ArtReview April 2024 by ArtReview

Away from the flock since 1949

Julien Creuzet Venice Biennale

Koo Jeong A Christoph Büchel

DEFINING THE NEW AND THE NEXT

DALTON PAULA

SAM ENG

GAME DEVELOPER

SINGER & CRE ATOR

OONA DOHERT Y

ANNA THORVALDSDOT TIR

KANTEMIR BALAGOV

TOLIA ASTAKHISHVILI

HO TZU NYEN

MOOR MOTHER

FOX MAXY

VISUAL ARTIST & EDUCATOR

CHOREOGRAPHER

VISUAL ARTIST

P OET & MUSICIAN

COMPOSER

VISUAL ARTIST

FILMMAKER & VISUAL ARTIST

DAVÓNE TINES

FILMMAKER

DALTON PAULA

VISUAL ARTIST & EDUCATOR

ANN VERONICA JANSSENS spring show APRIL 26 – JUNE 15, 2024 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

JULIUS VON BISMARCK ZWEI WÖLFINNEN APRIL 26 – JUNE 15, 2024 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

Callum Innes

Turn

March 16 – May 4, 2024 LOS ANGELES

ArtReview vol 76 no 3 April 2024

Dear Venice Biennale, If ArtReview were to be a stickler for numbers, it’d have a hard time pinning down how, exactly, to designate a zodiac sign to you. Luckily, it’s in the business of words and not digits, and so it’s allowed a degree of artistic license when it comes to just making stuff up. (Though if you ask Damien Hirst, he’ll tell you that you can quite easily do that with numbers too. Which means if, say, ArtReview’s editorial team were to miss a deadline – which it never does – but say it did – it could just tell its production team that it hadn’t, because it had in fact originally conceived of the issue way before the deadline, it just happened to not materialise in physical form until after.) So according to ArtReview’s calculations (based on an uncannily accurate horoscope ArtReview Asia brought back from its annual trip to Singapore), you ought to be a sheep. (A wooden one – which is absolutely not a comment on your personality – you get assigned one of the five elements, too.) And already you’re probably rolling your eyes and thinking, ‘Jeez, ArtReview believes in all that hocus-pocus? Could it be more basic?’ Firstly, that’s offensive, you should know better. And secondly, yes, actually: it could make another crack about sheep in formaldehyde. But it won’t. Aside from the fact that it’s about 50 years younger than you, Venice Biennale, and so born in a period when the world, for the second time, hardly made sense anymore, now and again it likes to seek out some higher spiritual power to believe in. (And you weren’t complaining when Peggy put the icing on your last birthday cake with her show of artists who got into magic

Nature healing

and esoteric stuff the first time things went tits up.) Besides, don’t be a hypocrite – ArtReview’s never once invited God’s ambassador to its birthday party. Going by what you’re telling everyone on the endless e-vites you’ve been sending out, ArtReview assumes you’re a bit self-conscious about your age (wait – here’s where the joke about sheep in formaldehyde goes!). According to that rather skilful fudging of numbers – is that the artworld equivalent of dog years, btw? – you’re also a dragon. (Again, a wooden one, ha ha.) And since ArtReview is an earth ox and therefore doesn’t mind getting dirty, it’s ploughed up some coverage on the good years of your 60, the bad years and the sometimes embarrassing years. Like the written equivalent of a birthday photomontage. There were some awkward years (when, just before ArtReview bounced onto the scene, you went through a weird incel phase and no one saw you for a few years; and remember that time when you thought a load of gate-crashers had turned up waving birthday banners for you? You were a bit of an elitist snob, tbf). And some years when you tried to reinvent yourself (some of us have done it better, but trying is what counts; like that one time when you decided to be ‘radical’ and uninvite all the national pavilions – which nobody likes to talk about). But overall you’ve done an alright job. Friends still turn up to your party every year, because, it turns out, we’re all sheep in the end. Congratulations, vb, you’ve completed an entire life cycle. hb, ArtReview

Year of the shrimp

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Stratagem I, 2024 (detail) © Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan Stratagems

New York pacegallery.com

Andrzej Wróblewski Look Out, it Comes! Air Raid | 1955 oil, canvas | 120 × 139, 5 cm Starak Collection Copyright to the art works of Andrzej Wróblewski © Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation | www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

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

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

Curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Date April 16_21

MAJD ABDEL HAMID

DAAR - SANDI HILAL & ALESSANDRO PETTI

YANA BACHYNSKA PAULA VALERO COMÍN

INITIATIVE FOR PRACTICES AND VISIONS OF RADICAL CARE (BANI KHOSHNOUDI, MAGDI MASARAA, ELENA SOROKINA)

SAAD ELTINAY

MAYA AL KHALDI & SAROUNA

D HARDING

R22 TOUT-MONDE

ADELITA HUSNI-BEY

ZORA SNAKE

NGE LAY

SAUL WILLIAMS & ANISIA UZEYMAN

REHAF AL BATNIJI

OLIVIER MARBOEUF KOUSHNA NAVABI SHADA SAFADI DIMA SROUJI & JASBIR PUAR Created by Alserkal Initiatives in partnership with Cité internationale des arts In collaboration with Lightbox

Venue My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point Navy Officers’ Club Arsenale, Venice

archie moore kith & kin

australia pavilion at venice biennale

from 20 april to 24 november 2024 commissioned by creative australia

curated by ellie buttrose

kithandkin.me

Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia

Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana Strada Nova, 4392, 30121, Campo Santi Apsotoli

20 · 04 · 2024

24 · 11 · 2024

Wednesday to Sunday · 10.00 - 18.00 Closed on Public Holidays

Marina Abramović & Pichet Klunchun · Priyageetha Dia Chitti Kasemkitvatana & Nakrob Moonmanas Khvay Samnang · Jompet Kuswidananto · Bounpaul Phothyzan Alwin Reamillo · Moe Satt · Jakkai Siributr · Troung Cong Tung Natee Utarit · Kawita Vatanajyankur · Yee I-Lann

Curated by Apinan Poshyananda smc.bkkartbiennale.com

Organized by

With the support of

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Art Observed

The Interview Paul B. Preciado by Benoît Loiseau 36

A Man’s World by Deepa Bhasthi 46 Techno Junk by Cassie Packard 48

Open Wounds by Manuel Borja-Villel 43

Writing Practice by Adam Thirlwell 49

page 48 Riar Rizaldi, Fossilis (still), 2023, video, colour, sound, 12 min 57 sec. Courtesy the artist

Art Featured

Julien Creuzet by Skye Arundhati Thomas 52

The Idea of an Artworld by ArtReview 70

Christoph Büchel by Stephanie Bailey 60

The Biennale at the End of Globalisation by J.J. Charlesworth 80

Koo Jeong A Interview by Andy St. Louis 66

page 52 Artwork inspiration for Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. © the artist

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 92 Matthew Wong and Vincent van Gogh, by Martin Herbert Whitney Biennial, by Jenny Wu Jacopo Benassi, by Mariacarla Molè Gina Fischli, by Tom Morton Thomas Hirschhorn, by Jenny Wu Sibylle Ruppert, by Alexander Leissle Robert Mapplethorpe, by Clara Young Marie Lund & Rosalind Nashashibi, by Nate Budzinski Henok Melkamzer, by Allie Biswas Siobhán Hapaska, by Declan Long Kate Mosher Hall, by Claudia Ross Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, by Stephanie Bailey Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, by Daniel Elsea Mark Salvatus, by Marv Recinto Non-Specific Objects, by Jasmine Reimer Jonathan Jones, by Tai Mitsuji

On nfts. edited by Robert Alice, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Contemporary Queer Chinese Art, edited by Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler, Jamie J. Zhao, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang Loot, by Tania James, reviewed by Mark Rappolt 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, by Nam Le, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Tschabalala Self: Bodega Run, edited by Sasha Bonét, reviewed by Marv Recinto from the archives 126

page 100 Sibylle Ruppert, Le Sacrifice (detail), 1980, oil and tempera on canvas, 65 × 81 × 2 cm. Courtesy Project Native Informant, London

NEBULA BASEL ABBAS AND RUANNE ABOU-RAHME GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ SAODAT ISMAILOVA BASIR MAHMOOD CINTHIA MARCELLE AND TIAGO MATA MACHADO DIEGO MARCON ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA FONDAZIONE IN BETWEEN ART FILM 17.04—24.11 2024 COMPLESSO DELL’OSPEDALETTO VENEZIA

BEYOND BOUNDARIES 20.4 — 24.11 2024 VENICE ART BIENNIAL PERSONAL STRUCTURES BEYOND BOUNDARIES

PALAZZO MORA PALAZZO BEMBO MARINARESSA GARDENS OPEN 10.00–18.00 CLOSED ON TUESDAY

PERSONALSTRUCTURES.COM #PERSONALSTRUCTURES

ECC-ITALY.EU

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno

Ten Years

Venice Biennale - Palazzo Bembo 20 April - 24 November Represented by Robert Mann Gallery

www.sandracattaneoadorno.com

@sandracattaneoadorno

Art Observed

Pochi sono gli uomini 35

Photo: Leo Freeman

ArtReview

The Interview by Benoît Loiseau

Paul B. Preciado

“For me, books are open. The beginning of a book is not its first sentence, and the end is not its last. Books are expansive, almost like voracious entities”

Somebody once asked the philosopher cum curator Paul B. Preciado why he didn’t write his own biography. “Because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote it for me in 1928,” he says in the opening scene of his debut film, Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) – an adaptation of Woolf’s genre-bending modernist novel. The premise, then, seems to be: ‘If you can’t write it, film it.’ With no prior directing experience, the Spanish-born and Paris-based author of Testo Junkie (2008) and An Apartment on Uranus (2019) was an unlikely candidate for the job. But despite his initial hesitations (more on that below), he’s regaled us with 98 minutes of wit and intellectual extravagance that both contrast and complement Sally Potter’s comparatively loyal 1992 adaptation. Playing in uk cinemas from July, Orlando – written as well as directed by Preciado – seamlessly navigates between the conventions of documentary filmmaking and literary adaptation. (It has already won a string of

awards, including the 2023 Berlinale’s Teddy Award for the Best Documentary Film.) The film follows a cast of some 20 trans and nonbinary characters of all ages and walks of life – most of whom are played by nonprofessional actors. Much like Woolf’s Orlando – an Elizabethan aristocrat who mysteriously changes sex and goes on to live for three centuries – Preciado’s protagonists traverse time and space in unconventional ways. “If only you knew,” we hear the philosopher say, addressing Woolf herself, “the contemporary world is full of Orlandos.” Throughout the film, these modern-day Orlandos recite extracts from the classic novel while sharing aspects of their own personal experiences of gender-affirming surgeries, encounters with the psychiatric institution and family relations. Unlike Woolf’s courtly protagonist, this makes Preciado’s horde comparatively relatable. (These accounts are punctuated by a handful of notable cameos by figures such as the artists Pierre et Gilles

April 2024

and the novelist Virginie Despentes.) More than a queer literary icon, here the figure of Orlando becomes the aesthetic and revolutionary template for a ‘people to come’, as Deleuze and Guattari might put it: the invention of ‘modes of existence and possibilities of life’. Produced by the Franco-German television channel arte, Orlando was crafted on a modest budget. Costumes are unapologetically minimal, often consisting of a mere neck-ruff. Sets such as a landscape backdrop or a mock boat-deck are filmed beyond their cinematic frame, revealing the behind-the-scenes of the film. It’s a rather punk take on Woolf’s novel, one that draws equally on the dialectic quality of philosophy seminars and the methods of aids video activism. One morning in December 2023, the day after the film’s London preview at the Barbican, I sat down with Preciado in a café to discuss representational politics, negotiating the televisual context and the radical power of poetry.

With or Without Me artreview Let’s start at the beginning: the genesis of the film. I know it was commissioned by arte. paul b. preciado Well, I don’t know if I would say ‘commissioned’. arte came to see me saying, ‘We want to make queer films. We don’t know exactly what this means. But we know we’d like to open the audience in that direction.’ So I had a series of discussions with them. Then at a certain point they came back to me saying, ‘We want to make a biopic: a film about your work.’ They had already made a couple of films, one about a trans girl and one about Bambi, one of the first trans women to come out publicly, who became a media figure in France during the 1970s. So, they had made these two films and when they spoke to me… ar … you felt you would become part of that series. pbp Immediately. They thought, ‘ok, we made these two films, we need something in between.’ Of course, both of them are about a female transperson. So they thought it might be interesting to have me in the middle. What they had in mind

was a very classical documentary. Someone would go to the village where I was born and interview my parents, go to my school, then interview me… That was a horrifying idea. So, immediately, I tried to tell them not to do it. I tried to convince them there were many other interesting things they could do. I said: ‘Make a documentary about Michel Foucault.’ Or, ‘Why don’t you make a film about Monique Wittig?’ And they were like, ‘Well, Monique Wittig is not so well known.’ Which is not true! So at a certain point I was desperate. They really wanted to make this film and I had the impression that they would make it, with or without me. And, really, the idea of Orlando came to me as a joke. I said to them, ‘I will not allow you to do this unless it’s an adaptation of Orlando by Virginia Woolf.’ To me, this was a way of saying: ‘end of the conversation’. I never thought they would like the idea. But as soon as I said it, one of them asked: ‘Who’s going to make the film?’ Then the head of the team said: ‘Maybe Paul could do it.’ At that moment, I don’t know what came to me. Still today, I’m thinking: why did I say yes? ar But it worked out.

Orlando (still), 2024, dir. Paul B. Preciado. Courtesy Janus Films

ArtReview

pbp Yes, it worked out. And you know, it’s a professional context that is at odds with what I normally do. arte’s idea for the film was making a 52-minute documentary. That felt too short. Now, in its final form, it’s very long. I almost kept it a secret [from the producers] because I knew from the beginning that I was doing something very different from what they expected.

An Image of Transness ar It’s interesting the way you describe this negotiating of the televisual context. It reminds me of the film Hervé Guibert made during the early 1990s, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur [Modesty and Shame, 1992], which documents the final months of his life before he died of aids-related complications. It was produced by Pascale Breugnot, a figurehead of reality television in France. She came to him with a camcorder saying, ‘Why don’t you make a film in which you will be both the author and the subject?’ Guibert originally came up with this exuberant film filled with fictional dérives. It opened with his friend, the artist Sophie Calle, stalking him to the island of Elba while filming him. There were all these insane scenes. Then the production team pushed to edit the film down and it essentially

became a documentary portrait of a patient dying of hiv/aids. It’s a beautiful film, but it’s not what he had envisioned originally. Were you worried your vision would be reduced to a preestablished format? pbp It’s interesting that you’re speaking about that film – I kind of forgot about it. Even though, when I was making Orlando, I could have had my hands on Guibert’s manuscript for his [unrealised] adaptation of Herculine Barbin’s memoirs. At the time, I was struggling. Not so much with arte – they called me 15 days after signing the contract and said, ‘Do you have the script for the film?’ I told them that I was figuring out what I needed to do, and that I would need some time. They left me alone. But I had this almost epistemic collapse in which I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’ I started to think about my aversion to so many films. The way I’ve been critical of representation, of something being immediately captured by the camera. I thought, ‘How am I going to do it without immediately giving a fixed image of who Orlando is, like creating an image of what transness is?’ So I started to look into authors I like that had made or failed to make adaptations.

ar Les films fantômes, as Guibert might put it. [In 1981 the French novelist published a series of essays titled L’Image fantôme, or ‘Ghost Image’.] pbp Exactly. So, I looked into Pasolini’s obsession for adapting theatre and how these adaptations were made, like Medea. What are the characters and actors he’s using to play these historical or mythical figures? I also looked into Almodóvar’s first films, his 1978 adaptation of Salomé by Oscar Wilde. It’s a completely crazy adaptation in which he’s playing all the characters with his friends, and you have the weirdest image of Salomé in the middle of the countryside. I find that extremely interesting. Then of course I thought about Hervé Guibert, who had this idea of adapting the memoirs of Herculine Barbin. ar With Isabelle Adjani! pbp Yes! ar Didn’t Guibert want Adjani and her brother to play Barbin at different stages of her life? pbp Absolutely. Thank God they didn’t do that! But I was interested to see how Guibert had translated Barbin’s biography into a script. So I did a lot of research, trying to find

some references. I came to the conclusion that I had two pantheons of films. On one side queer films, mostly underground and coming from art. One of these films is Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust. When I first met Hans, he was a good friend of Del LaGrace Volcano, and I remember seeing them making this film in a really diy manner. So that’s a film I went back to, among others by Jack Smith or Shu Lea Cheang, for whom I’ve written some scripts. And on the other side I found myself obsessively reviewing documentary essays. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s, of course. All the questions I was asking myself – like, ‘How to represent without reducing or transforming the image to an identity’, questions about biography, or the relationship between fiction and reality – were questions he was asking himself. At a certain moment, when Godard was becoming well known, he even had this intuition that he must destroy cinema in order to make cinema. ar Last night at the Barbican’s preview of Orlando, you discussed how your methodological influences came mainly from philosophy and activism. That was enlightening to me. Particularly as the film plays with the modalities and hierarchies of discourse, from

Medea (still), 1969, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

April 2024

truth to falsehood, documentary to fiction. That, to me, evokes the tradition of alternative aids media born within act up – groups like diva tv and their use or archival images mixed with new ones. They wanted to reclaim the means of televisual production to build their own image and discourse. pbp Those were crucial references for me. I grew up with these images. I was in my twenties when they were created. ar And you spent some time in New York too, didn’t you? pbp Yes, I studied in New York. I moved there in 1992. The person I was living with then was a student of Barbara Hammer’s. Barbara was having dinner at our place every other day! Everyone surrounding me at that time was working on films. Some of them were part of diva tv, too. But it’s funny, at the time I saw them as entangled with the traps of media. In that group I was the only one studying philosophy. As you say, they were playing with these different levels of discourse. But I had the impression that I needed a deeper knowledge of the history of language and science, even. And honestly, I never thought I would make a film myself.

A Negative Ontology of Film ar You talked about your scepticism about representation. Last night, you also mentioned that the film took three years to complete and that, towards the end, you thought it might not materialise due to financial reasons, but that you were content with it either way. It reminded me of the passage at the beginning of your book Testo Junkie, titled ‘Videopenetration’, in which you describe this mise-en-scène of filming yourself communing with and even embodying the ghost of your friend the writer Guillaume Dustan. Quoting Guibert, you write: ‘For the first time I’m tempted to make a self-portrait for you.’ Then, at the end of the section, you conclude: ‘I don’t watch the mini-dv I just filmed. I don’t even number it.’ To me, this passage questions the very ontology of film. What is a film? Is it the final product we watch on the screen, or everything else that happens in the process of making it? pbp In a sense, the politics of image[-making] is very present in my work. It’s almost like a negative ontology, an image that is never present. The force or the strength of the image Orlando (still), 2024, dir. Paul B. Preciado. Courtesy Janus Films

ArtReview

is precisely to be erased, because that’s exactly where we come from historically, right? From acts of erasure, acts of violent inscription within an image that doesn’t represent us. Maybe that’s why it took me a while to decide what to do with this film. At a certain point, truly, I was praying to Virginia Woolf. I felt a certain duty. When you say you want to adapt Orlando by Virginia Woolf, it’s not a joke. Not that I sacralise books. For me, books are open. The beginning of a book is not its first sentence, and the end is not its last. Books are expansive, almost like voracious entities. I was not so worried about the precision of the adaptation. But it had to be some kind of adaptation, right? So I went back to the book and asked myself, ‘What is the form of this book?’ Orlando: A Biography is probably Woolf’s least experimental book, and – maybe that’s why it was one of her most popular in her lifetime – it follows the structure of an ordinary novel, right? Even though, of course, there are so many transgressions. Still, someone can read it and say, ‘This is the story of a nobleman and their adventures’. So I thought something similar had to happen in the film: the structure would be following Orlando’s adventures. I knew

the film would not have a completely experimental form. In fact, Woolf has this amazing essay titled ‘The Cinema’, which she wrote at the same time as Orlando, when cinema was becoming mainstream. Woolf went to see a film about the sea, in black and white. Of course she’s obsessed with the sea and water. She’s amazed by the feeling of being completely immersed in water without being wet. So I think that [in Orlando] she’s practising this kind of jumping technique, this subjective writing that’s never fixed but moves from subject to subject and object to object. And I think she realises that cinema can do that in an interesting way. Of course, she’s also critical of cinema. She says that cinema is like a soup where you put everything, all the remains and leftovers, and let it cook. At a certain point, I thought, ‘ok, let’s embrace the melting pot and lose the fear of cinema.’ Maybe I had given too much power to the image. ar I wanted to talk about the fabulous scene unfolding in the waiting room of Dr Queen, the psychoanalyst diagnosing your Orlandos with gender dysphoria. And it’s interesting hearing you talk about adapting the fluidity of the novel, because there is something almost plastic about the temporality of Woolf ’s Orlando.

Yet what struck me about this particular scene in your film – besides its exuberance and humour – is that, by contrast, time seems to stop. It takes place in a very defined space, a little square of a room, in which people wait. pbp That scene, in a strange way, is the adaptation of the moment in the book in which a teenage Orlando meets the queen [Elizabeth I]. In the book, for me, it’s a scene of sexual violence. The queen is touching Orlando’s legs and bringing Orlando’s head between her own legs. She’s using her imperial power in an almost cannibalistic way, as if to eat the beauty, creativity and power of Orlando. I didn’t want to put any of my Orlandos in that position. Also, it was difficult to find someone playing the queen in that scene. You think of Sally Potter, who in her film of Orlando made her queen into an actual drag queen. I didn’t want to go there. On the contrary, I think what Virginia Woolf is speaking about is Orlando’s first encounter with the structures of power. In the end, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t make that scene. But we discussed, with the Orlandos, what

would be our equivalent of encountering these structures of power. And it was clear for all of us that it was the psychiatric institution, like a higher force that contains the process of transition, right? That was how the idea for the scene started. The question of using hormones physically in the scene was not easy. My producers had concerns about the association between syringes and drugs. And it’s like, ‘Why are you making this connection?’ That’s ordinary life for us. You wouldn’t ask a diabetic not to use a syringe because it reminds you of a junkie. So I had to struggle a little through that. Earlier, you underlined the different levels of discourse. And there’s a question in my film: what is the right discourse to counter another? Especially that of straightness coming from scientific discourses embedded within society about nature, normality, sanity and health. What could be the discourse to counter them? I realised it’s not philosophy. ar What is it? pbp It’s poetry.

