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vol 74 no 3
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Venice Biennale
Congratulations to our artists exhibiting in Venice
Joseph Beuys
Vera Molnár
Finamente articolato
The Milk of Dreams
20 April—2 October 2022 Palazzo Cini, Fondazione Giorgio Cini
23 April—27 November 2022 Biennale di Venezia
Anselm Kiefer
Georg Baselitz
Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce
Archinto
26 March—29 October 2022 Palazzo Ducale
Until 27 November 2022 Museo di Palazzo Grimani di Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Ramo Grimani
Daniel Richter
Arnulf Rainer & Emilio Vedova
Limbo
Ora
21 April—25 September 2022 Ateneo Veneto, Scuola Grande di San Fantin
21 April—30 October 2022 Magazzino del Sale and Spazio Vedova
Antony Gormley
Raqib Shaw
Lucio Fontana / Antony Gormley
Palazzo della Memoria
20 April—27 November 2022 Negozio Olivetti
22 April—25 September 2022 Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Ca’ Pesaro
Oliver Beer Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained 21 April—27 November 2022 Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia
DAVID CLAERBOUT HEMISPHERES APRIL 28 – MAY 28, 2022 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM
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Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal 22.04 – 25.09.2022 Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art Santa Croce 2076, 30135 Venice In collaboration with White Cube
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We have the enormous pleasure to congratulate the artists Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa and Luiz Roque for their upcoming participation in the 59 th International Biennale di Venezia The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani and also Mariana Castillo Deball for her participation in the 59 th International Biennale di Venezia representing the Mexican Pavillion in the group presentation Hasta que los cantos broten (Until The Songs Spring) curated by Catalina Lozano and Mauricio Marcin.
Mend e s Wood DM
São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm
Coordinator in Venice: PDG Arte Communications
DAVID REED Gagosian Basel
ArtReview vol 74 no 3 April 2022
Dreamscapes Did ArtReview ever tell you about the time it met Saddam Hussein? Yeah, thought not (that’s called a rhetorical question – it’s not really addressed to you, but is simply a cue for ArtReview to get where it wants to be). It was sometime around 1990 and the great dictator was hosting ArtReview and a few other people in a chemical factory in Iraq. It was one of those invitations you can’t refuse. Even if you never have any idea in which part of the country you are actually being housed. Still, there we were, wearing other people’s clothes, surrounded by a group of armed guards who appeared to have borrowed their outfits from the same place ours had come from. Which, when it comes down to it, gives off something of the whiff of all being in it together, until you remember that one of you has an AK-47 and the other does not. But life is full of haves and have nots. Not that social, or any other form of inequality, was on the agenda at ArtReview’s meeting with Saddam. On the one hand he seemed partly to be admiring the ingenuity with which a small section of a chemical factory had been turned into a shining outpost of the hospitality industry. In keeping with that, he wasn’t wearing his military outfit (the rest of his entourage were), but rather a dark suit and a silvery tie – the kind of thing you might wear to a wedding. Which ArtReview presumed was designed to offer a ‘friendly’ face on the other hand: there he was, patting
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children on the head, enquiring as to whether or not they had enough milk for breakfast. The thing is, ArtReview was so lulled by the banality of the whole situation that it can’t remember what Saddam said to it. Just as much as it can’t remember being particularly scared by the armed guards, because they, over the several weeks ArtReview was in Iraq, somehow became part of the furniture. That’s not to say that others of Saddam’s guests didn’t have it much worse. They did. Once ArtReview had been released from Iraq and returned to its office, it was excited about the great story it had to tell. Even if it appeared to have forgotten what others might refer to as some of the ‘good bits’, there was heroism, stoicism and resilience to be admired. All the things its colleagues generally thought ArtReview didn’t possess. Game changer. But when it burst through the doors and raised its arms in anticipation of weeping and hugs, it found that everyone was huddled round one of its colleagues. At some point they grunted a hello. And that was it. It turned out the colleague had been bitten by a shark. And had a huge cartoonish bite-shaped scar on their forearm to prove it. You couldn’t make it up. Perhaps there are times when you simply have to accept that you have no control over life. ArtReview
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Latifa Echakhch, Sun Set Down (diptyque 01), 2021, acrylic paint and concrete, vinyl and fiber on canvas mounted on aluminum 200 × 150 cm, each panel, 200 × 300 cm, overall
Latifa Echakhch Night Time
London
pacegallery.com
Art Observed
The Interview Harry Gould Harvey IV by Ross Simonini 28
Return of the Yogi by Mark Rappolt 40 Who Is Venice Really For? by Martin Herbert 42
