Koushna Navabi

Djordje Ozbolt

Ai Weiwei

Bruno Baptistelli