Orlando (still), 2024, dir. Paul B. Preciado. Courtesy Janus Films

April 2024

Benoît Loiseau is a writer based in London

َ ‫ما بعــد‬ ‫ الغـيث‬AFTER

Save the Date: Closing Week 20 – 24 May 2024 with performances, screenings, and conversations

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024

‫ بينــايل الدرعيـة‬RAIN ‫للف ــن المعاص ــر‬ February ٢٠٢٤ 20 – 24 May 2024

Britto Arts Trust, Palan & Pakghor, 2024 / Photography Alessandro Brasile

JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

biennale.org.sa

Operating under the title Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th Venice Biennale promises to be both inclusive and a gesture towards decolonising one of the world’s foremost largescale exhibitions. But is it possible to decolonise a biennial? Can a decolonising discourse radically transform the institution? Venice is more than a thousand kilometres away from the small island near Sicily where Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa set his posthumously published novel The Leopard (1958). Much like Tomasi’s book, could this Biennale be yet another example of a situation in which everything must change in order to remain the same? It has been well established that many objects found in the collections of great institutions, such as the British Museum, the Louvre or the Pergamon Museum, were obtained as spoils of war. It is also evident that colonialism has changed its strategies over the centuries and that the ways in which domination was exerted were multiple and complex. Frantz Fanon understood the ofteninvisible mechanisms by which coloniality endured. In his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) he demonstrated that colonial violence was exercised by making societies believe it was nonexistent. Metropolitan capitals educated the racialised elites of the colonies in such a way that they considered themselves French, English or Spanish above all else,

Open Wounds

Is it possible to decolonise a biennial? Manuel Borja-Villel ponders the promise of this year’s Venice Biennale to shift the discourse

Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, c. 1689, oil on shaped canvas, 99 × 137 cm. Licensed to public domain

April 2024

importing the continent’s habits and customs while defending its interests. Modernity and colonialism have gone hand in hand since their inception. Together they configured a world governed by positivist principles. Any form of knowledge that failed to abide by its codes was considered nonscientific and less evolved than European knowledge, and could even be persecuted as heresy. A modern aesthetic determined how the world was to be perceived and in doing so defined how to inhabit the earth and how to imagine other universes. It established a form of control and laid out the parameters of what could be considered beautiful, good and truthful. It set aside the histories of many populations, eliminating their common narratives and understandings of the earth in one fell swoop. As the scholar Rolando Vázquez pointed out in his 2009 essay ‘Modernity Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time’, modernity imposed two temporalities: one of the colonisers and another of the colonised. The former placed themselves at the centre, in the present, the latter were relegated to the periphery, permanently located in the past. A fracture occurred between these divergent temporalities – between those who dominated and those who suffered oppression. A walk through the collection at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin is telling in itself.

In some vitrines there are visible gaps where masks and sculptures that have been returned to their places of origin used to be. In all of the museum’s rooms the works are now accompanied by contextualising information describing each object’s provenance in detail, specifying if its acquisition was the result of plunder or genocide, or that some of the scholars who wrote on the exhibits were members of the Nazi Party. The impression is that of a thorough and detailed study undertaken for the purpose of reconstructing the biographies of these works. Nevertheless, a question remains unanswered at the completion of the visit: why is it that only the Germans are speaking up? Where are the other voices? This situation is not uncommon for most of the major European museums. Some years ago, the Prado organised an exhibition set to analyse transatlantic artistic exchanges. The title, Tornaviaje (Return Journey), clearly signalled the curators’ point of view: it referred to the return trip of the Spaniards back to Castile. The Indigenous communities were mostly absent from the discourse, as were the Afro-descendants. Despite frequent debates on the need for mending wounds in Europe, there is little awareness that when it is the coloniser who determines who is healthy and who is ill, the wound remains.

A part of European society is often outraged by the idea of massive restitutions and the resulting losses this would entail for the ‘encyclopaedic museum’, which has granted itself the role of world-heritage custodian for over two centuries. However, any act that is not accompanied by the alteration of our frame of reference is insufficient and ends in condescendence. Stolen goods must be returned, of course. But, even so,

top Cast brass plaque from Benin City, sixteenth century, in the collection of the British Museum, London. Photo: Vassil / Wikimedia Commons above Three British soldiers posing next to bronze plaques inside Oba’s compound, burnt during the siege of Benin City, 1897. Photo: Reginald Granville

ArtReview

if they continue to be displayed and studied at their places of origin in accordance with European ‘scientific’ and universal criteria, they are at risk of losing their enigmatic nature and will remain alienated from those who made them. The restitution of a treasured item is more than just its return; it is also the regeneration of existing links between the traditions, bodies and lands that colonisation interrupted. It is not a return to the past, but the coming of the past into the present. It brings with it the right to reject Western norms regarding use-value, ownership, access and control. Conversely, it demands solidarity and redistribution. In a process of social justice, it is essential to keep in mind the benefits obtained from the study and display of goods from other cultures and that their return be accompanied by the foundation of shared networks of cooperation and support, so that the colonised are able to create their own institutional forms and develop their own cultural ecosystem. Only in this way is it plausible to close the colonial gap and overcome systemic differences existing between the Global North and South. It is often thought that decolonisation only concerns those countries with a colonial past. ‘We are in solidarity’ – one often hears – ‘but it is not our problem’, or ‘we have no objects to return’. However, this false assumption is challenged by what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano called the ‘coloniality of power’. The history of European countries is not independent of the colonies. There is no British or Spanish nation separated from Indian and American communities and people. I am quite sure that the Venice Biennale will grant visibility to some narratives that have been unjustly silenced, if not repressed. Nevertheless, if the people who produced those narratives are denied the possibility of creating their own frames of reference and cannot determine their own forms of governance, then Foreigners Everywhere will remain once more an empty gesture. Decolonisation is a two-way street. Manuel Borja-Villel is an art historian and curator, and the former director of the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

The Endless Spiral

BETSABEÉ ROMERO

Curated by: Gabriela Urtiaga

Detail from Rolling Totem of Rubber and Gold by Betsabeé Romero

April 20 - September 1, 2024

Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa Galleria di Piazza San Marco

Main Partners: William S. and Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach and Santiago García Galván

628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach CA, 90808 562.437.1689 info@molaa.org

Beyond their salacious details, two recent truecrime documentaries about particularly heinous murders offer an example of how contemporary life for a woman in India remains viewed through, and irreparably shaped by, a patriarchal lens. Curry & Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case (2023; directed by Christo Tomy) and The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth (2024; directed by Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy), both streaming on Netflix, present a concoction of drama, scandal, sex and the grotesque that appeals to the voyeur in all of us. In other words, they make for good tv. But they also unwittingly offer a study in the extent of patriarchy’s hypocrisy, a commentary on India’s class system, an exposé of how the mass media has become addicted to sensationalism in order to transform news into entertainment and a spotlight on society’s double standards. All realities that, by the way, are engineered further to put women in ‘their place’.

Curry & Cyanide follows the case of Keralabased Jolly Joseph, who, in pursuit of a life of wealth and luxury, allegedly murdered six people, including a two-year-old, over a period of 14 years, by mixing cyanide into their food. The Indrani Mukerjea Story, meanwhile, follows the eponymous media mogul’s alleged murder of her daughter, Sheena Bora. While family dysfunction was at the heart of the sensational media coverage of the case, it also served to peel back the gloss coating the lives of the rich and famous, who, for India’s very large middle class, remain objects of both aspiration and extreme jealousy. Least of the many sordid details of the murder was the fact that Mukerjea tried to pass off her daughter by a previous marriage as her younger sister, who, just before her alleged murder, was in a relationship with Mukerjea’s stepson (her third husband’s son by his first wife). While we never hear from or see Jolly Joseph in Curry & Cyanide, Mukerjea is extensively interviewed and knows how to work the cameras. Having been released on bail, her dancing lessons, yoga moves, travel, a tell-all book and public speaking engagements are on display for her 1.5 million followers on Instagram. At this point, it almost does not matter whether or not either of these women are guilty.

A Man’s World

In India, writes Deepa Bhasthi, true-crime documentaries are deployed to reinforce patriarchal fantasies

top Curry & Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case (still), 2023, dir. Christo Tomy. Courtesy Netflix above The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth (still), 2024, dirs. Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy. Courtesy Netflix

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Once news of the murders went public, and was consequently sensationalised in the media, the narrative around both cases quickly narrowed to how Joseph and Mukerjea, both of humble origins, were ambitious gold-diggers who had had multiple relationships and were thus of loose morals. Similar insinuations are made by interviewees in the documentaries, be it by Mukerjea’s former friends, or her daughter by her second husband, or Joseph’s sister-in-law. This scrutiny of personal lives, irrespective of its relevance to the alleged crime, is a given, as is society’s assumed right to judge them according to vague moral standards. In a culture that exoticises and idolises the mother (most obviously as the symbol of the nation), that one could murder a child and the other her own daughter were denounced in public debate as going against the laws of nature and nurture. The ethics of true-crime documentaries and podcasts such as Serial can be shifty, especially when cases are still in the courts, as is the case with both Joseph’s and Mukerjea’s. But what these two documentaries do highlight is the difference in treatment when the accused is a woman rather than a man. For instance, Dahaad (2023), a fictionalised adaptation of the case of a serial killer from Karnataka who also used cyanide to murder his female victims, and The Serpent (2021), based on the life of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, portray the crime they committed as an aberration, a personal shortcoming in one man. Whereas for Joseph, Mukerjea and others like them, the documentaries swiftly become a commentary on what happens when women in general are allowed to do as they please. In public consciousness, there was never going to be any redemption for them. The documentaries only seem to assist in this stereotyping, strengthening the social conditioning that determines how women are seen, treated and talked about. Joseph and Mukerjea become cautionary tales about what happens when women dare to be ambitious, defy patriarchal expectations and cross the limits set for them by society. It does not matter that one is a middle-class woman in a back-of-the-beyond village and the other a wealthy public figure in glitzy Mumbai. Their damnation is the same, irrespective of class, caste or financial status. And therein lies the problem for all independent-minded women, whether accused of crime or not. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

sharjahart.org

THE CASABLANCA ART SCHOOL:

Mohammed Chabâa, Untitled, 1977. Image courtesy of Mohammed Chabâa Estate

Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde (1962–1987) 24 February 16 June 2024 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

This exhibition is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Tate St Ives in collaboration with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

This past January, the Schiaparelli ‘baby’ overtook my social-media feeds. Cradled by a model at the brand’s runway show during Paris Couture Week, the infant was sculpted from pre-2007 batteries, circuit boards and other electronic components encrusted with crystals and pearls. Albeit at a fetishising distance, the techno-putto pointed to e-waste as a material fact: a rare gesture in high-income countries, which frequently treat e-waste as materially and socially invisible while exporting it to Global South nations (though these flows are not as straightforward as they are made out to be, as the latter countries also produce their own e-waste, some of which is exported to the Global North). Our collective e-waste progeny, in its more and less dazzling forms, bears the distinction of being the world’s fastest growing (‘viral’) solid-waste stream; annual discard is projected to more than double to 111 million tons by 2050. This refuse is typically abandoned to landfills, leaching toxic chemicals into the earth, or alchemised back into useful matter through reuse and recycling, including informal recycling schemes, concentrated in low-income nations, that pose further health, safety and environmental hazards. Sometimes it becomes an artwork. Using it as raw material to think with, artists are bringing a critical eye to e-waste as a sociomaterial assemblage, offering pathways to grapple with its material life and global flows. Their creations often challenge the obsolescence that manufacturers design into devices and enforce through impediments to repair, and reject externally authored (‘imported’) schemas that claim to determine what is precious. The appropriative strategies they use nod to a rich history of artists working with detritus and questioning hierarchies of value, including the Dadaists, folk artists who turn to readily available materials and contemporary installation artists exploring aggregation and accumulation. Addis Ababa-based artist Elias Sime has worked with e-waste, among other everyday materials, for over a decade, crafting his intricately patterned and coloured Tightrope works (2009–) from reclaimed computer keys, electrical wires and circuit boards purchased at the city’s open-air markets. His vast wall-reliefs develop slowly due to their laborious construction and the wait for the scrap that will complete a composition; a viewer taking in their details

Techno Junk

Seeing e-waste, says Cassie Packard, is the first step towards dealing with it. And in the first of those things, art has a role to play might likewise adopt a gleaner’s purposeful pace. Simulating aerial landscapes, these works conjure up geographies of extraction and manufacture – sites whose pollution outpaces that of the postconsumer waste they help create, begging the question of where ‘e-waste’ begins. (Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an ai System, 2018, an extensive visualisation detailing the staggering amount of material resources, human labour and pollution behind the creation, use and disposal of an Amazon Alexa, gives an idea.) One such extractive zone is Indonesia’s Bangka Island, where tin – a common electronic solder – is surface-mined for exportation, turning the water and soil acidic. While making Kasiterit (2019), a film narrated by a solar-powered ai (tin is used in solar panels) who addresses the history of the industry in Bangka and the narrator’s place in it, Yogyakarta-based artist Riar Rizaldi was struck by the heaps of imported e-waste dumped there. This in turn inspired Riar Rizaldi, Fossilis (still), 2023, video, colour, sound, 12 min 57 sec. Courtesy the artist

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his film Fossilis (2023), set in a speculative future in which an archaeologist studies electronic discards (controllers, computers) in a virtual jungle. Fossilis features sets made from discarded cables and scenes built with abandoned computer-generated imagery from previous projects, another form of electronic refuse. Alongside fisheye footage of a bustling Yogyakarta e-waste market, a voiceover explains: “Our ancestors in the tropical equator… animated detritus circulating through flea markets full of electronic carcasses.” Instead of characterising individuals involved with informal e-waste economies as merely passive victims of exploitative flows, the archaeologist’s counternarrative presents figures who assert agency, embracing what theorist Jussi Parikka has termed zombie media. Between its resistance to decomposition, and the posthuman future that it anticipates and hastens, e-waste – precious or not – will outlive us. Building on this premise, New York-based artist-theorist Katherine Behar’s seriously playful E-Waste series of sculptural installations (2014) imagines a future in which Earth is no longer habitable for humans, but electronic devices endure, absurdly continuing to perform rote labour. Partly ossified in blobby, rocklike forms, usb peripherals (mouses, fans) just dated enough to appear archaic bathetically blink and whir. As they characterise objects as having effects, Behar’s decelerationist sculptures also call on us to care about the bodies with which we are enmeshed – be they human or nonhuman – by lingering on the disposability ascribed to machine and human labourers alike. E-Waste recalls philosopher Jane Bennett’s realisation, while gazing at refuse, that ‘the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter’. What else is being concealed or obfuscated in our – ‘our’ being necessarily geopolitically situated – cultural imaginaries around e-waste? What narratives of its present and future have we unduly allowed to harden? What is our relation and responsibility to this lively, toxic, unruly and utterly ballooning material? Asking these questions, it seems, begins with looking – not at a shiny spectacle from a remove, but at a knot in which we are socially, materially and affectively entangled. Cassie Packard is a writer based in New York

In the Royal Academy’s current show, Entangled Pasts, you can see John Akomfrah’s video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) – a three-channel work that uses the sea of the Middle Passage to think about the destruction of human and nonhuman life, while also practising a kind of multiple richness of presentation. Coming near the end of the ra’s giant show about the institution’s complicity in slavery and racial hierarchy, it has a kind of migraine intensity of hallucination. And I loved this, it unnerved and destabilised in the same way that the show itself constructed its own larger montages. In Vertigo Sea Akomfrah stages Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography of life as a slave – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano – while in a nearby room Isaac Julien in Lessons of the Hour (2019) restages the visit of Frederick Douglass to Britain. The eeriness of these twin figures, with actors allowing historical figures to come back from the dead, made the gallery space a kind of afterlife. Or there was the way opposite the screens that displayed Akomfrah’s aquatic montage they had hung Frank Bowling’s giant abstract painting Middle Passage from 1970, so that two oceans reflected each other. In the bookstore I picked up a transcript of a conversation between Akomfrah and curator/writer Johanne Løgstrup, published by Sternberg, where I came across Akomfrah’s beautiful idea of montage. Initially, he says, ‘it felt like an approach rather than a technique. As I grew older, I realised that it’s actually an ethic. It slowly dawned on me that this was about the way in which one accepted the coexistence of difference.’ Or, in other words: ‘The montage is a kind of method of persuasion. The editing is a method of persuading different slices from different projects, some I originated, some somebody else has shot, others I bought, to sit together.’ Maybe that’s a hopeful way of thinking about the show itself, although I’m not totally sure. In its effort to think about its compromised existence within the crime of empire, the ra has come up with a very strange exhibition, where morally offensive art coexists with artworks whose essence is based on an ethical refusal of complicity, a need to expose the untold or undertold stories of the oppressed (Akomfrah again: ‘The question of the untold is obviously an important one, because in a way it so much describes what constitutes a diaspora’). In its absolute idea of history as value, I felt what was missing was a more precise idea of aesthetic strategy, or an approach to the question of whether there might be ethically unimpeachable art that is nevertheless anodyne in its effects. I guess in some way I wanted the history to be inflected with more theory. A line by American academic Saidiya Hartman kept coming back to me:

Writing Practice v. la rabbia

What aesthetic strategies can make sense of an unstable present? Adam Thirlwell looks to forms of art with a strong theoretical component

‘I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it’. In such a future, the idea of complicity feels too neutral or even tautologous to be useful. And obviously we are also living in the future created by the Shoah. Earlier this month I went to see my friend, the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, give a lecture in a church (a church!) in Clerkenwell, after the Barbican had cancelled it when they saw its title: ‘The Shoah After Gaza’. It was a lecture given from a rightful place of immediate grief and solidarity for the people of Gaza, and also written from within Pankaj’s own autobiography, as someone who grew up ‘imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family of uppercaste Hindu nationalists in India’. So much of what he said was excellent: the argument that the best witness to the Shoah may be a dissident Jewish heritage of radical thinking and resistance; the insistence on the way survivors of the Shoah, such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, refused the idea that the Shoah could be used by rightwing Israeli governments to justify any mistreatment of the La Rabbia (still), 1963, dirs. Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovannino Guareschi

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Palestinian people; and the overwhelming fact that to many people outside Europe the fact of the Shoah as a kind of overwhelming negative sublime was simply absent, and that therefore many European assumptions about the existence of Israel were also absent on a global scale. But I also found myself worried by contradictions or non sequiturs. The largest non sequitur was the fundamental argument of the lecture – that ‘a necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory’. I couldn’t see the logic of this. If the Shoah created a reparative idea of universal justice, however flawed in its implementation, then it cannot be endangered by the Israeli state using it for its own propaganda. All that’s necessary is to attack the extremist politicians who create that propaganda, just as Améry and Levi did back in the 1960s and 70s. Or, if the universal is in fact flawed, then the question of Israeli horror and propaganda is irrelevant. The contradiction felt related to other local problems, like the contorted syntax of the following sentence (again from the lecture), which also felt less convincing than it wanted to be: ‘Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most nonWestern people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe.’ What I mean is: if the future we are living in is created by slavery and by the Shoah, it’s also a place where language is placed under giant pressure. So I admired how directly the lecture tried to think about the contemporary – and its problems came from the way the contemporary is a place in which everyone finds themselves proceeding along different historical trajectories, which means that any present moment is ontologically unstable. The other book I’ve been reading is a new translation of an old text by the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: La Rabbia, or Anger, published by Tenement Press. It’s a book Pasolini designed as an overlap and a complement to his 1963 documentary – trying to figure the conditions for revolution on a global scale, and which identified the illusion of race as the ultimate problem: ‘A new problem breaks out in the world. It’s called Colour. / The new extension of the world is called Colour.’ In response, wrote Pasolini, an artist has only one feeling: anger. What causes the poet’s discontent? An endless series of very real problems that no one is able to solve… Adam Thirlwell is a novelist based in London

Art Featured

che sanno andare 51

Julien Creuzet In a challenge to the Venice Biennale’s defining principles, the project for the French Pavilion is launched in Martinique by Skye Arundhati Thomas

Artwork inspiration for Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. © the artist

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We are in a windswept, cliffside garden that tumbles down to a glossy Creuzet’s insistence on launching his project for the French ultramarine sea. Ultramarin is also another way of saying outre-mer, the Pavilion in Martinique, supported by the Institut Français, follows French legal term for persons of ‘overseas territories’. “When I hear this instinct. He has carefully planned every aspect of our visit, and ultramarin,” says the artist Julien Creuzet, “I think of someone fantas- assembled a cast: his elders, peers and the island itself. Creuzet makes tical, superhuman.” We are in Martinique, in the French Antilles, films, sculptures, performances; he also writes poetry. The films are buffeted on one side by the Caribbean Sea, and on the other by the collagelike assemblages of found footage and animation, brought Atlantic Ocean. Creuzet, raised on the island, will represent France together with music and poetry. His work is at its best when it’s domiat the Venice Biennale 2024 and has chosen to bring the announce- nated by sound: Creuzet is a composer, a musician; he mixes samples ment of his project to Martinique instead of Paris; so here we are, and clips like a producer, with sudden sharp notes, drops in rhythm or a group of press, about to tour the island. The Négritude movement longer, more operatic turns. In an early video, from 2015, Oh téléphone, shaped Creuzet; and today we are in the garden of Édouard Glissant’s oracle noir (…), Creuzet films himself in a dark room, a phone flashlight former house. pointing at his face, which is held right up to the lens of the camera. In his speech at the launch of Creuzet’s project, the president of He repeats a poem: the Executive Council of Martinique, Serge Letchimy, promises to Oh téléphone, oracle noir, install Creole as an official language of the island alongside French. toutes les personnes écrans miroirs, The métropole prefect Jean-Christophe Bouvier is seated across from filent les images tactiles, him; he is the de facto leader of Martinique. Last year he quashed oh vas-y voir les nuages du soir. a petition to officialise Creole: ‘The language of the Republic is French,’ There is a pulpy rasp to his voice, carried with a tilted intonation, Bouvier said to the local assembly (the final decision is still pending). But Creole is as much ‘the language of the Republic’ as French, because and he swells certain words while softening others. Creuzet’s face ‘the Republic’ itself is entirely constituted by creolisation, the mixing has an almost devotional capacity: he blinks tenderly, so close to the together of peoples and cultures. At least this was the vision that influ- camera, the scene is raw, and his voice inflected with agony. It’s the enced members of the Négritude movement – Glissant, Aimé Césaire title work of a show at Le Magasin in Grenoble, a precursor to the and Suzanne Césaire – who supported Martinique’s remaining a terri- Biennale pavilion (the details of which remain under wraps at the tory of France at the moment of its decolonisation. It was, presumably, time of writing). A more recent mixed-media installation, Zumbi a way to hold the coloniser accountable, to turn subjects of the colo- Zumbi Eterno (2023), also carries this musical tenor – in a video componies into equal French citizens; France had, after all, been constructed nent, Creuzet sings in a whistling voice, and the poem tells a story. by the labour and resources of its colonies. These Caribbean thinkers Zumbi dos Palmares was a Brazilian quilombola leader, a resistance understood the process of decolonisation not as a quest for the fighter who famously revolted against Portuguese slave traders. sovereignty of single nation-states, but as the restructuring of the He was decapitated, his head placed on a spike. In Creuzet’s video a world itself. This was not simply a matter of geography, but of iden- twisted body, a cutlass angled into it, is flung into swirling waters. The body turns luminescent, bleeding flowers as tity, society, language – where the presumed Julien Creuzet welcomes the press fish pass through it. At Le Magasin, in front synthesis of nation, culture and citizenship at the Cape 110 memorial in Le Diamant, Martinique, of the video, a tv screen is propped vertically had to be dismantled and reformed. 6 February 2024. © Institut Français

