ArtReview December 2021 by ArtReview

Power 100

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SOME ENCOUNTERS YOU WEAR FOREVER. RINGS AND EARRINGS IN BEIGE GOLD, WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS.

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ArtReview vol 73 no 8 December 2021

Mad Hatters The other day, ArtReview was reading an article in The New York Times about how a curator at the New York Historical Society had marched up to a top-hatted horse-drawn-carriage driver who was minding his own business (while simultaneously touting for it, one presumes) at the south end of Central Park. The curator then flourished a reproduction of a painting of a horse-drawn carriage (plus top-hatted driver, plus passengers he’s explaining the sites to) in Central Park dating from 1945 (the painting, not the reproduction) and recorded the (living) driver’s interpretation of the work, to be exhibited as part of the work’s wall text in the museum. It’s all, the Times explains, about letting outside voices into hallowed halls. About divesting oneself of one’s authority and privilege. Perhaps even, underneath all that, about making art relevant to everyday life… ‘The public interpretation appears on the label directly below the professional insight,’ the Times adds approvingly. Small steps. It goes on to note that the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont recently invited students, ‘some without art backgrounds’, to rewrite some of its labels. Among the students were two from Ghana, who responded to a work by El Anatsui. Who is Ghanaian. Like ArtReview said, small steps. In any case, it’s the idea, not the execution, that counts. Everyone knows that that’s really the basis of the art of our times. The physical object (inasmuch as there might be one) really is the emperor’s new clothes. That’s why Mike Winkelmann invented Beeple and Beeple invented nfts. To keep it real. But ArtReview’s not here to tell you what you already know.

Way out

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Whether you want to laugh or weep at that New York Times story, it does – amid all the concealed commentary about the learned sense versus the common sense, the professional versus the amateur, the white cube vs the dirty street and its rather basic interpretation of commonality, fashion vs uniforms or folk costumes, and the things we share according to the happenstance of where we were born – highlight an underlying paranoia about art’s relationship to the wider world. More basically, it’s a paranoia about what it’s for (art, not the wider world, although there are, of course, those cloistered, privileged ivory-tower dwellers who, following the lineage of Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant, still argue the reverse – disgraceful). Particularly after a global pandemic that has reminded us that there are some aspects of the world at large from which there is no real escape. And of course, lockdowns, furloughs and all the stuff that comes with that have given those who have survived plenty of time to think about things. In essence each edition of ArtReview’s annual Power 100 is precisely about how the artworld is dealing with its perpetual condition of paranoia. About debates concerning how to value art and about what art is for. About whether it exists in a zone of (to borrow the disgraceful German philosopher’s words) wild freedom or a more rational, purposeful one. And perhaps how it can exist, simultaneously, in both. Of course, all these debates are not something from which ArtReview stands apart. But while it may seem, to those cynics among you, that ArtReview uses this list to displace its own schizophrenic and paranoid tendencies onto 100 innocent victims selected at random for their more-or-less vague connections with the field of contemporary art, it can assure you that it does not. Someone who wears a hat is not the same as someone else who wears a hat. Unless of course they are. One has to allow for a certain degree of emulation, after all. We all know that that’s also what contemporary art is all about. ArtReview

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Yoshitomo Nara

STOP THE BOMBS, 2019, acrylic on wood, 58 ⅞ × 46 ¼ × 3 ¹⁄16” © Yoshitomo Nara

Pinacoteca

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5 Hanover Square London pacegallery.com

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Rudolf Polanszky

December 10 – January 27 Shanghai

Wes Lang

January 6 – February 5 New York

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Turi Simeti

Marcus Jansen

Brent Wadden

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

January 6 – February 12 Paris, Matignon

January 8 – March 5 Paris, Turenne

January 13 – February 19 London

January 27 – February 26 Brussels

Alexis McGrigg

January 8 – February 5 Paris, Front Space

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DEC 1 − DEC 28, 2021

PERROTIN TOKYO

Jesper Just, Seminarium (2021), Gl Holtegaard. Photo by: David Stjernholm

SHANGHAI

EDDIE MARTINEZ

TOKYO

CMY

JESPER JUST

NEW YORK

PARIS

GABRIEL DE LA MORA XAVIER VEILHAN OB

EMILY MAE SMITH CLAIRE TABOURET BARRY MCGEE

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SEMINARIUM JESPER JUST

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IDA APPLEBROOG RIGHT UP TO NOW 1969 – 2021 29 JAN – 2 MAY 2022 DURSLADE FARM, DROPPING LANE, BRUTON, SOMERSET BA10 0NL WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM IDA APPLEBROOG, GOD, 2021. MIXED MEDIA ON WOODEN PANELS, 15 PANELS, 129.5 × 121.9 × 3.8 CM / 51 × 48 × 1 ½ IN © IDA APPLEBROOG. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH. PHOTO: THOMAS BARRATT

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Mandy El-Sayegh Figure One

Paris Marais December 2021—January 2022

Thaddaeus Ropac London Paris Salzburg Seoul

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Sprüth Magers

Berlin Andrea Zittel: A-Z West Works Pop-up Store November – December Robert Irwin December – March Nancy Holt Mirrors of Light December – February Hyun-Sook Song February – March London Pamela Rosenkranz Healer October – December Andreas Schulze December – March Rosemarie Trockel January – March Los Angeles Cao Fei October – December Lucy Dodd January – March Barbara Kruger March – July

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Mend e s Wood DM São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

Marina Perez Simão Sifang Art Museum Nanjing, China 5/11 2021 – 13/3 2022 Paulo Nazareth 34th Bienal de São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil 4/9 – 5/12 2021 Otobong Nkanga Kunsthaus Bregenz Bregenz, Austria 23/10 2021 – 6/2 2022 Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Turin, Italy 25/9 2021 – 30/1 2022

Lucas Arruda Fundação Iberê Porto Alegre, Brazil 2/10 2021 – 16/1 2022 Paulo Nazareth Sonia Gomes Antonio Obá Instituto Moreira Salles São Paulo, Brazil 25/9 2021 – 30/1 2022 Antonio Obá X Museum Beijing, China 11/11 2021 – 13/3 2022 Heidi Bucher Haus der Kunst Munich, Germany 17/9 2021 – 13/2 2022 Paulo Nimer Pjota Power Station Dallas, USA 22/10 2021 – 2/1 2022 Rosana Paulino MFA Houston Houston, USA 24/10 2021 – 23/1 2022 Mariana Castillo Deball Artium Museoa Victoria Gasteiz, Spain 5/11 2021 – 13/3 2022 Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Mexico City, Mexico 16/10 2021 – 1/5 2022

Mariana Castillo Deball, You Are Not Imprisoned By Any Durable Contour, 2021; photo: Rodrigo Casanova Cirett

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13/11/2021 - 22/01/2022

WORKS ON PAPER

ZENO X GALLERY ANTWERP SOUTH

RAOUL DE KEYSER

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JEAN DUBUFFET

PARIS

Bal des Figures

Clochepoche, 1973-1988 © Adagp, Paris, 2021 / Photo N. Brasseur

4 Nov. - 18 Dec. 2021

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KEITH HARING

MIAMI

Art in Action

Untitled (détail), 1985, Encre sur papier, 27,9 x 35,6 cm

27 Nov. - 18 Dec. 2021

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CMY

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ISABELLA FÜRNKÄS

BUILD ME A HOUSE Potsdamer Str. 81B, Berlin December 3, 2021 — February 12, 2022

hua-international.com

GREEN GO HOME Rirkrit Tiravanija &Tomas Vu

D08-3, 798 Art District, Beijing November 27, 2021 — February 19, 2022 250_AR_Hua.indd 1

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BRICE MARDEN These paintings are of themselves

Gagosian New York

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Viewpoints The Interviews

The Diaries

Anna L. Tsing by Ben Eastham 42

Chicago by Annette LePique 44

Tokini Peterside by Louise Darblay 46

Minsk by Antonina Stebur 48

Byung-Chul Han by Gesine Borcherdt 50

Bangkok by Max Crosbie-Jones 54

Ai Weiwei by Fi Churchman 56

Beirut by Rayya Badran 126

Eyal Weizman by Oliver Basciano 124

New Dehli by Deepa Bhasthi 130

Yadanar Win by Marv Recinto 128

page 128 Yadanar Win at a rally for Myanmar in Paris, France, 2021. Courtesy the artist

December 2021

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Power 100 Introduction 68 Statistics 72 The List 73 The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men artist project by Bani Abidi 78

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

Fire: the ninth cycle. Winner to be announced. Having celebrated 100 exhibitions in more than 40 cities over the last 13 years, the Prix Pictet, the leading award on photography and sustainability, will be announcing its 9th winner on the 15th December at an award ceremony in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a year like no other. Through months of lockdown and confinement museums and galleries remained closed; exhibitions were cancelled, and the art world carousel came to a shuddering halt. The Prix Pictet’s global tour of Hope, tentatively resumed, having been unable to exhibit between Lausanne in September 2020 and Verona in May 2021. Yet photographers continued to work. A resilience that the Prix Pictet celebrated with the publication of the book Confinement, featuring photographic responses to the crisis by 43 artists previously shortlisted for the award. At the same time, the award began its ninth cycle with the theme of Fire. Over the past thirteen years the Prix Pictet screening at the Théâtre Antique has become an important part of the opening week of the celebrated Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in the South of France. On Thursday 8th July, Stephen Barber, Chair of the Prix Pictet, and Isabelle von Ribbentrop, Executive Director, announced the shortlist for the ninth cycle of the prize. The shortlist features work by 13 artists from 10 countries on 4 continents. In making their selection, the independent jury, chaired by Sir David King, praised the outstanding quality of the portfolios submitted for the award.

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The winner of the ninth Prix Pictet award (CHF100,000) will be announced at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Wednesday 15th December 2021. Prix Pictet Fire will then embark on a world tour beginning with scheduled exhibitions in Tokyo, Zurich and Moscow. Work from the shortlisted artists, together with outstanding images from the wider submission, appear in the book Fire, published by teNeues in December. The portfolios of the shortlisted artists can be viewed online at: www.prixpictet.com Twitter: @PrixPictet Instagram: @Prix_Pictet Facebook: Facebook.com/prixpictet #PrixPictetFire Podcast: ‘Found in Conversation’ third season launching on 15th December in conjunction with the ninth Prix Pictet winner announcement.

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MODERNISMS IRANIAN, TURKISH, AND INDIAN HIGHLIGHTS FROM NYU’S ABBY WEED GREY COLLECTION

The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery

open until February 5, 2022 nyuad-artgallery.org | @nyuadartgallery

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Singapore Art Week returns for its 10th edition!

The pinnacle of Singapore’s visual arts calendar will feature an exciting array of over 100 art events that shows the best of the country’s diverse art scene. From live art to Chinese calligraphy to digital art to everything in between, see a spectacular spread of art from Singapore, the region and beyond! A Joint Initiative By:

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Santa Barbara fig. I-1.2

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Season 1. Santa Barbara How Not to Be Colonised? GES-2 House of Culture 15 Bolotnaya Embankment, Moscow v-a-c.org

4 Dec 2021 13 Mar 2022

GES-2

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Viewpoints 1

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“FRICTION GENERATES MOTION AND CHANGE”

ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING interviewed by Ben Eastham

The ideas of anthropologist Anna L. Tsing have not only entered the artistic discourse but are in the process of reshaping it. In books including the vastly influential The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), which has for a protagonist the matsutake mushroom, Tsing proposes a way of seeing the world that demolishes the boundaries separating human ‘culture’ from nonhuman ‘nature’. By describing how people are inextricably bound into the environments they inhabit, she illustrates how we might learn to live on a damaged planet. That the world cannot wholly be understood from a unified human perspective has obvious ramifications in the field of art. Feral Atlas – the research platform that Tsing cofounded with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou – responds to this crisis by experimenting with new ways of telling stories about our ‘more-than-human Anthropocene’. More widely, Tsing’s influence is apparent in the proliferation of artworks that aspire to ‘decentre’ the human or that propose new alliances across

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the convenient fictions of self, nation and species. These are the foundations for an aesthetics of art in the era of ecological catastrophe. artreview In your book Friction [2004], which sprang from your work in a region of Indonesia suffering deforestation, you describe a meeting with a tribal elder in which he asked you to intervene directly with President Suharto. After you explain that anthropologists don’t have that kind of political influence, he suggests that it is your responsibility instead to put a ‘hair in the flour’. Could you explain that metaphor and how it has shaped your own relationship to power? anna lowenhaupt tsing In Indonesia it is traditional to make rice cakes to appease the spirits, who can partake of their beautiful smell. So if you think that the national government exists in similar relation to the Meratus people as the spirit world – as an inescapable force over their lives with whom it is impossible Photo: Feifei Zhou

to communicate directly – then to put a hair in the cakes’ flour is to exploit a weak point in the system that connects them to it. I teach at a university in the United States, which brings constraints. But I’m willing to do that, in part, because it allows me to participate in the imagination of alternative visions that might make cracks in the apparatus of power, which is not quite the same as smashing it. Some of my colleagues think we should just stand up and denounce the system. But anthropology is one of the least powerful disciplines in the academy, and so denouncing is not enough unless you’ve figured out a channel through which your denunciations might carry traction. I fear that no one will listen to our denouncements unless we make them beautiful. It might be part of the work of writers and artists to invest critical work with this kind of traction: to put a hair in the flour. ar You have studied sites of environmental catastrophe – from the diminished forests of Oregon

ArtReview

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to the frontiers of extractive capitalism in Indonesia – and described the unexpected alliances that emerge from the ruins. They are figured as sites of destruction but also of resistance and creative potential. These zones are characterised by a force you call ‘friction’. alt Sometimes people interpret friction as only meaning conflict, but it is also a creative force. I think of rubbing two sticks to make fire, or the friction that creates the traction between wheel and road that pushes a vehicle forward. That friction generates motion and change, and it’s a useful way of thinking about how the political cultures and worldmaking projects by which we are surrounded don’t operate independently. Instead, they are always rubbing up against each other. Clearly, those processes can have catastrophic effects but they can also make possible new formations of power. You can’t know in advance what will happen. ar Do you consider the transdisciplinary work of Feral Atlas to exist in a comparable ‘zone of awkward engagement’? alt It is so important to work across different forms of knowledge-formation and allow them to interact without trying to create what [sociologist] John Law calls a ‘one-world world’, a homogeneous space in which everything fits perfectly together. This also allows us to consider how knowledge of all kinds, including Indigenous or traditional forms of knowledge, might rub up against each other to create new effects, rather than stand alone as separate planets. ar These interactions between diverse forms of knowledge – or communities, or species – aren’t figured as necessarily harmonious. Your work as a writer and with Feral Atlas instead foregrounds difference, translation and the friction that arises from those encounters. You’ve described those meeting points as ‘assemblages’. alt I like the term ‘assemblage’ as it’s used in ecology. In that context it describes all the plants, soils and other things that just happen to be in a particular place. It doesn’t assume in advance to know the relationships between them, and so it forces you to figure them out rather than simply apply a predetermined logic. Are these two plants in some form of mutualist relationship, or is one a parasite on the other? We don’t know, and we shouldn’t presume to know what the effects of their rubbing up against each other might be. I wanted to create a school like that, in which it was possible to study the places at which different cultures and politics come together without judging their relationship or their effects in advance. Those interactions between

diverse political and cultural projects create the friction we were talking about, and often they have unexpected and unpredictable effects that cannot simply be reduced to a predetermined algorithm. ar In The Mushroom at the End of the World you advocate for the importance of descriptive work, of observing and recording. Description, like illustration, has a poor reputation in both the arts and sciences. Why is description so denigrated, and why is it so important now? alt A false dichotomy between description and theory has really gotten in our way. It reduces description to merely mechanical work and makes theory transcendent, as if it were a religious commitment. Description is important because it gives traction to a theoretical perspective. To propose theory without description is to ask for the reader’s blind faith. Let’s take a problem like the Anthropocene. If we can’t describe the patches through which our environmentally troubled earth is emerging, then we can’t have any clue what it is we’re studying. That work is theoretical work, and without it we are in deep trouble. Feral Atlas is a critically engaged project of description. In the process it makes theoretical points, and so I’m interested that you tied the problem of description to that of illustration. We were very careful with Feral Atlas not to use art to exemplify theory, to show what’s already known. Instead the art does conceptual work in the same vitalising way that we’re ascribing to description. ar So description or illustration might allow us to think about objects, like the Anthropocene, that are otherwise too vast to conceptualise. Is it also a way of training ourselves to see that which we are conditioned to ignore? alt When I was in Oregon working on my project about mushrooms, I realised that the foresters simply couldn’t see the mushrooms that were proliferating in their forest. They were trained to see only board-feet of timber, even though these mushrooms became at certain points commercially more valuable than the timber. The foresters were stuck on an assignment they’d been given at the start of the twentieth century. I am committed to moving beyond the modernist vision practices that we have all been schooled in. Because in Oregon it wasn’t just the mushrooms that were invisible to the authorities, it was the Southeast Asian refugees who were living in the forest to gather them. It seems to me that figuring out what’s going on around us is a good first step towards figuring out how to go forward.

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ar How might changing the way we see the world make it possible for us to, as the subtitle of your most recent book puts it, live in the ruins? alt Stories of environmental collapse can paralyse people, but they can also open us up to the world and foster new sensibilities. Take for example Feifei Zhou’s drawings for Feral Atlas, which conjoin different historical references within a single landscape. That’s a new modality of seeing that might make it possible for the viewer to notice things in their regular world that were previously invisible to them. I’ve thought a lot about the affect that Feral Atlas aims to conjure, and I’ve settled on ‘wonder in the midst of dread’. Rather than being suffocated by the terrible things that are happening, that wonder might stimulate the curiosity we need to work through those problems. ar You are the coeditor of an anthology of essays entitled Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), which is organised around two wonderful and dreadful types: ghosts and monsters. How are they useful in terms of thinking about the Anthropocene? alt We are surrounded by ghosts. Consider those plants that have lost the animals that distribute their seeds, meaning they are no longer able to reproduce. They’re still clinging on, but there is no prospect of survival. They have one foot in the world of ghosts. This haunting is not just metaphorical, it is a material form of ghostliness. In terms of monsters, biology until 30 years ago was stuck on the idea that every organism simply reproduced itself in isolation from the environment and from history. Nobody thinks that anymore. We know now that organisms and their environments are interacting all the time and across species in ways that affect the next generation. In the twentieth century these interspecies interplays, and the chimeras of various sorts they produce, would have been considered monstrous. But this switching across species is now accepted in professional biology and the idea is creeping into the vernacular. All around us are beings that can’t possibly be understood independently of the multiple kinds of organisms that partake in them. ar How can art reflect this shift? alt Art can foster the curiosity and openness that generates the new sensibility we need to work with and through these problems. I’m delighted by all the experiments that go on in the arts. I think of Anicka Yi’s interspecies models – part fungi, mammal, plant, bacteria, robot – floating around Tate Modern, interacting with visitors. That can change what we think life is. Ben Eastham is a writer based in Athens

19/11/2021 16:20

CHICAGO 26 AUGUST

The Chicago listening event for Kanye (soon to be Ye) West’s studio album Donda began with a replica of the singer’s childhood home in the city, rebuilt and staged within Soldier Field stadium. The album is named for and dedicated to West’s mother. Such memorial leans into the uncanny when one considers that director Nia DaCosta’s addition to the Candyman horror franchise was released in theatres the next day. DaCosta’s film, set in the city’s gentrified Cabrini-Green housing projects, seems to centre on ideas of memory and legacy from a male perspective. However, it is the film’s women, one being the male protagonist’s mother, who emerge as the inheritors and guardians of intergenerational histories. I could claim that this summer of celebrated mothers in bigbudget Chicago art signals a broader shift within the city’s arts organisations during the covid-19 pandemic. Think: renewed investment in caregiving, and an emergent understanding of the value of unseen labour. Such a statement holds certain truths but also merits caution, as it simplifies the complexities and ambiguities of what care can mean (ie caring while Black, caring while female, caring while queer, caring with a disability) under neoliberalism. However, it is this same complexity, this same unease, that makes the mothers of Donda and Candyman flashpoints within the summer’s arts landscape. As these two women, one lived and the other written, are inflamed with an excess of signifiers, it is necessary to witness how these same gestures of meaning and making are translated throughout the Chicago arts: from the community placemaking and South Side archives of in c/o: Black women, to Public Media Institute’s pandemic relief efforts. In sharp contrast to these community-based, grassroots diy collectives, larger organisations vested in corporate interests – The Art Institute of Chicago and the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art – spent their pandemic laying off workers and pushing back against unionisation efforts. Such divisions, built upon race and class, are sadly commonplace under carceral capitalism. However, such demarcations are brought into sharp relief in Chicago through a history of redlining and divestment in the city’s South and West sides. West received his honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, the same year I graduated from the institution’s Art History, Theory and Criticism master’s programme. I remember peering over from my balcony seat to see tenured faculty and deans taking pictures with West. The next day I’d begin my job at the call centre soliciting museum memberships and donations located in the basement of the Art Institute. Six years later and I can still tell you without hesitation the best bathrooms to cry

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in throughout the museum. Over this summer I have thought quite a bit about my time in that basement, while writing the inaugural essay for the Chicago Arts Census, the first comprehensive, crossdiscipline data-collection effort in the city created by and with the art workers of Chicago. During those heat-laced writing sessions I was hit with a series of careening realisations: I’ve felt very alone and very sad for the majority of my working life as an art worker. My own mental spiral was in line with the census’s conclusions that new systems and organised resources were desperately needed to support artists and art workers struggling under the gig economy. More often than not, we find ourselves balancing multiple jobs, economic precarity and emotional burnout. A few weeks after my work with the census, I participated in an event held in conjunction with the city’s Architecture Biennial, an ecological workshop titled, ‘Soil Safari’. The workshop consisted of a small group meeting in one of the city’s abandoned lots (currently numbering in the twenty-thousands) to study the city’s soil. I won’t end this story with a trite lesson on new life from a single sunny afternoon, as the truth, like connection and care in the Chicago arts, is impossibly intertwined with privilege, class and race: the vacant lot in which the workshop was held used to house various care facilities for lgbtqia+ community members, until they were demolished by the city. These factors, along with the awkwardly human desire to both live with and without memory, are what combine to form a mathematics of compassion. Sadly, it’s a science routinely left on the shoulders of mothers and mother-figures, while others are seemingly absolved of its burdens. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, scholar Jacqueline Rose asserts that the unsolicited duty of all mothers ‘is to preserve the fiction that the world is a safe place… when if anybody knows that’s rubbish, it’s a mother’. That is the bind of mothering: it means being held aloft as the answer to life’s ills while simultaneously blamed for them. It’s the complexity, the knottiness of care after lockdown, what it means to continue to try to make, to write, to think about art. How can you show up to care for another, for an idea, for a purpose? Think back now to the mothers of Donda, of Candyman: it is the heaviest of burdens to be both everything and nothing. This is not a diagnosis, nor a hypothesis or proscription, but rather an urgent, ever-present question. How can that burden be lightened? How can you give of yourself to another, to the world? Annette LePique is an arts writer, educator and archivist based in Chicago

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all images ‘Soil Safari’ ecological workshop, September 2021, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial & 6018 North. Photos: Annette LePique

December 2021

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“FOR ARTISTS IT HAS BEEN A VERY TRICKY TIME”

TOKINI PETERSIDE

interviewed by Louise Darblay Tokini Peterside is the founder of art x Lagos, Nigeria’s first international contemporary art fair, which has acted as a catalyst for the local art scene since 2016. The fair held its sixth edition this year, both physically and online, with galleries from the continent and abroad. artreview Before setting up art x Lagos, you were working in the world of fashion – what led you into the artworld? tokini peterside When I started working with [fashion designer] Maki Oh and [concept store] Alára, the artists I was collecting would say, “You’re doing this work with Maki, she’s a great designer, but we would also love to have someone work with us on the business side of what we do”. I then went away for a year to business school between France and Singapore at insead, and spent a lot of that time thinking, ‘There is a need’. There is a need for artists to professionalise their practices. They don’t want to think about the business concerns.