I to I by Emmanuel Iduma 37 Marine Serre’s Art of Upcycling by Clara Young 38
Celebrating Brazil’s Avant-Gardes by Oliver Basciano 44
page 38 Marine Serre’s Hard Drive collection for Paris Fashion Week FW22.Courtesy the artist
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Art Featured
Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Max Crosbie-Jones 48
Kerima Tariman by Marv Recinto 56
Venice Without Spectacle
Maria Eichhorn by Martin Herbert 62
A Tale of Two Lagoons by Craig Burnett 72
Tomo Savić-Gecan by Martin Herbert 68
page 48 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mekong Murder Mystery, 2022, giclée print, 147 × 106 cm. Courtesy the artist
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Art Reviewed
EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 78 Hassan Khan, by Sarah Moroz Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, by Ela Bittencourt Donna Huanca, by Ren Scateni Ashley Bickerton, by Owen Duffy Hawai‘i Triennial 2022, by Patrick J. Reed Younès Rahmoun, by Digby Warde-Aldam Cooper Jacoby, by Athanasios Argianas Faith Ringgold, by Ben Eastham Patrick Goddard, by Samuel Solnick Giorgio Griffa, by Ana Vukadin Tori Wrånes, by Cat Kron CAMP, by Andrew Russeth Before I met you the world seemed like such a big place… now there is only this shop, by Claire Koron Elat Alegria, uma Invenção, by Oliver Basciano Hayv Kahraman, by Salena Barry Bernard Piffaretti, by Salena Barry Flora Yukhnovich, by J.J. Charlesworth Ho Rui An, by Max Crosbie-Jones 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, by Naomi Riddle
At Home in the World: A Memoir, by Ibrahim El-Salahi, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada, reviewed by Thu-Huong Ha Shamans of the Blind Country, by Michael Oppitz, reviewed by Fi Churchman Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti, reviewed by Lucy Mercer Scorched Earth, by Jonathan Crary, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed by Louise Darblay Peach Blossom Spring, by Melissa Fu, reviewed by Nirmala Devi
page 80 Charles Correa and Mahendra Raj, Hindustan Lever Pavilion, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, 1961. Courtesy Charles Correa Foundation
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AFTERTASTE 114
MAISON RUINART GIVES CARTE BLANCHE TO JEPPE HEIN RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW VENICE, 21— 24 APRIL, 2022
Photo: Jan Strempel / Studio Jeppe Hein
This is an invitation to embrace the moment, to activate all our senses, to open our hearts and reflect. We are RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.
DRINK RESPONSIBLY
UGO RONDINONE
BURN SHINE FLY
SCUOLA GRANDE SAN GIOVANNI
EVANGELISTA DI VENEZIA
APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 17
Art Observed
of Jungle Law 27
Photo: Norbert Garcia Jr. Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
The Interview by Ross Simonini
Harry Gould Harvey iv
“To me, the whole work is part of a process of devotion and metaphysics that relates to the linguistic tradition”
Harry Gould Harvey IV was born and raised, and continues to reside, in Fall River, Massachusetts, the economically depressed postindustrial city where Lizzie Borden axe-murdered her parents. As an exhibiting artist, Harvey is a sculptor and draughtsman; but fundamentally he is a lover of art. Two years ago, with his wife, Brittni Ann, he founded the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, a half-sardonic, half-earnest title for an institution he hopes will reinvigorate his hometown. Now in his early thirties, Harvey worked for several years as a photojournalist, a skill he today uses mostly on Instagram, where he actively aims to cultivate a community beyond New England. My first encounter with Harvey, however, came through seeing his drawings in galleries: esoteric-seeming diagrams with exclamations
of artistic devotion: ‘please art! help!’ or ‘art saves!’ or ‘regnant ideas everywhere!’ Some drawings go deeper and hint at a vast, self-aware theology underscoring Harvey’s oeuvre: ‘Attempts at trying to rationalize a preposterous harsh reality with no master nor god!’ Harvey is a reluctant but engaged Christian. His written drawings ring arch and biblical in tone, and he uses them to reaffirm his path of salvation, prayer and service. Almost all his work relates to sacred architecture: his drawings are framed in elaborate gothic ornamentation, and his sculptures usually take the form of miniature cathedrals. We spoke over video, with Harvey sitting in the kitchen of his home while I sat in my yard. He later toured me through the rest of the house, including his downstairs workshops, his wife’s
April 2022
studio and a prayer room. He’d owned this house for several years, but the building’s appearance suggested he might be illegally squatting there, with exposed electrical circuitry and a conspicuous absence of drywalling in every room. He seemed to take pride in his raw living environment, and was careful to note that he takes far better care of his museum. When Harvey speaks, he releases a miasma of meanings, and I often felt myself swimming in his rapid philosophical musings and archaic references. He is a self-directed scholar of history, and his work often invokes time, with wooden ornamentation sourced from burned buildings, candle wax drippings and used industrial heaters. We spoke for over two hours, and afterward he offered to send me some sticklebacks, a Fall River seafood dish.