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against a wall, and on it a translucent figure – inside of which, like an we sat, backs to the sea. Glissant wrote that slavery and its Histories X-ray, we see wires, bottles, cigarettes, sweets – who throws, one at a – with a capital H – could never be ‘perceptible or comprehensible time, a series of books to the front. These last are Creuzet’s library: solely using the methods of objective thought’. Césaire and his classNtozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Wole mate the Senegalese president-to-be Senghor both began their adult Soyinka, Maryse Condé and of course Césaire, among others. There is lives as poets before they turned towards politics. Creuzet in an interview with Platform says: ‘Poetry allows you to put together impossible poetry and essays; the languages are many. After the press conference we take a spindly road up to the Absalon things’. Césaire’s epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a waterfall, a sparkling clear spring beloved by artists from the island. Return to My Native Land, 1939) moves from narrative to high abstracIt’s a startling green landscape, at the centre of a mahogany forest. tion, as do the closing pages of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs Later, octogenarian ceramicist and painter Victor Anicet speaks to us (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). The latter forms a part of avant-garde from under his stained-glass mural in Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Martinican jazz musician Jacques Coursil’s album Clameurs (2007), in the volcanic town of Saint-Pierre, where he has tried, he says, which is a sequence of four oratorios with trumpet and voice, where to capture the dappling light of Absalon’s tree-dense landscape. music floats beside recitations of seminal Afro-Caribbean texts. In it, Anicet also spells out the presentCoursil’s trumpet is almost featherday Martinican relationship to the light, a sound as breathy as a voice. There are secrets in this work, not everyland: “We are the guardians of this Creuzet’s practice is in complex diathing is immediately perceptible or land, not its owners,” he says, referlogue with the work of those who translated for the viewer; it’s the right ring to the Indigenous people whose came before him: the references are trace has been all but erased from the in how he handles poetry and music, to opacité, as proposed by Glissant island, “and they left us an extraorand in his use of abstraction. The dinary land.” The name Martinique (Matinik in Creole) comes from sculptures that generally accompany Creuzet’s work appear as though Christopher Columbus’s mishearing of the Indigenous Taíno name swept to the shore from the sea: fraying pieces of cloth and fabric are for the island, Madiana – island of flowers. In 1635 the French arrived; wrapped around slim structural limbs that are either suspended from a year later, a genocide of the Indigenous peoples began. Martinique the ceiling or emerging from adjoining walls. There are also secrets was turned into a slave colony for the production of sugar, then more in this work, not everything is immediately perceptible or translated valuable than gold. The French imported more slaves to Martinique for the viewer; it’s the right to opacité, as proposed by Glissant. than were taken to all of present-day us apart from Louisiana (which The second day of our visit begins in the cast-iron-and-glass atrium has a long history as a French and then Spanish territory). of the Bibliothèque Schœlcher in Fort-de-France, with a performance Our trip had begun at the Cape 110 memorial, a field with sea- by poet Simone Lagrand: “Cette histoire n’a pas de krik. Pa ni yékrak / facing sculptures by artist Laurent Valère. Rough-hewn figures of Cette histoire sera dite même si la cour dort,” she says: This story has white stone emerge from the ground; the site, a memorial, functions no call, no response / It will be told even if the court sleeps. Each word as a reminder of the illegal slave trade that carried on years after aboli- lands hard, like a coin thrown to the floor. Lagrand speaks in Creole, tion. At the site, Creuzet recited a poem and played a piece of music as her poem is titled ‘Pays-mêlé’ (2021), mêlé in French meaning mixed;

Simone Lagrand and Julien Creuzet at the Bibliothèque Schœlcher, Fort-de-France, 6 February 2024. Photo: Nicolas Derne. © Institut Français

ArtReview

là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux / là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux (…) (detail), 2023, mixed media. Photo: Aurélien Mole. © Magasin cnac, Grenoble. Courtesy the artist

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là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux / là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux (…) (detail), 2023, mixed media. Photo: Aurélien Mole. © Magasin cnac, Grenoble. Courtesy the artist

Nous étions en terrasse, hors du temps, en ivresse quand ça commencer à péter dehors. La mousse de la bière blonde météore explosait dans le silence, plus de souffle, plus de soif. La nuit est une plaie ouverte (…) (detail), 2017, mixed media. © Magasin cnac, Grenoble. Courtesy the artist

Oh téléphone, oracle noir (...), 2023 (installation view, Magasin cnac, Grenoble). Photo: Aurélien Mole. © Magasin cnac, Grenoble. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

mêlé in Creole meaning chaos, unrest. It is also a verb: to be in trouble, and also to cause trouble. Creole carries a special register of resistance; anticolonial activism has always used the mixing and revising of language to articulate identity and resistance. The Schœlcher was Lagrand’s library when growing up, it’s where she first read Frantz Fanon. It was also Fanon’s library, where he first read the classics of French literature. As Adam Shatz writes in his new biography, when Fanon was told in school that he owed his freedom to a dead white man he was first stumped, and later enraged. His teacher was referring to Victor Schœlcher, whose book collection the library now houses. In 1802 Napoleon had reinstated slavery (it had been abolished in French colonies in 1794) and its practice was written into the French legal structure; trafficking was sustained even after slavery was abolished again in 1817. In 1848, after a trip through the Americas, Schœlcher petitioned to rewrite the law on slavery in France and its colonies. Victor Hugo describes the scene: ‘When the governor proclaimed the equality of the white race, the mulatto race, and the black race, there were only three men on the platform… a white, the governor; a mulatto, who held the parasol for him; and a Negro, who carried his hat.’ A new era of segregation was inaugurated; white settlers refused integration. In many ways, it persists. There is the Martinique experienced by métropole visitors – the beaches, the wood-cabin shacks full of fried fish – and then that of most Martinicans, who have been priced out by the leisure economy. French jurisdiction over the land restricts the formation of local industries, especially of agriculture, and of any trade between the islands. One of the few crops cultivated in Martinique is bananas. During the 1970s the French introduced chlordecone, an anti-weevil pesticide, to the island’s plantations. It’s highly toxic, banned by most governments, including in mainland France. Over 90 percent of the population of Martinique (and nearby Guadeloupe) were exposed to the pesticide, which poisoned the soil and freshwater, and islanders

have some of the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world. Research shows the two to be linked, and a case was taken to court, which eventually legislated in favour of the French government. We visit the atelier of artist Christian Bertin who grows his own bananas on a piece of land close to the island’s volcano, Pelée, and as the trees ripen, he wraps the fruit in canvas. He then bakes the bound banana fingers in ovens of his own design at a studio comprising at every corner installations made of old metal scrap – gates, fenders, tanks, washing-machine drums. It is a simple, complete gesture, repeated over the years. The baked bananas encased in canvas – large bulbous heads with scraggy limbs – are installed closely together, “forestlike”, he says as he makes us stand under them. ‘La date limite de colonization est arrivé / dlc dlc dlc,’ reads Lagrand’s poem ‘Pays mêlé’ in its final verse. ‘dlc’ is the acronym for la date limite de consommation, the use-by date stamped onto produce. In 2020, the year that statues all over the world ended up in rivers, city bays, the first to fall was here, in Martinique; it was a statue of Schœlcher. We visit the empty plinth, not to survey the stark, blank white platform, but to see what the statue’s removal now more clearly reveals: a mural that has always been behind it. Written by Anicet and rendered in the molten colours of the volcano – red, amber, an obsidian black – it narrates Martinican history: each layer a symbolic reference to the migration, displacement and revolutionary moments that shaped the island. “J’écris un futur différent,” says Lagrand, I’m writing a different future. “Voici un extrait de cette terre / Ne faites pas comme chez vois”, This is an extract from this land / don’t make yourself at home. ar Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion is on view in the Giardini, as part of the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer, editor and curator, currently in residence at the Beaux-Arts de Paris

Cloud cloudy glory doodles on the leaves pages, memory slowly the story redness sadness bloody redness on the skin (still), 2020, hd video animation, colour, sound, 12 min. © the artist

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ArtReview

Christoph Büchel With an apparent appetite for destruction, not least that of his own reputation and even art, what, one might ask, are the Swiss artist’s motivations, and does he have any limits? by Stephanie Bailey

Christoph Büchel tends to get cancelled. Take Capital Affair, the Swiss artist’s show with fellow artist Gianni Motti for Zürich’s Helmhaus in 2002: in lieu of artworks, the artists hid a cheque for the total exhibition budget of chf 50,000 in one of the museum’s galleries. If someone found it, they’d get the money, triggering the show’s closure. If they didn’t, the two artists would claim it on the official closing date, and any damage incurred by the search would be covered by a percentage of the budget and admission fees. The evening prior to the opening, Zürich mayor Elmar Ledergerber requested the amount be reduced to chf 20,000, otherwise he’d close the show. The artists refused, and Capital Affair was called off two hours before its opening press conference. Then Büchel’s exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass moca), Training Ground for Democracy, scheduled to open December 2006, collapsed into a lawsuit. Characteristic of Büchel’s brand of institutional critique, where imposing, hyperreal environments confront art’s political claims amid clusterfucked political realities, Training Ground for Democracy intended to mimic the mock-towns constructed by the us military for training, around the time of the ‘surge’, when thousands more us troops were deployed to Iraq. Among the items the museum procured at Büchel’s request were an oil tanker, a smashed police car, deactivated bombshells and a two-storey Cape Cod cottage – but not, alas, a commercial jetliner’s burned-out fuselage. According to court documents, Büchel grew frustrated with the museum’s handling of the project, which included a recreation of Saddam Hussein’s last hiding place. When the museum’s budget reached a limit, impacting assistant wages and prompting the museum to seek support from Büchel’s galleries against his wishes, he refused to continue unless certain conditions were met.

Mass moca publicly cancelled Büchel’s show on 22 May 2007 in a press release announcing Made at Mass moca, a new exhibition exploring (more successful) largescale artist commissions created at the institution. Büchel’s incomplete work was included albeit covered in tarpaulin, presumably until the museum received a verdict on the lawsuit it filed on 21 May seeking to show its ‘materials and partial constructions’ to the public – ‘the first time a us art institution has ever sought legal sanction to present work against an artist’s will’, noted art historian Virginia Rutledge in 2008. Büchel responded with a number of counterclaims. One sought an injunction on the museum displaying any part of the work, and another claimed damages for violating Büchel’s rights under the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act. ‘Since Mr. Büchel walked off the Mass moca project in January, accusations have flown back and forth like poison arrows, and it’s hard to sort out who did or didn’t do what and when,’ wrote Roberta Smith in The New York Times, while taking an unequivocal position on the matter. ‘If an artist who conceived a work says that it is unfinished and should not be exhibited, it isn’t – and shouldn’t be.’ The court felt differently: ‘When an artist makes a decision to begin work on a piece of art and handles the process of creation long-distance via e-mail, using someone else’s property, someone else’s materials, someone else’s money, someone else’s staff, and, to a significant extent, someone else’s suggestions regarding the details of fabrication – with no enforceable written or oral contract defining the parties’ relationship – and that artist becomes unhappy part-way through the project and abandons it,’ wrote the presiding judge, Michael Ponsor, ‘then nothing in the Visual Artists Rights Act or elsewhere in the Copyright Act gives that artist the right to dictate what that “someone else” does with what he has left behind, so long as the remnant is not explicitly labeled as the artist’s work.’

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In short, Training Ground for Democracy was a shit show – which in blatant failures of Contemporary Art’ that maga highlighted, hindsight is unsurprising, given the commission went ahead without ‘concerned more with spectacle and irony than critically dismantling a written contract – as was the fallout from its cancellation. Despite oppressive structures that undermine the lives of the most vulnerits win, Mass moca dismantled Training Ground for Democracy, while able’. The co-option of these prototypes – Büchel associated them Büchel reconstituted parts of the installation into Training Ground for with Land art and Minimalism – demonstrated contemporary art’s Training Ground for Democracy, presented by his then gallery Hauser ineffective ‘opposition to power and its abuse’, the letter continued, & Wirth at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2007. Reflecting the which ironically aligned with maga’s provocation, bearing in mind work’s mutation into what Büchel described as an ongoing meta- the cia’s instrumentalisation of Minimalism and other American project, budget spreadsheets, emails, letters and transcripts of legal art movements during the Cold War. Nevertheless, Büchel’s execudepositions were shown at Maccarone’s booth in the same fair. ‘This tion, which amplified his privilege as a white male artist peddling in new series of works I have been doing is a kind of physical manifes- controversy, obscured that shared concern. tation of the principle of freedom of speech and expression that the Maybe there’s a point to that. Entangling his apparent loathing dispute is about,’ Büchel told reporter of Western imperialism with his contempt Leaving controversies and for the mainstream artworld and his role Randy Kennedy. ‘It says to the museum: You within it, Büchel is fine with playing the cannot shut me up.’ The irony being that cancellations in his wake, villain in order to maximise the scope of Büchel rarely speaks in public at all. Büchel seems to invite the public discussion around his provocations. Meanwhile, Judge Ponsor – whose deliberate destruction of his Take his two-part 2014 exhibition, Land of ruling was partially overturned in 2010 David (Poynduk) and Land of David (Southdale by a federal appeals court – offered ‘a rare work wherever he goes Shopping Centre), which installed a prefabripersonal observation’ of ‘a sad case’ where both parties were responsible. ‘Something barbaric always adheres to cated dwelling used for settlement housing in Israel and Palestine in the deliberate destruction of a work of art – even one that is not quite the Tasmania’s Southwest National Park and transformed Hobart’s finished,’ he wrote, in a statement that could define Büchel’s entire Museum of Old and New Art (mona) in Tasmania into a shopping practice. Leaving controversies and cancellations in his wake, Büchel centre named after America’s first mall. Exhibits included a mock seems to invite that deliberate destruction wherever he goes. There Australian Liberal Party poster showing white sheep kicking a black was Deutsche Grammatik at Kassel’s Fridericianum in 2008, where sheep off the Australian flag, and one for an oyster bar opening at a trade fair of registered German political parties ended up with mona called The Midden, referring to the organic mounds evidenempty booths after parties represented in the Bundestag cancelled cing Aboriginal presence on the site where mona was built. A biogtheir participation upon learning of the neo-Nazi npd party’s invi- raphy of mona founder David Walsh contained, among other tation. And the mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice, documents, a list of Israeli illegal settlements, Adolf Eichmann’s a working mosque that Büchel controversially installed in a former Final Solution, a section from Solomon Guggenheim’s biography Catholic church for the Iceland Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and reflections on the life of Critchley Parker, who died in 1942 while which authorities shut down within a fortnight citing safety concerns. seeking a homeland in Western Tasmania for Jews escaping the The litany of offences circles back to one fact: Christoph Büchel Holocaust, drawing complex links between art, the racist foundations tends to get away with things, up to a point. Like when he stacked of modern Europe’s nationalist politics, antisemitism and Zionism 1,000 copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated into Arabic in the included, and the settler colonial histories of Australia and Israel. Land of David opened with scant indication that mona was staging middle of Hauser & Wirth’s booth at Frieze London in 2006, which received little more than a cheerful mention an exhibition at all, and Büchel’s authorEntangling his loathing ship was only revealed when a stand in in a New York Times profile on Iwan Wirth. mona’s foyer offering free dna testing to Or when he opened Guantánamo Initiative, of imperialism with contempt another collaboration with Motti, at determine Aboriginal descent – apparently for the artworld and his Centre Culturel Suisse à Paris at 6pm on 11 operated by the Australian government, role within it, Büchel is fine Decode Genetics and Roche – sparked September 2004. Challenging the legitipublic outcry. (As scholar Eleanor Paynter macy of the us naval base and detention with playing the villain and writer Nicole Miller have commented, centre on the site, Guantánamo Initiative initiated negotiations with the Cuban government to rent Büchel’s ‘tendency to blur or efface individual authorship reflects an Guantánamo Bay and establish a cultural centre there. Documents impulse not simply to catalyse audience agency, but to collapse the relating to the 1903 contract that asserted American control over the distinction between aesthetic and social spaces’). Lacking consultaarea were presented, including rent cheques the us Treasury appar- tion with Tasmania’s Aboriginal community, the installation was ently keeps sending to Cuba through the Swiss Embassy, and which the accused of being disrespectful and removed. Cuban Government has refused to cash in since the 1959 revolution. Describing ‘the spectre of unethical research’ haunting Tasmanian Perhaps unsurprisingly, Guantánamo Initiative led nowhere. That Aboriginal people, historian Greg Lehman contextualised the hurt. is, if the expectation was for the work to achieve its objective rather ‘The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre was one of the first organisathan agitate for reactions, like those Büchel triggered after launching tions in Australia to raise concerns when [Human Genome Diversity maga, a nonprofit art organisation that petitioned to designate eight Project] researchers began collecting dna from community members,’ prototypes for Donald Trump’s us–Mexico border wall as a national Lehman explained in Hobart’s daily newspaper Mercury. Dubbed the monument in 2018. In an open letter, art workers pointed out ‘the Vampire Project, ‘blood samples were obtained without informed

ArtReview

opening pages The Diamond Maker, 2020–. Photo: Michael Huwiler above Unplugged (Simply Botiful), 2007 (installation view, Art Unlimited, Art Basel, 2007). Photo: Georgios Kefalas. Courtesy Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

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consent and the genotypes of individuals were patented, resulting in to have willed its failure (which doesn’t mean he wasn’t prepared for claims of commercial ownership of the genes of marginalised people that potential). Particularly given his thoughts on Capital Affair, by wealthy corporations and governments.’ Nevertheless, Lehman whose ‘media-oriented and politico-cultural’ impact was achieved saw a critique of the Vampire Project in Büchel’s installation, given ‘at the cost of the show itself’ and its ‘greater potential for arousing the weaponisation of race, national identity and citizenship in the debate’. While reporter Kennedy, reflecting on his exchange with context of settler colonialism and its state-sanctioned hierarchies of Büchel as his profile rose amid the Mass moca scandal, felt that money systemic exclusion – ‘issues in 21st century Australia, as they are in the and attention were secondary concerns. annexation of Palestine by the state of Israel’. What remains, then, are Büchel’s motivations. Take his 2017 But Büchel’s mona adventure did not stop there. Another part exhibition at smak, Ghent, From the Collection / Verlust der Mitte (Loss of of the project, the C’Mona Community Centre, was a multipurpose Center). Büchel presented a chronological display of works by artists space installed in the museum that hosted, among other things, yoga from the Western canon, from cobra’s Asger Jorn to conceptualist classes, workshops with day-release prisoners and a meeting room for Joseph Beuys, that was shown with mattresses strewn on the floor local organisations. Expanding on Büchel’s volunteer-run Piccadilly in the staging of an emergency shelter. Another section of the Community Centre at Hauser & Wirth in London in 2011 – described by museum was repurposed into the living quarters for a group of art critic Karen Archey as reaching beyond the performative ‘hermetic refugees from Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan, who particibubble’ of relational aesthetics and its ‘disingenuous relationship to its pated in an archaeological dig behind the museum – ostensibly in cooperation with Association subject’, without resolving its Internationale Africaine, tied contradictions – C’Mona put a complex, unfiltered spotlight to the Belgian King Leopold II’s on one of modern and contemmurderous colonisation of the porary art’s greatest contradicCongo – looking for traces of a tions, by which art is presented citadel on which a casino was built for Ghent’s 1913 World as a relational force for the Expo, which eventually besocial good by institutions that came smak. The refugees also are intrinsically connected to rebuilt sections of the Calais historical, antirelational structures of exclusionary, hierar‘Jungle’ refugee camp on a site chical and extractionist power. near the museum where a huAs Lehman noted, ‘much of man zoo as Senegalese village Tasmania’s economic and culwas installed for that 1913 Expo. tural industry is built on the That gesture circled back to dystopic foundations of coloBüchel’s show, which includnisation’, and the fallout from ed a replica of the Congolese village presented at the 1958 Büchel’s mona show ampliWorld Expo in Brussels, and fied that fact. Speaking to Ausa trade-fair display of promotralia’s abc News, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Chief Exectional materials by companies utive Heather Sculthorpe said invested in Africa, like sda/ the lack of consultation with sdai, which bankrolled the Aboriginal elders was nothrenovation of Belgium’s Royal Barca Nostra, 2019 (installation view, 58th Venice Biennale). Museum of Central Africa. ing new for mona, making Photo: Jacky Chapman / Alamy Stock Photo Walsh’s swift decision to reWriting in Metropolis M, move the work and publicly apologise – after Büchel ‘high-tailed it Ghent-based critic Ory Dessau described Loss of Center as ‘more than back to Europe’, per mona’s Elizabeth Pearce – even more notable. a gesture of institutional critique deconstructing the ideology ‘For anyone who is familiar with mona’s brand, and its posturing as of the white cube and of museal display’, because ‘it politicizes an institution that seeks to shock and challenge, Walsh’s apology drew the artistic and cultural heritage of smak, and consequently of an unusually ethical line,’ wrote scholar Amy Spiers. ‘Büchel’s strategy Modernism in general, situating them within and exposing them succeeded in showing that even mona has its limits.’ to the bleeding context of the current European refugee crisis But what about Büchel’s limits? Given the volatility of his prac- and its historical roots in European colonialism’. Yet, as Gareth tice – he’s been called uncooperative, unethical, a ‘shock jock’, Harris noted in The Art Newspaper, while the project drew attena ‘stunning narcissist’, a ‘breaker of budgets’ and ‘a white male artist, tion to the Mediterranean migrant crisis, it largely ‘remained under continu[ing] the violence of white people’ – Büchel appears to have the radar’. Which may explain Büchel’s decision to transport the boat none, since creating conditions that maximise the potential for in which hundreds of migrants died in 2015 to the Venice Biennale in reactions that snowball into the public domain produce outcomes 2019, calling it Barca Nostra – ‘Our Boat’ – and installing it in front of even he can’t foresee. Even if Mass moca’s then-director Jim a café at the Arsenale. Thompson wondered if Büchel’s actions were ‘part of an elaborate Essentially a horrific readymade, Barca Nostra sunk in April 2015 art stunt’, Büchel seemed too invested in executing Training Ground between Libya and Lampedusa with an estimated 1,000 migrants