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They don’t want to think about negotiating with collectors. They just want to structure the commercial sides of their practice and receive greater exposure for their work. ar Is that how the idea of an art fair emerged? tp Yes. Recognising that it would be difficult for them to afford my services as a consultant, I started to look into the art-fair model as a way of helping to strengthen the arts ecosystem in Nigeria and across Africa, hoping that would then lead to greater visibility and support for artists, so that those who wished to sustain their careers in Nigeria and in Africa could do so and wouldn’t feel as though they had to leave the continent in order to have illustrious careers. I had just seen the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and wanted to bring the world to Africa, and Nigeria, to experience firsthand the incredible work being done here. Photo: Lakin Ogunbanwo

I also knew that the demand had to be there. I wanted to do that in Lagos, a city that I very much believed in and still believe in, as a cultural capital on the continent, because there’s so much potential here. ar What was the response from different actors and galleries on the continent internationally? What was the appeal of Lagos? tp From the first edition, we had Pan-African representation. We had reached out to the most established galleries in Nigeria and on the African continent, with the likes of Goodman Gallery and Stevenson in South Africa, and Gallery 1957 in Accra. They were excited at this idea of creating a very strong hub for the visual arts on the continent outside of South Africa. We then had galleries from across East and West Africa join us. Lagos is an economic powerhouse. I often quote this statistic that if Lagos was a country it would actually be the fifth largest gdp on the

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African continent. It’s also Africa’s capital of music, fashion, film. It just made sense to look at this vision of creating Lagos as an art capital. Then you have international audiences who were starting to explore the creativity coming out of Nigeria. After we launched, everyone from Tate to Zeitz mocaa wanted to organise excursions to bring their patrons here themselves to see what we were doing. ar There’s definitely a sense that the scene is growing there. There’s the Lagos Photo Festival, the Lagos Biennial, the new Shyllon Museum of Art, galleries and alternative spaces, and Yinka Shonibare is setting up the gas Foundation, while a uk gallery like Tiwani is opening a branch there. How do you feel the scene has changed since that first edition in 2016? tp The evolution has just been so fantastic to witness. In 2016 there was so much talk about the creative industry. Nigeria’s music industry was booming. It has since exploded, you have Burna Boy, Wizkid, these musicians doing great and winning Grammys; the film and fashion industries were growing too. The visual art was lagging behind, not for a lack of artistic talent but more from a lack of visibility, a lack of widespread awareness, and that was what I really wanted to change. Back then there were people who were increasingly affluent, potentially interested in the arts but not knowing how to access the art scene. I think art x Lagos did help open up the artworld to a much broader audience. Big existing collectors are important, but we also need to build up this other group that are coming in who may not spend a substantial amount on a work today, but can do so in a year, maybe two years’ time. Through the programming of our debut fair, we had aimed to signal very strongly to younger and nonspecialist audiences that this experience was as much for them as it was for the established collector. And then it was almost as if the gates were sprung wide open. People suddenly felt very empowered and motivated to come into all the other art spaces and exhibitions. The Lagos Biennial, founded by the artist Folakunle Oshun, launched in 2017. Galleries opened up to these audiences and started to market and promote their exhibitions very differently, because they got to experience the vibrancy and dynamism that comes into the artworld when you open it up to people who previously were cut off and left out. Now, every time there’s a national conversation about creativity, the visual arts is smack bang on the front of the agenda. ar How important is the local collector base for the scene, in comparison with international collectors?

tp Local patronage is very much at the heart of the fair. We opened our sixth edition this year. Three weeks before opening, we didn’t know whether Nigeria would lift its requirement of a quarantine for international visitors. Yet, despite that, we still went ahead with the fair because we know that Nigeria has a growing collector base that is capable of absorbing the new works brought by the various galleries. The galleries who are visiting from Ghana, from Ivory Coast, from Senegal, or from Spain or Paris, they can sell to other collectors around the world. What they want is to cultivate a collector base and a following in Nigeria and to reach sub-Saharan Africa, because, like me, they believe in the potential of local collectors and what that collector base can do for the broader art scene in the proliferation and continuation of the rise of Africa’s artists. ar How are artists and the general ecosystem coping with the situation in Nigeria? Be it the political unrest and insecurity, the #Endsars movement against police brutality that culminated last year, not to mention the pandemic, obviously, which took its toll on economies around the world. tp For artists it has been a very tricky time. With the pandemic, some became incredibly expressive on social media, sharing their work and thoughts. Others clammed up and were so frightened that they couldn’t do any work. There were so many varying reactions, but not different from what we saw from artists around the world. The End sars protests in October last year was another very difficult situation for us, because many artists were very passionate about the movement. There were interventions by artists who gathered at the protests to create work live that was inspired by how much they wanted to see change come in Nigeria. Then you had thousands of photographers across the country running to the protest grounds to document the effort. This was what led us to support this effort. We made an open call for photographers across the country and offered 100 sustenance grants, because here no major newspapers were commissioning them. We sent them small grants. We sent them raincoats. We sent them power banks. We sent them sd cards for their cameras. We sent them whatever we could get across to them to help them continue their work and to show them that we acknowledge and support their contribution to the protest. But then those protests were very brutally cracked down on by the government, which led to further disheartenment and disengagement from the creative community. Many became a lot more politically active with their work in terms of the narrative and the stories that they wish to tell. But a few decided to immigrate, which is sad but understandable.

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It was a year in which, for many of us, it felt as though our hearts were a bit broken. That’s why we’re bringing the fair back around again, to support the arts ecosystem but also to help uplift Nigerians and the Pan-African scene. Many artists want to be part of a solution-oriented effort for Nigeria. In fact, our curated programme at the fair is titled ‘The restful ones are not yet born’. As a fair that sees itself as reflecting the spirit of Lagos, we are also calling out and saying: Africa, Nigeria is not at rest. We’ve got to think about how to rebuild. ar It seems that the fair operates with a different model, one that’s much more institutional and engaged with the community and the scene. Perhaps by virtue of operating in a landscape with little public infrastructure, there’s a sense that the fair had to take on more responsibility than building a marketplace? tp I recognised from the get-go that by virtue of this fair taking place in Lagos, it needed to be dynamic and responsive, and open to young people. We had a music programme, art x Live!, which showcased Nigeria’s most exciting young musicians together with visual artists in a curated concert and exhibition. Then when Nigeria started to go through an increasingly difficult time last year, we sat down and said, who are we? What do we want to say? We do believe we should take a stance, because the issues that are being grappled with are too important for us not to. We also operate in a market where we do not have an extensive museum network, only recently celebrating the opening of a new dedicated contemporary art museum, which was founded by a private collector, Prince Yemisi Shyllon. We have an international photography festival in Lagos, a biennial and a small number of growing and exciting galleries. But in terms of public engagements with the arts, the week of art x Lagos is the biggest public arts experience in Nigeria. People come from across the country and the continent, as well as internationally, to be engaged, to learn, to be inspired. So we felt very strongly that we needed to speak to what we’ve been through over the past 24 months, since we held our last physical fair. We can’t just present art in a beautiful state, away from the broader context of our society, because the fair is also a reflection of the mood and the spirit of Lagos. One of the projects for this year’s fair is a short film that was created live at the fair by this incredible collective called The Critics, in collaboration with Aye, a sound artist. The fair’s audience members are the actors in it. Titled We Are Here, it speaks to a generation that recognises its base and its place in Nigeria and wants to be part of the solution and the way forward.

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BELARUS 25 MARCH

On 25 March 2021, a large exhibition, Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance, opened at the Mystetsky Arsenal in Kyiv. I took part in the exhibition as one of its six curators. The exhibition was dedicated to tactics of resistance and solidarity formed both in art and beyond, not only within the 2020–21 protests in Belarus but also since the end of the 1980s. More than 90 artists took part in the exhibition; the curators tried to show how art during the protests became an egalitarian instrument that no longer belonged only to professional cultural workers. The aim was also to represent the many tools and mechanisms held within contemporary art that allow the practice of resistance, the formation of connections and of common, shared experience – the creation, through political imagination, of new relationships, new structures, a utopian horizon of the future. The central metaphor and conceptual idea of the exhibition was a network of solidarity. The largescale protests that began in Belarus in the summer of 2020 and continue to this day have a complex, branching network structure built around the idea of cooperation and opposing itself to the official structure of power. Belarusian dictatorship is built on the principle of a rigid hierarchy, while the protesters represent a horizontal, dynamic networked model, without leadership. Even seemingly simple acts of resistance, such as the women who joined arms to form ‘chains of solidarity’, in a fact have a network nature. In the background is a large amount of support from those who are invisible but make it possible for others to take to the streets. There were cars circulating around protest actions, on hand to save the participants from detention; administrators and members on the Telegram messenger communities who tracked police wagon routes around the city; those who brought water or tea to the protesters; initiatives to help the victims; and so on – all together, they formed complex infrastructures without a single centre. Such tactics emerged as a response to unprecedented violence. At this point, about 900 people have been recognised by the international community as political prisoners, and more than 1 percent of the country’s adult population has been detained during protests; cases of violence and even murder during detention have been known. One of the most important actions, which demanded the end to violence but also showed that protesters were not just abstract subjects but concrete, living beings whose bodies suffer from pain and fear was the action The Art of the Regime. On 15 August 2020, Belarusian cultural workers formed a chain of solidarity near the Palace of Art in Minsk, one of the country’s largest exhibition spaces, which belongs to a fairly conservative, pro-governmental community, the Union of Artists. This building houses the collection of Belgazprombank, the head of which, Viktar

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Babaryka, had been arrested before the presidential elections. The cultural workers gathered at the protest held up photos of protestors who had been beaten by the police the previous week, while one of the artists undressed to show how his body had been beaten and mutilated during detention. From the shock of powerlessness in the face of the repressive state machine, an understanding of kinship built on empathy, care, intimacy and support was born. Indeed, the theme of caring and solidarity has been central to the work of many artists who created artwork during the protests. But what kind of solidarity are we talking about? Where are the boundaries of solidarity? After all, solidarity can be not only a practice of inclusion but also a practice of exclusion. This is eloquently evidenced by the openly xenophobic comments of users on social networks, and articles by the majority of independent media, created in response to the current migration crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. The presence of thousands of refugees from Syria, Turkey, Iraq and other countries is generally not supported by Belarusians, despite the fact that during protests against the regime many Belarusians were forced to flee the country and into the exile forced upon these same refugees. As journalist Nasta Zakharevich noted on the status platform, a division is emerging between ‘incorrect’ and ‘correct’ refugees. The former are denied solidarity, support and care, and are dehumanised, while the capacity for suffering is monopolised by the more privileged Belarusian refugees. It seems like the networks of solidarity, organised during the protests and still developing, do not necessarily have inclusive settings; access to these networks is not equal. Perhaps the toolkit of contemporary art, and the position of the contemporary artist as a mediator or connector, could still be important. Returning to the Every Day exhibition, I can metaphorically describe it as a refuge: the Ukrainian institution sheltered the work of artists and curators, providing space for expression that they are deprived of inside Belarus. This proves that support and inclusion have no boundaries. One of the artworks in the exhibition is a manifesto by artist Marina Naprushkina, in which she emphasises that ‘the state is not about making deals but about caring for the weak, the invisible, the excluded’. We might still envision networks of solidarity that do not work on principles of inclusion or exclusion, and extrapolate empathy and caring mechanisms not only for those close to us but also on those marked as ‘distant’ or ‘other’. Antonina Stebur is a curator and researcher from Belarus

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both images Every day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance, 2021 (installation view, Mystetsky Arsenal, Kyiv). Photo: Alexander Popenko

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19/11/2021 15:41

“I PRACTISE PHILOSOPHY AS ART”

BYUNG-CHUL HAN

interviewed by Gesine Borcherdt

Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher with a broad following in the artworld, where his writings, originally in German, on such perennial modern conditions as alienation, loneliness, the fragmentation and disintegration of reality, and the role of technology in fostering so many ills have found traction as well scepticism. The South Korean-born, Berlin-based thinker’s latest book, Undinge (Nonobjects), was published earlier this year. artreview Undinge revolves around our loss of connection to things in favour of digital information. What do objects have that new technologies don’t? byung-chul han Undinge proposes that the age of objects is over. The terrane order, the order of the Earth, consists of objects that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for human habitation. Today the terrane order has been replaced by the digital order. The digital order makes the world less tangible by informatising it. Nonobjects are

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currently entering our environment from all sides and displacing objects. I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. It makes me think of the novel The Memory Police [1994], by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The novel tells of a nameless island where objects – hair ties, hats, stamps, even roses and birds – disappear irretrievably. Together with the objects, memories also disappear. People live in an eternal winter of forgetting and loss. Everything is seized by a progressive disintegration. Even body parts disappear. In the end it’s just disembodied voices, floating around in the air. In some respects, this island of lost memories resembles our present. Information dissolves reality,

which is just as ghostly as those disembodied voices. Digitalisation dematerialises, disembodies and eventually strips away the substantiality of our world. It also eliminates memories. Rather than keeping track of memories, we amass data and information. We have all become infomaniacs. This infomania makes objects disappear. What happens to objects when they are permeated by information? The informatisation of our world turns objects into ‘infomat’, namely information-processing actors. The smartphone is not an object but an infomat, or even an informant, monitoring and influencing us. Objects don’t spy on us. That’s why we trust them, in a way that we don’t trust the smartphone. Every apparatus, any domination technique, spawns its own devotional objects, which are used to promote submission. They stabilise dominion. The smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime. As a tool of repression it acts like a rosary, which in its handiness the mobile device

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represents. To ‘like’ is to pray digitally. We continue to go to confession. We expose ourselves voluntarily, yet we’re no longer asking for forgiveness, but rather for attention. ar Undinge emphasises the ideas, found in many of your books, that in the place of building relationships with others – or the other – humans are increasingly mirroring themselves. Nevertheless people do live in relationships and even today remain attached to objects that they don’t want to throw away. What’s the difference between then and now, then being the time before globalisation and digitalisation? bch I don’t know if people who spend all their time looking at smartphones still have or need objects that are close to their heart. Objects are receding into the background of our attention. The current hyperinflation of objects, which has led to their explosive proliferation, only highlights our increasing indifference towards them. They are almost stillborn. Our obsession is no longer for objects, but for information and data. Today we produce and consume more information than objects. We actually get high on communication. Libidinal energies have been redirected from objects to nonobjects. The consequence is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now. Object fetishism is probably over. We are becoming informationand data-fetishists. Now there is even talk of datasexuals. Tapping and swiping a smartphone is almost a liturgical gesture, and it has a massive effect on our relationship to the world. Information that doesn’t interest us gets swiped away. Content we like, on the other hand, gets zoomed in, using the pincer movement of our fingers. We literally have a grip on the world. It’s entirely up to us. That’s how the smartphone amplifies our ego. We subjugate the world to our needs with a few swipes. The world appears to us in the digital light of complete availability. Unavailability is precisely what makes the other other, and so it disappears. Robbed of its otherness, it is now merely consumable. Tinder turns the other into a sexual object. Using the smartphone, we withdraw into a narcissistic sphere, one free of the unknowns of the other. It makes the other obtainable by objectifying it. It turns a you into an it. This disappearance of the other is precisely why the smartphone makes us lonely. ar You write, ‘Objects are resting places for life’, meaning that they are charged with significance. You cite your jukebox as an example, which holds an almost magical power for you. What do you reply when someone accuses you of nostalgia? bch Under no circumstances do I want to praise old, beautiful objects. That would be very unphilosophical. I refer to objects as resting

places for life because they stabilise human life. The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity. We can linger with objects. With information, however, we cannot. If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence it’s impossible to linger on information. That’s how it differs from objects. Information puts the cognitive system itself into a state of anxiety. We encounter information with the suspicion that it could just as easily be something else. It is accompanied by basic distrust. It strengthens the contingency experience. Fake news embodies a heightened form of the contingency that is inherent in information. And information, due to its ephemerality, makes time-consuming cognitive practices such as experience, memory or perception disappear. So my analyses have nothing to do with nostalgia. ar In your work you repeatedly circle around digitalisation for how it makes the other disappear and lets narcissism blossom, as well as facilitating voluntary self-exploitation in the age of neoliberalism. How did you initially conceive of these subjects? Is there a personal angle to it? bch At the core of my books The Burnout Society [2010] and Psychopolitics [2017] lies the understanding that Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary society can no longer explain our present. I distinguish between the disciplinary regime and the neoliberal regime. The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints. It is oppressive. It suppresses freedom. The neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it. We voluntarily and passionately exploit ourselves believing that we fulfil ourselves. So we don’t live in a disciplinary society but in a meritocracy. Foucault did not see that. The subjects of neoliberal meritocracy, believing themselves to be free, are in reality servants. They are absolute servants, exploiting themselves without a master. Self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. Kafka expressed this paradoxical freedom of the servant very fittingly in an aphorism: ‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master’. This constant self-flagellation is tiring facing page Courtesy Byung-Chul Han

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and depressing. The work itself, no matter how hard it may be, does not lead to profound tiredness. Even though we can be tired after work, it is not the same as a destructive tiredness. Work at some point comes to an end. The pressure to perform that we apply to ourselves, on the other hand, outlasts the working hours. It torments us in our sleep and frequently leads to sleepless nights. It is possible to recover from work. But it is impossible to recover from the pressure to perform. It is especially this internal pressure, this pressure to perform and optimise, that makes us tired and depressed. So it is not oppression but depression that is the pathological sign of our times. Only an oppressive regime provokes resistance. The neoliberal regime, which does not suppress but exploits freedom, does not encounter resistance. Authority is complete when it masquerades as freedom. These are insights that lie at the heart of my sociocritical essays. They can be summarised as: the other disappears. ar You don’t shy away from terms like magic and mystery. Would you classify yourself as a romantic? bch To me, everything that is is magical and mysterious. Our retina is completely covered by the cornea, even overgrown, so that we no longer perceive it. I would say that I am not a romantic, but a realist who perceives the world the way it is. It simply consists of magic and mystery. Over three years I established a winter-flowering garden. I also wrote a book about it with the title Praise to the Earth [2018]. My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control. It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it,

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because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm. We should rediscover the capacity for inaction, the capacity that does not act. So my new book, which I am working on at the moment, has the title Vita contemplativa or of inactivity. It is a counterpart or antidote to Hannah Arendt’s book Vita activa or of the active life (Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 1958), which glorifies human action. ar In Undinge you write, ‘We save masses of data, yet never return to the memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering an other.’ Similar incantations were heard at the time of the invention of the letterpress and later newspaper and television… Could it be that you are catastrophising the situation? bch My aim is not to catastrophise the world, but to illuminate it. My task as a philosopher is to explain what kind of society we live in. When

I say that the neoliberal regime exploits freedom instead of suppressing it, or that the smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime, it has nothing to do with doom-mongering. Philosophy is truth-speaking. In recent years I have worked on a phenomenology of information in order to make today’s world comprehensible. In Undinge I have made the proposition that nowadays we perceive reality primarily in terms of information. As a consequence, there is rarely a tangible contact with reality. Reality is robbed of its presence. We no longer perceive its physical vibrations. The layer of information, which covers objects like a membrane, shields the perception of intensities. Perception, reduced to information, numbs us to moods and atmospheres. Rooms lose their poetics. They give way to roomless networks along which information spreads. Digital time, with its focus on the present, on the moment, disperses the fragrance of time. Time is atomised into a sequence of isolated presents. Atoms are not

fragrant. Only a narrative practice of time brings forth fragrant molecules of time. The informatisation of reality thus leads to a loss of space and time. This has nothing to do with doom-mongering. This is phenomenology. ar You are currently in Rome, the epitome of a place of patina and history, where life happens on the streets, food with friends and family is important, and the Vatican is omnipresent. Do you not have the feeling that your grievances about the isolation of man and digital substitute-satisfactions only concern certain groups or situations? bch What is the point when people meet and mostly just look at their smartphones? Despite interconnectedness and total communication, people today feel lonelier than ever. We turn you into an available, consumable it. The world is running short of you. This makes us lonely. In that respect there is no difference between Rome, New York or Seoul. Rome impressed me in a different sense. For happiness we need a towering, superior other. Digitalisation gets

Dome of San Bernardo alle Terme, Roma. Photo: Architas / Wikimedia Commons

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rid of any counterpart, any resistance, any other. It smoothes everything over. The smartphone is smart because it makes everything available and removes all resistance. Rome is especially abundant in towering others. Today I again cycled around the whole of the city and visited countless churches. I discovered a beautiful church that bestowed a now very rare experience of presence on me. The church is rather small. Once you enter, you find yourself immediately under a dome. The dome is decorated in patterns formed by octagons. These decrease in size towards the centre of the dome, so that the dome creates a strong optical upwards pull. Light bursts in through windows arranged around the peak of the dome, where the depiction of a golden dove floats. The whole forms a sublime other with a vertical pull that effectively made me float in space. I was lifted up. That’s when I understood what the holy spirit is. It is nothing other than the other. It was an exhilarating experience, the experience of presence, right inside a holy object. ar In your opinion, what has to happen for the world to once again concern itself with real objects, charged with life – and most of all with other people? How can we learn to deal with the dilemmas of our time? bch Every book of mine ends in a utopian counternarrative. In The Burnout Society I countered I-fatigue, which leads to depression, with Us-fatigue, which brings about community. In The Expulsion of the Other [2016] I contrasted increasing narcissism with the art of listening. Psychopolitics proposes idiotism as a utopian figure against complete interconnectedness and complete surveillance. An idiot is someone who is not networked. In The Agony of Eros [2012] I propose that only Eros is capable of defeating depression. The Scent of Time [2014] articulates an art of lingering. My books analyse the malaises of our society and propose concepts to overcome them. Yes, we must work on new ways of life and new narratives. ar Another book of yours is called The Disappearance of Rituals [2020]. How do rituals, people and objects help to root us in our lives? Can we not manage by ourselves? bch Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed. In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same

time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful. Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically. Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal, and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society. In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal. Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance. ar You enjoy the German language in an almost dissective way and celebrate a paratactical writing style, which gives you a unique voice in contemporary cultural critique. It is a like a mixture of Martin Heidegger and Zen. What is your connection to them? bch A journalist from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit once said that I can bring down thought constructs that hold up our

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everyday life in just a few sentences. Why do you write a 1,000-page book if you can enlighten the world in a few words? A 1,000-page book, which has to explain what the world is about, perhaps cannot express as much as a single haiku can: ‘The first snow – even the daffodil leaves bend’ or ‘Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!’ (Basho) In my writings I do indeed make use of this haiku effect. I say: It-is-so. This creates an evidence effect, which then makes sense to everyone. A journalist once wrote that my books are getting progressively thinner, that they will at some point completely disappear. I would add that my thoughts will then permeate the air. Everyone can breathe them in. ar At the end of Undinge, where you quote The Little Prince, you refer to values like trust, commitment and responsibility as being at risk. But aren’t these core human values that outlast any era – even during dictatorships and wars? bch Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. Everything is shortlived. We tell ourselves that we will have more freedom. But this short-term nature destabilises our life. We can bond with objects, but not with information. We only briefly make note of information. Afterwards it’s like a listened-to message on the answering machine. It’s headed towards oblivion. I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust. ar Your books are more widely read in the arts than in philosophy. How do you explain that? bch Effectively more artists than philosophers read my books. Philosophers are no longer interested in the present. Foucault once said that the philosopher is a journalist who captures the now with ideas. That’s what I do. Moreover my essays are on their way to another life, to a different narrative. Artists feel addressed by that. I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. Or I practise philosophy as art. Gesine Borcherdt is a writer, editor and curator based in Berlin Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

24/11/2021 10:54

BANGKOK 8 NOVEMBER

Slowly but steadily, the notion sustaining so much climate crisis apathy and deferral – that the environmental impacts of our actions are remote from their causes in space and time – is being eroded. I was reminded of this, once again, when Bangkok’s serpentine river, the Chao Phraya, burst its banks on a hazy Monday morning in early November. From my 16th-floor riverside apartment, I saw torrents of mud-brown water engulf the courtyard of the local Chinese temple, fill the carpark of the Buddhist temple next door, then gush down the narrow soi (side-street) that leads to it. The waters steadily rose and rose before peaking at 1.33m above mean sea level. Yet street life barely flinched. A barefoot security guard with his trousers rolled up blew his whistle and ushered cars into the nearby hospital. Kids splashed and swam. Such is the coping mechanism in the riverside communities of the Thai metropolis – an imperilled city predicted to be below the high-tide line by 2050, and where residents who emit more carbon and greenhouse gases than those in London and Milan now wake up to smog for months each year (that same morning the air quality was ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’: Bangkok’s haze season has dovetailed with a heavy monsoon season that brought flooding to 32 of the country’s 76 provinces). As the direst warnings about Bangkok unfurl with disturbing precision, it is becoming clearer that the flawed ecology of its soi – the inequalities in housing, rampant construction, soot-spewing diesel trucks, double-bagged streetfood – is partially culpable. And it is also clear that there’s not much, beyond cutting down on single-use plastics, leaving the car at home and crying foul, that the public themselves can do about it. Judging by the outrage on social media – They lied! Nothing changes! Empty promises! – stoicism in the face of the rise in extreme weather events and chronic pollution is here bound up with frustration at the lack of remedial measures and forward-thinking policy. Yet this nagging sense of precariousness and powerlessness is not unique to climate change; it also permeates commonly felt concerns about urbanism and the built environment (the recent razing of the city’s last standalone cinema, the tropical art-deco Scala, for example), as well as wider ideological misgivings about how justice and power in Thailand operate. If there’s an upside to all this, it’s subtle: environmental (and social) degradation has triggered a groundswell in impassioned public responses. Bangkok does not have a long-range flood mitigation or clean air policy, but it does, for example, have catharsis through satire: a few hours after the flood, thousands were laughing about it thanks to Uninspired by Current Events, a Facebook page offering cartoon illustrations – some cryptic, others pointed – about Thailand’s ugly truths.