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Remain in Mist Harry Gould Harvey So I’m not sure, exactly, what your intentions are with this interview. What do you ask about? ross simonini I like to discuss the life and person around the art, rather than the art itself. HGH ok. Yeah, I totally know what you’re talking about, because that seems to be my relationship with art. I love it so much, but I have frustrations of course. I think it’s one of the more accurate social sciences that I participate in, where I could convey a greater sense of my personal journey to the collective. rs What’s your relationship to Christianity? HGH My relationship to Christianity was one that I entered attempting to negate to the highest degree, because of the patriarchal history, the monarchical nature of the papal supremacy, my distaste growing up in Portuguese Catholic high schools, my distaste at having to say prayers in Portuguese, and what felt like kind of forced indoctrination. So I entered Christianity trying to negate all that.
It’s complicated. I feel like some sort of spiritual worker in the real world, but I’m a student of the comparative religions. So it’s not so much that I feel Christianity has a place more than Islam or Judaism or Bahai or Hinduism. But I spent some time in a detention centre as a high school student and read the Bible and it became like a source text for me, allegorically, poetically and linguistically, for my own self-discernment. But I’m interested in faith. I’m not interested in belief.
HGH Belief is a knowing that’s not like a gnosis, that’s not like an internal knowledge. Belief, in my understanding, is the ossification of faith. But faith must be living and refreshable or else you’ll fall victim to the ossification of belief. And then belief becomes a structure that we have to combat with mysticism, which is kind of antithetical to the whole point of having faith to begin with.
exoteric. I have had to dive deeper into the esoteric now, but I hate how alienating it is to the general public. And I hate how dead-in-the-eyes people get the second you start talking about anything that alienates anybody. But I think our modern conception of what it means to be mystical is very different from what I understand it as. I’m not interested in being antithetical to anybody’s belief. And I don’t want to impose any type of political ossification of faith onto anybody’s true knowledge of themselves. Ultimately it’s like I have to enact Orthodox, nonmystical traditions to get mystical bread. But I get weary of plastic shamanism and these Neo-Gnostics. I’m interested in reality, and I think even the bounds of science become misty when you’re really diving deep into the reasons for why certain things happen. And I love the idea that we can hinge on something like the molecular makeup of fog, because it’s not of our built environment. For things to be illuminated, they should remain in the mist.
rs Do you dislike mysticism?
rs So how do you define mysticism?
HGH No, but I’m not interested in esoteric knowledge because I was so satisfied with the
HGH Ecology. The complex unseen relationships of organisms and their nuances and
rs What’s the difference for you?
We’ll Try, 2021, charcoal and coloured pencil on mat board, mdF, black walnut from the Newport Mansions, 90 × 65 × 4 cm. Photo: the artist
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ArtReview
Give them Bread (After Emma Goldman), 2021, preindustrial headboard, oxblood and milk paint, roses from the artist’s mother’s funeral, casting wax, formica from cocaine Sam’s hideaway, MDF, cast white bronze, found photographs, 170 × 123 × 9 cm. Photo: the artist
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paradoxes, relating to the linguistic traditions of humanity. RS Is that another way of saying ‘union with God’? HGH Yeah, if God is all the manifested language of all time of all humans trying to have reverence for something that’s greater than us; that’s before, after and during us, then yes. But not if God is, like, a person.
The Sublimation of Media RS How do your art objects relate to your faith? HGH I work every single day on an interspersed practice of devotional prayer that I hope to try to, like, illuminate things to myself into personally. And then I try to materialise those devotional moments into objects that I hope to charge with some type of metaphysics, that may be the linguistic quandary that I used to get to that object. And then I hope to do work in the real world with Fall River MOCA, running this nonprofit museum where the ministry relates beyond just the optics or the
icon or the venerated icon, if that makes sense. I really love making objects. They’re therapeutic for me. They’re part of the holistic function. But to me, the whole work is part of a process of devotion and metaphysics that relates to the linguistic tradition. RS So would you say that the objects collectively create a kind of unified philosophy? HGH It’s a snail trail. Or a map of detritus. I think the works are independent icons of multicultural and multinational belief structures, if that makes sense. And they’re not afraid to be spiritually, culturally appropriative, if that makes sense. I mean, when I was near eighteen years old, I was playing in a hardcore straight edge band, touring with this band and passing out copies of the Bhagavad Gita, you know? Art is my own in the Blakean way. And it’s the world that I’ve built to navigate my own shortcomings, my benefit, the benefactors of growth, the detriment of change of life and all that stuff. And ultimately all of the things that I really thought I was beating over people’s heads didn’t stick nearly as much as I wanted it to. And the things that did stick were surprising to me. And