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onboard, of whom 28 survived. The Italian government recov- to news reports tracking the boat’s delayed return to Augusta years ered the wreck in 2016 and moved it to a base in Sicily before it was later, where plans are afoot to create a memorial garden around it. placed under the care of the Augusta municipality, a landing site ‘Certainly, the ship has attained an international dimension,’ Augusta for Operation Mare Nostrum, Italy’s response to the Mediterranean mayor Giuseppe Di Mare told The Art Newspaper in 2021, summing up migrant crisis. Mare Nostrum, or ‘Our Sea’, cost the Italian govern- the motivations behind Barca Nostra from the outset, with the vessel’s ment a reported £7 million per month, and ensured safe passage for delayed return to Sicily extending that range. Attributed to the over 100,000 people within a year of its launch in October 2013. But damage incurred during its transportation to Venice, when its metal after Italy appealed for assistance, eu states criticised the operation cradle collapsed while being lifted by a crane, Büchel made a claim for encouraging people to risk the sea crossing, so eu agency Frontex through the Biennale’s insurance to repair the vessel for its return, replaced Mare Nostrum with Operation Triton in 2014, with a slashed but was denied since the damage occurred in the air and not in the sea budget and focus on border security. – a predictably sophistic avoidance of responsibility. Effectively a policy of nonassistance, as Forensic Oceanography Given the financial burden Büchel presumably shouldered, concluded in their 2016 report Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of perhaps it’s no surprise that the subject of his latest project, with Non-Assistance at Sea, Triton created a situation where commercial Fondazione Prada at the Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, is debt. ships were increasingly called into rescue missions they weren’t The artist’s installation, Monte di Pietà, engages with the history of an suited to conduct – such was the case with the sinking of Barca Nostra eighteenth-century palazzo that served as a charitable pawn bank in 2015, they found. That year, European Parliament president Martin from 1834 to 1969, before it became the Historical Archive of the Schulz called for ‘burden sharing’ based on the fact that five out of Venice Biennale between 1975 and 2010. A central element to the exhi28 eu member states were taking in 50 percent of refugees to Europe at bition is The Diamond Maker: lab-grown single-carat diamonds that the time. Yet no effective cooperation manifested. Neither in creating Büchel has been making since 2020, using his unsold works and dna from his own faeces, with the humanitarian responses to a global crisis, nor in mediatintention to continue until ing the ultraright sentiments he dies. There’s some poetry and movements that rose as to the gesture, with each shita result – as demonstrated in diamond appearing like a 2018, when Italy’s far-right intearful, if disdainful, lament: as much a ploy to stay finanterior minister, Matteo Salvini, cially afloat, maybe, as an exlaunched a campaign to block pression of an ageing artist’s search-and-rescue vessels from outlook on an artworld he docking in Italian ports, seems incapable of coming to and drafted a hardline antimigrant bill adopted by the terms with – even if there seem Italian government. to be plenty in that world still willing to support him. It was within this desperate context that Barca Nostra There are echoes of 1% in was brought to the Venice this monetary return. PresenBiennale – in cooperation with ted at Frieze New York in the mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice, 2015 (installation view, Venice Biennale). Photo: Luigi Penello. Public domain Augusta’s municipal council 2012, the year he sought funds and Comitato 18 Aprile, which to bury a Boeing 727 in the lobbied against government plans to scrap the ship – with Büchel desert, 1% was Büchel’s attempt to sell six trolleys bought from homecovering transportation costs. Presented with little information – less people for between $350 and $500 for 100 times more. The only not for the lulz, it seems, but out of contempt for a wilful ignorance q&a with the artist that exists online could explain why he relies – the vessel’s arrival was lambasted as ‘tasteless’ by those at the vern- on such dick moves, which tar what may well be decent intentions issage, seemingly more concerned with the insult of its presence – with a shitty brush. ‘When money is used as the content and theme and those taking selfies with it, like a Martha Rosler collage come of a show, you’ve got to expect people to react. But there’s no telling to life – than discussing the exclusionary policies that brought it how they will react,’ he said of Capital Affair. ‘No direct provocainto being. (Granted, as curator Alexandra Stock wrote in a scathing tion or umpteenth art scandal was intended. It was meant more in takedown, ‘The optics [were] bad because Büchel set it up that the sense of a catalyst for debate, something which crowd-pleasing way’.) While the stunt drew international attention – including shows rarely achieve.’ Cue Ponsor’s observation of a barbaric residue responses from Salvini himself, countering the idea that the Venice that sticks to an artwork that is deliberately destroyed. Only now, Biennale is an ineffective stage for protest – it also revealed the the piece of work is Büchel himself. ar limits of internationalism, whether in the artworld or the world at large. Christoph Büchel’s exhibition Monte di Pietà is on view at Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, That limit has been monumentalised by the trail of articles and Venice, 20 April – 24 November posts that exist as a result, like a fraught and ever-expanding shadow of an ongoing crime; whether a petition for the boat’s removal from Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong the Venice Biennale accusing Büchel of capitalising on Black death

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How to Work Together Koo Jeong A’s project for the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale seeks to explode the idea of nations and divisions altogether Interview by Andy St. Louis

Koo Jeong A brings an immaterial dimension to the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, in an exhibition that probes the cognitive correlations between scent and memory. This project encapsulates the artist’s conceptual approach to activating altered states of perception, which yields site-specific installations that explore preexisting notions of presence and absence, real and unreal. Throughout Koo Jeong A’s three-decade-long career, this methodology has taken shape in the form of skateparks slathered in phosphorescent paint, ar ice sculptures viewable only on digitaldevice screens, organic matter that emits sonic vibrations and other interdisciplinary manifestations of uncanny imaginaries. Regardless of the medium or context, Koo Jeong A always invokes poetic reassessments of the mundane by making felt that which exists beyond the spectrum of everyday perception. For their commission at the Korean Pavilion, Koo Jeong A presents a body of work that expands on their longstanding interest in ephemerality. odorama cities proposes an invisible portrait of the Korean Peninsula – a ‘scent landscape’ that renders individual memories as olfactory sensations. During an open call asking, ‘What is your scent memory of Korea?’ the artist collected some 600 individual stories, then collaborated with Seoul-based perfumer nonfiction to transform these memories into an assortment of fragrances that visitors encounter within the Korean Pavilion in Venice. ArtReview spoke with the artist about their

enduring interest in our sense of smell and its capacity to conjure pluralistic constructions of national identity. artreview Your project for the Korean Pavilion involved a huge number of people who contributed to its development. How did odorama cities come about and what was the motivation for undertaking such a complex project? koo jeong a I truly wanted to talk about an expanded and inclusive concept of the nation, which we collected in the form of scent stories through an open call. It started with a question about scent memories of Korea from all over the globe – not only limited to Koreans but also non-Koreans, as well as people who came to Korea or spent time there for work, or who were adopted or currently live outside of Korea but still have a story to tell about the scent of Korea, from very long ago to the recent past. We received 600 submissions from June to September last year. So odorama cities is certainly about collective thinking as well as remote imagination, something that is very abstract and at the same time becomes a wider story about creating a kind of new knowledge or meaning. ar Scent has been an area of interest for you since the very beginning of your career. It’s interesting that scent is capable of conjuring very visceral responses – which typically correlate to some sort of memory of a place, person or emotion – yet these memories are unique to each person. This makes scent a universal medium that also has a very personal dimension. In your numerous

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olfactory projects from throughout the past three decades, how do you typically go about selecting the scents that serve as the integral components of these installations? kja My first exhibition with scent was in 1996, when I was living in a very small studio on the top of a building in the centre of Paris. I decided to move out, and so I had three days of free space in my little studio and wanted to celebrate that shift of moving to a slightly bigger studio. I didn’t produce anything like a special scent, but I bought mothballs from a nearby shop. They had exactly the same scent as a grandmother’s cupboard. ar That’s a very distinctive scent, and one that is recognisable across generations and cultures. Did the decision to use mothballs come from a certain memory of yours? kja By using mothballs, I just wanted to celebrate that vacuum of time and space, which was very important for the installation. Memory is dynamic – it is not a precise place in the brain, as [author and science historian] Israel Rosenfield told me. But my idea was to shift the vacuum space into a common area or common future, and that motivation was also a part of the idea for odorama cities. Of course, when we collected the scent memories last summer, there were several people who wrote about the mothball smell, so we also included it among the 17 scents selected for the exhibition. ar Whereas your previous works were all based on a single scent, visitors to odorama cities will be experiencing a whole ‘scent landscape’. How and

Its Soul, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale

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kangse SpSt, 2023–24, bronze, plywood metal, pigment paint, scent diffuser, sensor, 157 cm (height). © and courtesy the artist

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why did you transition from working with one scent at a time to working with a broad spectrum of scents? kja When I was invited to propose a project for the Korean Pavilion, I was thinking of the need to talk about our time, which is a time of separation. I think it’s important to think more about togetherness and about a common future. And since the Giardini in Venice is also divided into nations with the pavilions, with this project I wanted to provoke something that will create some transnational pavilion that proposes an alternative to this fragmented outlook. That was the first motivation. By constructing a portrait of the Korean Peninsula, it was totally possible to compose a scent landscape out of people’s immaterial knowledge. This portrayal of the Korean Peninsula doesn’t provoke any sort of division of nations, but instead unification and togetherness – not separation but working together. ar What was your process for pulling keywords from the 600 individual scent memories collected through the open call’s many responses? And how were these keywords used to generate the actual scents that you produced for the exhibition? kja As we read through the 600 stories, we found lots of repetition. People wanted to remember something special to them and there were common themes, such as sharing memories of their family or their country, their experiences in nature – whatever memories make them happy. We created a database

that tracked the words that were repeated, the different scents that stood out and the style of storytelling or text. Then we selected the top 50 words and I divided them into cities. We made a kind of molecule out of these modules and then we started to construct. We were looking for very structured words that represented Korea and the diversity of the country, incorporating the real dimensions of people’s experiences from all over the world.

“This portrayal of the Korean Peninsula doesn’t provoke any sort of division of nations, but instead unification and togetherness – not separation but working together” ar This plurality of dimensions also translates into the realm of dreams, which are notoriously slippery in terms of where and when their stories take place. Memories are rooted in actual experiences in the physical world, whereas dreams are less tethered to reality. I think odorama cities activates both paradigms. It’s based on individual scent memories, but they are injected into a space where the actual thing connected to that memory is missing. In an interview for the 2023 exhibition Odor, Immaterial Sculptures at mgk Siegen, you said that ‘smell is the layers of

construction, a master plan of where you want to be’. Do you think that your project for the Korean Pavilion is also about using smell to construct dreams of the future? kja Totally, because the microparticles in each scent have different speeds when they move in the air. Thinking about the diversification of dimensions, I have been working in n-dimensional space, following mathematician Georg Cantor’s set theory – in dimension one and dimension two, you can’t see any differences between the triangle and the square, but in three dimensions, you can finally see their shapes are different. If you go into five, six, seven, n dimensions, you will have endless invention. The very microparticles of scent also have all these different dimensions in chemistry, in nature and in ourselves when we share space with those particles. The scientist Carlo Rovelli said that what you see is not always real and that time doesn’t pass by – rather, time is always a combination of the events and relationships in both a fast and slow state. All the probabilities and state relationships are interconnected, so when you are in the actual exhibition space of the Korean Pavilion, an image will become a vision in your brain and you will see yourself. ar odorama cities is on view at the Korean Pavilion in the Giardini, as part of the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November Andy St. Louis is a Seoul-based art critic and curator

OooOoO, 2019 (installation view, Triennale Milano, 2019). © Triennale Milano. Photo: Gianluca Di Ioia. Courtesy the artist

April 2024

The Idea of an Artworld Sifting through 75 years of its archive, ArtReview looks back on its coverage of the Venice Biennale

The year of the Venice Biennale’s 60th edition – that’s 2024 – is also ArtReview’s 75th anniversary. What was then titled Art News & Review was launched in 1949 – a year after the Venice Biennale was reinstituted following the Second World War, during which the Biennale had been hijacked to serve the politics of Benito Mussolini’s Fascists, its last edition held in 1942, before the events of the war overtook it. Emerging from the carnage of the conflict, European countries set to rebuilding, economically and culturally, and modern art became part of that effort. The Biennale, once a showcase for competing national identities, became a place where the more international culture of modern art could be celebrated. Ever since, it has served as a platform on which art from around the world is presented (though distance, money, cultural attitudes and politics conspire to make this a partial representation of what’s going on). But more importantly, the Biennale could be said to have created the idea of an ‘artworld’ as such – binding together disparate nations and cultures to the idea that art is something shared by societies everywhere, and that there’s something worthwhile in everyone else seeing what the artists where you come from are doing. Whatever the criticisms often levelled at the Venice Biennale in particular (a relic of colonial history and nationalism; an assertion of European or Western cultural values; an accomplice in the global commodification of culture; a tool of gentrification…), it remains the model for the ‘largescale temporary exhibition’ of contemporary art, those mega-exhibitions that now exist everywhere, and whose continued occurrence confirms the global reality of the ‘artworld’. ArtReview has often, but not always, paid attention to the Venice Biennale. Searching ArtReview’s archive reveals an ebb and flow of interest; an uneven and partial enthusiasm for this grand event, but one which is worth revisiting, to discover not only some of what went on at the Biennale, but also to see how art critics paid attention to it. Here ArtReview presents a selection of Biennale coverage from 1964 to 1990. Some critics were regular visitors – the Czechoslovak émigré J.P. Hodin and the Telegraph’s art critic Michael Shepherd. The following articles record some of the shifts across three decades, during which the Biennale went from Modernism to postmodernism, and from a Eurocentric institution to a more global one, via the political and cultural crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. ArtReview doesn’t always agree with itself after all these years – so has added notes to the documents; factual information, questions and criticisms. It may be time, right now, when the biennial exhibition needs a big rethink about where it is headed. A good time, then to look back on where it came from. ArtReview

ArtReview

1 A ‘vanity fair’, but also a kind of com-

petition, for J.P. Hodin the Biennale in 1964 is a mix of drowsy boredom and a vaguely annoyed sense that new things are happening, if not in Europe. Robert Rauschenberg has just won the Grand Prize, for his canvas Buffalo ii (1964), with its depictions of recently assassinated John Kennedy, us Army helicopters and Coca-Cola logos. But Rauschenberg’s win is a jolt – only the second time since the war that the Grand Prize is awarded to an American, it also signals the arrival of new ways of making a painting (silkscreen and photography) and the sense that art has to face up to the new world of technology and mass media. 2 The realities of a bigger artworld out there aren’t going away; local values and provincialism, and the speed of change from style to style are becoming issues. The artworld is accelerating and expanding; the idea that there might be a common set of criteria – of forms and reasons for making art – is starting to seem uncertain. The work of Andrea Cascella, sculptor of interlocking carved forms that appear both organic and mechanical, seems to embody this ambivalence. 3 There are developments that are ‘crazes’ (like American Pop art) and developments that should be taken seriously, such as kinetic art. 4 It’s all about national pride,

though, as if it were a contest between countries, and as long as they aren’t at war with each other. The Eurovision Song Contest is now eight years old. It’s perhaps a coincidence that most of the other countries Hodin criticises are behind the Iron Curtain; it’s in the Russian Pavilion, with its ‘official art’, that ‘art stops dead’. 2

5 Some art scenes are ‘out of tune’

with the contemporary moment. Art is something with a leading edge, with developments that lead to a consensus. Coming together (those 400 critics meeting 400 artists in Venice – still a small world) is a way of transmitting new trends to other parts of the world, or risk being out of sync.

Arts Review, Vol xvi, No 13, 11–25 July 1964, page 3, ‘Venice Biennale’, by J.P. Hodin

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1 Unintentionally surreal opening

images of protesting students demonstrating and fighting with police, alongside tourists and café orchestras, while plainclothes policemen masquerade as art critics during the Biennale’s press opening; vaguely hallucinatory, evoking the satirical nihilism of 1960s radical cinema; Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Weekend, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorema, Lindsay Anderson’s If… (all 1968). 2 Venice’s art students, taking their cue from student protests across Europe, come up with slogans denouncing art as commodity, demanding the end of ‘bourgeois’ art. Noting that fellow critic Pierre Restany (a more dedicated follower of artistic novelty and radicalism) is echoing Chairman Mao by issuing his Little Red Book of Pictorial Revolution, Hodin sees youthful pretentiousness, but also echoes of an earlier ‘anti-art’ rebellion, that of the Dada artists, 50 years before.

3 Nevertheless, student radicalism may be the only exciting thing around, and while the critic wouldn’t want ‘novelty and shock and surprise’ at any cost, there is a growing sense that art won’t be able to come up with anything substantially new. Having dismissed Pop art as a ‘craze’ a few years earlier, Hodin, like many critics at the end of the 1960s, now sees a cacophony of empty art ‘trends’. What Hodin wants is an artist who reveals the ‘mysteries of existence’, though what those are isn’t too clear. 4 Hodin thinks that if art has ended

up as mere novelty, and radicalism among the young is merely destructive, these are symptoms of something bigger – a culture giving up on the idea of the ‘human condition’, and anything that might make art bigger than just the price paid for them. The ‘culture of Europe’ here might be the old humanistic tradition that dates back to the Renaissance; but, Hodin glumly concludes, the ‘spiritual attitude of modern man is sick’.

Arts Review, Vol xx No 14, 20 July 1968, page 452, ‘Besieged Biennale’, by J.P. Hodin

ArtReview

1 The idea of a ‘moral shock’ to an institution by rebellious artists and students suggests something of the effect that the 1968 revolts had on cultural institutions. Even though old institutions like the Biennale wanted to compromise, Hodin notes that many artists stayed away; The New York Times reported that artists set to show at the American Pavilion (including Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol) withdrew their work in protest against the us wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. 2 Can a biennial really be a comprehensive or objective survey of all the ‘best achievements’ in art from around the world? Putting four ageing historians and critics in charge (these various professors were all born between 1909 and 1920) was probably not going to convince a younger generation of artists that the Biennale had its finger on the pulse of contemporary art.

6 2

3 The old notion of the artist as a maker of tangible things produced by age-old techniques is on the way out. The idea that the ‘creative act’ is located in forms of skill was being challenged by artists’ use of new media. Nevertheless it has remained a stubborn marker of value in art since. 4 Although the critic is lamenting the disappearance of a particular world and a view of art, Hodin can see that there is something oppressive about artworks that are fixated on using technology to produce sensory effects.

5 Here come artists and artworks that

are ‘intellectual’, full of rationality and cerebral coldness. Computers, synthetic materials, science and technology are what artists are into. ‘Feeling’, for the old critic, should be a normal aspect of why artists make artworks. 4

6 Here is Luis Fernando Benedit, whose Biotrón was a Perspex and metal enclosure of flowers and live bees feeding on the flowers. Roberto Burle Marx’s plans for a park in São Paulo pointed outwards to the merger of painting, landscape and urban design. In both cases, art is something bigger than the art gallery can contain. 7 Did art become a thing of the past? Hodin’s attachment to art as feeling and human expression and the crafting of materials by hand would be quickly sidelined by the explosion of artists experimenting with other disciplines and methodologies. The old Modernism finally over.

Arts Review, Vol xxii, No 16, 15 August 1970, page 521, ‘Venice Biennale’, by J.P. Hodin

April 2024

1 Since the artworld has expanded

globally since 1976, is the idea of having a single ‘bringing-together’ of the contemporary ‘art world’ even possible today? While, by 1976, the Biennale had begun to reorganise itself to accommodate both national presentations and a more international survey of contemporary activity, it remained a Western representation of what the ‘world itself’ might look like.

2 The freewheeling approach to national presentations turned out to mean that, in practice, the commercial art scenes – of particular galleries and dealers – had come to have a major influence in what was presented at the Biennale. 3 Shepherd points to the emerging reality of the ‘temporary structures’ making their mark on the art system. In 1972, the now-legendary Harald Szeemann had curated his hugely influential edition of Kassel’s Documenta, while the Biennale de Paris had, from 1971 to 1975, turned to presenting many of the more radical artistic trends from Europe and North America.

4 Critics are becoming curators of

parts of a bigger thematic proposition, a new development for the Biennale. Significantly, these thematic approaches also involve an art-historical purpose – reconnecting old avantgardes of the earlier twentieth century (especially from Soviet Russia) with contemporary activity.

Arts Review, Vol xxviii, No 16, 6 August 1976, page 401, ‘Venice Biennale ’76’, by Michael Shepherd

ArtReview

5 Art history and political history

becomes the subject-matter of exhibitions, staged as interventions in current politics. Although the critic doesn’t dwell on the issue, what follows indicates a similar activity of connecting the past to the present. Remembering alternative histories becomes the task of the largescale exhibition, in contrast to the histories maintained by museums. 5

Arts Review, Vol xxviii, No 16, 6 August 1976, page 406, ‘Venice Biennale ’76’, by Michael Shepherd

April 2024

1 The Venice Biennale becomes a matter of glamour, fashion and hedonism, something not to be taken too seriously, a beautiful backdrop to a kind of cultural tourism… 2 …nevertheless, the critic is keen to recount the big changes to the Biennale instituted by its leftwing director, Carlo Ripa di Meana – to summarise the scale of ambition that Ripa di Meana brought to the event, which is a more critically reflective form of exhibition-making.

3 The limits of confronting international politics, though, become clear as the ussr withdraws from the 1978 edition, following Ripa di Meana’s earlier ‘Biennale of Dissent’. The ussr, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia boycotted the 1978 edition; only the ussr persisted, eventually returning in 1982.

4 Shepherd notices the ‘exhibi-

tions of two feminist groups’, but doesn’t record that the exhibition of concrete poetry was the exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio (Materialisation of Language), curated by artist and poet Mirella Bentivoglio, an all-woman show of work by over 90 artists, the first such to be staged at the Biennale. 5 ‘To offer public art or private’,

here, points to how nongallery art is starting to take shape in the context of largescale exhibitions; experiments in Land art, performance and site-specific art start to become domesticated for biennial consumption…

Arts Review, Vol xxx, No 14, 21 July 1978, page 369, ‘Venice Biennale 1978’, by Michael Shepherd

ArtReview

6 £202 ‘economy’ return airfare from London, about £1,450 at current values!

Arts Review, Vol xxx, No 14, 21 July 1978, page 386, ‘Venice Biennale 1978’, by Michael Shepherd

April 2024

1 Holzer’s ‘Abuse of power comes

as no surprise’ would become the rallying call of the artworld’s#MeToo movement some three decades later; which can either be read as Holzer retaining her radical power, or the reduction of political movements to pithy slogans. 2 The Iran–Iraq War, which started after Saddam Hussein spearheaded the invasion of Iran, had ended two years earlier; that same year Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, resulting in a fatwa being placed on the author by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. To this day, Iraq does not have a permanent pavilion at the Biennale, but 2024’s edition features a record number of Iraqi artists in Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition.

3 One of Petry’s fellow critics did see the work in fact: Edward Ball would later discuss the Italian Pavilion with Edward Said in The New Statesman, praising a work in which Ukrufi sent packages to various Western capitals, ‘to evoke the experience of displacement’. 4 Jason Donovan and Kylie

Minogue. Then stars of Australian soap opera Neighbours, their characters’ wedding was marked with the release of the chart topping duet Especially For You (1989). 5 Cicciolina, also known as Ilona

Staller, was a member of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. Her Partito dell’Amore (Party of Love) was libertarian, countercultural and sex positive. Jeff Koons and Staller were married when he created Made in Heaven (1989–91), but they separated two years later.