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While Bangkok has not seen anything with the scale of Chiang Mai’s anti-air-pollution extravaganza Art For Air, nor the utopian or speculative ambitions of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s Land Foundation, exhibitions that broach the environment are also abundant. A retrospective of late Thai modernist Damrong Wong-Uparaj at the Bangkok Art Culture Centre was dominated by his idealised and sentimental depictions of simple agrarian life, while twee illustrations or paintings that pit man against wilderness and fetishise Nature have filled many a commercial gallery of late. More fruitfully, Warin Lab Contemporary, a gallery housed in the former residence of late wildlife conservationist Dr Boonsong Lekagul, launched in January with a year of environment-themed exhibitions. Other exhibitions wear their ‘environmentalism’ more lightly. In The Ecological Thought (2010), Timothy Morton argues that a more honest and interconnected ecological art – an art that thinks beyond Nature, global warming, recycling or solar power, and includes ‘negativity and irony, ugliness and horror’ – has a distinct role to play in the climate crisis. ‘Art’s ambiguous, vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words… art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond or between our normal categories,’ he writes. The multidisciplinary practice of, among others, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat occupies this liminal zone, as does Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s A Minor History, an ongoing two-part show at 100 Tonson Foundation that continues his decade-long study of the Mekong River, the silty brown waters of which are, due to silt-trapping dam projects funded by foreign investment, turning blue in places. Invoking both real-life extrajudicial killings and the mythical Naga serpent of northeastern folklore, A Minor History’s three-channel installation mediates northeast Thailand’s changing environment – the death of myths, activists, innocence, fragile ecosystems, ways of life – in a playful manner that defies rigid conceptual categories. Ecology is wildly layered with cosmology, politics, poetics. That sinking feeling isn’t going away: Thailand’s lack of commitment was plain to see at cop26 in Glasgow, where it refused to sign new methane pledges and forest preservation treaties, or commit to phasing out coal power. But in Bangkok galleries, as well as besieged Bangkok streets, the ‘dark ecology’ Morton has articulated lives and breathes: ‘Things will get worse before they get better, if at all. We must create frameworks for coping with a catastrophe that, from the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already occurred.’ Max Crosbie-Jones is writer based in Bangkok

ArtReview

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Courtesy Uninspired by Current Events

above Apichatpong Weerasethakul, A Minor History, Part One, 2021 (installation views). Photo: Supatra Srithongkum and Sutiwat Kumpai. Courtesy 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok

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24/11/2021 10:36

“THE ARTWORLD IS BASICALLY DOMINATED BY CERTAIN IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE SELFSERVING”

AI WEIWEI

interviewed by Fi Churchman Contemporary artist and human-rights activist Ai Weiwei came to international prominence for his open criticism of the Chinese government’s autocratic rule and its human rights policies, a position that resulted in the state’s efforts to silence his condemnations via sustained intimidation, a 2009 attack by the police that left him with a brain haemorrhage and a three-month imprisonment in 2011. Following the unannounced demolition of his Beijing studio in 2018 by local authorities, Ai relocated to Berlin. His memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, published this autumn, tells the story of China’s political and social history over the last century through the intertwined experiences of Ai and his father, the renowned modernist poet Ai Qing, who was exiled for

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two decades, including a period of hard labour in Xinjiang. artreview How did you approach writing 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows? ai weiwei I always need to be balanced: to not get too emotionally involved and to be a little bit cool in tone. Otherwise the emotions are often overwhelming. On the one hand because the book spans 100 years of China’s history (and that’s a large period to cover) – but on the other because it reflects the history of two people: me and my father. I wanted it to be balanced so that it wasn’t too much about us, but rather sets our stories within a historical context. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

ar How do you see the relationship between writing and making art? aww Ideally they should be one. As someone who has always been interested in conceptual art, I have always thought the form and concept should be undivided. It would be too arrogant or misleading to just give a form without a clear conceptual interpretation of the work. If it’s just about the words, it can be too obvious and dry: it doesn’t have charm. It needs to be balanced. Artworks can have specific meanings but can be vague and abstract at the same time. For me, writing is like a clear measurement of how far you can go with an idea: it’s black words on white paper; there’s a clear definition.

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ar You’ve previously said that you hate ‘hidden meanings’. But your artwork does have a lot of hidden meanings… aww That’s the nature of art. It has to be able to be interpreted by itself and often it has multiple meanings. But that’s why I need to write. For me, writing is part of the art practice because it sets a clear meaning. However, it doesn’t have the same emotion as the artwork. That’s why I have to have both. ar Your father, Ai Qing, was a renowned modernist poet, and in your book you mention these handwritten messages that were placed in public known as Bigcharacter Posters, some examples of which were used by the state to denounce your father, but also one written anonymously by someone called Mechanic No. 0538, who used this format to criticise Mao Zedong – did language play a role in your becoming an artist and the process behind your practice? aww I think language has had a very profound impact on my work. When my father wrote poetry he was very careful in selecting his vocabulary, as are all poets. So that method of using a limited number of words to carry a powerful idea has always been very attractive to me – to see how language functions. I think, with any form of art practice, control is a crucial skill. So choosing words, form, materials carefully is the best means of expression. And expression itself is a selection of emotions and concepts. That process reflects the uniqueness of any individual work. It’s not about fitting all your ideas into one thing, but about reducing it and in fact excluding certain emotions and concepts. ar Is that opposite to the way you grew up absorbing words and phrases used in Communist propaganda that were taught to you at school? Because there was an expectation that you would accept these ideas given by the state without question? aww Yes. I think it’s about trying to limit yourself from becoming another kind of propagandist. It’s about saying something carefully but also acting on it. And to act on the ideas is crucial, otherwise they just become antiwords. They function with no meaning. ar How do you act on your ideas? aww I try to use different media: writing for social media, making videos, films and images, installations or even using pieces of Lego. Firstly, there is a challenge in understanding a particular medium; it takes a great effort to learn to control materials – whether it’s porcelain-making or Chinese carpentry – as well as knowledge of how these materials have been used throughout history. Secondly, you have to find the right material for the right

concept. For example I used Lego for Trace (2014), a series of portraits of political prisoners, because it was necessary to give all the images the same kind of quality; at the same time, it was important to show they are distinct from one another – and Lego felt like the perfect medium for this. Similarly, with Sunflower Seeds (2010), porcelain has a huge tradition in Jingdezhen [where the work was fabricated by 1,600 artisans over a period of two-and-ahalf years]: every woman knows how to make porcelain, which involves a very sophisticated process, but they make them just like they make dumplings. That’s the beauty of it. You have one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, but at the same time, it’s just like how every Chinese household would put dumplings in their wok and boil it. I still think of it as a miracle. But in every artwork, each different medium takes the same kind of effort to make sure that the aesthetic and moral work together to communicate an idea. To act on an idea is to make art, because the fight for freedom is part of freedom. ar And what’s been your most important act so far? aww The most important thing I have done is to set up different ways of communicating social and political issues, and not just doing something that is self-indulgent, but rather to test if that expression really functions as a way of reflecting humanity and human dignity. If you took away my writing – the blogs, the social media messages, the book – my so-called artwork would fall apart. It’s like flesh and bones. To be alive, we have to have these connected structures of bones and tissue. That’s how my art comes alive. ar Do you think your written ideas have a greater impact than your artworks? aww That is very hard to measure, partly because this book has just come out. I used to think people liked watching films, and I made so many films. But it depends on the circumstance, because in China, people love to watch films, but in the West, no one goes to theatres anymore – they just react quickly to socialmedia images. So the book really hasn’t been tested yet in the West. I used to write blogs in China, which were extremely popular. I believe that is the reason for the police brutality and attention from the state. If I had just made the artworks, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Even in detention, the interrogators never asked me about my artworks, except for when I flipped the finger at Tiananmen [Study in Perspective – Tiananmen, 1995]. I told them I did it to the White House too, but the interrogator said, ‘I’m a Chinese policeman, I’m taking care of my duties, and if you did that to the White

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House, the us police should take care of that’. So, basically, in prison they read my blogs to me as evidence of subverting state power; the texts were critical of the Chinese government and of the party. They even asked me to reread them, and asked me if I agreed with their judgment. I said, ‘I do.’ ar Do you feel there’s a connection between your and your father’s writing? aww Well, his writing was very calm with good intentions, and my writing is quite brutal and harsh. He faced 20 years of exile; the police told me that I’d have been killed if I had been writing during that time. But it’s very clear that our experiences correlate in some ways, I think. My father went to Paris before he was twenty years old, to become an artist and poet; I went to New York to study. We have both been subject to the enforcement of state laws as individuals who have spoken our minds. I feel proud to be identified as an individual who can still defend freedom of expression. ar Since moving to the West, do you see any ways in which the power structures here reflect some of those in China? aww I think China is clearly a very authoritarian society, and that has been the history of the country for 2,000–3,000 years. It never really changed. But for the past 200 years, the West has undergone an Industrial Revolution, and before that there was the Renaissance. Democratic systems were established in the West, but capitalism is a competing structure that creates different problems. In the West, on the surface, there’s liberty and individual freedom and an encouragement of people’s so-called creativity, but the world is so much controlled by corporate culture that those ideas are economically challenged because the corporate powers hide within the political, educational and media structures. So here we’re facing a very different structural problem. ar And how does that impact the artworld? aww I think the artworld is basically dominated by certain ideologies that are self-serving, and capital-oriented. Artworks have to be recognised by important dealers and galleries, and have to be bought by collectors, which might then be donated to museums. It means sacrificing a huge amount of education and effort and creativity to fit into that system, in which it seems impossible to achieve success. In the West, education is fixated on telling people how to become successful – those ideas are taught in school education and through mainstream value judgements. That is the problem. It’s a pollutant, and opposite to the idea of the individual.

24/11/2021 11:00

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RAYMOND FUNG : BETWEEN BREATHS 2 NOV 2021 - 7 JAN 2022 21 Ryder Street, London

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17/11/2021 11:02

Power 100

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THE POWER 100

Gentlemen’s hats ‘How are fashions created? Who creates fashions? Two very tricky questions, certainly.’ Luckily for you, when it comes to art, ArtReview is here to solve these questions painlessly. To make the tricky straightforward and provide an easy-to-use cribsheet detailing the ‘hows’ and the ‘whos’. At least that’s what its marketing people say. If only things were that simple. (The quotation, by the way, is from Adolf Loos, mocking the ‘Association for Hat Fashion in Vienna’, which met once a year to decide the coming year’s hat fashions for gentlemen in the imperial city. And thus ‘for the whole world’. Remind you of anything?) The artworld has always been a slightly irrational ecosystem in which the various competing (and sometimes intersecting) values of class, race, gender, historical and current hegemonies and conflicts, economics, ideology, national and global politics, and even old-fashioned aesthetics hold more or less sway. Sometimes (as last year) it’s informed by what’s going on in society and the world around it; at other times it seems to be almost hermetically (and wilfully) sealed from all that. Perhaps what’s most interesting as a subject of study is the way in which these various value systems adapt to or change each other. For however much we might seek to identify with or promote one set of values over another (ArtReview, for example – perhaps naively – likes to think that it operates in an artworld that isn’t governed by commerce and exchange values), as time goes by, it’s increasingly difficult to separate, completely, one set of values from another. Then again, perhaps it was always thus. As a consequence of all that, at one extreme the Power 100 (now in its 20th edition – those of you interested in history can take a look at two decades of art’s everchanging fads and enduring values at artreview.com) can be (and often is) read as a measure of perceived success on a field of combat; on another it can be viewed as a way of measuring how a change or development in one part of the ecosystem affects the others (the study of which, in the world at large as opposed

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to in the artworld specifically, has been pioneered by anthropologists such as Anna L. Tsing). Last year’s Power 100, for example, reflected the consequences of lockdowns and reduced travel, two measures that had an immense impact on an artworld (and, of course, on people in general) that thought of itself as global; as a result, it focused on ostensibly less art-specific global campaigns for social justice and reflected a world in which the circulation of ideas had a greater impact than (the much slower) circulation of artworks. While, in that sense, it marked a coming together of the wider world and art, it (necessarily) privileged theory over practice. And yet, if you read through this year’s list closely, you’ll find that theory, or thinking about what art is, what it’s for and what it can be, remains the glue that holds together the various pieces of what we once, quite casually, referred to as a global artworld. The current list, because it responds to the developments of the past 12 months, continues to reflect issues of circulation and velocity, with some parts of the world or sections of the artworld infrastructure opening up faster than others. As museums and galleries have begun to recover from the pandemic, the manifold injustices and related issues raised by Black Lives Matter, for example, have become less a matter of theory (when it comes to the artworld) and more one of practice. And museums, while they remain a cornerstone of the artworld in every sense, are less flexible when it comes to addressing art’s current concerns, due to the bureaucracy and infrastructures they embody, and remain more reactive than agenda-setting in terms of their output. As various aspects of the art ecosystem attempt to restructure, lateral and contingent organisation becomes increasingly evident, and needed. This is, of course, a generalisation, as many things on a list like this one, which attempts to measure the state of the global artworld in 100 personalities, will always be. Particularly when much of the world in general remains more focused on local realities than global ones.

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On which matter it’s probably a good point to reiterate how the Power 100 is constructed. The list is shaped through the input of over 30 panellists and collaborators spread around the world. Each uses three criteria to evaluate who is shaping the development of contemporary art in their locality: that the people in question have been active over the past 12 months; that whatever it is that they do is shaping the kind of art currently being produced; and that their impact can be considered global rather than purely local. Although this last, given current conditions (in which exhibitions, by and large, remain the purview of local audiences rather than globetrotting art-lovers), continues to be particularly hard to judge, when the interaction between the global and the local continues to be kaleidoscopic and tentative. Through this process, some issues and arcs become apparent: debates about what forms activism can take in the sphere of art versus whether or not art has the capacity to be activist at all; or how, as artists increasingly work through digital manoeuvres, there is an equal and opposite tendency towards mucking about in paint and clay; and, of course, the big one (at least for a list like this one) – in what ways, if at all, we might think of the artworld as being global today. The process throws up some ironies, too. While men are in the minority on this year’s list, they (or their digits) permeate the list and provide its cover image, as part of a version of Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi’s artwork The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021) commissioned for this issue. ArtReview saw the work for the first time at an art fair. Despite which fact art fairs are not prominent on this year’s list. Which is to suggest (in reference to Abidi’s artwork) that observing and parsing power can be a means of understanding it, of seeing patterns. And not going by gut instinct or surface appearances. Although the artworld certainly relies on that. Which is also to say that this list is not about the magazine’s taste or likes, or personal positions, but rather about the artworld as a group of people with different tastes, positions and viewpoints see

it, and how those disparate viewpoints sometimes intersect or meet. Or don’t. While trying to be as dispassionate and objective as possible. Even if most successful art does depend on passion and a degree of subjectivity. And you can make of all that what you will. While in art in general anyone and anything (or for that matter any nonthing) can be represented, the artworld tends to privilege some representations over others. Which is one of the reasons this list was established all those years ago. One of the things that the history of this list demonstrates is that while most things evolve slowly in the artworld, other things are more fast-moving (or even faddish, depending on your point of view). From one year to the next the top of the pile can become the bottom, or not make the list at all. This might indeed be the case with this year’s number one, listed according to the standard numbering found on every nft transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, but more generally representative of nfts and the cryptocurrency networks of which they are a part. nfts without doubt offer an alternative to the ways in which art is distributed and circulated, while also introducing it to new networks and new audiences. As commercial galleries and museums (and even magazines) scrabble to enter this emerging territory, it’s definitely a disrupting force in the traditional art environment – while being equally disruptive (in a concretely negative way) to our relationship to the environment in general. That question, of art’s, and the human world’s in general, relationship to the environment around us, is another force that has shaped this list. All this is of course evidence of the ways in which different ecosystems are interlinked, while at the same time indicating that the list as a whole continues, as it did last year and as we continue to shape and imagine our ‘new normals’, to favour those who introduce disruption, change and newer ideas (a generalism again) over those who don’t. Of course, by next year we may well have snapped back to the old ways of being. But for that we’ll have to wait another 12 months.

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nft: the dematerialisation of art In 2020 the art object was finally dematerialised. It’s not that eyemelting amounts weren’t still being paid for physical things, of course. After covid and lockdowns, the art auction market has come roaring back; at the Sotheby’s sale of the collection of Harry and Linda Macklowe in November, a painting by Mark Rothko went for $82.5m, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti for $68m. Physical artworks continue to attract financial value to them, in which money is captured and congealed, in vast amounts. But with the incursion of nonfungible tokens – nfts – into the art market over the last year, the link between physical thing and market price seems to have finally unravelled. A common refrain in the often-bewildered response to the millions paid in cryptocurrency in the much-hyped sales of nfts over the last months is, ‘But what are you actually buying?’ Images and video animations that, by default, can be viewed on any screen, anywhere, should be endlessly reproducible and impossible to commodify. Yet with the development of the nft protocol, based on the Ethereum blockchain, an apparently hard and verifiable guarantee of uniqueness (or limited edition) can now be tied to these ‘digital goods’. Virtual objects, generated by code, can now be as rare as a handmade art object. The headline-grabbing sales of Mike Winkelmann/Beeple’s 2020 Collection last December, then topped by the $69m paid for his Everydays: The First 5,000 Days at Christie’s in March, jolted the art market into realising that digital culture could finally be aligned with its own commercial paradigm of rarity and exclusivity. Suddenly, all the physical paraphernalia of art galleries, museums and objects to go in them have become, if not exactly redundant, then not wholly necessary for the economy of collecting to thrive. With the apparent guarantee of title of ownership that nfts promise, data becomes ownable, and the physical aspect of rarity becomes secondary, since so much of the market value of contemporary art lies not in the object, but the circulation of its image through digital culture.

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The significance of this can’t be underestimated, partly because one of the consequences of making rare objects virtual and available on a common standard of exchange is that the culture of collecting becomes universalised – putting the superrich collector and the little guy, elite culture and mass culture, side by side on the same platform. The collector market for artworks is only one market for collectibles, but traditionally the art market has been aligned with the other luxury-object tastes of the 1 percent, in particular design objects and high fashion, so that the artworld has tended to exist in distinction to mass culture. Yet pop culture is full of its own collectors. Even though pop culture is, on the surface, about mass-reproduced goods, its audience also covets rarity. The merchandise of fandom – limited-edition models and figurines, trading cards, the memorabilia of film and tv, music on vinyl – are artefacts that, although tied to the images and sentiments of pop culture, are still made rare and desirable, and can be owned. In October a pair of Michael Jordan’s red and white Nike Air Ships, worn during his first season with the Chicago Bulls, in 1984, sold for $1.47m. But, as mass culture has known for some time now, collecting is becoming virtual. In the world of online gaming, for example, virtual objects command a market, in the form of ‘in-game virtual goods’. According to one estimate, the global online microtransaction market was worth $33bn in 2020. Millions of people will buy objects that persist within the space of a particular game. It was only a matter of time before this commodification of digital content would appear in millennial visual culture, and the nft explosion begins to make sense if one considers that digital-native artists are the generation keen to find ways to monetise their creativity, at a moment when their economic prospects seem more precarious than ever. It’s a reasonable aspiration to make a living from your own creative work. But the response to the covid pandemic shut down

ArtReview

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AND OTHER CRAY-CRAY CRAP much physical culture, at a time when online culture was already being monopolised by the big platforms. Performing musicians, for example, were badly hit by the closure of live music and were quick to see the possibility of an alternative to miserly streaming royalties – a week before Winkelmann’s Christie’s sale in March, the band Kings of Leon issued their new album (albeit still with a physical version available) to be bought via an nft, racking up $2m in sales. In November legendary producer Timbaland released elements of his forthcoming ep as nfts. With musicians increasingly at odds with streamers over revenues, alternative platforms for monetising your fanbase will continue to be attractive. Similarly, for a generation of commercial visual artists, trained in graphic design, illustration, cgi and video, nft offers the promise of a vehicle by which the price of one’s creative work can be controlled and traded, at a time when the economy of digital culture has tended to strip creatives of ownership and control. Winkelmann, remember, once earned a living making visuals for events, making his Everydays images for years before he had even heard of nfts, steadily building his fanbase on Instagram. None of this can be separated from the hype around cryptocurrency, of course. The nft explosion makes sense as the merging of cryptocurrency with the fan culture of digital goods, led by oftenunderpaid digital ‘creatives’. The marketplace for images of bored apes, or cryptopunks, or any of Winkelmann’s fevered, derivative imaginings, is one founded on the torrent of exchanged value flowing through the Ether (Ethereum’s cryptocurrency). That this kind of visual art has become a form of bragging rights for crypto millionaires is because there are now such people as crypto millionaires. But as the value of cryptocurrencies like Ether and Bitcoin continues to rise, the incentive to market your creative work in this particular form becomes vividly attractive. Distinguishing the artist’s desire for control over their creative work and the speculative mania

driving cryptocurrency is pointless, since there’s money to be made on both counts. This doesn’t necessarily mean any of this will be more equitable for artists, of course. The big nft trading platforms, such as Nifty Gateway and OpenSea, are in the business of making money from artists too. But the lure for all involved is hard to resist. For a culture increasingly conducted online, and with virtual reality and augmented reality being touted by big tech as the next big thing, the pressure to turn data into objects that can be traded in virtual currency by net-natives who are as much online as ‘afk’ is building. Mark Zuckerberg’s hourlong October ‘keynote’ video, heralding Facebook’s conversion to the ‘Metaverse’, has a fleeting glimpse of the new art object – as Zuck’s hipster friend dials in to tell him about the “ar street art” she’s finding “all over SoHo” the swirling virtual artwork starts to fade. “Hold on,” she says, “I’ll tip the artist, and they’ll extend it.” In the future, artists will all be tipped by tech billionaires. But the dematerialisation of rarity was always going to happen. For years, video and digital artists, their gallerists and lawyers, have concocted contracts to limit the supply of artworks that are inherently reproducible. Art stars have discovered the vast sums that can be made from editioning works, and that the certificate of authenticity is the only document that really counts, without which a work becomes worthless. We may like to think that the nft explosion is driven by speculative delusion. That may turn out to be true. But in principle it resolves the problem of rarity for the age of digital content, adding the strange allure of ownership (and of course speculation) to the intangible culture of images in which we increasingly live. ArtReview

December 2021

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1 ERC-721

2 ANNA L. TSING Thinker American Last Year 15 (with Feral Atlas)

Non-human entity International new 1 Nyan Cat 2 Photo: Feifei Zhou 3 OK Video Pangan, 2017. Courtesy ruangrupa 4 Photo: Sara Pooley. Courtesy White Cube, London

‘nfts can represent ownership over digital or physical assets. We considered a diverse universe of assets, and we know you will dream up many more: Physical property – houses, unique artwork, Virtual collectables – unique pictures of kittens, collectable cards…’ Four years on from its publication, ‘erc-721’, the specification for the ‘non-fungible token’ (on the Ethereumbased blockchain – other specifications exist) has upended the art market, bringing contemporary art and millennial meme culture crashing together. With projects such as CryptoPunks starting the craze for gamified virtual collectibles in 2017, erc-721 turned data into virtual property, and the artworld began to realise that digital culture can be made rare. With staggering prices achieved for Beeple’s work in the last year, the art market has discovered a new generation of collectors, while artists around the world have discovered a way to market their art that bypasses the old art-dealer system. It’s hard to predict the long-term upset this bit of code will cause. But in 2021, all the old assumptions of the art market and art culture have been thrown into chaotic, creative uncertainty.