Arts Review, Vol xlii No 14, 13 July 1990, page 380, ‘Venice: The Biennale’, by Michael Petry

ArtReview

6 The Pope and the Penis (1990), by the artist collective Gran Fury, consisted of a giant poster of Pope John Paul II with a corresponding text detailing the Church’s doctrine on sex and contraception, exhibited near a poster featuring an erect penis. At every step the work’s exhibition was threatened, first when Italian customs seized it; then the artists were visited by us diplomats worried about the brewing controversy; that visit was followed by one from the Italian police; the Biennale planned to remove it until other exhibiting artists threatened a boycott; magistrates visited following legal action proposed by the Italian parliament. Gran Fury’s Avram Finkelstein recalled that at one point they were forced to hide the work behind the bins of a pizzeria lest it be confiscated.

Arts Review, Vol xlii No 14, 13 July 1990, page 381, ‘Venice: The Biennale’, by Michael Petry

April 2024

The Biennale at the End of Globalisation

by J.J. Charlesworth

What’s next for the contemporary-art biennial, now that the era of neoliberal globalisation that shaped it starts to unravel?

ArtReview

This year marks the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale. Less noticed first Havana Bienal), to the [end of the twentieth century], more is the fact that it’s also the 50th anniversary of the edition that, in than fifteen international biennials have been established’. Basualdo one sense, didn’t happen. After the edition of 1968, which featured argues that the biennial form is the cultural expression of globalisaart-student protests and riot police, and following several years of tion, a phenomenon ‘reflected precisely in the growing proliferation controversy over how the Biennale should be run, the new president, of this unstable institution of the largescale international exhibition’. the socialist Carlo Ripa di Meana, recast the mission of the organisaBut if the ‘largescale international exhibition’ of contemporary tion, taking it, for the next three years, in an explicitly political direc- art is a relatively recent phenomenon, closely tied to the realities of tion. This was not business as usual: the national pavilions were shut- globalisation, it might be that the period that drove its expansion tered, the previous model of historical surveys was abandoned and is coming, if not to an end, then to some kind of juncture. The polithe summer schedule shifted to October. The 1974 edition became tics in which largescale exhibitions of the Western artworld operate ‘The Biennale for a democratic and anti-fascist culture’, committed is changing fast. As the Biennale’s 2024 edition gets ready to open, it to staging art, theatre and cinema that protested against the Chilean already finds itself faced with the conflicting aspects of the shifting dictatorship that had overthrown the leftwing government of culture of globalisation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that conflict lies in Salvador Allende the year before. Then, in 1976, though the exhibi- the reemerging tensions between nationalist and internationalist tions of the national pavilions returned, Ripa di Meana framed the agendas. In this, the Venice Biennale’s peculiar hybrid identity, as at main exhibition and the edition’s theme as a ‘Homage to Democratic once a showcase for the reality and the idea of the nation-state, and also Spain’, at a moment when Spain had a platform for a different supranationendured four decades of the rightalism, has come to the fore. That hybrid wing regime of General Franco. And by identity, meanwhile, pulls into focus the particular character of largescale 1977 the maverick president was planning the ‘Biennale of Dissent’, a showexhibitions: that of the global curator. case of unofficial Soviet art, theatre and Foreigners Everywhere is the title of the international art exhibition film by artists either still in the ussr, or Russian dissidents living abroad. element of the Biennale, curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa. It’s the The edition, which finally opened on slogan for a critique of the politics of 15 November 1977, was loudly decried national identity, of borders, of stateby the Russian government, and put hood and statelessness, that, according into question the loyalties of the Italian to Pedrosa’s curatorial statement, will Communist Party, while bringing Ripa privilege those seen historically as podi Meana’s new approach under intense litical, social and cultural ‘strangers’; domestic political scrutiny. By 1978, Ripa di Meana had resigned, and the ‘the queer artist, who has moved within Biennale was reestablished in the form different sexualities and genders, often that has endured since – independent being persecuted or outlawed; the outpresentations in the national pavilions sider artist, who is located at the and a common largescale exhibition, margins of the art world, much like the self-taught artist, the folk artist and the put together by the Biennale itself. Nevertheless, the events of that artista popular; the indigenous artist, decade are a reminder that while the frequently treated as a foreigner in his Venice Biennale – oldest of all the bienor her own land.’ nials – tends to appear to be a permanent It can, of course, also be read as a rebuke to the political context of conand immovable presence in the global art system, it has never been immune to pressures for change or temporary Italy, and contemporary Europe more broadly. This contemporary politics, or, at its most radical, to the possibility of edition of the Biennale is the first to open under the populist rightdisappearing altogether. And yet the history of the politically engaged wing government of Giorgia Meloni, which came to power in October Biennales that Ripa di Meana instigated, for a brief moment, was 2022, on a ticket of cultural traditionalism and curbing immigration, quickly forgotten. this last also a reflection of the fact that immigration and the control During the four decades that followed, the Biennale morphed of borders is becoming a major electoral issue across Europe. With progressively into an event that both reflected and drove the artworld the Meloni government’s appointment of rightwing journalist and into the age of globalisation, which accelerated, commentator Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as the following the end of the Cold War, from the Biennale’s new president, some observers worry above Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Italian), 2004 (installation view, what this might mean for the Biennale’s artistic 1990s onwards. As Carlos Basualdo noted in his Cité internationale des arts Paris, 2004). independence and culture of internationalism. 2006 essay ‘The Unstable Institution’, after the © Studio Claire Fontaine. Courtesy the artist Biennale’s founding in 1895 it would take ‘five Tensions over the politics of internationand Galleria t293, Rome alism, the nation-state and the Biennale’s indemore decades and two world wars to found the facing page Posters for the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Bienal (1951)’. Yet ‘in the brief interpendence have also surfaced in controversy over 1974. Courtesy Archivio Storico della lude of fifteen years, from 1984 (the year of the Israel’s participation, in the wake of the latest Biennale di Venezia, asac

April 2024

developments in the Israel–Gaza conflict. An open letter signed by South to Western-centric perspectives in the biennials organised outover 22,000 calling for the Biennale to exclude Israel prompted Italy’s side the West, but also the arrival of those perspectives within the minister of culture to intervene directly, with a statement excoriating global biennials of the West. those who ‘think they can threaten the freedom of thought and of creaThe incorporation of overlooked and ignored voices of the Global tive expression in a democratic, free nation like Italy’. Meanwhile, the South was the rationale for the engagement of Indonesian colleccampaign group Art Not Genocide Alliance (anga) denounces what tive ruangrupa as artistic director of Documenta 15. It also frames the it sees as the double standards of a bienappointment of Pedrosa, the first South American curator of the Biennale. Both nial that supported Ukraine following As the Venice Biennale’s 2024 of these appointments allow these very Russia’s invasion in 2022. Now anga is edition gets ready to open, demanding the ostracisation of Israel’s Western, very European institutions it already finds itself faced with the to signal their commitment to current representation by participants, press and visitors. And yet autocratic counpostcolonial curatorial agendas. As conflicting aspects of the shifting tries like Saudi Arabia and China are Basualdo perceptively noted in ‘The culture of globalisation, namely present at the Biennale to little critiUnstable Institution’, while museums the tensions between nationalist ‘are, first and foremost, Western insticism, suggesting that both the needs of European diplomacy and the priortutions… the global expansion of largeand internationalist agendas ities of protesters continuously shift scale exhibitions performs an insistent and change. de-centering of both the canon and artistic modernity’. What he saw Whichever side one takes, or whether one takes sides at all, it’s as a novel development during the 2000s (particularly with Okwui evident that the tensions emerging in world politics are starting to Enwezor’s groundbreaking Documenta 11 in 2002) has now become fracture the benign, if vacuous, internationalism that has under- a frequent rationale in largescale exhibitions: from Documenta to written not only the Venice Biennale but the wider model of the bien- Venice; from the Bienal de São Paulo to the Biennale Jogja. Common nial during the era of globalisation. Arguably, that model was always to many of these curatorial projects is the emphasis on international only really credible when ‘globalisation’ meant the kind of world order and transnational solidarities over national ones. governed by an unchallenged West, dominated This points to a development that is too little by a hegemonic us. But that unipolar world order examined in the evolution of the biennial or Donskoj e Rosal, Cortina di ferro (Iron Curtain), 1977 (installation view in the fine arts section is now a more fractious and unstable multipolar largescale exhibition, perhaps because its develof the ‘Biennale of Dissent’, 1977, Venice). world. And one of the cultural aspects of that unopment is assumed as a given; the role and Photo: asac. Courtesy Archivio Storico status of the curator. There were not always ravelling is the growing challenge of the Global della Biennale di Venezia, asac

ArtReview

curators of contemporary art at the Biennale; until the 1970s, the large rather than historical art; exhibitions whose curators, in the decades group exhibitions staged alongside the national pavilions tended that followed, became more representative of the global artworld, to be art-historical surveys, intended to reconnect an international and whose exhibitions, like the many other largescale exhibitions public with the art of the earlier twentieth-century, a history that had that would soon appear, became the ‘means to confer order on the been obscured and suppressed by the rise of fascism in Europe and thick samples of present activity’. the disruptions of war. In a letter to the New York Review in September 1977, ahead of the But by the late 1960s, critics agreed that this art-historical func- ‘Biennale of Dissent’, Ripa di Meana argued that ‘Art inevitably creates tion had largely been achieved. So in 1968, the British critic Lawrence a tension between itself and society, its conventions, accepted ideas, Alloway could observe the shortcomings of the Venice Biennale, established ideologies, prejudices, and conventional morality. How a concluding that, ‘at present, the Biennale is formed as always, by the society absorbs these tensions, how it deals with the defiance posed participating countries’ send-ins, over which Venice has no say, and both by art and ideas – these are questions that have been of concern by random conglomerations on the labyrinthine walls of the Central to the Venice Biennale.’ That concern, however, was that of a curator Pavilion.’ ‘What is necessary now’, Alloway wrote, ‘is to discover siding with a more activist agenda for art, and willing to mobilise an a means to confer order on the thick samples of present activity.’ entire organisation to political intervention, destablising, in the procWhat Alloway was looking for – though the figure had not been ess, the unspoken compromise between politics and art on which the named yet – was the curator of contemporary art; the individual who, biennial model is founded. Today, largescale exhibitions are again beeven in 2006, Basualdo could call ‘a relatively unfamiliar figure’, now coming sites of political contestation and conflict, shaped by the ending needed to ‘negotiate the distance between the value system [of] the of the era of neoliberal globalisation once led by the West. But as the critic and art historian, and… the ideological pressures and prac- controversies over Documenta highlighted, these conflicts are arising tices corresponding to the institutional setting in which such events because while curatorial agendas have globalised and internationalemerge’. Six years after Alloway’s comments, the Venice Biennale was ised, at the level of national politics electorates are turning away from rebooted by a radical director who turned the antique institution into the globalist perspective, as evidenced by the rise of populist political a platform for political art, engaging with geopolitical issues well movements and governments in Europe and the us. As contemporary beyond the bounds of Venice or Europe. Ripa di Meana’s experiment curators advocate, through biennials, for a postnational view of the eventually hit the hard limits of national politics and Cold War diplo- future, they are starting to encounter the turn away from the globalist macy. What emerged out of it was a Biennale that view taking place across the West. The biennial La Intermundial Holobiente, Theaterschlag, of contemporary art, born of neoliberal globaliretained the old form of the national presenta2022 (installation view, sation, may not survive that contradiction. The tions, but which would host increasingly influDocumenta 15, Karlsaue Park, Kassel). ential curated exhibitions of contemporary, only question is – what comes next? ar Photo: Nils Klinger

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a morte con dignità 91

Matthew Wong, Vincent van Gogh Painting as a Last Resort Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 1 March – 1 September A painter of intensely colourful yet tormented canvases kills himself in his mid-thirties, having only begun painting at age twenty-seven after trying various other trades. This artist has suffered from mental health issues, has had unhappy dealings with the artworld and finally found in painting the best way to articulate his tumultuous, uncontrollable inner life. Such, of course, is Van Gogh’s story. It’s also that of Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong, who died in 2019 after a brief, rocketing career that brought him about as much happiness as Van Gogh’s commercial failure did him. Painting as a Last Resort is how Wong described his chosen medium to a friend, and this, his first European survey show, combines 62 of his canvases with six by Van Gogh, one of his chief influences.

You walk in with suspicions: are there vested interests, invisible hands, behind this speedy would-be canonisation? (The show appears to have been driven by an in-house curator’s enthusiasm and is part of an ongoing series pairing Van Gogh with contemporary artists.) Will it backfire anyway? And then you look, and all kinds of perceived distances – between Wong and Van Gogh, deep and recent past, Wong and us – fall away. Wong, who struggled with severe depression and Tourette’s syndrome and was autistic, first studied anthropology and gained a master’s in photography before turning to painting circa 2011, primarily using Facebook to self-educate and to correspond voluminously with other artists. The show’s opening phase shows him,

Matthew Wong, Coming of Age Landscape, 2018, oil on canvas, 152 × 178 cm. © Matthew Wong Foundation c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023. Courtesy Home Art

ArtReview

like any diligent art student, working through influences, mainly Postimpressionism and gestural abstraction: a highlight, 2014’s sensuously smeared Valley, filters aspects of de Kooning and Joan Mitchell through a tangerine-andtoothpaste-green haze. Within a year, though, Wong had found a pained confessional mode: in the ink-on-rice-paper portrait Untitled (2015), against a quivering forest backdrop, we see a face wrapped in constraining black straps, eyeballs staring out anxiously, mouth bound. Around this time, Wong started selling work – figures like White Columns director Matthew Higgs had begun positioning him as a notable outsider artist, which he claimed to feel ambivalent about – and, as he kept painting and researching, his work gained an itchy,

Vincent-infused radiance. In The Sun (2016), multicoloured impasto lines laser explosively from the buttery titular orb at the painting’s centre. The Other Side of the Moon (2017), which the catalogue cross-references with a similar Forrest Bess painting, feels like a colour photonegative: a deep green moon hangs in a marmalade sky above a fervid, mottled landscape of psychedelically coloured flora in black fields. Like so many of Wong’s landscapes, it doesn’t feel so much like a physical place as analogous to an interiority both rich and saturnine. Where, given the ostensibly double-headed nature of the show, is Van Gogh in this? One answer would be ‘nowhere much’: his paintings generally preface the chapter divisions (with training-wheels titles like ‘Bold Brushwork’ and ‘Learning by Doing’), avoiding explicit compare-and-contrast. Another answer, though, especially as we steer into Wong’s final two years, is ‘everywhere’, as the younger artist’s envisioning of and clinging to nature – painted,

in his case, from imagination – becomes increasingly intense, even as secondary influences like Alex Katz streamline his brushwork. With its central luminary presiding over an expanse of golden yellow countryside, Van Gogh’s sunbaked 1889 Wheatfield with a Reaper is formally comparable with Wong’s moonlit Coming of Age Landscape (2018), over which calligraphic marks spell out a mysterious gazetteer of trees. It being neither day nor night but some strange, pregnant, insomniac interstice becomes, in his final years, key: see the almost-surrealist silence of A Dream (2019), where a cornflower-coloured trail tracks through midnight-blue woodland towards a beach, above which the sun or the moon casts a martini-glass-shaped reflection in near-black water. This motif, a route leading towards somewhere you can never really get to or, conversely, know you’re headed down whatever you do, repeats piercingly through Wong’s late canvases.

The wristy Dark Reverie (2018), a smudgy crooked path into an almost lightless, spooky-branched forest that finally disappears round a bend, is perhaps Wong at his most resigned. In Night Crossing (2018), a small figure in a canoe, going sideways across the canvas, is forever stalled halfway under vast hills made of swiped deep-blue paint, while the moon passes behind a big broccoli-shaped navy tree under a numinous pointillist night sky. As a painting, it’s both magical and hurts a bit to look at, and like so much here it cuts past any arguments about linear art history – that certain approaches are ‘done’, or whatever – because people aren’t done with experiencing psychic pain, with trying to find compensatory beauty in the world or with looking for solace and wherewithal in the past. And for as long as you’re in front of Matthew Wong’s best work, you wonder why anyone thinks that painters should be either. Martin Herbert

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889, oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm. Courtesy Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

April 2024

Whitney Biennial 2024 Even Better Than the Real Thing Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 20 March – 11 August Given that the 81st edition of the biennial shares a title with a u2 track with jaunty lyrics that go, ‘You’re the real thing / Even better than the real thing’, you might approach the visual and sound- and time-based works by its 71 total participants – 29 of whom are included in concurrent film and performance programmes – expecting to encounter a barrage of libidinal intensities. Described in its curatorial statement as a ‘dissonant chorus’ inaugurating a future characterised by bodies existing and shapeshifting freely in physical and virtual space, the 2024 biennial seems poised to inherit the formal concerns of its previous iteration, which featured memorable born-digital and posthuman works by Jacky Connolly, Aria Dean, Daniel Joseph Martinez and WangShui. At first sight, this year’s four-floor presentation, with its minimalist restraint and intimate closed floorplan, suggests more harmony than dissonance. Evidence of a struggle between dominant, reactionary interpretations of reality and the lived realities of marginalised groups takes time to emerge. When it does, however, we see the reality of the latter linked to the notion of historical truth. Madeleine HuntEhrlich’s film Too Bright to See (2023–24) pays tribute to the overlooked Martinican theorist Suzanne Roussi Césaire (1915–66). Long takes shot in Miami, in which an actress portraying the thinker stands solemnly among palm trees, reading occasionally from her essays, conjure Roussi Césaire’s Martinique no more than the landscape of her time did: “This beautiful, lush island”, a line from the film reveals, “camouflages the colonial reality”. As a corrective to

archival biases favouring those in power, viewers are urged to seek out the narratives of women and colonial subjects buried beneath the visual harmonies of natural vistas. In Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time (Iris’s Version) (2023–24), an actress playing an actress in a recreation of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre reflects, “Some roles are far away from my real life. I do a lot of research… I try to recall the films I’ve seen and then I really put myself into them.” Perhaps the past exists only as images, but an empathetically researched reenactment can help recover real emotions. Likewise, in Pollinator (2022), a video about the Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson (1945– 92), the artist Tourmaline strolls in early-twentieth-century attire through cultural institutions in Brooklyn; in A Plot, A Scandal (2023), artist Ligia Lewis dances with spears, parodying racist tropes, then romps around in a period costume on a verdant hill in Italy. These three works reanimate history’s spectres to show how, as Tourmaline asserts in her artist statement, ‘The truth of life is its ongoingness’, or, to quote Lewis’s film, “Ghosts don’t die so easily”. Considering the biennial’s own function as a time capsule, the curators seem to have asked, ‘What do we want future historians to know about our present reality?’ Accordingly, many of the works on view index the human body’s vast indeterminacy, which we’ve come to recognise via technology and introspection. Jes Fan’s biomorphic sculptures – 3d-printed cat scans of his leg muscles, spine and stomach – function elegantly as metonymised self-portraits. P. Staff’s portrait takes the form of a wallpaper

Nikita Gale, tempo rubato (stolen time), 2023–24 (installation view, Whitney Biennial 2024). Photo: Audrey Wang. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

ArtReview

on which their countenance is at once expanded, dispersed and obscured. Using ceramic body-casts threaded with pvc tubes, Julia Phillips posits parental care as the extension of one body into another, while the invisible hands activating Nikita Gale’s player piano suggest that, through labour, bodies extend far beyond the flesh. For the future historian, the biennial also registers several of today’s most urgent political debates. A neon sign by Demian DinéYazhi´ spells out a message to ‘pursue + predict + imagine routes toward liberation’ while flickering the phrase ‘Free Palestine’, echoing the demand of activists who have, in recent months, gathered in the streets of New York and institutions like moma and the Brooklyn Museum to call out acts of whitewashing and name those with financial ties to the Israeli arms industry. Elsewhere, 2,500 snapshots depicting tasks associated with abortion care, which Carmen Winant collected from archives and clinics across the American Midwest and South, commemorate half a century of legal and ideological struggles for reproductive rights. One sees as well in the strips of photographic film Lotus L. Kang deliberately exposed under ‘wrong’ levels of light and humidity, which hang in a captivating fifth-floor installation, and in the expanse of ‘soiled’ junk and paint-spattered tarp that constitutes Ser Serpas’s work in the Whitney’s lobby, the unremitting desire to defy aesthetic norms, a necessary first step, the exhibition suggests, towards envisioning a ‘better’, liberated reality. Jenny Wu

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, xhairymutantx Embedding Study 1, 2024. Photo: Audrey Wan. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

April 2024

Jacopo Benassi Criminal Self-Portrait gam, Turin 27 February – 2 June Panorama di La Spezia (Panorama of La Spezia, 2022) serves as a manifesto for, or microcosm of, Jacopo Benassi’s photography. Named after the Ligurian town where the artist was born, it’s an offcut, literally, of his larger installation Matrice (2022); the structure consists of two wood-panel walls forming the corner of a room, the external edges hacksawed unevenly. On the ‘outside’, sprayed graffiti suggests the walls may have been recycled, while on the inside are hung examples of Benassi’s collaged-together, installation-style, photo-driven practice. Two crudely framed works comprise nocturnal photographs of public gardens in La Spezia, focusing on plants and shrubs. Lashed to these with tension straps are acrylic landscape paintings; reproductions, apparently, of landscapes of the Gulf of La Spezia by the Italian Agostino Fossati. On a little step in the structure’s corner are a pair of slippers; above them a glory hole. The landscape here is a fragmented place, a field of forces in tension, a hiding place, a pleasure zone; but also a scene of intimacy and obsessions, both inside and outside, private and public.

In Autoritratto truccato da femmina (Selfportrait made up as a woman, 2007) Benassi wears a fringed wig and smeared lipstick. The flash photography is cruel, shining incandescently on the synthetic hair, reflecting in the artist’s pupils. It suggests an unflattering police mugshot or, with the use of the wig to alter his appearance, a document of criminal anthropology. Benassi gives us a glimpse of photography that hides criminal intent behind a mask of truth; he reveals himself, showing his face frontally, fixing his gaze on the camera, while hiding behind the disguise. Throughout the exhibition, what is visible and what remains hidden continually flips and reverses. At the other end of the gallery is Monumento a Cesare Lombroso (c. 1910), a plaster model of Leonardo Bistolfi’s statue dedicated to the eponymous Italian psychiatrist and anthropologist, considered the founder of criminal anthropology. The model, drawn by Benassi from gam’s collection, is in poor condition, fragile and cracked, supported by a wooden armature. The body, whether sculpted or human, is held together by tension and effort, just like Benassi’s works. Lombroso, holding a skull in his right

Adolf Hitler – Museo delle cere di Londra, 2000, fine art print, wood and glass frame, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio Perottino: Courtesy Francesca Minini, Milano

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hand, appears shortsighted behind his plaster spectacles. The man who once mercilessly analysed the characteristics of criminals using the discredited skull-measuring pseudoscience of phrenology here seems scrutinised by Luce che illumina la luce (2024), a 250-watt headlight mounted on plasticine-covered tubes, evoking the lighting of police interrogations. There are other images, though we take their presence on trust: a photograph of a wax statue of Adolf Hitler from London’s Madame Tussauds is apparently concealed behind multiple layers of glass. Other portraits of figures such as artist Nan Goldin, Italian stylist Alessandro Michele, Benassi’s own parents, Snow White and a cast of the artist’s foot, framed and collectively held together with straps, hang from a small crane. Only the backs of the frames are visible, their supposed content indicated by labels. The exhibition increasingly assumes the form of a secret garden, photography becoming a broken promise to freeze reality for good. It is not so different from driving through the countryside at night, where reality exists only in the moments illuminated by your headlights, solely for you and only for a fleeting moment. Mariacarla Molè

Gina Fischli Love Love Love Soft Opening, London 16 February – 6 April At first glance, Gina Fischli’s animal sculptures feel like poor specimens. Not quite 1:1 scale, and crudely modelled from wire mesh and sloppy, off-white plaster, some of them sport pelts made from ragged fabric offcuts, in what might be an only partially successful attempt to disguise how far short their bodies fall from the creaturely ideal. Nevertheless, it’s clear from the way they’re displayed that somebody thinks they have potential. Eleven of the Swiss artist’s critters parade down a low, U-shaped plinthcum-catwalk, contestants in some kind of pet show, perhaps daydreaming of the pat on the head they’ll receive should they be awarded a rosette. The organisers of this competition appear to embrace diversity, at least in the matters of species and breed. Thomas (all works 2024) is a tartan-sheathed bunny rabbit, Elizabeth a leggy poodle and Albert a curly-tailed pug swaddled in pink, Issey Miyake-like pleats. These pedigree pets are joined on the catwalk by several animals that are commonly considered vermin. Beatrice the fox daintily crosses

her paws, Arthur the mole stares blindly out of his gleaming, sequined eyes, while John the piebald rat sniffs at the ground, his long tail raised like a middle finger. Are these official participants in the show, or interlopers who’ve clambered up from their dark dens, tunnels and sewers, to feast on whatever morsels they can find here, be it a crumb of attention, or a half-eaten doggie treat? The exhibition’s title, Love Love Love, recalls a dashed-off comment beneath an Instagram post. As that platform’s users will know, this affirmation might be applied equally to an image of a cat lover’s new kitten, or to a painter’s latest canvas (‘#wip’). An accompanying text draws a parallel between pet shows and the functioning of the contemporary art world, and the implication is that we should read Fischli’s knowingly makeshift sculptures as proxies for the figure of the emerging artist – a fundamentally half-formed creature who’s been given just enough grooming to pass muster as a contender. Looking at the catwalk, a space of both performance and of judgement, we wonder if it will

be a pedigree pet who comes out on top, or one of the so-called vermin. In today’s artworld, class advantage is an increasingly vital precondition of success. Then again, the industry’s gatekeepers ‘love love love’ an exception that proves the rule. Needy, obedient, self-regarding and full of very human pathos, Fischli’s competing critters hit their satirical target. What’s missing, here, is a reckoning with those who pick the winners, and those who profit from the whole dog and pony show. Elsewhere in the gallery, a tall freestanding plinth supports Florence, the most abstract work in the exhibition – a globule of plaster, grey dishcloth fabric and Day-Glo orange feathers, which vaguely resembles a garden bird eviscerating a slug. We might cast her as the victor of a previous contest, enjoying her spoils on the podium while looking down her beak at the other, marginally less scruffy beasts flaunting themselves on the catwalk. Primped for public presentation, and hungry for approval, to her they must feel like gauche pretenders to her crown. Tom Morton

Elizabeth, 2024, wire, plaster, textiles, 95 × 89 × 73 cm. Photo: Tom Carter. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London

April 2024

Thomas Hirschhorn Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it. Gladstone Gallery, New York 24 January – 2 March In this single-work exhibition, Thomas Hirschhorn wages a philosophical war using cardboard, tape, printed images, polystyrene and aluminium foil. These elements come together to form a wall-to-wall installation that doubles as a polemic against the false promises of Silicon Valley and the threat of ‘robotic control’, a phrase in the text the artist has spraypainted on the wall by the entrance, which begins, ‘Dear World, we are talking about “Artificial Intelligence” – but why only “Intelligence”, why not “Artificial Willpower?” “Artificial Belief?”’ and concludes, ‘be aware or be next!’

Hirschhorn, a self-proclaimed ‘artist, worker, soldier’, is known for what he calls ‘doing art politically’, but in the thick of Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it. (2023), his handcrafted labour feels less like the illustration of a political problem than an imagined representation of the seedy internet café that comes to mind when hearing about ‘sudden gamer death’ and other social ills, or a spoof of a teenager’s messy bedroom. Rows of cardboard tables are littered with cardboard game controllers, cardboard smartphones, cardboard credit cards, chunks of polystyrene carved into coffee mugs and pizza slices, tinfoil cylinders given

Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it., 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

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inkjet-printed Red Bull labels and lines of polystyrene ‘cocaine’. The artist once said in an interview, ‘To make art politically means to choose materials that do not intimidate’. Like a paper fortress, Fake it exemplifies this point. Its informality begets a sense of comfort and public-mindedness, as have Hirschhorn’s past projects, such as his Gramsci Monument (2013), where the artist collaborated with residents of Forest Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development in the Bronx, to construct a series of plywood pavilions dedicated to the Italian Marxist thinker. Compared to the collaborative premise of Gramsci Monument, Fake

takes a more confrontational approach. Many of the dummy computer monitors at Gladstone are cut into shards and made to look as if they’ve been fractured by bullets. Their broken ‘screens’ display a mixture of frames from first-person shooter games and journalistic photos of warstricken urban centres. It is tempting but perhaps too easy to read this fever dream in the vein of cyberpunk, wherein society collapses at the hands of technology and ai, and simulacra steadily encroach on physical space, fusing with its shabby materiality. So is viewing it as a straightforward critique of nihilism in the face of false utopias and disinformation. Like past works, such as Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002), for which he transported Documenta visitors away from the exhibition site to a majority-Turkish suburb of Kassel, and his ‘Ur-Collage’ (2008), in which he juxtaposed fashion

editorials with images of mutilated war victims, the effectiveness of Fake it hinges on its ability to produce visual and conceptual dissonance. The installation swarms with contrasts. Cutout printed images of cgi soldiers, armed and uniformed, dangle from the ceiling on skeins of clear masking tape. Animated by a whirring industrial fan perched on two paintspattered step ladders, they twirl like mobiles at eye level, evoking various emotions based on viewers’ past encounters with such personnel. Cutouts of emojis – yellow smiles, purple devils – fill the airspace between the soldiers and the ceiling, their beady eyes and stock expressions clashing with the videogame avatars’ uncannily lifelike visages. Covering one of the gallery’s walls is a grainy black-and-white photo of a building’s crumbling facade. The totality of this archival image is disrupted by the swinging

ornaments. Smiley faces sporting sunglasses and heart-shaped eyes appear to mock the scene of destruction and the war it symbolises. At first blush, the installation may seem juvenile in spirit, in terms of both the scene it depicts – a den of drugs and videogames – and the confidence with which it dispatches its abstract philosophical arguments. What might prove illuminating, once the viewer has read and turned over every possible meaning of the writing on the wall, would be to try hunting for the sources of the photographs reproduced among the cardboard effigies: a simple Google search yields dozens of comparable images of modern ruins captured in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. In this sense, without spelling it out plainly, Fake it taps into the trepidation of today’s netizens in the face of concurrent global conflicts and surfaces the structural causes of our collective disquiet. Jenny Wu

Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it., 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

April 2024

Sibylle Ruppert Frenzy of the Visible Project Native Informant, London 6 March – 20 April The floor of Project Native Informant is newly carpeted – black, thick, the pile giving under each step. It’s the most comfortable you get in Frenzy of the Visible, a first uk show of the late Sibylle Ruppert’s work, who dealt in drawings, paintings and collages of grisly, libidinous horror. Overlooked during her career, the German-Swiss artist only received a retrospective, at H.R. Giger’s private museum in Zürich, in 2010, the year before her death. In a fourpanel work of crayon and charcoal on paper, La Bible du Mal (Bible of Evil,1978), muscular, bulbous figures in greys and browns tussle across the two middle panels, propped up by a clenched calf growing out of something like a beetle with small breasts; and a herculean arm grasping at what might be a body in foetal position or a penis with abs. Spouts of water frame the amorphous forms; sticky black droplets amid the white flecks look like eyes – hungrily, lustfully watching. On the far-left panel, the face of a frog is skewered to flesh emerging from a hollow, metallic-looking face, its mouth pinned back by a fishhook. Oh, there’s also a phallus with the face of a shark and, on the far-right panel, a hummingbird on steroids atop a tusk impaling a cherubic human head. Above it all, starlight shines white and clean,

a halo awaiting a messiah. There’s something here of Hans Bellmer’s freakish, limby drawings and Max Ernst’s surreal painted nonplaces, as well as a Boschian sense of theatre to the framing. But Ruppert makes each feel prudish by comparison. Her works aren’t just evocative of nightmares, they’re inspiration for having even more disturbing ones. In Ruppert’s universe, all is fair in sex and war. There are no morals to impart. The violence depicted is often unbearable but carried out with devilish zeal – in Ma Soeur mon Epouse (My Sister My Wife, 1975), a crow-beaked being plucks at the penis and feels for the nipples of an androgynous figure splayed on a bed, aided by conniving faces in the charcoal-drawn shadows. Our empathy, or whatever is left of it looking at this vision of abuse, is pulled towards the prone figure’s right hand grasping at gathered sheets. In La Fontaine (1977), a three-headed creature expels a half-formed person from, you guessed it, its outrageously disproportionate member. The person grasps at the air, their hair swept into a frenzy by vicious pencil strokes, then falling into a pristine pool of liquid beneath. We are all, Ruppert suggests, born violently into the world, then disappear back to it, returned not as beings but matter.

La Bible du Mal, 1978, crayon and charcoal on paper, 203 × 367 × 4 cm. Courtesy Project Native Informant, London

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If ours is a morally and aesthetically puritanical era, Ruppert’s work is a tonic. Frenzy of the Visible would be horrifying if it wasn’t also such sickly fun. In a lithograph, La Langue (The Tongue, 1970), foamy snot runs down onto a pointed, lumpy tongue resting in a vulvic valley. An etching, Beilage zu Maldoror (1980), depicts a partially unfurled switchblade protruding from the torn crotch of an androgynous, again-muscular figure. Later collage works enter real-world objects into the equation: one figure has engines for lungs and metal-piping for bones (Untitled, 1981); leather kinkwear reveals ass cheeks joined to a bubbling torso in Pour l’Anniversaire de B.A. (1978). These point more determinedly to the queerness of Ruppert’s work, aesthetically evoking the occult sexuality of films like Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and the Pop eroticism of Italian giallo cinema, and a female-gaze inversion of Giger’s nightmarish sci-fi – even if she never achieved their notoriety while alive. As a current cultural acceptance of a kind of nihilist transhumanism grows, Ruppert’s remarkable work – of a portentous, painful, fluid world – is perfectly, if belatedly, timed. Alexander Leissle

Pour l’Anniversaire de B.A., 1978, collage with airbrush, 38 × 31 × 3 cm. Courtesy Project Native Informant, London

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Robert Mapplethorpe Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris 2 March – 2 April If it’s boring to call a Mapplethorpe show shocking, is it shocking to call it boring? I mull this over while checking out the 46 pictures Edward Enninful extracted from the photographer’s archive for this show. Following other artcontiguous personalities like director Sofia Coppola, fashion designer Hedi Slimane and actress Isabelle Huppert, the former British Vogue chief is the latest to play the Thaddaeus Ropac gameshow ‘What’s My Mapplethorpe?’, whereby curating does not so much hotwire an artist’s work with fresh synaptic connections as operate cunningly as a portrait of the person doing the picking. Enninful organises the exhibit in twos like a Vogue editorial of two-page spreads, and at times the curatorial tête-à-têtes are trite. There is a pair of Lisa Lyons (both Lisa Lyon, 1982), for instance, one in which the bodybuilder is in modest white wedding dress, and the other in which she is buck-naked and flexing save for a long white veil covering her head. The pairing does not make for transcendent commentary but neither do the photographs themselves, which are typically flawless but inert. In another quartet, Enninful has included photos of the 1980s model Dovanna (both Paris Fashion / Dovanna, 1984): a surrealistically disjointed one in which Karl Lagerfeld in side profile, looking like a hand

puppet wizard, looks on at the couture model, who floats above his nose Fátima-like, frontal, prim and framed in a vertical frieze or doorway. In another she is wearing a lightly mesh-veiled pillbox hat – a recurring accessory in Enninful’s selection that reminds us that society portraits and flower photography constituted the foil to Mapplethorpe’s immaculate raunch, which has been entirely nixed from this show. Enninful is Ghanaian-born British and one of very few powerful Black men in the fashion industry. He threw open the door to diversity at British Vogue during a seven-year tenure backlit by an always-smouldering, sometimes fully ignited #BlackLivesMatter. He says he discovered Mapplethorpe through the photographer’s 1986 The Black Book. And yet he has chosen just a small number, and the least controversial, of these pictures of coveted gay Black trophies – a Brancusi-like dented Black buttock, for instance, a Black man, head-down and prostrated on a plinth, and a fraternal, tender partnering of the alopecia-white Robert Sherman with the black Ken Moody. Mapplethorpe staged Black men’s bodies as must-have sex objects but in this last choice and the 1982 Embrace, also in the show, of a Black man and a white man holding each other, Enninful soft-pedals Mapplethorpe’s threading of race into the Gordian tangle of sex and power.

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Would that Mapplethorpe really did play as nice with race as Enninful has edited him: including a picture of a black-and-white Dalmatian (1976) was an especially nice touch of wishful curating. Perhaps this is why Enninful falls back to the comparatively safe terrain of fashion, but again this is no easy job here. Mapplethorpe’s cold, formalist, hieratic presentations play off the off-camera heat of bdsm mises-en-scène but work like Novocain on fashion shots. Dresses provide no thrill against the chill of Mapplethorpe’s technique. He was no equal to Helmut Newton, whose fetishisms were lewd and sly, and Enninful ignores the attempts Mapplethorpe made in the same direction: the almost shabby black patent leather stiletto (Melody, 1987) didn’t make the cut and neither did his bondagey belted torso for the designer Tokio Kumagai. Which leaves us with the photos we have seen – over and over. Here is Patti Smith on the cover of her album Horses (1975), Paloma and her fab arms (Paloma Picasso, 1980), Robert as boy in leather jacket, Robert as girl in glam fur… Sensing that audiences would find even taboo Mapplethorpe a tad flaccid given the ordinary fare we now have on the internet, Enninful tried to make a case for Mapplethorpe’s best-known, shock-free work. And what we got was, well, Vogue. Clara Young

Marie Lund & Rosalind Nashashibi O Rose Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen 10 February – 7 April In the basement gallery of Den Frie, BritishPalestinian filmmaker/painter Rosalind Nashashibi’s 66-minute stream-of-consciousness film Denim Sky (2018–22) rolls through diaristic scenes of friends on holiday: adults and children relaxing together, playing on a beach, cooking together in a shared rental flat, browsing a charity shop. Then, the same people, now in loosely improvised scenarios: they stride down a corridor in mock-military single-file. Later, a stern woman in a library assigns the group a mission, and the scenarios continue. Denim Sky’s light-footed depiction and dramatising of personal relationships – their contingencies, their playful yet profound importance to us – provides a departure point for Nashashibi and Danish sculptor Marie Lund’s collaborative O Rose, which tries to tease out common strands between these two friends’ otherwise distinct work. In the ground-level entrance hall are Lund’s Slips (2023). Four narrow vertical bands of glossy copper bend outward from the walls – singly on two separate walls, a pair side-by-side on another. Their forms, each kinked horizontally on the top third, exemplify how Lund’s work, often formally spare with light touches of their fabrication, can feel both familiar and elusive, intimate yet extensively reproducible. Throughout Den Frie’s ground floor galleries are Lund’s Difference Over Distance (2024), grey plastic mats hung roughly over doorframes with brass strips,

obstructing the way; makeshift and heavylooking, but lightweight and delicate when you pass through them. Next door is part one of Nashashibi’s The Invisible Worm (2024), its three parts screened across three separate spaces, each around five minutes long, and mostly shot inside Den Frie itself. In it, regular Nashashibi collaborator Elena Narbutaité skims through a magazine featuring photos of an intense-looking man modelling elegant suits. “I really think he’s like the artist,” a female voiceover speculates. “He’s looking at his work, and he’s asking himself, ‘Is this finished?’” The Invisible Worm’s segments unfold between Lund’s sculptures, each artist’s works occupying alternate gallery spaces. There’s a blinkand-you’ll-miss-it lightness to both artists’ work that combined can become disorienting. Lund’s Daily (2024), floor sculptures made of moulded paper and rubber granulate, echoes the curvature of the octagonal gallery, nudging viewers towards part two of The Invisible Worm. Here, a smiling Narbutaité dances in an empty gallery – the same one we just left – to a recording of ‘Elegy’, from Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943), which sets William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ (c. 1789) to music. As Narbutaité slowly contorts, as if navigating Lund’s yet-to-be-installed sculptures, a tenor sings Blake’s cryptic stanzas: “O Rose thou art sick / The invisible worm / That flies in the

night…” Next door is Lund’s The Thickness (2021/23), ten steel vent-like sculptures mounted around the second octagonal gallery’s walls, accentuating Den Frie’s centripetally flowing architecture. Beside one sculpture is an untitled Nashashibi watercolour on paper, dated 2024, showing two swans, long necks curving and heads touching to form a heart, the painting based on a small glass ornament we see in Nashashibi’s studio in The Invisible Worm. “I myself adore art…,” Narbutaité explains, now sitting at the bar of Den Frie’s café, at the video’s conclusion. “And yet, when making it myself, I kind of feel like it’s a form of wasting time.” Shots of London’s Houses of Parliament and the artists’ studios pass by. A wormlike fleck contorts across the screen, possibly Blake’s invisible worm, maybe just grit on the film. It’s unclear why the artists chose Blake’s poem – the wormlike fleck that crawls between the political and personal? A pun on Nashashibi’s first name? – with Blake’s broody and elliptical words less an object of study than a reflection of the artists’ interest in how tiny inflections can become lasting enigmas. Visiting O Rose can feel like you’ve interrupted a private conversation, filled with the contingencies, in-jokes and time-filling digressions at the heart of most friendships. It’s this that O Rose distils: the artists’ fascination with how fleetingly small moments resonate through our lives. Nathaniel Budzinski

Rosalind Nashashibi, The Invisible Worm (still), 2024, 16mm film transferred to hd, three channels, colour, sound, 17 min. Courtesy the artist

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Henok Melkamzer Telsem Symbols and Imagery Sharjah Art Museum 24 February – 16 June As the first institutional exhibition dedicated to the paintings of Ethiopian artist Henok Melkamzer, this survey of over 100 works (all untitled and made between 2013 and 2024) questions how present-day art practices arising from long-gone native rituals are categorised and perceived. Specifically, the exhibition seeks to resituate the ancient Ethiopian tradition of telsem, which, although adapted by living artists such as Melkamzer, has long been framed (by Western critics) in terms of anthropology rather than art history. The Amharic word telsem, which in English translates as ‘talisman’, describes an occult drawing or, perhaps more accurately, a type of graphic design based on astrological predictions and a precise system of structural components. For instance, the vibrant seven-colour palette that dominates the works here is representative of the seven

vowels of the Ge’ez alphabet (the original Ethiopian script that is now only used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) as well as the days of the week. Similarly, the same set of lively symbols recur in these pictures, from eight-pointed stars and bird heads to crescent moons and pairs of eyes. Originally taking the form of intricately inscribed scrolls to be worn on the body, these bespoke creations were commissioned by those seeking respite from illness and were understood as magical objects that would eradicate evil spirits. By the nineteenth century, millions of these healing scrolls were in use, despite obstacles put in place by emperors who punished those who relied on amulets and debteras (church scholars who have not been ordained due to their interest in non-Christian beliefs, such as fortune-telling). In recent decades,

Detail of 2023 works shown in Telsem Symbols and Imagery, 2024, Sharjah Art Museum. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

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the use of scrolls and comparable therapeutic aids have declined considerably, perhaps due to what Melkamzer has called a ‘satellite infection’, alluding to the country’s embrace of foreign cultures at the expense of its own heritage. The conflation of telsem with witchcraft has also remained pervasive, meaning that responses to it can be suspicious in nature. Critically, the tradition of making telsem extends, for the most part, generationally, through blood relatives – and only to those who are considered trustworthy (the mysterious rules through which these designs operate, though decipherable to only a few, are nonetheless to be guarded). So while students at the Ale School of Fine Art and Design in the country’s capital might try to emulate telsem, they lack the depth of knowledge that characterises it (also, to note:

teaching at the school focuses on European art history). Melkamzer, who resides and works in the highlands overlooking Addis Ababa, was trained over several years by his father and grandfather; both telsem healers by trade. In the hands of Melkamzer, though, this practice of devising complex images has taken a different course. While his foundational understanding of telsem informs the works shown here (many incorporate numerical calculations and are guided by the Ethiopian calendar), they ultimately seek to expand the possibilities of the medium. Going by their deeply varied compositional strategies, many of which veer away from convention, the artist’s endeavours are evidently as much about formal experimentation as they are about articulating a remnant of Ethiopian visual culture in the present moment. In his handling of the artform, then, Melkamzer insists on just that: what he is making should be understood as pure painting. To make this point, the exhibition opens with an entirely abstract work – the most

minimalist of the group. Its surface has been divided into a grid of six squares using a pencil-thin line, onto which five circles have been overlaid or incorporated. Later on, the shape is explored again in a small group of paintings that have been hung together. Usually used as a framing device for a symbol, such as a sun face, these canvases feature circles that have been saturated with fluorescent yellow and white paint respectively, positioned as the focal point of each painting. In the same way, a handful of canvases drenched in black each depict a letter from the Ge’ez script, made visible with big, translucent brushstrokes, the textures of which illuminate the pictorial qualities of these symbols. In line with these details, Melkamzer’s reorientation of telsem is also noticeable on two other fronts: parchment has been replaced with canvas; plant pigment with acrylic paint. The scale of the works range from small squares to monumental rectangles that reach three metres in height. Many canvases are covered in an endless pattern of vines that seamlessly

interlock, creating a dense matrix that functions both as a backdrop and the central subject of the work. The motif is a vital facet of telsem, signifying the forces that connect humans with the planet, and Melkamzer’s ideas are at their most developed in some of the largest paintings that probe how the background and foreground interact. In one, the vines are eclipsed by a network of brightly coloured squares that appear to float on top of the maze underneath. Another is an exercise in symmetry, with a dizzying number of elements all existing on the same plane. The exhibition brings attention to an artist who possesses undoubtable skill, but the question is whether it will help to change perceptions of telsem, specifically in terms of how it is allowed to function as a traditional cultural practice. Melkamzer’s work should be positioned within the context of contemporary African painting – a practice, he shows, that can draw on ancient traditions, resulting in work that does not need to be defined according to Western art history. Allie Biswas