As every year brings scarier confirmation that we are living through a global catastrophe, so it becomes more urgent to find new ways of imagining our relationship to nature. The American anthropologist is hardly the first thinker to propose that we can understand the world only by decentring the human perspective on it, but few have provided such a clear template for how that Copernican revolution might be effected. In books such as The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) Tsing shows how new alliances might emerge amidst the ruins of capitalism by taking the matsutake mushroom for the protagonist of a story told through numerous (human and nonhuman) viewpoints. This collaborative impulse is also expressed in Feral Atlas, the curatorial platform she founded with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, which combines scientific research with artistic expression to show how the fields might usefully dovetail. Tsing suggests that it is art’s responsibility to reimagine the Anthropocene in order that we might survive it.

3 RUANGRUPA

4 THEASTER GATES

Artist Collective Indonesian Last Year 2

Artist American reentry (20 in 2019)

The Jakarta-based artists and curators have been prepping for Documenta 15, which under their direction will open in Kassel in June. Except ‘direction’ is the wrong word, for the first Asian curators to take the reins of the 66-year-old event are also the first collective, organising the show under the concept of lumbung, a sort of process for comradely sharing. ‘It’s like owning a drill,’ explained member Farid Rakun. ‘Those who own one don’t necessarily use it daily, and someone else can use it in the meantime. Because of this, not everyone in the community needs to own a drill.’ Among those sharing this egalitarian philosophy, which ruangrupa has practised since 2000 at their gallery space and free school in South Jakarta, are a Rojavabased film commune and a Cambodian artist-run space, who will be joining the group in Germany this summer. Typically, ruangrupa picked a Berlin-based street paper to announce the artists.

For Gates’s hometown solo show at Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, the artist made work using the contents of a former hardware store on the city’s South Side, a place that acted as much as a community hub as a shop before it closed. Generating spaces for meeting and exchange, especially for underprivileged groups, has become the artist’s raison d’être, harnessing the money he gets from blue-chip outings (including London’s White Cube this year) to aid the more socially conscious work. Among his long list of recent solo shows (the Whitechapel in London; Artspace, New Haven; tank Shanghai) was an exhibition for Prada’s Rong Zhai gallery in Shanghai, from which the fashion brand and the artist launched an incubator programme for designers of colour coming out of New York, la and Chicago. Meanwhile the artist inaugurated a permanent commission for the new Studio Museum in New York, is working on Barack Obama’s presidential library and next year will design the Serpentine Pavilion in London.

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5 ANNE IMHOF

6 FRED MOTEN

When Imhof populated the entirety of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo this year with Natures Mortes – her biggest show yet, an epic fusion of tableaux vivants, music, painting and works by some 30 guest artists – it felt like a victory lap. Since her Golden Lion-winning breakout with Faust at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the German artist has brought something genuinely new to contemporary art: living sculpture riding on both gothic subcultural energy and the glamour of youth, precision-tooled for sharing on social media – indeed, the sight of massed spectators, physically together yet often glued to their phones, feels like part of the art. Given her presentations’ abundant hipness, Imhof’s collaboration this year with fashion house Burberry felt almost preordained. But even as she nestles into the upper firmament of the artworld, there’s an edginess to her work that won’t be diluted: darkly abstract, ritualistic spectacles for end times.

7 CAO FEI

Thinker American Last Year 5 ‘I don’t know what it means to have power, or whatever the kind of power it is that I supposedly have in the art world,’ commented the poet and theorist on his inclusion in last year’s list. Although antithetical to its premise, his ambivalence reflects on precisely why he is here: his ongoing and restless body of work of building up philosophy and ideas from where they happen – between our bodies and shared moments of culture. There’s an agility in his insights and refusals that has long proved key to his long list of artistic collaborators, including Arthur Jafa and Wu Tsang. This year Moten continued his long collaboration with Stefano Harney with the release of All Incomplete (2021), ‘a peripatetic book of influences and circumstances, and sharedness’. The book’s voracious essays circle around the possibilities of resistance and education, considering George Clinton equally alongside Jacques Derrida. It’s an appropriate handbook for times to come. ‘To preserve the totality,’ they state, ‘is to refuse its completion.’

8 KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE

Artist Chinese Last Year 27 She might be one of China’s best-known artists, but 2021 was the year Cao got her first major show in the homeland. Staging the Era, at ucca Beijing, a retrospective of the artist’s film, video, virtual reality and installation work, turned a typically wry eye on the country’s cultural, social and economic changes over the last decades. Not that the artist is a stranger to institutional outings per se, with a typically hectic diary of European and American shows this year including a solo at Sprüth Magers’s Los Angeles space, a project for Espace Louis Vuitton in Munich and Supernova, an upcoming two-part survey at maxxi in Rome and the Centro Pecci in Prato, Tuscany. Cao was also the recipient of this year’s £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize: in these pandemic times, her exploration of themes of isolation, the alienation of technology and dystopian capitalism seem more relevant than ever.

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Artist Collective Indigenous Australian / American new The collective comprises over 30 Indigenous members of a rural settlement in Australia’s Northern Territories and the critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli, who joined the community since the early 1980s. Their films document life under the watchful eye of the state through a combination of diy methods – often shot on handheld cameras and phones – and narrative strategies that foreground Indigenous histories and ontologies and point to the social and environmental impact of settler colonialism. In doing so, it not only offers a model for grassroots self-organisation but pioneers filmmaking techniques that propose new forms of Indigenous collective agency. Having gained increased visibility in the artworld, this year they joined forces with WeTransfer and London’s Serpentine to raise funds for a new green residency and open-air gallery on a protected compound, and received the £25,000 Eye Art & Film Prize alongside exhibitions at venues including the ica at nyu Shanghai, Kunstverein Braunschweig, and E-Werk Luckenwalde, where they formed part of Lucia Pietroiusti’s ‘Power Nights’ programming.

5 Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy Sprüth Magers 6 Photo: LaMont Hamilton 7 Photo: Jin Jiaji 8 The Jealous One (still), 2017. Courtesy Karrabing Film Collective

Artist German new

ArtReview

24/11/2021 15:41

9 Courtesy the artist 10 Photo: Kalpesh Lathigra 11 Photo: Ari Marcopoulos. Courtesy Sprüth Magers 12 Photo: Alfredo Esteban (Ho), Photo: William Furniss (Hsu), Photo: Wendy Ng (Tain)

10 DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW

9 CARRIE MAE WEEMS Artist American NEW

Thinkers American / British NEW

Since the 1980s, Weems’s art has explored subject matter that now feels to sit at the very centre of contemporary art discourse: Black subjectivity, particularly Black female subjectivity, the crucial importance of bearing witness to history, and the racist power structures upon which the United States is built. There are, her endlessly inventive work in photography, text, video, installation, fabric, social practice and more attests, myriad ways of articulating these concerns. Yet up until a decade ago her practice was occluded by the artworld – itself a problematic power structure – since when her achievements have steadily been recognised. A MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipient in 2013, the first Black woman to receive a retrospective at the Guggenheim a year later, W.E.B. Dubois Medal-winner in 2015, Weems now seems firmly established in the vanguard of contemporary art, both as a maker and a deeply influential thinker for younger generations of artists. This month, she unveils a major new commission – spanning installation and performance – for the Park Avenue Armory, reflecting on political life in America.

The late radical anthropologist David Graeber (1961–2020) no doubt would have had something brilliant to say about what has become known as ‘the great resignation’, shorthand for the numerous people exiting the postpandemic workforce (or not returning to it all). The author of, among other important works, Bullshit Jobs (2018) and the magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Graeber understood better than most how our current ideals amount to fraudulent advertising for crap goods. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), which Graeber cowrote over the last decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously this year. Wengrow and Graeber’s project has been to show how alternatives of social and economic organisation have been a deep part of our ancestry all along; the Rousseauian ‘state of nature’ is the myth to be shed, and what the two call the ‘Indigenous Critique’ of ‘western’ societies offers an enduring, and heartening, means to enact social and cultural innovation in the present. No recent book is gaining faster traction in the artworld right now. Artists, take note.

11 KARA WALKER

12 CHRISTOPHER K. HO, CLAIRE HSU & JOHN TAIN

Artist American REENTRY (28 in 2019) The New York-based artist’s work was widely on display this year, with a solo show in New York and a career-spanning exhibition that started its US tour at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, while her work was included in group shows in New York and around the US, as well as in Cologne. Her own archive of drawings accumulated over two decades was displayed for the first time to critical acclaim at the Kunstmuseum Basel this summer, also touring to the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands in 2022. But notably, beyond this there were various signs of Walker’s influence in wider culture, forming the backdrop for FKA Twigs’s music video released at the start of the year, and conservative news outlets picking up on the outrage of parents whose preteens were being taught one of her explicit silhouette works in a North Carolina high school; increasingly, Walker sets out art as a site for confrontation and necessary conversations.

Archivists Hong Konger / Austrian-Chinese / American-Taiwanese Last Year NEW / 34 / 34 An eventful year for Asia Art Archive (AAA), 2021 saw the stepping down of its influential cofounder and executive director, Claire Hsu. Her successor, Ho, was formerly a board member at AAA’s New York outpost. AAA, which documents and makes accessible materials on regional art histories, challenging traditional global narratives, has about 110,000 records in its collection. Its show at Tai Kwun, Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys, inspired by the personal archive of the Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen, included ‘sets’ by five artists, among them Walid Raad and Kwan Sheung Chi, that engaged with knowledge production. Its many public education and outreach activities included a Mobile Library in Nepal developed with Siddhartha Arts Foundation, as well as a series of closed-door seminars called Art Schools of Asia. Three new archival collections were launched this year: the Oscar Ho Kong Kay Archive, the archive of Green Papaya Art Projects and Manila Artist-Run Spaces Archive.

December 2021

14 ACHILLE MBEMBE Thinker Cameroonian Last Year 24

Curator Italian Last Year 78 Pietroiusti founded the General Ecology project at the Serpentine in 2018, plugging environmental concern into every facet of the London institution. The project continues, though the curator has now officially left the organisation and is acting as a ‘strategic consultant’. Developing the Institute for General Ecology as an independent body in which art and science are in dialogue, she is making a further attempt at modelling what a contemporary institution might be in an age of crisis. She has also been keeping Sun & Sea (Marina), the climate change opera she originally curated for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, on tour. This year it was staged in ten cities across Europe and the USA. One of those stops was E-Werk Luckenwalde, outside Berlin, where she is currently curating a portion of their Power Nights series of immersive evening art programmes, with events by Karrabing Film Collective and Cooking Sections. Next year she will take the lead on the forthcoming Biennale Gherdeïna 8 (with Filipa Ramos) in Italy, and work with James Bridle in programming a section of the Helsinki Festival, following ideas around AI and the more-than-human.

If the philosopher’s idea of necropolitics – capitalism’s sovereignty over life and death – was often quoted during the pandemic, the writer is also increasingly a point of reference for Black, queer and trans artists. The son of independence fighter Ruben Um Nyobè, killed by French troops in 1958, Mbembe has this year published a new collection of essays, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, in time for his organisation of the France-Africa Summit in Montpellier. Emmanuel Macron, previously criticised by Mbembe for expressing a patronising attitude to the continent, was in attendance, while roundtables on economics, politics and culture (with restitution at the top of the agenda) attracted participants from across Africa. Mbembe also attended the COP26, and has been vocal on environmental slow violence: ‘Under the leadership of the North, we have relentlessly sought to liberate ourselves from natural and organic environments instead of consciously making room for them’, he wrote in an essay for e-flux this year.

16 FELWINE SARR & BÉNÉDICTE SAVOY

15 OLAFUR ELIASSON Artist Danish-Icelandic REENTRY (49 in 2019)

Thinkers Senegalese / French Last Year 3

This spring, Eliasson boldly opened Basel’s Fondation Beyeler to the elements, removing walls so that the Renzo Piano-designed space was open 24/7, and flooding it with green-dyed water filled with plants, flowers and microorganisms. Proposing the museum as an ecosystem, it’s exemplary of the staged entanglement with nature that the artist has presciently explored for decades, as well as of his insistence on giving up control to external forces. Hence Eliasson’s many artworks with ‘Your’ in the title, such as this year’s Your Ocular Relief at Tanya Bonakdar in New York: a balmy suite of interactive, light-based works offering optical massages for pandemic-wearied viewers. Collaboration, of course, is the artist’s core value: his practice, enfolding design, architecture, cookery and more, has long served as a model for merging artistry with activism, with particular emphasis on ecology – Eliasson’s nonprofit Little Sun Foundation launched a campaign to raise awareness of solar-powered solutions to the climate crisis. No wonder that when the COP26 climate-change summit launched recently in Glasgow, his artworks accompanied it.

Three years have passed since Sarr and Savoy published their report advocating the unconditional restitution of African cultural heritage, originally commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron. If the report quickly became an influential framework for institutions across Europe to grapple with the colonial legacies within their collections, it is now starting to bear tangible fruits, with multiple Western institutions and governments (committing to) returning artefacts acquired through force, clandestine excavation, corruption or theft. Most notably, Germany and Nigeria signed a memorandum of understanding concerning 1,100 artefacts held in German ethnological museums to go on display in a new institution in Benin City, designed by David Adjaye. Meanwhile, in France the report’s influence was felt throughout the historical Africa-France Summit, convened by Macron under the leadership of Achille Mbembe. If some critics dismiss these gestures as moves to cultivate soft power in former colonies, they still constitute concrete steps towards the decolonialisation of Western institutions and the cultural reappropriation of African heritage.

ArtReview

13 Photo: Thaddäus Salcher 14 Photo: Heike Huslage-Koch/Wikimedia Commons 15 Photo: Lars Borges 16 Photo: Megan Medenhall (Sarr); photo: Peter Rigaud c/o Shotview Artists (Savoy)

13 LUCIA PIETROIUSTI

17 Photo: Leon Kahane 18 Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia 19 Courtesy Forensic Architecture 20 Photo: Robert Hamacher. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

17 HITO STEYERL

18 CECILIA ALEMANI

Artist German Last Year 18

Curator Italian Last Year 48

A retrospective at k21 Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf, closed in January before moving to the Pompidou, Paris, in May. Meanwhile, summer brought another institutional solo outing, at the San José Museum of Art, as well as almost a dozen group shows. The European retrospective chronicled three decades of film and installation, yet Steyerl has long moved beyond the artist role to that of more general public intellectual, delivering Cassandra-like warnings against the dangers of big tech and ethics-free economics, as in a keynote speech at the Max Wasserman Forum in April titled ‘Decolonize the Digital Sphere and Transition it Towards the Commons’. Attempts to bring her into the establishment in September inevitably failed: the artist refused Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit in protest of the country’s handling of the pandemic, particularly with regards to culture and education. A professor of new media art at Berlin University of the Arts, Steyerl responded to the prolonged closure of universities by moving some of her teaching onto the videogame Minecraft.

19 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

When appointed curator of the Venice Biennale, Alemani had not envisaged she would be ‘stuck in my office-slash-closet in the East Village for a year and a half’. Instead, with travel restrictions in place, she has been researching remotely, relying on a network of advisers to help find artists for the 59th edition. Helpfully, however, she got an extra year – the event was delayed to 2022 – which has allowed for more commissioned work. It also gave her time to hone a title for what she says will be an ‘optimistic’ exhibition: The Milk of Dreams, taken from a book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. The pandemic kept the Italian curator close to her day job: since 2011, she has been artistic director of New York’s High Line, spearheading the annual plinth commission, which this year saw a new work by Sam Durant grace the skyline, alongside the outdoor group show The Musical Brain.

20 ARTHUR JAFA Artist American Last Year 6

Artist Collective International Last Year 14 ‘Being not this and not that. It’s part of our power,’ says Eyal Weizman, founder of the London-based collective of architects, artists, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists and lawyers. And while their reconstructions of crimes, of state and corporate violence, were shown at numerous museums this year – not least at hkw Berlin – their work has real-world implications. An investigation into the police shooting of British man Mark Duggan, presented at the ica in London in July, helped the victim’s family negotiate a financial settlement. The team will be hoping for similar justice with Cloud Studies, an investigation into petrochemical pollution along the banks of the Mississippi River – especially as it moves from its second iteration at the Whitworth in Manchester to various community spaces in Louisiana. The collective isn’t without detractors: pro-Israel groups forced the removal of a statement in support of Palestine that fa erected in Manchester (reinstated after outcry).

The artist’s new film is a more abstract affair than Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), his now ubiquitous montage of footage chronicling Black experience in America: aghdra (2021), which showed in New York, is an 85-minute cgi epic that traces a sun rising and setting over an ocean that solidifies in a slowly unravelling and unending catastrophe. ‘I’m so saturated with anti-Blackness. I hear a tsunami of microaggressions,’ Jafa said in an interview, while referencing thinkers (and friends) like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten as inspirations for the film. Meanwhile, the artist received his first retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, a career-spanning installation at the Glenstone museum, Maryland, and a solo at Gladstone Gallery, featuring a series of new wall-based sculptures with pipes and textile arranged into gunlike forms, together with photographs. Among his many group shows, his work was in Grief and Grievance at the New Museum, New York, the last project of late curator Okwui Enwezor.

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Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq Ronald Reagan Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Alexander Lukashenko Jair Bolsonaro Tony Blair Imran Khan Narendra Modi

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Vladimir Putin Donald Trump Joseph Stalin Hun Sen Robert Mugabe Kim Jong-un Idi Amin Benjamin Netanyahu

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John F. Kennedy Barack Obama Abdel Fattah el-Sisi Omar Al-Bashir Fidel Castro Boris Johnson Bill Clinton

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21 STEVE MCQUEEN

22 PAMELA J. JOYNER

Artist British Last Year 16

Collector American Last Year 13

23 DAVID ZWIRNER

Getting the art bug from repeated visits to the Chicago Art Institute from the age of six, Joyner became a collector on a mission. While the walls of the museum back then were dominated by art by white people, Joyner is determined to use the wealth she has accrued through a career in finance to collect and lend the work of Black artists. This year Joyner donated 31 paintings, sculptures and drawings by 20 American artists from the African diaspora to SFMOMA (where she is a trustee, alongside board positions at MoMA, the J. Paul Getty Trust, Tate Americas and the Chicago Art Institute). The works were selected by Joyner to plug gaps in SFMOMA’s collection, offering new, more inclusive readings of art history. ‘What I want visitors to take away is that there were people of color not only working in the field,’ Joyner said this year, ‘but defining the character of the movement at that time.’

24 ADRIAN CHENG

Gallerist German Last Year 30

Collector Hong Konger Last Year 12

While Zwirner saw the (presumably) painful departure of Jeff Koons and the Donald Judd estate from his artist list, he has been actively directing the gallery’s evolution in other directions. During the pandemic the dealer offered online sales space to smaller operations, and what started as an emergency response has formalised into a permanent, independent enterprise: Platform, backed by Zwirner and fronted by his children Lucas and Marlene. At his bricks-and-mortar galleries in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong, Zwirner has been pursuing a socially conscious agenda: More Life, a series of solo shows relating to the AIDS epidemic, and an exhibition by Kandis Williams, inaugurating 52 Walker, Zwirner’s new ‘kunsthalle-style’ offshoot space run by Ebony L. Haynes, which operates a separate website from that of Zwirner’s mainline brand. In November the gallery announced the launch of Utopia Editions, focused on original prints and collectors aiming to climb the ladder by starting at a lower price range.

In 2008, when Cheng, now CEO of Hong Kong’s New World Development Company and a member of numerous international museum boards, created the K11 brand, people didn’t understand having art culture embedded into a commercial entity. Increasingly they do. As well as a series of shopping malls incorporating gallery spaces across Greater China, K11 organises international artist exchanges, stages and supports international exhibitions, supports China’s emerging art scenes and millennial culture more generally, creating a complete ecosystem for a new generation of artists. It’s not just about the new, however: summer saw a Georges Mathieu retrospective arrive at K11 Musea in Hong Kong, while Cheng’s latest project is a curatorial collaboration with cult fashion editor Carine Roitfeld on Savoir-Faire, which showcases traditional Chinese craftspersonship with designer fashion. It’s opening celebration, K11 Night, has already been dubbed ‘the Met Gala of Asia’. And – full disclosure – ArtReview’s group show Breaking the Waves opens at K11 HACC a week later.

ArtReview

22 Photo: Drew Altizer 23 Photo: Jason Schmidt 24 Courtesy K11 Foundation

While the artist-turned-cineaste’s year has been quieter than last, the awards for his work kept coming: Small Axe (2020), the television miniseries based on the director’s real-life experiences growing up in London’s West Indian community, won five BAFTAs and received two Golden Globe nominations, while McQueen also scooped Cologne Film Prize for his life’s work, and received honorific awards by the Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center, as well as Variety magazine. This year also saw the BBC broadcast Uprising, his harrowing three-part documentary on the 1981 New Cross fire that killed 13 young Black people, and the tragedy’s long-reaching effect on British race relationships. Back in the gallery, Ashes (2002–15), the artist’s video portrait of a young Grenadian man murdered by drug dealers, was shown at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK. But McQueen was mostly prepping for Blitz, a new feature film set to go into production next year. Effortlessly moving between the gallery and cinema, McQueen epitomises today’s restless artist.

26 IWAN WIRTH, 25 MANUELA LARRY WIRTH & GAGOSIAN MARC PAYOT 25 © Roe Ethridge 26 Payot (left), Manuela and Iwan Wirth (right). Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke 27 © Kick the Machine 28 Photo: David Heald

Gallerist American Last Year 29

Gallerists Swiss Last Year 31

Reporting on the megadealer invariably invokes his real estate: Gagosian’s gallery empire currently stands at 18, with a recent addition in Paris complementing properties in New York, LA, London, Hong Kong and across Europe. Located by the luxurious Place Vendôme, the latest gallery (it’s his third in the French capital) opened with a Calder show, complete with a monumental red sculpture by the late artist installed in the Place Vendôme as part of FIAC’s Hors les Murs section. In London the gallery has been ploughing through a yearlong takeover by Damien Hirst, in which the artist staged three self-reflective exhibitions, while the dealer’s second space hosted Social Works II, a group show curated by new gallery staffer Antwaun Sargent, centred on Black social practice (a version of the exhibition debuted in New York in June). One of the artists included, Rick Lowe, was then announced as joining the gallery. Otherwise it has been the usual big-boy jockeying: he took Donald Judd’s estate off David Zwirner (and Jim Shaw from the winding-down Metro Pictures), but lost Jeff Koons to Pace.

27 APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL Artist Thai NEW

The couple, alongside gallery president Payot, have had luck as much as strategy helping this past year. ‘Little did we know that the art world was going to get decentralised, and that people were going to be re-evaluating their relationship to nature and to cities,’ the couple told the FT as Hauser & Wirth opened premises this summer on Menorca’s Isla del Rey. Like their venture in the West Country of England, the site is more than a gallery, incorporating a restaurant and events and education facilities. This goes with white cube spaces in Zürich, New York, London, LA and Hong Kong, as well as Monte Carlo, Gstaad, St Moritz and the Hamptons. In New York the gallery staged a show of Philip Guston, including the Ku Klux Klan paintings that caused the postponement of a museum touring show last year. With almost half of its roster consisting of artist estates and the role of public institutions uncertain, the Guston show indicates that the gallery isn’t hesitating to try and take their place. Meanwhile, the gallery may have lost Simone Leigh, but it’s taken on Frank Bowling, Thomas Price and Christina Quarles, and announced the sole representation of Cindy Sherman.

28 NAOMI BECKWITH Curator American NEW

The much-anticipated release of Memoria, the artist and director’s first feature film in six years, didn’t go unnoticed, winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival and picking up the top prize in the Chicago Film Festival. Its release plan also surprised many in its uncompromising stance in support of the big screen: shown in one city and in one cinema at any one time, with no DVD or streaming platform release. Meanwhile, under his artist hat, Weerasethakul staged two exhibitions: the survey Periphery of the Night at the Institut d’art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, and A Minor History at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Foundation, which includes a new three-channel video excavating the past in Thailand’s northern Isan province. Combining tales about murdered political dissidents, the mythical naga and abandoned cinemas that speak to the buried violence in Thailand, it reaffirms Weerasethakul not just as one of the most distinctive voices in world cinema but as one of the most steadfast critics of political repression.