Detail of 2023 works shown in Telsem Symbols and Imagery, 2024, Sharjah Art Museum. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

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Siobhán Hapaska Medici Lion Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 1 December – 10 March The headline acts in Siobhán Hapaska’s recent exhibition are a big cat and a small dog – both in a somewhat beleaguered state. The former is a recreation of an antique marble monument: the show’s titular Medici Lion (all works 2023), composed of 3d-printed panels latched together and suspended above the floor by an elaborate system of straps. This pale, tethered, four-metrelong beast, a copy of a frequently copied historical sculpture (the first and most famous manifestations being the second-century Roman original and a later pendant, commissioned by Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1598), is hung as a spotlit trophy in the centre of the high, wide gallery. Hapaska’s lion is a meticulous reconstruction, but beneath the tautly held-together figure lie traces of destruction too: in place of the globe on which, in other iterations, the stately lion rests a strong front paw, symbolically proclaiming imperial majesty, Hapaska has arranged a tidy pile of marble fragments. These are, by implication, ruinous effects of excessive power: remnants, even, of a shattered world. The other animal, near the entrance, underscores these apocalyptic intimations. Here, greeting gallery visitors is a sculptural portrayal (again mainly made in the milky polylactic acid

of 3d printing) of a luckless pooch labelled Salvator Mundi – named in passing tribute to the damaged and disputed Leonardo da Vinci painting. Hapaska’s knee-high ‘saviour of the world’ (the Latin title’s English translation) looks an unlikely hero. Whereas in the painting, Christ cradles a crystal sphere – symbolising benevolent sovereignty over heaven and earth – the dog sits with a glass ball by its foot: a toy to be played with. Divinity is both suggested and travestied. Wrapped in bandages, its back legs hitched to a canine wheelchair, its small head hidden, absurdly and horribly, in an ill-fitting gasmask, this embattled mutt might be the last dog alive, less noble saviour than unexpected survivor. Its precarious existence, not unlike the literal predicament of the mocked-up Medici lion, hangs by a thread. Accompanying information points, at times, to ways of contextualising these creaturely presentations. A soundtrack playing in the background while viewers contemplated the bulky physical presence and sleek, grey polymer surface of the lion is, for instance, identified as ambient noise from Westminster Abbey, recorded during the period of public mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, the variously clanging, shuffling and whispering sounds enriching the sensory

Medici Lion, 2023 (installation view, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin). Photo: Louis Haugh. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

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complexity of the installation. But Hapaska’s sculptural entities feel more forceful and unpredictable when not harnessed to fixed historical realities. At their best – in drastic evocations of constrained and compromised organic nature, through controlled, sometimes savagely comic expressions of violence and physical pressure – her works provoke rather than pontificate. Hapaska’s approach to sculpture, here, centres on almost sadomasochistic applications – and, as with little Salvator, sometimes sinister depictions – of material stress and physiological strain. Buckled within its taut web of seatbeltstyle restraints, the Medici Lion is an assertively stabilised form, and yet its assembled pieces look equally liable to be pulled apart by the tethering. As with many other such instances throughout Hapaska’s work – the arrested motion of a motorised tumbleweed in Ecstatic (1999); the plump red fibreglass spheres squished to apparent bursting point between snakeskin-covered steel brackets in Snake and Apple (2018) – her strung-up, stretched-out take on the Medici Lion is a statement of sustained sculptural tension and suspended meaning. This much-replicated totem is, here, a singular presence and an ambiguous avatar: at once commanding and, as a symbol of lasting power, insistently insecure. Declan Long

Kate Mosher Hall Never Odd or Even Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles 17 February – 23 March Palindromes are ancient games, riddles in which words and phrases read the same backward as forward. Kate Mosher Hall’s paintings (and their titles, which, including the name of her exhibition, are occasionally palindromic) encourage a similarly unorthodox dexterity, suggesting that viewers see the forms of contemporary media in new, unexpected ways. Accretions of silkscreen, acrylic paint, charcoal and flashe compose Mosher Hall’s paintings. Her layered works stage topsy-turvy encounters with visual culture, masking nostalgic imagery sourced from home movies or photo archives with techniques that emphasise the nature of their digital and analogue reproduction. Up close, these charged surfaces dissolve into grids, pixels or moiré patterns, their fragments disrupting emotional attachments to consumer media. In Mosher Hall’s work, the reproduction of images belies their original content. Squeeze wax (all works 2024) features three silkscreened film stills placed inside overlapping rectangles set in a larger, darker backdrop. Their grainy footage vaguely depicts a domestic scene – a figure stands above a sink or table, the camera’s angle

lopsided – with the lo-fi quality of a degraded 1990s home video. The cropping of Mosher Hall’s silkscreened elements further hinders the visibility of the hazy camcorder excerpts. From afar, the similarly sentimental scene in 31,556,952 seconds is only just decipherable: a single birthday candle flares, perhaps held up by a parent’s hand. The snapshot, though, appears in a seemingly infinite series of sequentially smaller squares, its content increasingly unrecognisable. These repetitive, screenprinted compositions are difficult to discern, implying and obstructing emotional relationships to source material. Mosher Hall’s techniques seem to allegorise the way the mass distribution of media can supersede sentiment – or even comprehension. In Clothing as a spell, pixelated squares cloak a street scene’s details, shadowy silhouettes fragmented by the overlaid motif. Its patterning evokes the design of social media, a ‘grid’ that partially conceals the people pictured beyond. Hit silver displays similar faded grey squares over a black background. White figurative outlines and faint sun-flares peek out from below,

suggesting the landscape that may have been visible prior to the grid’s application. Mosher Hall’s paintings reverse a structure common to online media outlets: their templates do not usher images into view – instead, they hide them from sight, recreating images only to make them incoherent. Palindromes simultaneously emphasise language’s forms while encouraging disregard for them. Readers must leap over capital letters, spaces and punctuation, ignoring typical structures in order to produce a phrase’s mirrored meaning – if there is one. It’s worth remembering that what ‘Never Odd or Even’ describes might not actually exist; all real integers are either odd or even, though Mosher Hall’s work beckons more expansive – and unreal – interpretations. Her works pose similar conundrums, subordinating recognisable subject matter to the technology that reproduces it. What emerges is haunting and irreverent: Mosher Hall dips into media’s pathos but paints only its pixels. The resulting artworks defy conventional logic, their apparitions slipping from comprehension as easily as they arrive. Claudia Ross

Clothing as a spell, 2024, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 140 × 165 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles

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Shanshui: Echoes and Signals m+, Hong Kong from 3 February Featuring artworks and design items from the m+ collection, this exhibition opens up shanshui, the landscape genre in ink art, to the context of a postindustrial, digital world, by amplifying the conceptual nature of the tradition’s Chinese name, meaning ‘mountain and water’. Introducing a twenty-first-century poetics of shanshui in the first of nine sections, aptly titled ‘Expanding the Canon’, is Chua Chye Teck’s Scholar’s Rocks (2013–18). Arranged on a plinth, concrete clumps gathered from construction sites in Singapore are placed on wood stands like urban gongshi (rocks admired for their resemblance to other natural phenomena). Situated between the symbolic and real, these forms traditionally function as objects of contemplation that tap into the ineffable, cosmic totality of life on earth, much like a shanshui painting: conduits between the tangible and intangible, solid and fluid, past and present. Likewise, Guo Cheng’s Becoming Ripples (2024), installed nearby, seems almost to stand as an illustration of the show’s introductory text, which describes shanshui as a mode of ‘philosophical thinking and poetic imagination’: mirrored fabric behind a glass window ripples according to a kinetic system based on electromagnetic waves drawn from sources like wi-fi signals. The undulations generate fluid, abstract reflections that recall ink mountains, or anything else flowing – or reflective, for that matter, which seems to be the point. Take Xu Bing’s ink on paper Landscript sketch in the Himalayas (1999), a landscape of Chinese characters whose English translations are printed on tracing paper placed over a facsimile of the painting in Landscript sketch in the Himalayas-English translation of the Chinese characters (1999), shown alongside it. Lines like ‘Dense white fog’ and ‘There is something here but I do not know what’ highlight the psychological dimensions

of the landscape as a space where the objective and subjective meet. Other works take up the exhibition’s subtitle, Echoes and Signals. Guo Hongwei’s watercolour-on-paper series of mineral specimens, Illustration Book of Natural Form (2017), and Awazu Kiyoshi’s offset lithograph of stratalike coloured lines, Sky Sea West East (1980), depict Earth’s materiality as the power source for communication technologies. Nearby, two twentieth-century radios from the museum’s collection, produced by the Tanin Industrial Company, are shown next to Sakumi Hagiwara’s black-and-white digitally transferred 16mm film Kiri (1972), of a fog lifting over a landscape to the metonymic sound of a prayer bell, as if to illustrate communications as almost spiritual binding, cosmic forces that reverberate through all things. The inclusion of design objects might feel forced, until you surrender to this exhibition’s shanshui state of mind, in which any object can function as a ‘philosopher’s stone’. Isamu Noguchi’s Radio Nurse and Guardian Ear (1937), a pair of Bakelite and enamelled steel encasements for a two-way radio the artist designed for the Zenith Radio Corporation, double as artistic forms and functional devices, echoing shanshui paintings by connecting the concrete and abstract, near and far. Noguchi’s ‘Cloud Mountains’ sculptures reinforce that expansive connectivity, with hot-dipped galvanised steel forms, including Mountains Forming (1982–83/1984), seeming to mirror the hills and skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s harbourfront skyline visible through the windows, a shanshui irl. Movement defines ‘Light and Sound’, a black-box section centring on two movingimage works. In Nguyen Trinh Thi’s immersive audiovisual installation 47 Days, Sound-less (2024), circular mirrors installed on a ceiling frame reflect roving orblike images across the

facing page, top Amar Kanwar, The Peacock’s Graveyard (detail), 2023, seven-channel video installation, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy m+, Hong Kong

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space, beamed from a projector, of jungle scenes from movies like Apocalypse Now (1979). At times, the projections stop, leaving ambient sounds that bleed into a screening room where Amar Kanwar’s seven-channel video installation The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023) uses images of animals, rivers and plants to tell morbid stories, including those of a hangman who quits his job and a beggar who leaves behind a fortune in death. Outside, Shiro Kuramata’s 1972 tinted acrylic lampshade that looks like a ghostly white sheet, Lamp (Oba-Q), and Heidi Lau’s (All is) non-hierarchical (2022), a craggy midnight-blue ceramic arc, echo Kanwar’s incarnation of natural forms to embody ghostly tales. The natural world’s capacity to hold human stories continues in ‘Interventions in Nature’, where Ana Mendieta’s singlechannel Super 8 film Silueta Sangrienta (Bloody Silhouette, 1975) shows the artist lying naked on a muddy riverbank, disappearing to leave a bodily outline filled with a luminous red liquid. She then reappears lying face down in that imprint: an iconic fusion of human and land. Liu Chuang’s three-channel video Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018) amplifies the planet’s profoundly energetic materiality within the context of deep, living time, by exploring crypto mining in the context of China’s imperialist and modern histories, and in relation to the peoples of the Zomia region, with one scene blending faces across time and space. The scope of Liu’s video, which spans millennia, miles, histories and fictions, distils into sculptural form in the exhibition’s final room, ‘Restart’. Here, Park Hyunki’s Untitled (1987/2018) comprises two columns of analogue tv monitors showing videos of rocks, which are stacked upon and topped by actual rocks: a merger of the symbolic and real, like a shanshui painting. Stephanie Bailey

facing page, bottom Park Hyunki, Untitled, 1987/2018. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

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Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2 March – 22 September The most intriguing object in Tropical Modernism is not an architectural model or drawing nor a material sample or piece of furniture. It is a grid of postcards from Ghana attributed for the most part to unknown photographers, and taken between 1959 and 1971. Lent by the research group Postbox Ghana, they depict bright modernist buildings from across the country – a community centre, a store in Accra, civic buildings, social infrastructure. In among them, two cards stand in colourful contrast, depicting traditional scenes: one capturing market stalls and the other Ghanaians in Indigenous dress. Their juxtaposition with the rest of the postcards suggests two realities living side by side: the ascendant,

universalist, internationalist architecture, on the one hand; taking root in a vernacular terroir on the other. Together, they are a projection of what was a new cultural confidence and a new national identity. So much of architectural practice is the act of representation; of artistry, drawing, collaging, image-making. We imagine and draw so that others can build. It is where architecture begins, and as this compact show in the v&a’s Porter Gallery illustrates, where architecture also retires, to become something more: the archive of places, and the memory of the ideas that, in a brief moment in time, were given form. Could modernism be localised? Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India stands

as an emphatic answer to this question: an entire capital city, it is the immersive oeuvre of tropical modernism. Invited by Fry and Drew, Le Corbusier eclipsed them and latecolonial British building initiatives to deliver something on a grand scale. But is it Indian? Punjabi? International? Does it even matter? Here the memory is that of the end of colonial history and the bright beginning of a new independent one. A seismic geopolitical shift that had an aesthetic side-story; at the heart of it was that modern-vernacular tension illustrated by the Postbox cards. It is the binary by which modernisms of the Global South came to be. Fry and Drew are the reference point for the exhibition, which covers just two countries:

James Barnor, Sick Hagemeyer shop assistant as a seventies icon posing in front of the United Trading Company headquarters, Accra, 1971, 1971. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

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India and Ghana. In the 1940s and 1950s, they designed schools and hospital buildings in Ghana as part of a last gasp of imperial charity, and were the first architects to take on the brief for Chandigarh, at the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister. The vast planned city features here through objects: a large colourful masterplan drawing, a Jeanneret chair and models of buildings such as the Tower of Shadows, which itself inspires elements of the exhibition design. The presence of vibrancy and colour in some of the drawings and models demonstrates how modernism in the Global South deviated from its monochrome sources. One highlight is a long vertical axonometric sketch of housing in Aranya township. Its painterliness and its vignettes of people living alongside one another as neighbours captures grit and character – two qualities not typically associated with the International Style.

The modernisms forged in postwar India and Ghana were just one example of a localising of modernisms around the world. Elsewhere in Britain’s fading imperial orbit, there were Arab modernisms, ones across Africa, micromodernisms flourishing in places like Sri Lanka or Hong Kong. Beyond, there were the Latin modernisms; there were the ‘settler’ modernisms of North America and Australia. They, too, began as largely European imports and then adapted. For architects in many societies, particularly those with colonial legacies, modernism provided an opportunity to project both a sense of the ‘new’, while signalling their membership of a shared international future. But in the architecture on display here, and particularly in how it is represented, the beginnings of a new architectural approach are evident. There is a lineage between the Indian and West African modernisms and the global

architecture of today, as the show demonstrates. Images of buildings by the late B.V. Doshi and lesser-known architects, such as Achyut Kanvinde’s Indian Institute of Technology, Victor Adegbite’s Black Star parade ground and projects by J. Max Bond Jr, Habib Rahman, all featured here, demonstrate a localising of modernist principles to suit climate, materiality and ideology. It is this approach that has been tested ever more pointedly in the vernacularising aesthetic of their heirs today. We see it in the work of contemporary architects such as Studio Mumbai, Francis Kéré, Yasmeen Lari or Anupama Kundoo; the exhibition ends with vox pops from some of these same practitioners. Their architecture feels nearly independent, venturing into something completely new and premodern. Their postcards from around the world today help to paint a picture of modernism’s own self-destruction. Daniel Elsea

Giani Rattan Singh and Pierre Jeanneret at the Architects’ Office, Sector 19, with two components of a model for the Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, India, c. 1953–54. © Pierre Jeanneret fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

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Mark Salvatus Relaxation is a State of Mind The Drawing Room, Manila 17 February – 16 March Despite the title of the show, one doesn’t feel very relaxed standing in this long corridored exhibition space filled with Mark Salvatus’s paintings, collages and installations of rice bags and tripods. The artist’s works are usually varied – engaging with local life and geopolitics through photography, moving image, painting and found objects – but those here are so visually and thematically disparate that one struggles to guess as to what sort of titular ‘relaxation’ brings them all together. Along both walls of the exhibition are 14 paintings from Salvatus’s ongoing Scratchings series (2017–). These vary in medium (acrylic on canvas or paper) and size (from 22 to 122 cm tall), characterised by abstract archlike or crackled forms, and thin scratchings into the paint. In one of the larger ones, Scratching Series: Dreams of Time (2023), dark hues of black, blue, grey and red take the form of round arches that slope across the canvas with thin scratchings following each curve. Visually, these paintings communicate little more than amateurish abstract decorative shapes. Their subtitles,

like the aforementioned or To Infinity with Many Winds (2024) and A woman in the moon is singing to the earth (2023), are vaguely poetic and ethereal, so then to read the exhibition text and discover these paintings allude to some sort of ‘way-finding amidst the chaos of urban life’ is certainly a surprise. In the middle of the hall is the installation Tools (2024), in which 18 glazed ceramic slabs, each approximately the size of the average mobile phone, are mounted on upright black tripods and arranged on a white table. One features a smiley face, while the rest include multiple finger indentations and are glazed with different earth tones. Here with the tripods that hint at making a spectacle of one’s self, Salvatus seems to be casually alluding to how online professions – say, being an influencer – have become more attractive than traditional forms of livelihood, like agrarian work with the land as the ceramics’ materiality, fingerprints and earth tones might imply. Six white plastic utilitarian chairs with 25kg sacks of rice slouching on each seat are scattered

Waiting, 2024, rice sack, cotton filler, plastic chair, dimensions variable. Courtesy The Drawing Room, Manila

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throughout the space. Titled Waiting (2024), this work is, remarkably, the exhibition’s most compelling despite its simplicity. The bags’ markings indicate they come from different Southeast Asian countries including Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines, seemingly implicating the politics of agrarian commodities and labour within Salvatus’s home country, the Philippines. The receptacles’ reclining positions suggest rest, but also hint at whether this is induced by strain or leisure. There is meaning here, but one that must be inferred from knowledge of Salvatus’s wider practice – such as installations like Hacienda (2010) or Land mines (2022) that confront agrarian workers’ rights – which often carries a sustained investment in social responsibility. Only then might this, in turn, inform a more pointed interpretation of this exhibition as engaging in the politics of relaxation. Without this background information however, Relaxation is a State of Mind seems like a series of frustratingly bad artworks thrown together for the sake of staging an exhibition. Marv Recinto

Non-Specific Objects Capitain Petzel, Berlin 20 January – 24 February Non-Specific Objects takes its lead from American sculptor Donald Judd’s 1965 essay ‘Specific Objects’ and its omission of embodied, racial and gender differences by presenting art that continuously refers to them. It brings together works by 11 artists that challenge Judd’s attachment to identifying the essence of sculpture and painting, though, ironically, the show aligns with his observation about artistic categories: whether material, symbolic or linguistic, these are never as solid as they appear. In the way that Judd’s essay reveals the difficulty in defining sculpture and painting, this exhibition challenges conventional ways of interpreting materials and their associations with identity and the body. In David Douard’s BirdZhandzand US´ (2023), for example, an assemblage of objects and consumer materials (xeroxes, chipboard, vinyl tape, etc) centres upon a towering aluminium grille, on which a photographic image shows closeups of a face, hand and ear. Towards its base is a transparent plastic bellylike orb; inside are a large white plastic tongue, tiny plastic hands, flowers and an ink drawing. The assemblage is physical, bodily, but not visceral. While many body parts are present, their combination produces a foreign rather than familiar response. If there’s anything this exhibition does clearly, it’s to point to the nebulous ways in

which identity (or the body) is under constant control: geographic boundaries, demographics, gender ‘norms’ and reproductive freedoms, to name a few. In Jack O’Brien’s Phaedrus (2024), a hanging sculpture made of two cellos with basketball-size metal balls cling-wrapped to their midsections, the weight of the objects and the tension of the wrapping are palpable. Across the room, Kristina Nagel’s Thread i, ii and iii (2024) illustrate more literal bondage. Nagel’s photographic low-angle closeups feature fragments of a curvaceous body in a tight black leather one-piece. As in O’Brien’s work, Nagel establishes control by using restrictive material and positioning the viewer physically below the subject – a dom-sub relationship. These works point to Judd’s reliance on firm categories, and how new art might evade or remain controlled by them. Non-Specific Objects seems conceptually and physically divided, the work upstairs addressing material constraint and release, and that in the basement focusing on linguistic symbolic power – most notably in Sin Wai Kin’s video, Dreaming the End (2023). Sin, a nonbinary artist, here uses drag, costume and makeup to create two characters mired by language. In the opening scene, the character Change chokes on an apple in a garden, triggering her first words, “I can feel

the words shaping me as I speak them… watching the thing become itself right now…” Nodding to the Garden of Eden and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use’, Sin confronts us with the instability and simultaneous power of language over meaning, gender and experience. Elsewhere, second character The Storyteller answers questions in syllabic rhythm: “Name name name, name name name, name name…” By homogenising all words into one, Sin illustrates the arbitrary yet tremendous power of verbal identification. As Change says later, “The story changes the body, the body changes the story, changes the body…” In his essay, Judd often defined new artwork by describing what it is not: ‘The new three-dimensional work doesn’t constitute a movement, school, or style’; ‘A fair amount of their meaning isn’t credible. The use of three dimensions isn’t the use of a given form…’ Similarly, Non-Specific Objects declares what art, the body (and identity) is not – a static definable whole. In many instances we are left less with an idea of a characteristic essence of artforms, the body or identity, and more with an understanding of how we resist the conceptual boxes – Judd’s favourite shape – that we’re forced into. Jasmine Reimer

Kristina Nagel, thread iii, 2024, print on pvc, hook screws, 165 × 111 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin

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Jonathan Jones untitled (transcriptions of a country) Artspace, Sydney 15 December – 11 February On 19 October 1800, two ships – the Géographe and Naturaliste – set out from Le Havre in France; two years later they landed in Warrang (Port Jackson) in the Eora nation. Led by Nicolas Baudin and ordered by Napoléon, the expedition was propelled by the predictable colonial imperatives: ‘discovery’ and extraction. Aboard the ships were gardeners, mineralogists, botanists and zoologists who would achieve these purposes – which, in reality, meant the ripping of minerals, plants and animals from their homeland. By the time the ships returned to France in 1804, the expedition had amassed more than 200,000 dried and preserved specimens and objects, alongside 1,500 plant species and 3,872 animal species, including emus, dingoes, wombats, kangaroos and black swans. Of the live animals, 72 survived the trip. The specimens that returned to France were spread between the Muséum national d’Histoire

naturelle, Paris, and Joséphine Bonaparte’s Château de Malmaison, west of the capital, and destined to become totemic curios of the South. This event is critically revisited by Jonathan Jones in an exhibition that agitates and unsettles the smooth surface of Australia’s colonial history. The works on show here – which include meticulously embroidered woollen panels, reframed portraits of First Nation peoples, carved emu eggs, and 206 earthenware replicas of cultural objects that were originally taken to France but are now missing – all reach into history in an effort to reclaim what was taken. Indeed, at the heart of the exhibition is both a demand for restitution and act of healing. While it might be impossible to bring home the broad crosssection of living species and heritage objects misappropriated by the French expedition, the route that Jones’s exhibition travels – from its first presentation at the Palais de Tokyo