The deputy director of the Guggenheim arrived at her new job in January from a decade-long run as chief curator at MCA Chicago. There are few institutions on this list, but Beckwith’s tenure at her previous institution became synonymous with a diverse and intellectually rigorous programme, symbolised not least by the 2018 Howardena Pindell exhibition, which brought the late African-American artist canonical status. Likewise, in January, Beckwith was one of several curators who helped realise Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, an exhibition originally conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor, which opened at the New Museum, New York. In an interview for Artnet she posed the questions, ‘How can we possibly imagine how art is deeply embedded in the social? And has a responsibility to community?’ She has yet to inaugurate her programme at the Guggenheim, but for an institution embroiled in a race row prior to her arrival (an investigation found no evidence), she is a force of positive disruption.

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30 DARREN WALKER

29 Photo: Nils Mueller for Wertical 30 Photo: Justin French 31 Courtesy Kadist 32 Courtesy Superblue (Dent-Brocklehurst); Photo: Suzie Howell (Glincher)

29 KAWS Artist American new

Philanthropist American Last Year 11

One criterion for entry onto this list is influence on the public perception of what art is. This influence is sometimes indirect – as in the thinkers whose ideas shape the art that the public encounters in museums – and sometimes direct. kaws, the Brooklyn-based artist also known as Brian Donnelly, belongs in the latter camp. Starting out as an animator by day and street artist by night, he has, in the past 20 years, achieved a level of brand recognition through commercial partnerships and celebrity supporters that few in the field can match. That brand takes the ubiquitous symbols of commercialised capitalism, most notably Mickey Mouse, and subverts them in a manner too vague to qualify as either critique or celebration. Kid Cudi’s arrival at the Met Gala wearing a kaws-designed necklace valued at $1m was typical of the artist’s ability to generate buzz, but it is this year’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum that suggests his influence on culture might be longer-lasting than many had thought, or hoped.

31 VINCENT WORMS

As president of the Ford Foundation, Walker positions himself as a philanthropist-activist, seeking to promote inclusion and equity. This year his focus has been more on environmental issues, divesting from fuel and contributing to the high-profile fund pledged at cop26 to be given to Indigenous peoples. When Walker wrote an article for Time magazine earlier this year, stating that ‘if employers are serious about change, they must reorient jobs to centre around workers’, presumably he also meant this to apply to the numerous art institutions he helps to fund, which this year included substantial amounts to the American Alliance of Museums and the Whitney towards diversity and inclusion efforts. The foundation continued to support a wide range of arts initiatives, from the production of documentaries about Nam June Paik and Ebony magazine to the Simone Leigh presentation at the Venice Biennale next year. Not to mention the launch, with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, offering $50,000 apiece to 75 artists over the next five years.

32 MARC GLIMCHER & MOLLIE DENTBROCKLEHURST

Collector American Last Year 28

Gallerists American / British new

The angel investor’s foundation Kadist seemed well suited to a disparate and fragmented year, functioning as it does with a global network of collaborators and advisers that includes Cosmin Costinas of Para Site in Hong Kong and Zoe Butt of the Factory in Ho Chi Minh City. While the foundation’s six locations worldwide, in Chengdu, Guadalajara, Nanjing, New York, Paris and San Francisco, remained shut for much of the year, the foundation was still prolific, with a continuous stream of online exhibitions by artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson and American Artist; hosting monthly conversations featuring the likes of artist-curator Brook Andrew and filmmaker Ana Vaz; supporting initiatives such as the 8-bridges gallery collaboration in San Francisco; welcoming Dread Scott at its Paris residency; while adding to its 1,600-artwork collection. From the autumn, physical exhibitions resumed, with group shows such as If Time is Money, Are atms Time Machines? in Nanjing, which included works by Ian Cheng, Walead Beshty and Heman Chong.

It was a busy year for Pace, where Glimcher is ceo and president: it expanded its gallery in Seoul and opened a new 1,020sqm space in London, to join real estate holdings in New York and East Hampton, on the West Coast, and in Hong Kong and Geneva. Meanwhile, Glimcher, together with former Pace London president Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, inaugurated Superblue centres in Miami and London, institutionalising the immersive art experience they cofounded and which has now drawn over 25,000 visitors in its itinerant form, here with the likes of A.A. Murakami and Es Devlin providing the crowd-pleasing ambience. Yet bricks and mortar are only part of the picture for Glimcher: he has also set up an nft platform and will take payment in cryptocurrency, strategies rumoured to be among the reasons Jeff Koons joined Pace. This year wasn’t all plain sailing, though: in March Glimcher saw the departure of two senior staffers, Douglas Baxter and Susan Dunne, following bullying claims against them.

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33 FRANÇOIS PINAULT

34 PAUL B. PRECIADO

Collector French REENTRY (64 in 2019)

Thinker Spanish Last Year 39 If the cultural clout of philosophers can, like rock bands, be measured by online discussion of their bootlegs, then Paul B. Preciado is on the rise. So fevered was the debate sparked by smartphone recordings of his inflammatory 2019 lecture to a psychoanalytic conference that the transcript was later published as a book (released this year in English). In its combination of continental theory with the writer’s own experience, this attack on the intellectual and clinical establishment is typical of an approach that Preciado perfected in Testo Junkie (2008). Its highly literary take on an intellectual tradition running from Foucault through to Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam might also explain why Preciado’s writing is so appealing to artists dealing with identity, gender, technology, body politics and sexuality. It was announced this year that Preciado is working on an essay-film titled Orlando: My Political Biography. It’s based on Virginia Woolf’s rebellious, time-travelling, gender-switching hero/ine. Who else?

35 EBONY L. HAYNES

36 MIUCCIA PRADA

Curator Canadian NEW

Collector Italian Last Year 35

Haynes was taken on by David Zwirner to do something different, and she sees 52 Walker, the newly opened gallery in Lower Manhattan, as adopting an ‘adapted kunsthalle model’, albeit one backed by blue-chip money. Haynes is to take things slower and make things riskier than the market normally demands, opening with a solo show for Kandis Williams, an artist who explores race, authority and eroticism through collage, performance, video, assemblage and installation work. The gallery will then proceed at a leisurely pace through four further shows in 2022, featuring Nikita Gale, Nora Turato, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Tau Lewis, each accompanied by an issue of Clarion, the gallery’s in-house journal. It’s an approach that’s catching on: in December Haynes will curate part of the NADA Miami art fair, featuring similar risk-taking galleries. Haynes also runs an online programme that offers professionalpractice workshops, for free, to Black students worldwide; herself a model of how to change the system from within.

Miu Miu, the Prada label, collaborated with the Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani to launch its Spring 2022 collection, the artist mixing her signature animated humour with real-time footage of the runway show. It’s the first time the brand has collaborated in such a way, yet its head designer has long been a thoughtful patron of art. This year Fondazione Prada in Milan staged an exhibition of Simon Fujiwara, while her Venice palazzo was turned over to Peter Fischli. Shanghai’s citizens saw the year in with a show by Alex Da Corte, followed by Theaster Gates, the American artist foregrounding his ceramic work, domestically arranged in the former early-twentieth-century residence. The show marked the launch of Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, a three-year collaboration between Prada and Gates to support fashion, product and graphic designers of colour. Meanwhile the Damien Hirst-designed Moscow iteration of Prada Mode, the brand’s long-running roving artsy members’ club, had its November opening pandemic-postponed.

ArtReview

33 Photo: Matteo De Fina 34 Courtesy Paul B. Preciado 35 Photo: Lelanie Foster 36 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Twenty years after he first planned to open a museum in Paris, this year finally saw the inauguration of Pinault’s much-hyped £140m art palace in the Bourse de Commerce, an eighteenth-century architectural landmark redesigned by architect Tadao Ando. On lease from the city council, the Bourse is the new backdrop for rotating thematic displays drawing from the luxury-goods magnate’s more-than 3,000-piece art collection, with an emphasis on artists of colour such as David Hammons and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who have had little visibility in France. Programming at his Venice spaces continued with a much-lauded survey of Bruce Nauman at the Punta della Dogana, while the collection built on its offsite presence across France: organising a show at Le Fresnoy for artist-in-residence Enrique Ramírez and an exhibition featuring work by 57 artists from the collection in Rennes, and lending 19 works by Jeff Koons for a retrospective at Marseille’s MUCEM. Meanwhile Christie’s – which Pinault owns – hosted the first-ever NFT auction, hammering down Beeple’s Everydays (2021) at a record $69m.

37 JUDITH BUTLER 37 Photo: Collier Schorr 38 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town 39 Photo: George Darrel. © Ai Weiwei Studio. Courtesy Lisson Gallery 40 Photo: Lukas Wassmann

38 KOYO KOUOH

Thinker American Last Year 10

Museum Director Cameroonian Last Year 32

The theorist’s decades-long attention to the performativity of identity has been an enduring presence in radical artists’ work. With queer and trans practices increasingly a requirement for museum programmes and at biennials, Butler’s name is being cited in press releases and curatorial statements globally. Her more recent work has focused on protest and nonviolence, including support for pro-Palestine movements. But it is for her views on gender that she is most sought-after: this year she has been particularly vocal in backing trans rights (rejecting the position taken by most ‘gender critical’ feminists), flatly pronouncing to The Guardian, ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’. Yet for Butler trans liberation is not really a question of bodies and labels, but part of a fight for human and nonhuman freedom. As she stated in a recent discussion with Mel Y. Chen around the exhibition New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, at bampfa in Berkeley: the “pandemic time has moved the human off its axis”.

“Our imagination was violated,” the director and chief curator of Zeitz mocaa in Cape Town told French President Emmanuel Macron in October; “Africa has been married to France in a forced marriage for at least 500 years… It’s not possible that we find ourselves here in 2021”. Kouoh, speaking at Achille Mbembe’s new Africa-France Summit in Montpellier, is best known for founding the Senegalese raw Material Company arts centre and residency programme in 2008, before moving to South Africa in 2019. She has, therefore, done more than many to create space for the continents’ artists to prosper. At Zeitz her shows this year included Tracey Rose’s largest retrospective to date and an exhibition of new work by Johannes Phokela, as well as Home Is Where the Art Is, a mass call for locally-made amateur production. She is adept at taking the message further afield too, as curator of next year’s Triennial of Photography Hamburg, pointedly taking ‘currency’ as its subject.

40 HANS ULRICH OBRIST

39 AI WEIWEI Artist Chinese Last Year 69

Curator Swiss Last Year 19

‘Authenticity and accuracy are the most important requirements for artists. That is why art cannot shy away from aesthetics and ethics,’ Ai recently wrote in an op-ed for The Economist. Indeed, the artist does not shy away from anything and continues to be a thorn in the side of the establishment. In June it was Firstsite, the east England gallery that he said had censored a work made in solidarity with Julian Assange (the arts centre says it came in late), and more recently it was Credit Suisse, which he accused of closing his account to curry favour with China (the bank said it was missing paperwork). Next up was the Brazilian government, targeted in his show at Serralves, Porto, where, presenting a 32m bronze cast of the pequi tree, he lamented that the ‘Amazon has gradually collapsed’. Further solo outings include the Imperial War Museum, London, and mmca Seoul. And along the way, a media blitz marking his Penguin-published autobiography.

Some question whether the pandemic has ended Obrist’s age of ubiquity, yet it didn’t seem to bridle his influence. He’s been hosting online interviews (speaking to architect Sumayya Vally, as well as artists Es Devlin, Torkwase Dyson and Tino Sehgal), writing for print (a new book, 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, featuring suggestions from luminaries including Olafur Eliasson, Sophia Al-Maria and Cao Fei; and a postface for the recently published Museum of the Future: Now What?) and contending with jury positions (Art Explora residency prize in Paris, the Hublot Design Prize). The Serpentine Galleries, where Obrist is artistic director, emerged from lockdown with major surveys for British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor in the north gallery – which this year dropped the controversial Sackler family from its name – and for French painter Hervé Télémaque in the south gallery. Meanwhile Obrist’s nine-hour filmed recording of interviews with theorist Édouard Glissant went on view at the brand new Luma Arles, where he’s a senior adviser.

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41 SIMONE LEIGH

42 METAKOVAN Collector Indian NEW

One marker of power is when you join a megagallery and then quit just two years later –Leigh left Hauser & Wirth this autumn – not immediately to join another but because the present one wasn’t ‘the right fit’. Leigh’s admirable act might even suggest a shift in the artist/gallerist power dynamic; that said, she holds plenty of cards. Her obdurate, hieratic, often eyeless sculptures of Black women, often fused with African vernacular elements (architecture, pitchers), have only increased in visibility in recent years: the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a Guggenheim solo show, a sentinellike High Line commission, and, this year, shows ranging from the New Museum’s Okwui Enwezor-conceived Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America to the New Orleans Triennial. In 2022, meanwhile, Leigh will become the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. She may have repeatedly suggested that her preferred audience is women of colour, but a goodly part of the artworld is watching her now.

The NFT explosion would have been quieter if it hadn’t been for Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days becoming the third most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction. But for that, someone had to buy it. MetaKovan, aka Vignesh Sundaresan, is not a conventional big-money art collector; until his winning $69m bid for Beeple’s magnum opus, the Indian crypto investor was unheard of. In December 2020 Sundaresan had bought $2.2m worth of Beeple’s works on Nifty Gateway, through his NFT ‘fund’ Metapurse. Of course, these purchases were in Ether, so Sundaresan’s entry into the artworld is really the story of the anarchic craze for cryptocurrencies, and how some savvy players have gamed this unregulated, frontier world of virtual value. Some have raised questions about Sundaresan’s activity – in November a Reuters investigation looked at the events leading to the stellar rise and crash of a new crypto coin he created for investors to buy into his NFT purchases. The moral of the tale? In crypto, some make millions, others lose them.

43 JULIA STOSCHEK

44 ANICKA YI

Collector German Last Year 33

Artist South Korean-American NEW

Some collectors are disengaged hoarders; Stoschek, who’s about to celebrate two decades since beginning her focused accumulation of moving-image art, is the opposite. The billionaire heiress consistently puts her vaunted collection, currently totalling some 870 works by 290 artists, in circulation – not only in exhibitions at her galleries in Düsseldorf and Berlin (the latter this year hosting Fire in My Belly, a group-show meditating on violence by adroit new curatorial hire Lisa Long) but in international institutions and, since 2019, progressively online. Meanwhile, as well as wielding influence on top-tier museum boards, Stoschek sponsors research and residency programmes for emerging curators and promises further collaborations with art schools, evidently aiming to ensure that future generations know how to think about and conserve time-based media. Landlord issues may be nudging Stoschek out of her Berlin space in 2022, but otherwise her philanthropic empire only keeps expanding.

Of all artists currently working, Yi might be the most aesthetically open-minded: she’s made art from (among other things) snails injected with hormones, bacteria, tempura-fried flowers and scent. The latter was a constituent of Yi’s Turbine Hall commission this year, In Love With the World, in which swooping robots – hybridising mushrooms and aquatic creatures, and dubbed ‘Aerobes’ – homed in on body heat, while changeable ‘scentscapes’ drifted through the air (if not necessarily through one’s facemask). Yet as dramatic as they are in themselves, Yi’s formal innovations are in the service of ambitious, eco-minded speculation: conceiving of how we’ll live with self-evolving artificial intelligence, and abolishing hierarchies between plants, humans, microbes and machines – a downgrading of the human that feels central to a sustainable future. And if we’re not here to see it, Yi is bracingly, instructively pragmatic. As she told ArtReview earlier this year, ‘I’m not too attached to “survival”. I think that we had a good run.’

ArtReview

41 Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis. Courtesy the artist 42 Courtesy MetaKovan 43 Photo: Şirin Şimşek 44 Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Artist American Last Year 49

45 Photo: Giacomo Sanzani 46 Photo: Daniel Buchholz 47 Photo: Spencer Lowell. Courtesy Berggruen Institute 48 Photo: Calla Kessler. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

46 WOLFGANG TILLMANS

45 BROOK ANDREW Artist Wiradjuri / Australian Last Year 42

Artist German Last Year 23

This year was quieter than last, when he curated the Biennale of Sydney, but now Andrew’s own artmaking can be prioritised. Exhibitions in Australia at the Campbelltown Arts Centre and the Murray Art Museum Albury presented both new and some of the artist’s oldest works, while Tree Story, a group show at Monash Museum of Art, came just as Andrew, who is of Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry, embarked on an Indigenous-led three-year collaborative study on the significance of trees in southeast Australian Aboriginal cultures. Andrew has become an in-demand voice on panel discussions, not least Gropius Bau’s November symposium Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing, a prelude to a show Andrew will cocurate there next year (which will include gaban, a play by the multitalented artist), and he is advising the Nordic Pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale as it shifts to host three indigenous Sámi artists.

While in Budapest to open his solo show at the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in June, Tillmans joined a protest against the homophobic policies of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The photographer has long mixed art and politics. His solo show with Maureen Paley this year included a nude portrait of himself on the sands of Fire Island, New York, a place he visits not only for holidays but also to check in on the Fire Island Artist Residency, run for lgbtqi+ artists, which Tillmans supports through his Between Bridges foundation. This year the foundation also staged a conference at hkw Berlin titled ‘European Culture of Resistance against Fascisms’, backed scholarships at a German education charity, supported various individual lockdown art projects and funded a queer zine. Tillmans released two singles of brooding electronic music and had a retrospective at the Museum for Science and Technology in Accra; he presented a show at Mumok in Vienna; and he chaired the board of London’s ica – including managing its current hunt for a new director.

47 NICOLAS BERGGRUEN

48 AMY SILLMAN

Philanthropist German-American Last Year 55

Artist American new

The Berggruen Institute is a thinktank focused on politics and technology, but it is perhaps not surprising that Nicolas, son of the late art collector Heinz Berggruen, uses his nonprofit to also fund artists. Under the label ‘The transformations of the human’, the likes of Anicka Yi, Ian Cheng and Pierre Huyghe have been commissioned to develop research into ai, biotechnology and climate change. Eventually Berggruen is aiming to establish a research campus designed by Herzog & de Meuron on a plot of land in the Santa Monica Mountains (if the nomadic patron has a home, it’s la, where he sits on lacma’s board), but for now Berggruen, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.7b, just inaugurated a new centre in a Venetian palazzo at which he will sponsor conferences, workshops and exhibitions in partnership with institutions such as Tate and moma. Meanwhile, his personal collection stretches from the likes of Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter to Petra Cortright and Jon Rafman.

Sillman has acquired her share of imitators over the years, but nobody presently can equal the knotty verve of her paintings, which for still images feel remarkably mobile, oddball shapes jostling against the rectangle’s confines. That’s likely down to the unusual twin roots of her aesthetic: the influence of Abstract Expressionism and that of the animations and zines she makes. Sillman might be equally potent, though, as a writer and educator: her selected writings, Faux Pas (2020), is a tour de force – speckled with wry cartoons – that swings from musings on the physical weight of paint to generous appreciations of her predecessors and contemporaries. If these texts show a deep resistance to critical cliché and an insistence on being entertaining, Sillman’s exhibition earlier in the year at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St Louis and her current show at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, are parallel reminders that painting remains full of possibility – provided, of course, you have the hand and mind of Amy Sillman.

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49 Photo: Noor Photoface (the Samdanis); Photo: Myra Ho (Campbell Betancourt) 50 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 51 Photo: Jerriod Avant 52 Photo: Claire Dorn

49 NADIA SAMDANI, RAJEEB SAMDANI & DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT

50 MAJA HOFFMANN

Collectors / Curator Bangladeshi / Bangladeshi / American Last Year 41

Collector Swiss Last Year 56

In normal times curator Campbell Betancourt and patron couple Nadia and Rajeeb would be busy preparing for the 2022 edition of their biennial Dhaka Art Summit. The pandemic has pushed the next two-week jamboree of exhibitions, lectures, symposia and prizes to the following year. Work is nearing an end, however, at Srihatta, the art centre and 100-acre sculpture park the couple are building in Sylhet, northeastern Bangladesh, but that is not likely to open until next year. Which isn’t to say Betancourt has been able to put her feet up: a regular on panel discussions (‘we’re all zoomed out’ she wrote in one invitation to a talk series she had programmed) and residency and prize juries (including Art Explora, awarding a studio in Montmartre; a prize for sustainable art presented at the Artissima fair), this year she also helped establish the EDI Global Forum for Education, a digital platform and international network of art institutions, for the Morra Greco Foundation.

51 JENNIFER PACKER

After eight years of gestation, Luma Arles, the pharmaceutical heiress’s arts centre in the South of France, inaugurated its Frank Gehry-designed tower. Shimmering with 11,000 stainless-steel panels, the private foundation will host Hoffmann’s family collection, exhibitions and events, opening with works including Christian Marclay’s iconic The Clock (2010), Carsten Höller’s slides and Olafur Eliasson’s mirror works, among others; a café by Rirkrit Tiravanija; and the archives of Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz and Derek Jarman on display. Like every good patron, Hoffmann insists ‘it’s not about hanging a collection, but social impact’; she has long hosted artist residencies, her research helped by a high-impact committee of advisers including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, Liam Gillick, Tom Eccles and Philippe Parreno. Coinciding with Laura Owens & Vincent van Gogh, an ambitious double-header at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Owens instigated a mentorship programme with Luma Arles under the banner ‘Studio of the South’. Across the pond, in New York, Hoffmann retained her position as chair of the Swiss Institute board.

52 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

Artist American NEW

Gallerist French Last Year 50

The Philadelphia-born and New York-based artist’s paintings are fraught portraits and still lifes that manage to be both precise and indirect, with an intensity that finds its focus in small details, whether a pair of folded hands or the fold of cloth under a bent knee. Her work was included this year in the triennial Prospect 5 in New Orleans, as well as a solo show now reopened at MOCA Los Angeles. Most prominently, though, was her substantial retrospective, which opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London in May, and toured to the Whitney Museum in New York in October. Common among the works included were aspects of friendship, memory and grief, though they also retained an ambivalent distance from the sitters, as if not wanting to pry. ‘I have access to surface, and to social dynamics,’ Packer has said. Among those artists painting the Black body, Packer’s work provides a quiet reordering of what we can see in portraiture.

Nothing slows the French dealer, not even a pandemic: on top of his galleries in Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai, he opened in September a 400sqm Paris space dedicated to the secondary market, located in a five-storey townhouse right by the Élysée Palace. Premium-price pieces on show include works by Georg Baselitz, Glenn Ligon, Lee Ufan and Andy Warhol. On the primary market, Perrotin continued to stage shows for his 50+ artists, including superstars JR (New York, Tokyo) and Daniel Arsham (New York) and Superflat king Takashi Murakami, who took over the gallerist’s entire booth at KIAF in Seoul. Like many of his artists, Perrotin long ago decided to move beyond the confines of the artworld: in September he drew crowds to his Marais gallery with a show by the legendary director Lars von Trier, featuring photographs of iconic scenes from his films, and he recently released a range of streetwear with Highsnobiety, emblazoned with the Perrotin logo and the phrase ‘Current, upcoming, and past’.

December 2021

53 JR

Artist French new

Artist South African Last Year 52

The ubiquitous artist-photographer, known for his monumental blackand-white photomurals that often bring to the fore the unseen faces that make up communities around the world, this year released Paper & Glue, a ‘making of’ documentary revisiting some of his most ambitious projects at sites including the us–Mexico border, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and a California supermax prison. But jr is not one to dwell on the past or get slowed down by a global pandemic, instead he completed trompe-l’œil installations in Paris, Florence, and at Egypt’s Great Pyramids, the last a part of an unprecedented exhibition across the Unesco World Heritage Site. Meanwhile the Frenchman has been successfully navigating the artworld: this year staging solo shows at Perrotin, Tokyo; London’s Saatchi and Pace galleries; the Groninger Museum; and curating Truc à Faire, the inaugural show at Galleria Continua’s new Paris space. In between all that he also had time for a pre-Met Gala collaboration with Timothée Chalamet, while Kourtrajmé, the free art and cinema school he coruns in Paris opened its third outpost in Dakar this January.