Study for untitled (transcriptions of country), 2021, historical prints, objects, embroideries by Shabnam Mukhi, Lida Heidari and Rabia Azizi. Courtesy the artist

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to its current showing at Artspace – represents a repatriation of sorts. This reversal finds its strongest expression in untitled (embroidered Eora country) (2021): a work comprising 308 roughly a3-size wool panels, each of which have a plant species – taken by Baudin from the Eora/Sydney region – embroidered on their surfaces in black thread. Laid out across three tables that fill Artspace’s main exhibition hall, the visual impact is spectacular. The panels were embroidered by Jones’s collaborators for this project – a group of Sydney-based migrant artists and artisans, in dialogue with Elders – who painstakingly attended to the idiosyncrasies of each plant, and whose presence added another layer of diverse cultural history and legacies of movement to the work. Each embroidery is based on photocopied records from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and includes

carefully reproduced notations, barcodes and handwritten descriptions that signal the crude imposition of European knowledge systems onto these plants. The implied violence of this latter practice is exposed by a nearby plaque that explains that ‘The transportation and translation of these plants was done without the consent of Australian Indigenous people, for whom plants are kin.’ Against this declaration, the subtle three-dimensionality and tactility of the sewn plants – which almost seem to grow out of their fabric substrate – suggest a living relationship that moves beyond the flat itemised institutional scan. The materiality of untitled (remembering Eora) (2021) displaces the colonisers’ vision and their assumed position as the privileged representer of historical events. The work consists of engravings based on portraits of local Aboriginal people made by artist Nicolas-Martin Petit in 1802, which are hung on the wall in a row, each framed by a separate wreath composed of either scallop shells, gumnuts, emu eggs, brushtail possum fur or paper daisies. The individual materials reference the collections stockpiled

by Baudin, while the wreaths recall the ancient Greek symbol for victory that Napoléon used to give historical weight to his imperial power. In reappropriating Napoléon’s own coopting of the wreath, untitled (remembering Eora) wrestles the power of narration away from Petit, deploying this symbol of colonial power as a proclamation of Aboriginal identity and reconnecting each of the sitters with the materials of Country. There is a sophistication to this retooling that turns the embedded history of Petit’s series of engravings upon itself, and in doing so centres First Nations perspectives. This strategic reworking of historical material is echoed in Jones’s and Lille Madden’s (an Arrernte, Bundjalung and Kalkadoon woman from Gadigal Country) soundscape, untitled (corroboree) (2021), which reworks a musical score created by the French expedition in response to an Eora corroboree. The soundscape washes over the space, melding the sounds of a harp and piano with the sounds of Country: the lapping of the ocean and the songs of birds. The work finds particular resonance in the newly reopened halls of Artspace, whose

expansive windows and light-filled galleries feel connected to its natural surroundings – a space in a permanent state of exchange with the outside world. People look in and the artworks look out. untitled (transcriptions of country) transacts in a series of beautifully rendered poetic interventions and reparative acts that reach across time, bypass the barriers of the colonial archive and transcend the impossibility of retrieving lost cultural possessions. Coming shortly after the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum – which failed to pass and would have given First Nations Australians constitutional recognition and a new constitutionally enshrined representing body – its stakes could not be higher. The exhibition probes at how we understand the world and its history, but more than that, who gets to narrate this understanding. In direct opposition to the epistemological violence of colonialism, which is built upon singular authority and the unilateral extraction of ‘resources’, we find here a network of voices and hands unpicking and reworking the designs of the past. Tai Mitsuji

untitled (emu eggs) after Étienne-Pierre Ventenat, 2021–23, and untitled (vases, armes, pêche), 2023, mixed media, ceramic work by Somchai Charoen, dimensions variable. Photo: Jenni Carter. Courtesy the artists

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Books On nfts Edited by Robert Alice It is both absurd and fitting that a book that wants to document the history of nft culture – an extreme manifestation of contemporary society’s shift towards things digital – should materialise at 650 pages long, measure 36 × 50 cm and weigh over 10kg. And that it comes in two levels of collectability: a 1,500-copy collector’s edition and an even rarer (only 600 copies) ‘Hard Code’ edition, which comes in a stainless-steel slipcase, perhaps appealing to the crypto-nft ogs with a spare £1.5k burning their e-wallets. Yet while On nfts goes big on the printobject fetishism, reflecting something of the exuberant, anti-elitist vulgarity of the recent nft boom, artist and curator Robert Alice pulls together a thoughtful and informative record of the decade in which the growing interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies intersected with artists of every kind, catalysing an eruption of creativity the mainstream artworld struggled to comprehend. Mixed with the glossy profile pages on 101 nft artists of note are useful essays by artists and critics dealing with the key debates and innovations that have come to define the nft space. As Alice puts it in his introduction, ‘it is a history that has celebrated art at all levels

Taschen, £750 / £1,500 (hardcover)

and to all audiences; focused less on the art world elite but on themes of democratization, disintermediation, and decentralization’. Alice and his contributors do an accessible job setting out the conceptual parameters of that history; in his own discussion of Kevin McCoy’s proto-nft Quantum (2014), Alice notes how it was digital artists who discovered common cause with blockchain enthusiasts’ interest in scarce virtual assets and decentralised currency. ‘The blockchain made possible a process that artists of all mediums have been attempting to implement for decades: one in which the provenance of even the most immaterial conceptual and digital works could be traced and verified, and the sales of future works controlled.’ Two cultures, both in tension with the established artworld, come together in nfts; in Rhea Myers’s discussion of the blockchain ‘smart contract’, avant-garde and conceptualist art has long anticipated the debates of authenticity and certification of the art object. Alongside this critical art-history is a history of excluded or outsider cultural production; discussing the ‘Rare Pepe Wallet’ (a jokey, fanbase exchange for self-produced ‘Pepe’ digital trading cards), Jason

Bailey and Alex Estorick note that what lends the project its ‘particular cultural legitimacy is that its memes were the product of everyday people – rather than an insulated elite – whose communal engagement conjured a viral form of folk art’. On nfts could easily become the headstone for a cultural explosion that seems, for now, to have fizzled out, since it misses a more sceptical analysis of the shortcomings of blockchain utopianism and crypto grift. Aaron Wright and Serena Tabacchi’s examination of daos (decentralised autonomous organisations) holds onto the techno-utopian vision that technology will give humans the tools for more democratic, nonhierarchical forms of organisation. Yet a recurrent theme in the essays is the reassertion of centralisation by nft marketplaces and legacy players; indeed, Bailey and Estorick note that the legendary 2021 Beeple auction, while turbocharging the nft craze, ‘dealt a deathblow to crypto art as a realistic anti-art alternative to the traditional art world’. Real-world economics and politics hasn’t yet been replaced by crypto and blockchain, and art hasn’t yet dematerialised. As On nfts solidly attests, materiality is where value still resides. J.J. Charlesworth

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art Edited by Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler and Jamie J. Zhao Bloomsbury Academic, £85 (hardcover) In 1997 homosexuality was decriminalised in China; it was depathologised in 2001. In 2016 television was banned from depicting ‘irregular sexual relationships’ – a phrase that captured everything queerness might encompass. The period roughly bracketed by these events was one of leniency, when queer arts surfaced alongside avant-garde and feminist movements. Contemporary Queer Chinese Art takes us through this history. After an introduction that accounts for the key moments of recent queer history in China – including the un’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), the Beijing Queer Film Festival (2001–15), China’s first queer exhibition, Difference-Gender (2009), and Shanghai Pride (2009–20) – the book unfolds

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in 14 essays by artists, activists and curators who helped create those legacies. Among these are reflections by papercut artist Xiyadie, lesbian artist and icon Shi Tou and curator Si Han, who mounted the first institutional show of queer Chinese art, Secret Love (2012), in Stockholm’s Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in 2012. The book, however, is not simply an account of these seminal projects. Through a Judith Butler-inspired discussion about the agency of vulnerability, kinbaku artist and scholar Bohan Gandalf Li rethinks this originally sadomasochistic practice as a desexualised and nonbinary means of connection and care. Art educator Wei Yimu talks about his paintings of penises, inspired by the doodles a nine-year-old student

ArtReview

drew in his class, and how these childlike depictions can be a ‘visual spoof of the compulsory masculinization of Chinese men’. Filmmaker Popo Fan reflects upon the biopolitics of eating (‘When one cannot speak as one wishes, almost the only way to satisfy oneself is to eat. I could almost hear the authorities saying: “Shut the f*ck up! And just eat!”’ Fan writes). Despite the range of themes, at times the writing can feel vague and banal. Indeed, while reading this book you have the nagging sense that there’s another voice buried underneath these English texts speaking words that are perhaps ineffable in both languages. More effort to connect with it might have made this collection more poignant. Yuwen Jiang

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Loot by Tania James Harvill Secker, £18.99 (hardcover) Tipu’s Tiger is a late eighteenth-century automaton, made for Tipu Sultan, the Muslim ruler of Mysore, presumably in celebration of his victories over the forces of the British East India Company during the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–84). Its makers’ names have been lost. When ‘played’, it depicts a near-lifesize European struggling and howling as a tiger mauls his neck. When the East India Company defeated and killed Tipu in 1799, it carted the automaton back to London as part of its extensive booty, describing it as a ‘memorial of the arrogance and barbarous cruelty of Tippoo [sic] Sultan’. Tipu would later feature in the original copy of the Constitution of India (1949) as one of the nation’s early freedom fighters; the automaton lies within a glass case in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. It’s also the fulcrum around which American author Tania James’s latest novel turns. Loot is part historical novel, part gesture towards colonial redress, part adventure story, part romance, part exposé of English attitudes to race and class. Part of its problem is that because of the overlapping thematics it never goes into any theme in any depth. But this messiness might also be its central truth, for the stories that are read into the Tiger are different depending on who’s telling them. Although we know that the reality of the Tiger’s tale remains that it’s told by the victors.

As for the novel, it follows the fates of the imagined creators of the automaton, French clockwork specialist Lucien Du Leze and his local apprentice, the woodcarver Abbas. Lucien is ‘trapped’ in Mysore as his homeland is transformed by revolution making it impossible for him to return. Abbas comes from a lowly background and has been rapidly elevated thanks to his skill with the lathe. Their patron, Tipu, is in the last phase of his reign as the British noose tightens around his neck. All three are fighting for agency in a world that denies it to them. Their stories animate the Tiger in a way that goes beyond the historical object’s mechanical crankshaft and bellows. Lucien makes it back to France; Tipu dies; the people inhabiting his fort at Srirangapatna are slaughtered; the city is looted; ‘prizes’ are distributed to soldiers (the Tiger goes to an English officer and aristocrat who chose it over gold and jewels to better satisfy the orientalist tastes of his wife); Abbas barely survives and follows his creation to England, managing also to fall in love with Lucien’s adopted daughter, the mixed-race, but white-passing Jehan; the officer’s wife, it later turns out, has a sideline in erotic and exotic literature, having churned out her own, semiautobiographical version of Aladdin; she’s having a (necessarily) secret relationship with her husband’s sepoy assistant, his master having died before he left India;

while Abbas, aided by Jehan, is determined to repossess his creation as proof of his skill and existence. ‘Behind each imperfection’ in the Tiger, we are told, ‘is a story only he [Abbas] would know, a story interwoven with his own.’ The problem, of course, is that almost every character that encounters the Tiger has a story of their own to tell too. Even an apparently simple word like that of the book’s title has multiple interpretations. To the British aristocracy, ‘loot’ is a card game (a version of ‘snap’), while to people like Abbas it’s a form of theft, and to organisations like the East India Company Tipu’s Tiger is both a reward and a helpful form of justification for violence and exploitation. What we learn in the course of James’s narrative is that, in the battle of who gets to tell their story, class trumps truth, and race – ‘the final ranking’ – trumps class. In this, the author is self-consciously indebted to the twentiethcentury Sri Lankan leftwing intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who was director of the London-based Institute of Race Relations between 1973 and 2013. Towards the end of the novel, she deploys an adapted version of his celebrated statement about postcolonial migration – ‘we are here because you were there’ – although perhaps the truer summary of the novel is contained in another of Sivanandan’s catchphrases: ‘If those who have do not give, those who haven’t must take’. Mark Rappolt

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le Canongate, £12.99 (hardcover) ‘Whatever I write is / Vietnamese. I can never not – / You won’t let me not –’, writes Nam Le early on in this collection of poems. From then on in it’s not clear who’s projecting identity. The writer or the reader. And it makes for uncomfortable reading. Melbourne-based Le came to Australia from Vietnam as a boat refugee when he was less than a year old: ‘picked on, picked last, left out / looked through looked at, looked at too long / called a slant or chink or nip or ching chong’. It’s been 16 years since his awardwinning debut collection of short stories The Boat hit the shelves. This, his subsequent book, has had time to brew. This collection is driven by rage and violence. Anger against the violence of the English

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language with its rules that, in effect, force users to make categorisations. ‘“Which is the subject, which object?”/ Whose tongue? How many? What gender or case?… But Vietnamese answers: “I am all these things. / Or any.”’ And so this collection is peppered by references to literary and political figures from both East and West; by bits of Latin and bits of Vietnamese. Just as much as the rage is punctuated by bursts of humour: ‘So You don’t know Vietnamese. / Did Pound know Chinese? Did Rexroth? Snyder? / Fenollosa? (Do I either? Ha ha!)’; Poem 26 ‘Erasive’, subtitled ‘Erasure rhymes with Asia’ (each poem has a theme), is greyed- and blacked-out so that the unmarked letters spell ‘No archive is safe but is this

ArtReview

all there is to it’ (each poem also takes a different form). While the title of this collection may suggest otherwise, the freedom Le is driving towards is a freedom from representation. ‘What’s Vietnamese in me / Could fit in a poem’ he writes. To escape being categorised for how they look, to escape the constraints of their body as much as the constraints of language. To be their own person; to express their own truth (without renouncing their ancestry or history – the violence of war, for example, haunts this collection). And for anyone who has felt lost in the sea of identity, ‘never fully anything’ as Le puts it, this extraordinary collection points a way to how you might feel found. Nirmala Devi

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton To get behind the defences of any foodie in your life, there’s a simple trick: ask them how to make a certain dish. Food lovers, claims one character in Butter, ‘are so delighted when someone asks them for a recipe that they’ll tell you all kinds of things you haven’t asked for along with it’. This tactic drives the plot of the novel, when a journalist, Rika Machida, asks for a beef-stew recipe from Manako Kajii, a hedonistic gourmand recently convicted of scamming and murdering a series of men. Kajii, in overpublicised court hearings, maintained she was innocent, but has since refused to tell her story to anyone. Thus begins the correspondence that drives this slow-burn thriller, based on a true story, in which Machida attempts to get the scoop on Kajii, ‘whose days were spent shopping and eating’. When, that is, she was not allegedly scamming money from and killing off older men. Under the ruse of seeking cooking tips, Machida tries to figure out the truth. As Kajii’s simple tips, like making rice with soy sauce and butter, advance to more specific, and peculiar, dining instructions – such as eating noodles from a specific ramen shop after having sex – you start to wonder who is leading on whom. What follows is a game of cat and mouse, enacted through hungrily wetted lips

4th Estate, £14.99 (softcover)

and told with the kind of eager, searching language used to recount a favourite meal. To use Western analogies, it’s like The Martha Stewart Show meets The Silence of the Lambs. The book oozes with descriptions of taste and how ways of seeing the world can become imbued with food. Machida’s first bite of the buttered rice is ‘a shining golden wave, with an astounding depth of flavour and a faint yet full and rounded aroma’, all of which ‘wrapped itself around the rice and washed Rika’s body far away’. We follow as she begins to taste more and more, progressing from a professional too busy to think about food to a hungry sensavore eager to try everything. Her revelations and insights into understanding the convict, as well as her own body and her relationships to those around her, come through preparing and sharing food: making spaghetti with roe or a quatre-quarts for her on-off boyfriend, a macaroni gratin for her friend’s estranged husband, a roasted turkey for the extended, improvised family she has managed to gather around her through the butter-laced journey in the book. We know how deeply she has immersed herself in this new food-oriented world when, later in the book, she describes seeing Kajii in a courtroom, facing retrial, as looking ‘like a giant blancmange’, and the

magazine’s gossip-hungry readership as ‘starved of calorific substances. They’re super responsive to anything with a whiff of crunch or excess about it.’ Written in 2017, but newly published in English, Yuzuki’s narrative is based in part on the real-life ‘Konkatsu Killer’. The woman was convicted of fraud and the murder of men she had met on dating sites; despite some of the evidence being inconclusive, she was put to death. In the book, the media frenzy around Kajii’s case focuses on her unashamed dedication to both pleasing men and pleasing herself: ‘what the public found most alarming, evening more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin’. At times Butter dresses itself up as a whodunnit thriller, and at others a friendship novel, delivered in even, earnestly narrated episodes that feel cookie-cutter ready for an eight-part television adaptation. But it’s the uneasy, persistent social misogyny, and how it polices social norms and expectations, that is the novel’s true focus. Simmering through the book is the refrain that each of us has to learn to listen to our own tastes, desires and sense of satiation to find what constitutes a ‘good amount’. Butter gives a healthy, easy-reading serving of social commentary, where only the gluttonous are innocent. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Tschabalala Self: Bodega Run Edited by Sasha Bonét Gregory R. Miller & Co, $55 (hardcover) Rather than focus on her own practice in this vibrant monograph, Tschabalala Self takes this opportunity to think more broadly about bodegas and their cultural significance among minority communities. Through ten texts and an interview with the artist, Bodega Run provides a space in which Black, Brown and Latino voices can articulate their own realities, as well as providing an opportunity to reflect on the artist’s eponymous paintings. With respect to that second mode, writer Sasha Bonét’s introduction focuses on the Black female body, its continued mistreatment and its importance in Self’s practice. The second essay, by artist and writer Ayanna Dozier, reflects on Self’s Bodega Run mixed-media series (2015–), describing the artist’s subject as both a powerful, martyred ‘Bad Bitch Prometheus’ and

a ‘hypersexual figure that both confronts and subverts the sociosexual politics of Black femininity’. The eight texts thereafter, by Loryn Lopes, G’Ra Asim, Naomi Fry, Joshua Bennett, Raven Rakia, Carolyn ‘CC’ Concepcion, Camille Okhio and Roya Marsh attempt to approach the bodega from different vantage points. Asim’s ‘Microdosing Wakanda and Talokan’, for example, is a personal essay that starts with an anecdote about an encounter within a bodega and then seamlessly weaves in social concerns about race and privilege; Fry’s playful contribution honours the bodega cat; and Concepcion’s memories and snapshots of her family’s own shop provide an intimate sense of these stores that mean so much to minority communities. Yet while the approaches to the bodega are varied, there are inevitable overlaps between

April 2024

one essay and the next. And while this emphasises certain themes – among them community, marginality, race, gentrification, violence and anger – there are also moments when the repetition seems redundant. Like Asim’s, the essays of Bennet, Rakia and Marsh touch on similar sociological concerns surrounding the bodega, so that by the end, the sheer number of essays seems unnecessary. That the texts also appear one after another, admittedly punctuated by occasional reproductions of Bodega Run paintings or full-page spreads of insights from Self, can make the whole feel a bit like a marathon despite the evident strengths of the individual texts themselves. Yet if the purpose of a catalogue is to contextualise work rather than simply sing hymns of praise to it, this one does that. Marv Recinto

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On the cover Julien Creuzet, photographed by Nicolas Derne in Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 2024

… e spesso non quelli che ti aspetteresti.

April 2024

Words on the spine and on pages 35, 51, 91 and above are by Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (1947)

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from the archives The Long Haunting of Madge Gill It is hoped that when Madge Gill died in 1961 she was united on the same spectral plane as her longtime spirit guide, Myrninerest. It is perhaps understandable that Gill should find great comfort in the guidance of an entity from another universe, given how harshly this world had treated her: born to a single mother in London’s East End in 1882, Gill was hidden away at home from censorious Victorian eyes for much of her early childhood. Aged nine she was given up to a children’s home and from there she shipped off to Canada under a child labour scheme and entered domestic service. At eighteen she managed to get a passage back to England, though adulthood did not put an end to her sublunary woes. An abusive marriage with her cousin followed, and from three pregnancies just one son survived. It was while recovering from the birth of a stillborn daughter that Myrninerest first took possession of Gill’s body. Gill began making art during her earliest trances, but she only started to seriously engage with ink drawing, executed on paper, postcards or rolls of calico cloth up to eight metres long, during the seances she organised at her home from the 1930s onwards. Here she could produce dozens of works in a single sitting, each ‘immensely intricate, a proliferation of scrolls, hatchings and micro-doodles’, as Art News and Review (since renamed ArtReview) put it in a 1969 review of a posthumous exhibition of her work at Grosvenor Gallery, London. Gill’s collaboration with Myrninerest proved fruitful prior to her death as well, and brought an uptick in her fortunes: she showed annually at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, preferring the nonprofit space to the commercial galleries that offered her exhibitions during her lifetime, as she had no authority – she explained – to sell work, given it was made by her noncorporeal friend. Gill described Myrninerest as ‘a very progressive spirit’, something that no doubt appealed to Art News and Review’s critic, Oswell Blakeston, who praised Gill’s ‘whole range of weird experiments, which make this memorial show quite fabulous’. Blakeston, a pseudonym of Henry Joseph Hasslacher, whose own writing ranged from gay-detective fiction to Working Cats (1963), a pet guide, and Cooking With Nuts (1979), a recipe book, presents this paranormal collaboration with no cynicism. Gill’s work was made in the context of English spiritualism, which emerged during the Victorian era but really found a public, not least through the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The History of Spiritualism in 1926, after the death and devastation of the First World War led many to look not only for a way to keep in contact with those who were killed on Europe’s battlefields, but to seek meaning beyond the earth on which they were slain. By the time Blakeston was writing about Gill’s work, ‘a new generation’ was open once again to ‘its impact because it shocks our unconscious’, the critic thought. Blakeston, gay and, according to his partner, the artist Max Chapman, with a ‘quick eye for the bizarre and the outrageous’, was a keen exponent of Britain’s burgeoning counterculture, providing elsewhere one of the first written descriptions of a mescal trip. Blakeston embraced Gill’s practice precisely because of her outsider quality, a rebuke to the stuffy conservatism that returned to the British Isles after it went to war again.

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The spirit of these ink drawings seems ordained to perpetually reappear every few generations, as new seekers find in Myrninerest an ally against the order of previous. At a time when shifting politics has embraced alternative cosmologies – though more often those of Indigenous nations than that which could have been found in a chintzy wallpapered living room of a terrace in East Ham – Gill and her ghost will be included in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale this year. May Myrninerest find solace in La Serenissima. ArtReview