55 BYUNG-CHUL HAN

Muholi prefers to be called a ‘visual activist’ rather than an artist, and their photography has long been a means of bringing recognition and dignity to African lgbtqia+ people. The nonbinary artist has had notable success in this, with their survey travelling from Tate Modern in London to the Bildmuseet in Sweden and Gropius Bau in Berlin in November, and a retrospective during the Lagos Photo Festival. New works from their ongoing series of self-portraits Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–) went on view at Stevenson, Amsterdam, while older works were revisited at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, and Denver’s Center for Visuals Arts. The photographer also recently took to painting self-portraits, which debuted at Yancey Richardson, New York, in September. There was no rest either when they were stuck at home in Umbumbulu, just south of Durban, during the pandemic, turning their house into a school for local youth offering workshops in painting, drawing, sculpture and computer skills.

56 LAURA OWENS Artist American

Thinker German Last Year 62 ‘Culture was the first thing to be abandoned during lockdown,’ Han wrote in ‘The Tiredness Virus’, an essay published in The Nation earlier this year. ‘What is culture? It engenders community! Without it, we come to resemble animals that want merely to survive. It is not the economy but most of all culture, namely communal life, that needs to recover from this crisis as soon as possible,’ he continued (while congratulating himself on having predicted all this in his 2010 book, The Burnout Society). No wonder some of the South Korean-born philosopher’s greatest fans come from the artworld. His works have nevertheless been translated into more than 17 different languages. This year saw the publication in English of Capitalism and the Death Drive, about contemporary society’s ‘destructive compulsion to perform’, while his latest tract, Undinge (Nonobjects), landed in German bookstores, lamenting the many blindnesses that come with our transition from inhabiting a world of things to one of pure information. Reason for the artworld to love him even more.

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The painter has had a series of disparate collaborations this year. The first, in her home state of Ohio, was with a bunch of teenagers, going through the Cleveland Museum of Art’s archives with them to produce a playful exhibition of her work. The second was sharing equal billing with Vincent van Gogh at a two-person show at the eponymous foundation-space in Arles, where she placed his paintings against a set of vivid, digitally collaged wallpapers. The contrast is telling, from adolescent awkwardness to taking on the prototypical male artist, as Owens’s work makes no distinction between pop and art-historical references, gestures and methods, combining Photoshopped surfaces with acrylic swirls and readily swapping the illusion of surface and depth. As she’s stated, ‘I want to ask what “painting” means and what “craft” means’; and her willingness to confront what image-making means today has made other artists look to Owens to help define what contemporary painting can be.

53 Courtesy JR 54 Courtesy Zanele Muholi 55 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han 56 Photo: Noah Webb. © Laura Owens. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ and Galerie Gisela Capitain

54 ZANELE MUHOLI

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57 Photo: Sebastian Böettcher 58 Photo: Noam Galai for TechCrunch/Wikimedia Commons 59 Photo: Ito Akinori. Courtesy Mori Art Museum 60 Photo: Sarah Franklin

57 SHEIKHA HOOR AL-QASIMI

58 CAMERON WINKLEVOSS & TYLER WINKLEVOSS

Curator Emirati Last Year 53

Entrepreneurs American new

As director of the Sharjah Biennial and founder of the Sharjah Art Foundation, Al-Qasimi has spent the last two decades working tirelessly to make the uae the centre of the region’s art scene and a hub for dialogue between East and West via exhibitions and assemblies. This year’s biennial (conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor) was postponed to 2023, but she has nevertheless overseen – among others – a retrospective for The Otolith Group, the third iteration of Sharjapan (which introduces Japanese culture to the Emirates), a midcareer survey for Hrair Sarkissian, a residency programme curated by Tarek Atoui and the Foundation’s Bani Abidi show travelling to mca Chicago. Curiosity, dialogue and collaboration remain at the heart of Al-Qasimi’s working methods; she also sits on the boards of kw, Berlin, and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, and is president of the International Biennale Association. Her fashion brand Qasimi meanwhile revealed its Spring/Summer 2022 collection, dedicated to preserving local handweaving techniques and supporting female artisans.

‘We’re all astronauts building on the frontier of money and the frontier of art and the frontier of finance,’ Cameron Winklevoss told Forbes magazine in April. The Olympian Ivy League twins, who in 2004 famously sued Mark Zuckerberg for having stolen their idea for what would end up as Facebook, have become key players in the intersection of cryptocurrency and art. Having amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune by buying bitcoin early, the brothers launched the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange in 2014, which became the first us-licensed exchange for Ether, the Ethereum blockchain currency. In November 2019 the brothers bought nft auction site Nifty Gateway, which went on to stage record-breaking sales of CryptoPunks and Beeple’s 2020 Collection, and 2021 has seen Nifty dominate sales with its similar ‘curated’ approach to showcasing artists, partnering with Sotheby’s on their $17m auction of nft favourite Pak in April. But with competition hotting up, Nifty is shifting from this exclusive model to become a more open trading site for this exploding market.

60 SARA AHMED

59 MAMI KATAOKA Museum Director Japanese new

Thinker British-Australian new

Director of Tokyo’s privately funded Mori Art Museum, Kataoka is also artistic director of the 2022 Aichi Triennale (and first non-man to occupy the post), the topical theme of which is still alive. As president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Art (cimam), she is at the forefront of thinking about the future of museums postpandemic and keeping them afloat. The organisation’s annual conference this year focused on xenophobia and climate change, proposing toolkits and methodologies for institutions to address and communicate on these issues. Meanwhile, on home turf she established a digital programme that included artists sharing recipes and culminated in an actual cookbook released this year. In between dealing with governments and culinary concerns, Kataoka is also putting money where her mouth is. Earlier this year, together with Hong Kong’s M+ and National Gallery Singapore, and supported by the Hans Nefkens Foundation, the Mori launched a $100,000 award for Asian artists working with moving image.

‘The personal is institutional,’ the writer wrote in 2016, in the wake of resigning permanently from academia in protest at how Goldsmiths, University of London, had failed to address issues of sexual harassment. As art’s institutions continue to come to terms with hierarchies built on decades of discrimination and abuse, Ahmed’s body of work has been an increasingly cited source in how to navigate the realities of what happens after people speak up and speak out. Her approach to feminist theory and institutional critique is pragmatic, with books such as Living a Feminist Life (2017) or her longstanding blog Feminist Killjoy providing detailed studies of how rhetorics of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ get dragged through intimate and bureaucratic tangles. This year Ahmed published Complaint! (2021), which posits complaint as a form of feminist methodology and catalogues experiences of what it takes to actually confront abuses of power and change working conditions, reflecting the issues raised at art colleges and museums across the globe.

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62 MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ

61 CANDICE HOPKINS Curator Carcross / Tagish First Nation / Canadian Last Year 61

Thinker British-Thai NEW Southeast Asian cinema and video art are generally underrepresented in critical writing from the region, but this writer-curator is providing crucial theorisation and contextualisation of such image-makers via text, exhibitions and other collaborations. She has written on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz and Nguyen Trinh Thi through the lens of postcoloniality and local avant-garde movements, contributing to important de-Westernised histories of cinema. Started in 2019, her curatorial and publication project, Animistic Apparatus, which examines the correspondences between Southeast Asian moving images and animistic practices, had a screening at Amsterdam’s Other Futures festival this year, and while her book, Animistic Medium: Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists Moving Image, is forthcoming. Currently, she is professor of cinematic arts at the University of Westminster, where she codirects the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. Her work in general traces the ways in which our relationship with the screen has evolved to open new potentialities for the medium.

64 PHILIP TINARI

63 IBRAHIM MAHAMA Artist Ghanaian new Having found international success with his work – he is best known for his upcycling of jute sacks into massive tapestries that often cover entire buildings – Mahama has been busy helping build an infrastructure for the thriving art scene back home in Ghana. Using the money gained from shows such as at White Cube in London in September, Mahama has been converting Nkrumah Volini, a huge 1960s derelict grain silo in his home city of Tamale, into a cultural centre – joining two other institutions the artist has opened in previous years, including the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and Red Clay, a studio complex and cultural hub. Across all three sites plus The Workshop in Accra, Mahama staged a group show in April in which Ghanaian artists were brought together with the likes of Olafur Eliasson and Zanele Muholi to explore the nature of time. Meanwhile, his work was cropping up everywhere from New York’s High Line to the Soonsbeek festival in the Netherlands, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

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Museum Director American Last Year 63 The director of Beijing’s UCCA continues to grow his empire, setting up a branch of the institution in Shanghai (UCCA Edge) that opened in May with a group show reflecting on the rise of Chinese contemporary art on the global stage during the 2000s, followed by Becoming Andy Warhol, the most comprehensive exhibition of the Pop artist’s work in China to date. Other blockbusters included Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgement (the artist’s first solo exhibition in China), on view at UCCA Beijing this winter, while over at coastal outpost Dune, Daniel Arsham’s fictional ruins engaged with the site’s geological features. Amidst all this, Tinari found time to curate the inaugural Ad-Diriyah Biennale in Saudi Arabia, which opened in December, while planning towards the opening of a fourth space, in Chengdu, for 2024, as part of the city’s International Art Island development (for which he’s an adviser). Perhaps UCCA curator-at-large Peter Eleey, who Tinari swiped from MoMA PS1 earlier this year, will be able to help with the load.

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61 Photo: Jason S. Ordaz 62 Photo: Marion Vogel 63 Photo: Jon Lowe 64 Photo: Stefen Chow

This year, the curator was awarded the inaugural Noah David Prize from LA’s Underground Museum in recognition of her work in bringing new audiences to the work of Indigenous and Native American artists. While she continues as a senior curator at the Toronto Biennial, helping to shape the 2022 edition, in August she was announced as the executive director of the newly opened Forge Project on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in upstate New York, a multifaceted initiative based in a building designed by Ai Weiwei that includes a lending collection focused on Indigenous and local artists, a teaching farm and a set of fellowships, the first of which were announced this year, supporting an artist, a writer, an architect and an environmental activist. Hopkins, a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, has been helping to reshape cultural institutions away from the ‘Anglo-Saxon mindset’, providing context and support so that Indigenous work and ideas can be ‘represented through our own perspectives and lenses’.

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65 LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE Artist British new

Gallerists German reentry (39 in 2019) If you represent two of the artists in this list’s top ten – namely Anne Imhof and Cao Fei – you surely know what you’re doing. It makes sense that those two would find a home at Sprüth Magers, whose longstanding commitment to women artists is legendary. This year, working across their venues in London, Berlin and Los Angeles (and, of course, online), the gallery mounted its first solo show of Nancy Holt’s work and announced worldwide representation of Louise Lawler (who they have worked with since 1987); her latest Berlin presentation – spectral photographs of Donald Judd’s moma retrospective, taken after dark – was a highlight of the gallerists’ 2021 programming. Their longstanding interest in West Coast wit, meanwhile, was evidenced in both a Hollywood-themed John Waters exhibit that laser-targeted its drolleries at the locals, and the announcement (albeit hardly surprising, given their decades-long collaboration) that Sprüth Magers would represent John Baldessari’s estate.

68 ANTWAUN SARGENT

67 MARIANE IBRAHIM Gallerist Somali-French new

Curator American new

Since opening a gallery in Seattle in 2012, the Somali-French gallerist has focused on primarily working with artists of African descent, including the in-demand painter Amoko Baofo, who currently has a solo show at the Museum of African Descent in San Francisco, and photographer Ayana V. Jackson, who will have an exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art next year, as well as collaborating with Brazilian curator Hélio Menezes. After moving base to Chicago in 2019, in September this year the gallery opened a space in Paris, inaugurated with an exhibition of gallery artists titled after the Josephine Baker song ‘J’ai Deux Amours’ (“I have two loves: my country and Paris,” the song goes), followed up by a show by Afro-Brazilian artist No Martins, while also announcing representation of Japanese artist Yukimasa Ida. Focusing on works that tend towards figuration and the politics of depicting Black life, Ibrahim is international in her ambition.

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Yiadom-Boakye has long been looked to for her singular approach to portraiture, painting enigmatic snapshots of fictitious Black sitters. While her work set records at auction this year and her influence is such that she figures in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s critically acclaimed, awardwinning debut novel, Open Water (2021), the painter (who also writes) was more notable for quietly making history via the museum exhibitions of her work. Her extensive solo presentation at Tate Modern, billed as a midcareer retrospective and originally due to open in May 2020, was the first to be given to a Black British woman by the institution. The exhibition was open only for a few short weeks this year before embarking on a tour to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; it is currently at k20 in Düsseldorf, and will travel to Mudam Luxembourg next year. In an appropriate turn, reflecting the artist’s considerations of persistence and presence in her work, the exhibition will return again to London next year to make up for lost time.

Not many art critics get to steer the discourse, but Sargent isn’t just any critic. A prodigious advocate for Black artists and creatives – see his 2019 book The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion; Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists (2020), which he edited; and his highly popular Instagram account – he’s been a significant force in galleries representing and spotlighting artists of colour. So it was shrewd of Gagosian to make him a director this year, and given the gallery’s abundant resources, Sargent wasted no time in realising his exhibitionmaking ambitions. Social Works, his debut show at the gallery’s 24th Street space, brought together a dozen Black artists whose work engages directly with their communities, and incorporated projects ranging from Linda Goode Bryant’s functional urban farm to David Adjaye’s first largescale sculpture. While some observers worry that the artworld’s deeply belated embrace of artists of colour is a fad, figures like Sargent – razor-sharp, committed, media-savvy – will ensure it isn’t.

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69 Photo: Nicole Tanzini di Bella 70 Courtesy Art Basel (Spiegler); Photo: NRKbeta/Wikimedia Commons (Murdoch) 71 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi/Contour, Getty Images 72 Photo: Tim Bowditch

66 MONIKA SPRÜTH & PHILOMENE MAGERS

66 Photo: Robbie Lawrence 67 Photo: Fabrice Gousset 68 Photo: Chase Hall

69 Photo: Nicole Tanzini di Bella 70 Courtesy Art Basel (Spiegler); Photo: NRKbeta/Wikimedia Commons (Murdoch) 71 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi/Contour, Getty Images 72 Photo: Tim Bowditch

70 JAMES MURDOCH & MARC SPIEGLER

69 KADER ATTIA Artist French-Algerian reentry (63 in 2019)

Art Fair British-American / French-American

Attia was preoccupied with the ramifications of colonial legacies and traumas long before movements to decolonise institutions and return cultural artefacts came on the global agenda. Through poetic installations, sculptures and videos, Attia interrogates the various forms of Western domination, exploring the possibility of ‘repair’ as a metaphor for resistance and the reappropriation of heritage and narratives. In November he opened a large survey at Mathaf, Doha, with two new commissions reflecting on restitution and on the concept of silence as both crippling and potentially reparative, in addition to shows at State of Concept, Athens, and bak, Utrecht. The latter was the occasion for Attia to revive the spirit of La Colonie – the now-closed communal arts hub exploring decolonial practices he set up in Paris – through a series of irl and livestreamed conversations with the likes of philosopher Achille Mbembe and political theorist Françoise Vergès. The 2022 Berlin Biennale, under his direction, will give him a new platform to develop these pressing conversations in more depth.

71 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

Art Basel parent company mch was experiencing financial difficulties even before the pandemic. Then its art fairs in Hong Kong, Basel and Miami were cancelled (or went online; ‘It doesn’t work,’ dealer Dominique Lévy summed up), precipitating a ten percent staff loss at Art Basel. So there was a lot riding on 2021, especially now that Art Basel global director Spiegler has the backing of Murdoch’s Lupa Systems investment vehicle, mch’s ‘anchor shareholder’. Hong Kong, though delayed, went off without a hitch (a relief given that Spiegler had promised full refunds if the fair was cancelled), and the Swiss edition was judged a slow but steady success, despite the notable absence of American collectors. Spiegler had enticed 272 galleries with a 10 percent discount, a promise to cover hotel quarantines and a chf1.5m (£1.2m) ‘solidarity relief fund’ for those disappointed by sales (97 galleries took up the offer). Miami returns with 254 exhibitors, roughly its prepandemic level. Murdoch’s art interest goes beyond booths: this year he invested in an art-focused nft marketplace.

72 AARON CEZAR

Collector Italian Last Year 68

Curator American Last Year 75

While Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s foundation already has spaces in Turin and Piedmont for her 1,500-strong collection, and also hosts a young-curators residency now in its 15th year, plans are afoot for expansion. In 2020 she cancelled plans for a Madrid venue (but she maintains a second curatorial residency programme in Spain) and instead announced the opening of an arts centre on the Venetian island of San Giacomo in Paludo in time for the 2024 Venice Biennale. For now, beside the eight group shows across her present venues, the Turin foundation debuted a new work by Martine Syms, the inaugural winner of a new commission devised by the collector alongside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (who will show the video work next year). Sandretto Re Rebaudengo also sits on the international councils of New York’s moma and London’s Tate, and is raising money for the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, which supports young artists in east Africa, through an ongoing fashion collaboration.

Delfina Foundation treats contemporary art as an ecosystem, offering residency and discussion space to artists, curators, writers and collectors. As questions concerning collections, funding and decolonisation become increasingly prominent, this holistic approach appears prescient. Working with curator Rose Lejeune, Cezar, who has headed the nonprofit organisation for 13 years, pays particular attention to artists working outside the Western Europe–North American axis: supported by a network of patrons and sponsors, residents this year hail from, among other places, India, Czech Republic, Syria and Peru. Cezar also advises Art Jameel in Jeddah and the Asia-focused Asymmetry Art Foundation; and he helped hand out £1m to 40 creatives as part of the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists. Yet it was artists who produce anything but tangible assets that made it onto the Turner Prize shortlist this year: five socially minded collectives selected by a jury that included Cezar.

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73 ARI EMANUEL, SIMON FOX & VICTORIA SIDDALL Art Fair American / British / British Last Year 90

Gallerist South African Last Year 65

With Frieze, where Fox is CEO and Siddall is board director, forced to cancel all its physical fairs last year, there was much talk as to whether the model had had its day. This year the Los Angeles edition was cancelled again, and the New York fair opened in May, in a new central Manhattan location, much scaled down with just over 60 exhibitors. By the time Frieze London swung round in October however the chatter looked empty as the fair signalled a return to pre-pandemic normal with over 250 galleries setting up shop in Regent’s Park. Emanuel, CEO of parent company Endeavor, is clearly betting on the art fair’s continued relevance, green lighting the announcement of a new fair in Seoul next year. There’s some sensible precautions being taken however: having long supported the Condo London gallery swap, Frieze monetised the model with year-round gallery spaces in London’s Mayfair available for hire by out-of-town dealers.

75 EUGENE TAN

Continuing her commitment to outreach projects which includes fundraising for local healthcare, the Goodman Gallery director this year launched the South South initiative which brings together artists, curators, institutions, nonprofits (including RAW Material Company and Green Papaya Art Projects), galleries and collectors from across the Global South as an online community. Billed as a platform that ‘offers a repository and a space for new, shared value systems centred on community, collaboration and exchange’, South South presents a programme of talks, moving image, artist projects and hosts a curatorial residency. On the gallery front, Cape Town saw exhibitions for Sue Williamson and Shirin Neshat, Johannesburg held Paul Maheke’s first exhibition on the continent, while the London space presented new works by Kapwani Kiwanga. In May, Essers opened a seasonal outpost in New York’s East Hampton, rivalling the collection of blue-chip galleries that popped up in the summer retreat during the pandemic.

76 PRATEEK RAJA & PRIYANKA RAJA

Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 46

Gallerists Indian Last Year 86

Under Tan, the National Gallery Singapore’s pandemic programming achieved a balance of crowdpleasers and more obscure exhibitions investigating modernism from an Asian perspective. There were blockbuster surveys of local art stars such as modern painter Georgette Chen and social realist painter Chua Mia Tee, as well as a thoughtful two-person pairing of Chen Cheng Mei and You Khin. Tan is also the director of Singapore Art Museum, which has announced a new 3,300sqm two-storey venue at the Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Set to open properly in 2022, the space has already staged a teaser solo-show by Choy Ka Fai and welcomed the recipients of SAM’s inaugural international residency programme, and will soon host Nguyen Trinh Thi, winner of the $100,000 Han Nefkens Foundation Moving Image Commission, for which it is a partner. SAM, which also organises the Singapore Biennale, has named the four curators for the 2022 edition. Set to be a key event on the Southeast Asian art calendar, the biennale promises to ‘journey to unfamiliar terrains’, speaking to its ambitions to drive conversations beyond the region.

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Experimenter gallery operates over two spaces in Kolkata, working with artists such as Raqs Media Collective and Bani Abidi, and staging shows this year for Sahil Naik, Reba Hore and Radhika Khimji. But it’s the wider attention to networks and dialogue that sets them apart. The gallerist couple position the gallery as an incubator, with learning programmes and bursaries available to artists outside of their represented programme. This year, they hosted their 11th annual curator’s hub online, bringing together an international group to discuss current issues in exhibition-making, with speakers including new MACBA Barcelona director Elvira Dyangani Ose and Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who helps run Dar Jacir, a project space in Bethlehem that is rebuilding after being ransacked by the Israeli army earlier this year. Experimenter was also on the initial organising committee of the International Galleries Alliance set up this year, alongside Sadie Coles HQ , Proyectos Ultravioleta and dozens of other spaces, describing itself as a non-hierarchical collaborative alliance.

ArtReview

73 Photos: Billy Farrell (Siddall and Emmanuel); courtesy Frieze (Fox) 74 Photo: Anthea Pokroy 75 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 76 Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata

74 LIZA ESSERS

77 Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles 78 Photos: Winnie Yeung @ VISUAL VOICES. Courtesy M+ 79 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul 80 Courtesy Dana Kopel

78 SUHANYA RAFFEL & DORYUN CHONG

77 AMOAKO BOAFO Artist Ghanaian NEW

Museum Director / Curator Australian / South Korean REENTRY (82 in 2019)

Boafo’s career trajectory has been stratospheric. Literally: in July he was commissioned by Uplift Aerospace to paint the exterior of a rocket (built by the Jeff Bezos-owned company Blue Origin) that launched into space in August. Success for the artist, whose portraits are usually painted directly with his fingers, has been double-edged though, as his work has been targeted by speculative collectors looking to flip it for a quick buck. Having received a debut institutional solo show at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, the artist himself is nonetheless determined to build his career on less mercantile foundations. At home in Accra he has expanded his own studio to include several neighbouring spaces, which other emerging artists can use for free. ‘The vision is to provide a safe space where artists can come together, practice, collaborate, experiment, and also learn to express their art in the purest of ways,’ Boafo told Artnet. ‘The art scene in Ghana has always been about collaborations and coexistence.’

It’s been over a decade since the idea of a museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District was proposed. Raffel has occupied the institution’s director positions since 2016; Chong has been chief curator since 2013 (one year after Swiss collector Uli Sigg donated 1,463 works of Chinese contemporary art). In November their vast and much-delayed museum finally opened, with six shows, including historical surveys (Individuals, Networks, Expressions looks at postwar art from an Asian perspective; Hong Kong: Here and Beyond provides an overview of local production from the 1960s onwards) and a solo exhibition for Antony Gormley. It wasn’t all plain sailing: the museum has had to cope with the potential impact of the new National Security Law (removing the images of two works by Ai Weiwei from its website). Nevertheless, with the opening of the museum comes the opportunity to expand global art discourse in a way that offers greater visibility to Asian perspectives and allows the institution to present the cultural contexts of Asian art in greater depth.

80 DANA KOPEL

79 HYUN-SOOK LEE Gallerist South Korean Last Year 83

Thinker American New

As blue-chip galleries and Frieze Art Fair add Seoul to their list of places requiring a permanent/perennial presence, Lee says she welcomes both the attention and the competition it will bring to Kukje, the gallery she founded in 1982. But she has some advice for her younger peers: ‘Korean galleries should strengthen their own identities, differentiating ourselves from other international galleries’. That said, it’s been a decidedly Western affair at her Seoul headquarters, with shows for Julian Opie, Jenny Holzer and the estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Nonagenarian painter Park Seo-Bo, with whom Lee has historically promoted the Dansaekhwa movement, also had an exhibition, coinciding with his being awarded South Korea’s highest cultural honour, the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit. Things were a bit more local at Kukje’s Busan gallery: shows included paintings by Jina Park, a solo for veteran art-school teacher Ahn Kyuchul and photographs by filmmaker (and Oldboy director) Park Chan-wook.

In 2019 the writer and organiser was working at New York’s New Museum as an editor, helping to set up the institution’s union. By the next year, after successfully establishing a museum branch and negotiating better contract terms, Kopel was laid off amid pandemic cuts. This year, in a series of articles, including the widely shared ‘Against Artsploitation’, Kopel detailed her experiences and set out the limitations of art institutions’ abilities to address inequalities, despite countless proclamations to the contrary. While others on this list, such as Sara Ahmed, have long publicly spoken of these issues, Kopel’s writing has made her the unofficial spokesperson for the museum union movement, the record of a personal journey providing a galvanising and recognisable point for wider struggles happening in art institutions worldwide. ‘Labor organizing in the art world is critical, but so is acknowledging that there will never be a “good” museum under racial capitalism,’ Kopel wrote. ‘Why cling to the museum when we could start anew, toward justice?’

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82 HOLLY HERNDON & MAT DRYHURST

81 KAREN BARAD 81 Courtesy Karen Barad 82 Photos: Boris Camaca (Herndon); Suzy Poling (Dryhurst) 83 Courtesy Para Site 84 Photo: David Uzochukwu

Thinker American new

Artists American / British new

Since publishing their book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Barad has become an increasingly cited source on how we comprehend and interact with the material world. Beginning with a background in quantum physics, Barad shifted their attention to feminist theory. As they wrote in 2019, ‘quantum theory is shot through with the political’. Their stance is one of entanglement and complication, where agency is a relationship, not something owned, or given or taken away – notions that apply to paintings as much as protest. Barad has been present this year with a series of talks across academic, art and philosophical contexts, from Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s ‘Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities’ in Helsinki to the Temporal Belonging network’s annual conference on ‘The Material Life of Time’, but even more through the incessant nods to their work, featured in pieces by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Fred Moten, and their idea of the ‘intraactive’ being referenced on countless exhibition press releases.

Musician Holly Herndon and technology researcher Mat Dryhurst have long collaborated in developing new processes and sounds that have shaped Herndon’s releases, most notably in training Spawn, an ai entity that provided vocals on her most recent album, proto (2019). This led to the development and release this year of Herndon’s ‘digital twin’, Holly+: drawing on machine learning and neural networks, users can translate any sound into a digitised version of Herndon’s voice. While releasing experimental electronic compositions that help explore how the organic and digital can collaborate, it is the pair’s activities in mining the implications of technological developments that are a beacon for the artworld. Making such experiments as Holly+ publicly available, alongside releasing generative animation nfts and their ongoing podcast Interdependence – which features discussion between tech researchers, philosophers and artists, including artist Lawrence Lek and science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling – are all part of what make Herndon and Dryhurst indispensable guides to our digital futures.

83 COSMIN COSTINAS

84 BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG

Curator Romanian Last Year 38

Curator Cameroonian Last Year 84

Para Site, of which Costinas is executive director, celebrated its 25th anniversary this year by looking back at its history as one of Hong Kong’s most influential independent art spaces and affirming its role as a key supporter of experimental practices in Asia. The new 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships programme, awarded to 18 young Hong Kong artists, includes reciprocal learning and support sessions and invites participants to apply for individual grants of hk$20,000 to realise a proposal. Meanwhile, Para Site’s NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour continues into its second year: 28 Filipino artists received hk$20,000 each for unconditional use. It was business-as-usual programming this year. A long-running open call for emerging curators produced Alvin Li and Junyuan Feng’s Liquid Ground; an institutional tie-up with Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum resulted in Curtains; and a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Luke Ching Chin Wai questioned wider structures in society. Meanwhile, Costinas’s postponed edition of the Kathmandu Triennale is scheduled to take place this coming February.

‘Power is a recurrent theme in my work… what space do you or I use to deliberate these things?’ The curator will soon have more room to talk about the issues that have long preoccupied him: economics, race, postcolonialism, care. In June it was announced that, come 2023, he will direct the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. While he waits for his desk at the Tiergarten institution, however, Ndikung was preoccupied with Force Times Distance: On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies, the 12th iteration of the Dutch quadrennial Sonsbeek, for which the curator invited artists including Olu Oguibe, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ellen Gallagher and Ibrahim Mahama to contribute art around the idea of work. There’s Savvy Contemporary to consider too, the busy ‘art space, discursive platform, eating and drinking spot, njangi house, space for conviviality’ that Ndikung founded in 2009 to foster dialogue between artists in the Global South and Europe.

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85 JULIANA HUXTABLE Artist American new

Thinker Mixe / Mexican new

‘Fantasy, […] identification with the non-human and with the spiritual realm is in the flesh and in the body,’ the artist, writer and dj has stated. ‘It’s being performed in movement. It’s being enacted in language and on the dance floor. It’s all a complex matrix, to me, that makes it impossible to separate what the real and the fantastical are.’ This movement between the two epitomises much of her work, shifting between installation, photography and performances that explore the projections of identity and the science-fiction potential of self-creation. Huxtable’s myriad activities as a Black trans woman are as wide-reaching as they are utopian, seeking to redefine the present, whether in a gallery – with exhibitions this year in Derby, Geneva, Lisbon and Nashville – or a nightclub: in a year for beginning to reconnect with people in physical spaces, she was most active in clubs and music venues across the world, from Berlin, Amsterdam, London and New York to Krakow, Crete and the outskirts of Beirut.

Gil’s influence has been growing since the publication of ‘Nunca más un México sin Nosotros’ (‘Never Again a Mexico Without Us: Indigenous Nations and Autonomy’), an essay in which the Mixe linguist, translator and language activist argued that ‘Mexico is not a single nation but a state in which many nations exist, oppressed’. Her day job is as a legal translator and contributor to both El País and monthly magazine Este País, her columns for the latter being released this year as a collection; combined with her increased online presence through talks during the pandemic, her profile has grown way beyond Mexico. Through these she articulates not just how Mexico has cannibalised the culture of those colonised nations, but how the obliteration of Indigenous languages and knowledge is a violence perpetuated globally: from Latin America to the Ainu people in Japan or the Sámi people of the Arctic north. This year she joined with actor Gael García Bernal to make a documentary series on climate change.

87 ANSELM FRANKE 88 SAN ISIDRO MOVEMENT / 27N Curator German Last Year 70

Artist Collective Cuban

As head of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s visual art and film department, Franke has taken a transdisciplinary, longterm approach, where the institution is a locus and meeting place for debate and exhibitions. While hkw was closed at the start of the year, they continued much of their programme, such as the ongoing thread The New Alphabet, exploring alternative forms of learning, online. From the summer, the two-year project Investigative Commons was launched, following on a long collaboration with Forensic Architecture, exploring how we might reestablish notions of public truth, while the exhibition and publication Illiberal Arts addressed the inequities at the heart of liberal capitalism. The multistrand, fast-paced programme has continued with the oral history project Archive of Refuge, turning to the memories of people who migrated to Germany over the past 70 years, and working towards the conference series The White West: Whose Universal? next year. Alongside the institution’s director Bernd Scherer, Franke continues to push at the idea of what a contemporary institution can be.

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‘July 11 marked a before and after in Cuba’s history,’ Claudia Genlui, a cofounder of the San Isidro movement, told Vice after protests caught the island’s autocratic government by surprise. Formed in 2018 by a group of artists and intellectuals in response to increasing crackdown on artistic freedom, San Isidro now numbers some 300 supporters many of whose lives are a game of cat-and-mouse with the state security forces: the performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has been in and out of jail, and this year went on hunger strike; in November artist Yunior García Aguilera was forced into exile and art historian Carolina Barrero arrested. Yet the resistance is strong, as attests the formation in 2020 of another network of artists and journalists, the 27N collective: while their leader, Hamlet Lavastida, was jailed this year for three months, the group issued a blistering manifesto for e-flux in April and has been spreading the message through art and performance as much as street protest.

85 Photo: Rob Kulisek 86 Photo: Martin Herrera 87 Tamar Guimarães, Luisa Cavanagh and Rusi Millan Pastori, Soap – Episode 5: Moses and Monotheism (still), 2021 88 Photo:Reynier Leyva Novo

86 YÁSNAYA ELENA AGUILAR GIL

ArtReview

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89 WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM Curators Croatian Last Year 82

90 MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ Curator Peruvian Last Year 95

89 Photo: Damir Žižić 90 Photo: Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy 91 Photo: Bernice Mulenga 92 Photo: Paul Odigie

The four-strong curatorial collective – Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, Sabina Sabolović and Ana Dević – was formed in 2000, taking over the direction of the city-owned Galerija Nova in Zagreb three years later. Last year they took the helm of Kunsthalle Wien in next door Austria, yet their egalitarian spirit is undimmed. While their adopted country has been in and out of lockdown, the group managed shows for fellow collective Averklub, all residents of the Chanov housing estate, the largest Roma settlement in the Czech Republic; cult local artist Ines Doujak (who pointedly took the histories of pandemics and their relation to global trade as her subject); and Singaporean Ho Rui An. In May, Peruvian curator Miguel L. López was drafted to mastermind a group show featuring, among others, Amoako Boafo, Karrabing Film Collective and the us-based group Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together! Meanwhile Galerija Nova, now run by Dević, is still going strong, with an industrious six shows this year and seven public events. Many hands make light work.

The artists in And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers? at Kunsthalle Wien offer resistance to the ‘anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation’, López writes in his curatorial introduction. Art practices based on social and environmental care have long preoccupied him. In January the now itinerant curator left teor/ética, the Costa Rican nonprofit he directed, leaving him time to spread the message further afield: in May his exhibition of Peruvian photographer Flavia Gandolfo closed at the Museo de Arte de Lima, while in June the long-touring Cecilia Vicuña retrospective ended at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. In July he opened a show at icpna in Lima that surveyed the early encounters between Peruvian artists and feminist discourse during the 1990s and is preparing a show of the late Sila Chanto and Belkis Ramírez, both known for their printmaking and antipatriarchal voices, at the ica at vcu, in Richmond, Virginia, to open early next year.

92 AZU NWAGBOGU

91 SOPHIA AL-MARIA

Curator Nigerian new

Artist Qatari-American new Self-described ‘techno-pessimist’ Al-Maria won’t be constrained by one medium, or even a few. The Qatari-American polymath writes (from journalism to memoir), makes a range of lens-based and moving image work, performs, sculpts – see her first public artwork, this year’s Serpentine Commission, taraxos, unveiled this summer at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park – and more, to the admiration of veteran futurologists like William Gibson. Much of her work is in the service of her key concept, ‘Gulf Futurism’ (a term coined with musician and artist Fatima Al-Qadiri), a critical analysis of the Arabian Gulf as a dystopian model of the global future, making Al-Maria the rare artist who stakes out a discourse of her own rather than augments one that already exists. This year saw two high-profile shows at Moscow’s Garage mca and the Luma Foundation in Arles – plus a Jarman Award nomination – while next year she brings her ideas home, so to speak, with a major solo presentation at Doha’s Mathaf.

The Nigerian curator has long been building cultural infrastructure, as the founder and director of African Artists’ Foundation, a nonprofit organisation which supports artists and hosts exhibitions; last year, during protests in Lagos, the foundation supported photographers with on the ground resources of food and recharging facilities. Nwagbogu is also the director of LagosPhoto Festival, which has just run its 12th edition under the theme of ‘Memory Palace’, and set up the online platform Art Base Africa as a space for commentary and criticism on African art. He remains active internationally, this year on a series of jury panels including the Photo Vogue Festival in Milan, the Sony World Photography Awards, the Berlinale’s feature film award, and as one of the curators selecting work for a virtual residency on the Voice nft platform; he received an award this year from the Royal Photographic Society for his curatorial efforts.

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93 ELISABETH MURDOCH

94 LEGACY RUSSELL Curator American Last Year 100

Collector British-American Last Year 98

95 MARTINE SYMS

While the writer and curator’s book Glitch Feminism, released last year, continues as a much-cited source on the emancipatory potential of the digital realm, Russell remains a savvy connector and synthesiser of contemporary ideas. She began the year as an associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, working, while it remained closed for renovations, on its public programme InHarlem, including an installation of a Thomas Price sculpture in Marcus Garvey Park. Meanwhile, an online exhibition put together for last year’s Performa was exhibited at Kunsthall Stavanger this year, and she staged discussions with artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson and Maria Gaspar. In the autumn, Russell made the shift to become director and chief curator of The Kitchen, New York’s long-running nonprofit space for exploring new media. While her programme there has yet to kick in, she’s working on a second book as part of a long-term research project around the notion of the black meme.

96 MERIEM BENNANI

Artist American NEW

Artist Moroccan

The American artist has been a little bit spread around this year – which is appropriate, as her work, in part, is about dispersal and how versions of the self fragment and circulate. While working primarily with video, Syms also runs her own publishing imprint and doesn’t hesitate to branch out or collaborate, whether hosting the Carnegie Museum of Art’s podcast series Mirror with a Memory – speaking, for example, with artist Stan Douglas and Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman – shooting images for a Prada sportswear line or lending her imagery to fashion-line Étude’s Winter designs. A restless chronicler of our networked present, she had work this year at LACMA and Glasgow International, she premiered new videowork on the Serpentine and Fondation Beyeler websites, and she had solo shows in London and New York. Episodes of her fictional, ongoing meta-sitcom She Mad (2015–) are currently at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway.

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Posting eight episodes of her semi-animated series 2 Lizards (made with Orian Barki) on Instagram during last year’s lockdown drew Bennani a legion of fans. Among them MoMA, which this year bought the work; Miuccia Prada, who asked the artist to collaborate on the runway show for her Spring/Summer Miu Miu collection; and collector Julia Stoschek, who in September asked the artist to join the advisory board to her private foundation (having exhibited at the Berlin institution last year). Bennani’s work, which mixes absurdist humour and pointed commentary on the post-colonial condition, technology, economics and power, was on show at François Ghebaly in LA in March. Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPS Interlude) (2021) was the latest episode in a moving image trilogy in which she imagines a futuristic American-run detention camp holding captured teleporters. Next year, visitors to the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Nottingham Contemporary will be able to find out what happens next in the sci-fi drama.

ArtReview

93 Ludovic Robert c/o SISTER 94 Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath 95 Photo: Hedi Slimane 96 Photo:Sunny Shokrae

Alongside its annual report, ‘Representation of Women Artists in Britain’, Murdoch’s Freelands Foundation has turned its sights (and money) towards a long-overdue research project into racial inequality in art education. Partnering with the race equality thinktank Runnymede Trust, Freelands Foundation aims to publish the report ‘on access to visual art for Black, Asian and ethnically diverse students’ in autumn 2022. The foundation has also committed £800,000 to two arts institutions, Wysing Arts Centre and the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, which combined will support 120 artists from underrepresented backgrounds in presenting work at museums and galleries around the country. Alongside this, the non-profit supports another 15 organisations including the Arts Council, Open School East, and Create London, and has loaned £3m to the worldwide Arts & Culture Impact Fund. The Freelands Award, which gives a mid-career female artist a prize of £100,000, continues annually; this year, the prize is awarded to Jacqueline Poncelet.

97 MARIO CRISTIANI, LORENZO FIASCHI & MAURIZIO RIGILLO

98 ZEHRA DOĞAN

Gallerists Italian Last Year 93

Artist Kurdish Last Year 97

97 Photo: Ela Bialkowska / oknostudio 98 Photo: Hoshin Issa 99 Photo: Niara Giorgia 100 Courtesy Facebook

Last year Galleria Continua, founded by the trio in 1990, bucked its own trend by opening a gallery in Rome, an established art centre: its original spaces are in the Italian town of San Gimignano and the French commune of Les Moulins. Continua’s Beijing space opened in 2005. This year, while most dealers were chasing collectors to ex-urban resorts of the rich, Continua took a punt on central Paris (as well as a popup for Anish Kapoor in Dubai). ‘There was sadness’ to the shuttered city, Fiaschi told The Art Newspaper. They opened, he added ‘to generate smiles’, first with a jr-curated exhibition pre-refurb, followed by two group shows. Still undergoing rennovation is the controversially privatised Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, where the gallery staged a small show of Cuban artists in anticipation of opening a space within the complex. Also conflicted is the trio’s operation in Cuba, which some Cuban activists have accused of legitimising the government.

99 HÉLIO MENEZES

The journalist, artist and activist has continued to raise awareness of the persecution of Kurds via a series of solo exhibitions in Italy at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea and Prometeo Gallery, both in Milan, while her work was included in shows at Cruce, Madrid, Kiosk, Berlin, Photobastei, Zürich, as well as in a group exhibition at the Criminal Police Department Mühleweg, Zürich. Earlier this year, Doğan told ArtReview that ‘In sexist discourses, the earth is personified as a woman’s body, becoming, like a woman’s body, something to be possessed. I draw and paint women who oppose this fate’. Her opposition has led her to serve time in prison on different occasions, and in Prison n°5, a graphic novel she released this year (and for which she was awarded the 2021 Le Soir Prize for News Report Comic Strips), she returns to her experience of incarceration at Diyarbakır prison. Zehra. The girl who painted the war, a children’s novel by Antonella De Biasi based on her life story, also landed in bookstores, with illustrations by Doğan.

100 MARK ZUCKERBERG Entrepreneur American new

Curator Brazilian new When São Paulo activists set fire to the statue of colonist Borba Gato in July, Menezes was the go-to voice for Brazilian media. It’s unsurprising that he was on speed dial given the curator’s continued mission to amplify Black voices in Brazil’s museums and galleries. His day-job at Centro Cultural São Paulo is just part of that platform. Beyond the institution’s annual open-call exhibition and an online show for Jota Mombaça, Menezes curated an acclaimed survey of the memorialist Carolina Maria de Jesus at Instituto Moreira Salles and appeared on numerous juries and panel discussions. It’s a reputation grown out of Afro-Atlantic Histories which he co-curated across Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2018, a survey of over 450 works tracing Black-Brazilian culture. That exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in October and will continue to the National Gallery of Art, Washington dc next year.

It’s likely that Facebook’s billionaire ceo will be happy to see the back of 2021. Grilled by us lawmakers in March for the social media giant bearing some responsibility for the Capitol Hill riots, by October Zuckerberg was facing accusations that Facebook was ‘morally bankrupt’ – with former employee Frances Haugen testifying to a us congress committee that Facebook’s products ‘harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.’ With social media becoming an increasingly toxic issue, it’s perhaps understandable that Zuckerberg should want to fanfare the tech giant’s new direction – the ‘metaverse’. With Facebook Inc rebranded as ‘Meta’, the company’s focus is now on a social internet merging virtual reality, entertainment, culture, gaming, digital commerce and, of course, virtual goods – with nfts as a part of this brave new online world – while the company spent a reported $10bn on its vr development arm, Reality Labs. With over 2.9bn users worldwide and $29bn earned this year, Zuckerberg’s behemoth is looking to shape the direction of how virtual culture might be experienced, art included.

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48 people everyone else gallerists on the list has heard of 120

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ArtReview

24/11/2021 14:33

THE 2021 POWER 100 1 erc-721

34 Paul B. Preciado

68 Antwaun Sargent

2 Anna L. Tsing

35 Ebony L. Haynes

69 Kader Attia

3 ruangrupa

36 Miuccia Prada

70 James Murdoch & Marc Spiegler

4 Theaster Gates

37 Judith Butler

71 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

5 Anne Imhof

38 Koyo Kouoh

72 Aaron Cezar

6 Fred Moten

39 Ai Weiwei

7 Cao Fei

40 Hans Ulrich Obrist

73 Ari Emanuel, Simon Fox & Victoria Siddall

8 Karrabing Film Collective

41 Simone Leigh

9 Carrie Mae Weems

42 MetaKovan

10 David Graeber & David Wengrow

43 Julia Stoschek

11 Kara Walker

44 Anicka Yi

12 Chris Ho, Claire Hsu & John Tain

45 Brook Andrew

13 Lucia Pietroiusti

46 Wolfgang Tillmans

14 Achille Mbembe

47 Nicolas Berggruen

15 Olafur Eliasson

48 Amy Sillman

16 Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy

49 Nadia Samdani, Rajeeb Samdani & Diana Campbell Betancourt

17 Hito Steyerl 18 Cecilia Alemani 19 Forensic Architecture 20 Arthur Jafa 21 Steve McQueen 22 Pamela J. Joyner 23 David Zwirner 24 Adrian Cheng 25 Larry Gagosian

75 Eugene Tan 76 Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja 77 Amoako Boafo 78 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong 79 Hyun-Sook Lee 80 Dana Kopel 81 Karen Barad 82 Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst 83 Cosmin Costinas

50 Maja Hoffmann

84 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

51 Jennifer Packer

85 Juliana Huxtable

52 Emmanuel Perrotin

86 Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

53 jr

87 Anselm Franke

54 Zanele Muholi

88 San Isidro Movement / 27N

55 Byung-Chul Han

89 What, How & for Whom

56 Laura Owens

90 Miguel A. López

57 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi

91 Sophia Al-Maria

26 Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth & Marc Payot

58 Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss

92 Azu Nwagbogu

59 Mami Kataoka

93 Elisabeth Murdoch

27 Apichatpong Weerasethakul

60 Sara Ahmed

94 Legacy Russell

28 Naomi Beckwith

61 Candice Hopkins

95 Martine Syms

29 kaws

62 May Adadol Ingawanij

96 Meriem Bennani

30 Darren Walker

63 Ibrahim Mahama

31 Vincent Worms

64 Philip Tinari

97 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo

32 Marc Glimcher & Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst

65 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

33 François Pinault

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74 Liza Essers

66 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 67 Mariane Ibrahim

98 Zehra Doğan 99 Hélio Menezes 100 Mark Zuckerberg

24/11/2021 11:06

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18/11/2021 14:13

Viewpoints 2

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19/11/2021 16:57

“EVERY TERRITORY BECOMES A SITE OF STRUGGLE”

EYAL WEIZMAN interviewed by Oliver Basciano

The Israeli-born architect is the principal of Forensic Architecture, a collective of architects, artists, academics, lawyers and journalists founded in 2010 and based at Goldsmiths University, London. Working with various partner organisations, the group conducts investigations into alleged human rights abuses by nation-states, security services, police and corporations. Often used in legal actions and public enquiries, the work is also presented online and in museums and art centres internationally. This year Forensic Architecture was the subject of solo shows at the ica, London, and the Whitworth, Manchester, and participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Investigative Aesthetics, coauthored with Matthew Fuller, was published by Verso in August. artreview Your new book involves a reassessment of the term ‘aesthetics’. I wonder if you could explain that a little in relation to Forensic Architecture’s work. eyal weizman For us aesthetics is not a way into art and culture, but a fundamental principle of our work. Aesthetics is perceived as pleasurable. It is synonymous with beauty and decoration, with play or a lack of seriousness. Where subjectivity is required of the artist or scientist,

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the investigator must be objective. Our work starts by trying to break that dichotomy. We are saying, to be effective in the forensics field – in journalism and law, within human rights – the nineteenth-century epistemic virtue of neutrality is unhelpful. And though we will not compromise our ferocious engagement in the verification of the facts, a researcher must in fact be embedded, situated and perspectival to the issue they are dealing with. The way you achieve that is through the field of aesthetics. Aesthetics is not a question of beautification but of the sensible. ar So what is aesthetics to Forensic Architecture? ew Aesthetics is effectively the way in which things register the proximity of other things. Deep attunement to objects and surfaces is our starting point. We look with care and detail at surfaces, whether they are digital surfaces or material, such as the first few millimetres of an architectural surface. Paint on plaster is like a membrane that registers the building’s being in the world: the temperature, pollution, differences in radiation. Through the very first surface millimetre of a building you can read Courtesy Forensic Architecture

changes in climate and emissions, or even changes in environmental laws or a political situation. Just as we are attuned to a close reading of texts, we can be attuned to the close readings of material surfaces, of organic surfaces. ar What is ‘hyperaestheticisation’, then – another term you use? ew If aesthetics is the relationship between bodies and objects in the world, then to hyperaestheticise becomes an ethical-political act in which you examine, at a particular historical conjunction, the way in which, say, a landscape, has become aestheticised to a particular action upon it, radiation exposure, for example. The way you do that is to increase the object’s sensorial ability by networking the object or landscape with other local sensors. What is fabulous is when you aestheticise a piece of territory. We’ve done that recently in Louisiana for a project that was coordinated by the artist Imani Jacqueline Brown. We took a sugarcane field and looked at aerial images and at the surface terrain in search of graves of formerly enslaved people. We become attuned to the minutiae within the terrain. After the crop is cut we can see every small angulation in the

ArtReview

23/11/2021 17:31

territory, we can see moments where the topography does not correspond to the natural way in which water would sculpt the slope. We can deduce that there must be something under the terrain. Sometimes the plants that grow over graves are slightly different from the plants that grow around them. These are ways in which the organic surface and the topographic surface are hyperaestheticised. Then you go into books and you go into the archival records; sometimes you go into photographic records and look at the threshold of detectability, at the very minutiae of the film to see if there are any other traces or anomalies to be registered. By putting all this together, by hyperaestheticising testimony, media surfaces, material surfaces, organic surfaces, you create an assemblage of sensors. That is where the ethical-political act occurs. Then of course there’s the act of construction, which is what happens in our studios. ar You chose to call it a studio rather than a lab? ew Absolutely: a lab is all about hermetic protocol, closed-door experimentation. You reduce the friction between your work and the world outside. A lab works with distilled evidence; we work with what we call dirty evidence. Just think about a gun being pulled out of the ground, it’s full of dirt. For the legal process, you need to clean off the dirt and present it. For us, we’ll be interested in what kind of ground it was on, how can we actually take the dirt to open up new lines of inquiry, to make new claims, to criticise the linearity of the legal process, which is often used against those people most in need of protection. We also work experimentally in an openstudio manner with a multiplicity of collaborators. It includes people who are within a given struggle themselves. That’s very different from any other forensic investigators, but for us it’s absolutely essential that the evidence becomes a tool for those social movements or those people who are at the forefront of the struggle against state repression. ar Why show the work in galleries then? ew If you want to politicise, if you want to create a wider reception, if you want to work towards political change, you need to put it in other fora, like the media. For us, art and cultural spaces have been very good venues in which to get our work beyond the legal bubble. ar The gallery can be a problematic space, though. The idea that it is a hermetic space – a clean white cube, where art is shown without being muddied by the outside world – is repeatedly shown to be false. When you were invited to take part in the Whitney Biennial, you produced an investigation into Warren B. Kanders,

vice chair of the board of the institution’s trustees and ceo of Safariland, which is one of the world’s major manufacturers of so-called less-lethal munitions. This year you threatened to close a solo show at the Whitworth, in Manchester, after it removed a message of solidarity with Palestine. ew My very first book, A Civilian Occupation [2003], written before Forensic Architecture [fa] was formed, started as an exhibition catalogue, but the exhibition got banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. After fa was founded, art spaces offered us two things: money – always good – and a space that allowed us to say things that are impossible to say in court. A court is a much more restricted arena: any form of political statement is not only frowned upon; you’ll be thrown out. Of course, we came to realise that though a gallery is a place that can be used to reflect upon politics, it is not a place outside of politics. Our experience at the Whitney illustrates that there’s no safe ground. All the forums in which we work, whether they are journalistic, judicial, parliamentarian, the un, they’re all skewed in different ways. That’s why we need a presence in all of them. You need to both fight with them or through them, and to fight them sometimes. When we were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2019, uk lawyers for Israel, who were one of the organisations leading the campaign against us in Manchester, immediately complained that we were falsifying the case against Israel, and that the Tate should not show these anti-Israeli activists [the collective showed an investigation into the 2017 police raid of Umm al-Hiran, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert, which left two civilians dead]. They lost that time and they lost in Manchester. Two-nil. The Israeli government ended up having to recant their version of events, however, admitting that our investigation was correct, that the person was killed, that he was not a terrorist. ar Your Louisiana investigation starts off with a memorial to the leader of the Confederacy – a symbol of racism – in Louisiana, but that work’s real subject is another form of structural racism, air pollution. The latter receives a fraction of the attention the so-called statue wars do. ew Kinetic violence is something that registers in the media, yet when you come to environmental violence, ‘slow violence’, as Rob Nixon calls it, it becomes less visible. The changes are sometimes accretional and imperceptible, and you need to try to find other strategies to aestheticise things that don’t lend themselves to aesthetic capture in the same way. In that project in Louisiana with Imani, we asked ourselves how you defetishise that which oppresses you. Even oppression tends to have names, figures,

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sculptures, buildings that represent it. The crime scene in Louisiana is immense in space and time. I think that this is one of the great challenges for us. ar After kinetic violence and environmental violence, the third violence is what you have termed digital violence. ew We were part of a big coalition of organisations that were researching the cyber warfare company nso Group. Effectively what we’ve done on cyber surveillance is to look at the people who were targeted. What happened to their lives? What happened to their mental health? How does digital violence enable violence in the physical domain? What resistance is being offered? For us, we don’t want to separate the environmental, digital and kinetic violence but show how they overlap. ar nso has been involved with covid-19 contacttracing technology and you discovered that there had been a data breach with the health data of Israelis being made public. Do you think the pandemic has offered a cover for greater surveillance? ew I think we are less conspiratorial than that. But I think the pandemic creates a condition of vulnerability that could be occupied, and could be claimed in different ways. The project that we’ve done on nso actually looked at its use of the pandemic to roll out the worst, the most egregious violation of Israeli citizens’ privacy. These tools were developed first, obviously, on Palestinians. I think that we need to be vigilant and, without compromising public health, insist on issues of privacy, because it’s going to be very, very difficult to unroll something that has been rolled out. We’ve seen it before. People made a bargain during the so-called War on Terror, accepting to trade some privacy for more security, and that trade-off was abused. ar Forensic Architecture also utilises the digital footprints we all leave in its investigations, though. For example, you mention in the book that the running app Strava allowed secret us military bases to be identified, because military personnel were jogging the perimeter fences, leaving a gps trail. ew Nothing is predetermined. I think that every territory, whether it’s digital or physical, becomes a site of struggle. We need to struggle with and for technology. We need to struggle for accountability inside the algorithm of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sometimes we need to use machine learning for human rights. I think that a background in critical theory allows one to do these two things simultaneously; to understand, for example, that Facebook is the site of the biggest surveillance operation in the history of mankind, but it’s also a place where you can find secret information.

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BEIRUT 8 AND 14 JULY

This past year, like the one before it, was shrouded in grief. During that time, not only has Lebanon witnessed the worst financial and economic crisis in its history – the result of a decades-long Ponzi scheme led by the Central Bank and the Lebanese ruling class – but also the catastrophic Beirut Port explosion last August, which killed over 200 people, injured thousands and made more than 300,000 people homeless. As well as a global pandemic. Looking back on this time, I have to check my phone’s impossibly large photo library to try and retrieve a moment I stole away to watch a film or see a show in town. There weren’t that many. And I didn’t keep a record of any of them. That is not to say things were not happening; local cultural spaces and galleries were painstakingly installing shows and organising events, albeit small, some of which I was a part of in some capacity. I remember berating myself for not having the energy to see exhibitions that I should have gone to see, if only to enact change on the sluggish cadence that the city continually imposes on us. But it’s no use to push oneself to feel generous and inviting when you’re moving through the motions of grief, loss and exhaustion. Yet on two different occasions in July I decided on a whim to shake myself out of this torpor by watching a pair of documentary films screened under the framework of Metropolis Cinema’s ‘Écrans du réel’, a yearly documentary film festival, which returned to the screens this year after being interrupted by the pandemic. It was my first time in a cinema since the pandemic started, and the weather was already punishingly hot and humid in Beirut, with very few electricity hours to turn on the air-conditioning at home. So it was such a relief to know that I could walk a few minutes and spend a couple of hours in a large, dark air-conditioned cinema. The fuel crisis had already become a painful reality by then and would worsen in the coming scorching months. In fact, it might have been impossible to host the film programme at all had it been scheduled a month later. While I hid away in the dark, the two films, screened only days apart, seemed to reflect the inescapable realities of Lebanon. The first was Overseas (2019), a documentary by South Korean filmmaker Sung-A Yoon, which chronicles the rigorous training that young Filipino women receive before being employed in households across the Gulf region and other countries in Asia. The second was Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid’s sprawling three-hour The Insomnia of a Serial

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Dreamer (2020). Eighteen years in the making and featuring the filmmaker’s friends and loved ones, the film revolves around prolonged conversations about love, cinema and Beirut across different temporalities. Soueid, the titular insomniac, had hoped that their stories would put him to sleep. To me, notions of departure weighed heavily in both films. Soueid’s film seemed to mark the end of an era in Beirut. It’s as though the filmmaker was bidding farewell to a host of places, people, stubborn and recurrent images (in the manner of impossible dreams), and to a version of the city that has already faded away. It was, at times, difficult to watch, not only because of how bad things were becoming outside of that cinema but also because Soueid succeeded in reeling us into his own nostalgia. Yoon’s film captures, through an empathetic and restrained lens, the ways in which many migrant domestic workers prepare themselves emotionally to emigrate to farflung and hostile places – Beirut being one of them. It was hard not to see the ways in which the imminent departure of these women anticipates the uncertain futures that await them at the end of their journeys. And, later, to be conscious of the fact that they were soon to arrive in the very city that Soueid was leaving behind. This past year has seen an unprecedented exodus of people, something I’ve been unable to reckon with. These departures, often too painful to come to terms with for those who remain here, have irrevocably changed the city and its people. I fancied myself immune to these pains before these past two years, but the acute sense of loss that envelops everyday life feels endless and cruel. Perhaps because it’s impossible for us to measure. Watching these two films, however, reminded me of the necessity to think about what remains to be done in a world so bereft. On the one hand to give ourselves the time to mourn what we have lost, and on the other to persevere in the fights we started – namely on questions of labour in this country – during the uprisings of 17 October 2019. The question we are left with concerns what we can still save from the rubble of our individual pain. Though it may take some time before we can emerge from mourning and grief, what will and should remain with us is our anger. Rayya Badran is a writer and translator based in Beirut

ArtReview

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both images Overseas, 2019 (stills), dir Sung-A Yoon

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“ONE ADVANTAGE FOR US IS THAT WE CAN SPEAK FREELY OUTSIDE OF THE COUNTRY”

YADANAR WIN interviewed by Marv Recinto

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ArtReview

24/11/2021 11:07

Yadanar Win, a multimedia artist from Yangon, Myanmar, has been involved in the country’s contemporary art scene for the past nine years. With the help of Goethe-Institut, Win fled from Myanmar to Germany last April following the February coup d’état and is currently in exile in France. In her homeland she organised local artists and community members, and is now working to bring the diaspora together. She (together with Ma Ei and Ko Latt) is part of the performance art collective 3am, which is exhibiting at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art in Reston, Virginia. Her own practice is critical of her homeland’s politics, culture, nationalism and patriarchy. She is currently focused on spreading information about the crisis in Myanmar and calling for action. artreview Let’s look back to the 1 February coup d’état, in which Myanmar’s military, officially known as the Tatmadaw, deposed leaders of the democratically elected National League for Democracy, declared martial law and transferred power to Commander-inChief Min Aung Hlaing. You were in the country at the time. Can you share your experience of this event and its aftermath? yadanar win At that time I was in the quarantine centre, having just arrived in Myanmar from France. The centre was in darkness, with the phone and internet dead. We knew something was wrong because it was the exact date that Parliament would have convened to recognise the nld’s election victory. As people in the centre left their rooms to talk, we heard the coup d’état had taken place. It was shocking, and for three days the whole country was silent; then Tayzar San [a physician and pro-democracy activist from Mandalay] organised the first protest, and afterwards everyone was in the streets. We felt betrayed, sad and angry. ar And you participated in those protests? yw I was in the quarantine centre for two weeks and the protest movement was getting bigger day by day. Groups of artists were already there, as we could see on social media. Since last year we had been trying to launch an exhibition called Our Art Collectors on 1 February to fund an association for Myanmar contemporary art. But everything was happening at the same time. Members of the artist-founded association were already at this protest movement, trying to paint on the street in the downtown area of Yangon. They would paint and sell the work to passersby, donating the money to people who quit their government jobs to protest the military. The reason I had come back from France was because our collective group, 3am, had planned an exhibition. I contacted the other members

and they were already on the street protesting. We planned to perform in the centre of Yangon where protesters were gathering and invited other artists to participate. This was the main performance event for me. I did a three-hour performance on 18 February because, by then, protesters had been executed in Myanmar. Ko Latt and I sat facing one another, holding protest signs against the military while blood dripped from a bag. Other artists were also staging performances. Mai Ei worked with beansprouts and invited participants to be involved by cutting the root off – like cutting the root of the military. It was a memorable day because we freely expressed ourselves through the performance. Later, on 27 February, the military started shooting in Yangon and killed 18 people. After this, people became more hesitant to protest. ar You might describe the way in which the Burmese people are coming together against the Tatmadaw as a form of national unity. However, since independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar – then Burma – has struggled to form any coherent national identity that is equally representative of its ethnic diversity. Indeed, perhaps this fixation on identity is central to issues of citizenship, human rights, politics and armed conflict in the country, resulting in instability. What does Burmese nationalism look like to you? yw I’m not Burmese: my grandpa came from China as an immigrant. My mom is Shan and Mon, while my father is half-Chinese, Mon and Shan. I’m mostly seen as Chinese: in school they called me ‘Chinese girl’. In terms of nationalism, I think my country is very strong on the religion and the nationalism concept. But I’m not a nationalist, I don’t like the idea of racism or nationalism that some people follow. This is also related to the growing nationalism in Burma: the military supports this extremism and uses it to gain power, bullying and fighting with other armed ethnic groups, exploiting their resources, and occupying their lands. They use religion [Myanmar is majority Buddhist] and nationalism to discriminate against ethnicity. In fact the Tatmadaw use this phrase in all their propaganda: ‘It’s your Duty to protect the Race and Religion’. If you have an identification card, you are required to fill out your ethnicity, and there are classifications according to your race. The military does not give equal rights to people, these are different according to your ethnicity. I am Myanmar or I am part of Myanmar, but in my country this ethnic discrimination is so significant because of how this dictatorship rules the country and exploits these ethnic Yadanar Win in the 3am performance Bloody Coup, Yangon, 18 February 2021. Courtesy the artist

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people. Since the military orchestrated the first coup, in 1962, Myanmar has been very centralised around the majority Bamar [or Burman] people. The military are also Burmese. ar You’ve since left Myanmar. Can you explain why and how you left? yw I left Myanmar on 20 April after I did a public performance in Yangon. Our performance went viral on Facebook, Tik Tok and the military-owned media [Myawaddy tv]. From February until March, the Tatmadaw released a warrant list on tv that includes social-media influencers, writers, artists and even celebrities. We were afraid we might appear on this list: if you do, you have to run and be constantly on the move. At that point, Goethe-Institut, where I had been an artist-in-resident, contacted me saying they would like to help me. I completed the visa process and left for Germany in April. ar That brings me now to your performances in Europe. Can you expand on the works you created during your time here and what you are hoping to accomplish? yw When I escaped from Myanmar, I had this notion that I left the country and this difficult situation. It was hard at the beginning because this is a totally different environment. Then I also don’t know the language. Luckily, I have friends who have been to and know about Myanmar who are helping to support the Civil Disobedience Movement – like friends from the Transnational Coalition for the Arts, Andreas Hoffmann and Anne-Katherin Klatt. They support me and give me a forum to speak about what’s happening in Myanmar since international coverage has slowed down. In July, after having the chance to settle a bit, I organised an exhibition, titled Insight Out/ Myanmar Kunst & Realität, of 30 Myanmar artists and showed footage of the protest movement on the street by Raise Three Fingers to show what has happened. Some people don’t even know where Myanmar is because of the… ar Isolation? That is, has the country’s political and cultural isolation – past and present – contributed to the fading attention? yw Yes, isolation. There have been opportunities for me to show across Europe. I collaborated with the Myanmar diaspora, and I did a public performance in Paris this September. Some Myanmar artists are already in France. Like me, they are artists in exile and we want to work together as a group. One advantage for us is that we can speak freely outside of the country and create networks or resources to engage with the people who are still inside Myanmar, fighting. Marv Recinto is a writer based in London

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NEW DELHI c. 2021

Museums are odd places. They often conceal more than the various histories they reveal. The sparse information on provenance and dates below displayed objects sanitises the journeys they were forced to make from their homes to vitrines, drawers and storage rooms in buildings around the world. Not surprising, for such migrations were almost always marked by the violence, trauma and exploitation of colonialism. Garima Gupta’s recent work Out of Place (2021), which the New Delhi-based researcher and artist posted online over a few months – she and I follow each other on Instagram – draws attention to the moments when pieces of natural history were separated by excavation from a mountain, river or cave and transported to museum collections to create a visual inventory of nature to be consumed as a curio. What was to be an onsite residency shifted to Zoom because of the pandemic, and Gupta worked mostly with archival images. The drawings in the series take the minerals and meteoritics in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut as a starting point to comment on the difficult histories behind such acquisitions. Importantly, her work recontextualises the presence of such materials in these ‘out of place’ collections, so far away from their sites of origin. They resonate with the current reckoning of museums in the global north with the weight of colonial pasts and issues of reparation and restitution of objects in their collections. Researched in collaboration with curator Chitra Ramalingam, Gupta’s drawings layer images of minerals over aspects of their history. For instance, the apophyllite is from Bhor Ghat, a mountain pass near the port city of Mumbai that was tunnelled by British colonialists to lay one of the first railway tracks on the subcontinent. It was a project that notoriously resulted in the death of thousands of workers due to poor working conditions and several epidemics. Gupta inserts an archival image of the first railway map under her drawing of the mineral. The map does not seem very detailed; in fact at first it scarcely even looks like a map. But the hint of a backstory to the mineral drawn in the foreground is an invitation to the viewer to imagine a landscape that places the museified object in its natural, native setting and highlights the extractive process that led to its presence in the museum. In another work in the series, she draws an image of a part of a meteorite that fell in Namibia centuries ago, the specimen from another world now labelled and in a museum. There are also drawings of graphite, calcite, copper and molybdenite, all of which continue to be of value in commerce. Obviously, the idea of extracting resources from nature, mostly by force, and unmindful of the larger sociocultural and political implications this carries, is hardly a modern-day problem alone, as it can be traced back to the early decades of European colonial ambitions.

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Native populations that lived with the earth and not as a separate, more powerful entity to it, were routinely branded wild and primitive, and therefore ‘eliminated’, ‘tamed’ and ‘civilised’. The use of such associative language aided the perception of alienation between the natural world and us human beings. One of the many repercussions of this distancing was that parts of the earth were routinely and crassly removed to be exploited, whether industrially or by museums, passing through networks of power, inequalities, value, caste and other layers of politics. The exploitation and trauma evoked by museifying nature (leaving aside cultural, spiritual and historical objects of importance for now) is hardly an abomination from times bygone. Especially in countries like India, where a capitalist economy was introduced later than in Anglo-Euro-America-centric societies, the practices of colonial pursuits continue, with projects that bulldoze people’s desires and the landscape’s capacity to tolerate such change. Just in my district of Kodagu alone – a tiny principality set in the Western Ghats mountain range of Southwestern India – deforestation and unchecked construction projects have led to erratic weather patterns that result in floods and landslides. A class of climate refugee is slowly being created. Support to the economy comes from a newish tourism industry, but uncontrolled development in the sector has brought another set of socioeconomic and cultural problems for these vulnerable hills. Yet, against common sense and science, a flyover project to the hills where the river Kaveri is born – a site that saw several kilometre-long landslides just last year – is supposedly in the offing. A heli-tourism project newly begun will not only disturb precious wildlife but also contribute to a surge in more construction to accommodate the tourist influx. Animal–human conflicts caused by shrinking forests are at an all-time high. Nationally, new amendments to a mining bill will make it easier for companies to bid for and control mining rights in the country, further privatising the commons. Such instances of brazen, shortsighted exploitation of land are innumerable, but hardly feature in mainstream media, which so often toe the Modi government’s line. Gupta’s works serve to newly draw attention to how the colonial mindset continues in the modern world, albeit cloaked as capitalism. Most artefacts and natural materials in museums everywhere will likely remain migrants that can never return home. As a means to understanding how a country’s resources are ruthlessly plundered, often in cahoots with the government itself, Gupta’s drawings reveal the absurdity of the very act of collecting parts of nature and the violence involved in such practices. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

ArtReview

24/11/2021 11:08

Layered drawing of apophyllite from Bhor Ghat, India, from Garima Gupta’s Out of Place, 2021

Layered drawing of molybdenite, from Garima Gupta’s Out of Place, 2021

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03.12.2021 - 04.09.2022

International Art Center

Copenhagen Contemporary James Turrell, Ganzfeld APANI (2011). Courtesy the artist and Häusler Contemporary Zurich. Photo: Florian Holzherr

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on the cover and on pp 78–83, 90–93, 100, 101, 106–109, 114, 115 Bani Abidi, The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men, 2021, publication version. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata

Words on the spine are lyrics from Public Enemy, Fight the Power (1989), written for the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing (1989), directed by Spike Lee

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’Tis the season of mince pie-making, mulledwine drinking and merriment, and I have fallen into a rabbit hole researching the humble little pie that is (probably) one of the oldest foodstuffs currently scoffed during Christmas – albeit with a slightly tweaked recipe. Today, the popularity of mince pies causes media outlets to scramble to publish their lists of ‘Best Supermarket Mince Pies’ each year – but to be honest it doesn’t really matter which store-bought ones you stuff into your mouth; they’re all disgusting. Take my advice and avoid the forewarned mince pie shortage by making your own versions. So ubiquitous are mince pies in the Anglophone world that variations on the treat appear in English literature from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) (‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.’) to the Ghost of Christmas Present’s throne of Christmas fare in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) to Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous Jane Eyre (1847), who busies herself with the ‘beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnising of other culinary rites.’ The earliest English cookbook, The Forme of Cury (c.1390), documents numerous recipes for tarts and pies that include meat, preserved fruits and spices, a mixture generally known as mawmenny:

Aftertaste

Mince Pies by Fi Churchman ‘Take pork ysode; hewe it & bray it. Do þerto ayren, raisouns corauns, sugur and powdour of gynger, powdour douce, and smale briddes þeramong, & white grece. Take prunes, safroun, & salt; and make a crust in a trap, & do þe fars þerin; and bake it wel & serue it forth.’ This recipe, written in Middle English, and many similar renditions in The Forme of Cury, have culinary roots that trail much further back in history and across geographies – to the tenth-century Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Dishes, c. 950s) written by the Baghdadi author Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq. In this compendium of foods and recipes collected from across the region known as the Fertile Crescent, where the practice of drying fruits was a more common method of preserving than in the West, al-Warrāq records stews

from Persia, such as sikbaj or zirbaj, which often contained mutton, beef or poultry cooked in a sour-sweet juice made of vinegar, preserved fruits and spices. As for the spices, those such as cinnamon, pepper, cloves and nutmeg were a secret closely guarded by Arab traders: one fanciful tale told to their rivals in Medieval Rome and Greece includes that of the ferocious Cinnamologus, a giant bird that built its nest with cinnamon sticks collected from an unknown land, and from which they had to steal the coveted spice. In the twelfth century, European crusaders brought these ingredients back to the West, which were introduced to the kitchens of the wealthy: the stews, baked into a ‘coffin’ (a thick, hard pie crust that was less about eating and more about ease of transport and preservation), became a dish reserved for festivities and Christmas celebrations because of the rare and expensive spices they contained from the ‘Holy Land’. A few centuries later, European merchants and traders began to bypass their Arab suppliers, going straight to the source in Southeast Asia (and resulting in the colonisation of those islands in an attempt to gain monopolies on the spice trade). With spices more accessible, the mince pie – also known at various points as ‘shrid pie’, ‘mutton pie’ and ‘Christmas pie’ – became common fare around Christmas, when it was baked into oblong shapes to represent a baby’s crib, topped with a little pastry Jesus. (These quickly went out of fashion in the seventeenth century, when Puritan England frowned upon idolatries and luxuries, as evidenced in Cromwell’s propagandist Marchamont Nedham’s 37-page poem: ‘All Plums the Prophet’s Sons defy,/ And Spice-broths are too hot;/ Treason’s in a December-Pye,/ And Death within the Pot.’) Mince pies contained meat until the late Victorian period when the ingredient was largely dropped in favour of the sweet flavours of the fruits encased in a puff or shortcrust pastry. If you’re too lazy to prepare the filling (like me), at least put some effort into a buttery, crumbly, crisp pastry. Then, as you set a plate of freshly baked pies on the table, you can (like me) bore your guests with the complicated history of this festive food. Now where’s my throne of mince pies?

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