they’re still surprising: the messages that I get regularly from people. Somebody DMs me on Instagram, talking about my work, saying that the way that I dealt with the passing of my mother helped them in a way that they weren’t expecting. So it’s like, this venerated icon that I’m trying to imbue with this aspect of transubstantiation, or filling it with spirit, has gone off and lived in the world through the sublimation of media. What I think about is, Ken Kesey said that shit floats, cream rises. There’s always going to be shit that floats to the top, but after all the cream rises, and that’s the thought process of this loose mystical cosmology. RS Have you found that the artworld is fairly receptive to your spirituality? HGH Uh, well, I feel the artworld buried my mother, which is a really weird and beautiful economic happenstance that I’ll forever feel indebted to. She’s in a cardboard box upstairs in my room, you know, cremated. So it’s like, I publicly went through the loss of my matriarch. And humiliatingly, I didn’t have the capital to bury her. And I was on Instagram and made
A Monument To The Families That Have Nothing To Offer The State But Their Children, 2021, partially stripped and charred church doors from Providence, casting wax, candles, lead organ pipes, job-site heaters from Fall River, scrap metal from Whole Foods, steel angel from New Bedford, cast white bronze and coloured pencil on Xerox, dimensions variable. Photo: Dario Lasagni
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a post about needing some financial support for this loss. And it wasn’t five accounts giving me $500. It was $5, $12, $6, $2 from strangers from the artworld that knew of my work and the representation of myself through media, supporting some aspect of me as a personal individual to deal with this universal reality that everybody’s going to have to deal with. I know there are a lot of people who can’t stand this type of work. That’s fine. It’s not for them, but there are some people who really just connect with it. And the artworld has provided me a lot of space, respect and care based on the labour that I’ve put in to get to this point.
To Reenter Some Type of Womb RS Your work all revolves around architecture, in some way or another. Does that seem right to you? HGH I think it all came from the fact that I, as an autodidact, had a lot of different practices and jobs. I worked as a welder metal fabricator, bronze patina finisher, a carpenter woodworker. It all really helped me understand what was
behind the walls. I had to go fix plaster sheet, rock walls, and I learned that a wall is like a series of little pieces. And then individuals took trowels of plaster and globbed it on. What we see is a smooth finish, but what’s behind here is a mess of hair from horses and tree from woods. And sometimes even wool from sheep from the 1800s. So I was looking at living architecture, vernacular histories, manifested in jerry-rigs and odd jobs and weird layers. I saw the same proletarian faith or linguistic faith or reality that I came from referenced in the built environment. And I was astonished by it. And I started reading – what did first-period architecture in America look like? When did it transition from the colonial to Carpenter Gothic to the Victorian period to Mies van der Rohe? How do these forms influence our lives? So it’s similar to my attempt to deconstruct and reconstruct the spiritual world. RS Earlier you said art was therapeutic for you. How so? HGH Catharsis is the ultimate holistic function for art. And I must make art at all times. I’m a very anxious person. I have an intuition that’s very, very strong and it manifests in physical and
nonphysical ways in my body that have been really hard to reconcile. It’s as if I had visions enacted onto me, but ultimately know that I’m within my corporal being within my body, if that makes sense. I have out-of-body tremors. I lose language at points. I spend eight hours a day in the bath, submersed in water, continuously drawing baths. So today from three till about eleven, I was in the bath. I’ve suffered in the past from ulcerative colitis, stomach ulcers, panic attacks, hospitalisations, whatever. Ultimately, I know it’s just artefacts of a complex lived reality with potentially some PTSD. RS From specific events? HGH When I was younger, I was robbed at gunpoint, beat up with a metal baseball bat. So that tends to leave me in a state of hypervigilance. But the bath is redemptive in the sense that it feels as if I cannot attempt to reenter some type of womb. So the objects that I make, that people see in these refined exhibitions, those are for the time that I’m not in the bath, and the art that people see with FRMoCA, that’s really the time that I’m not able to be in the studio.
Support Structure / Art Saves !, 2021, charred nineteenth-century wood pump organ, cast white bronze, casting wax, OSB from Fall River, black iron, street sweeper bristles, thumbtacks, black walnut, 155 × 124 × 58 cm. Photo: the artist
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Feral Furnace / Spectral Reality, 2021, industrial space heaters, casting wax, cast white bronze, street sweeper bristles, lead pipe organ pipes, scrap metal from Whole Foods, candles, black walnut, dimensions variable. Photo: the artist
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rs What are you doing in the bath? Reading? hgh Constantly. I’m just like, St. Augustine of Hippo was in a gang – I gotta research this! And I’ll spend hours reading about it. rs I’m always relieved to know that the saints and mystics didn’t all lead saintly lives. That knowledge would have given me solace as a kid. hgh Yeah, I was a fucking terror as a kid. I dropped out of high school when I was sixteen or seventeen years old. Leading up to that, I did not graduate a single year. I didn’t graduate from anything. I was in special education my whole life with people who were like severely mentally handicapped and with esl students, my first language is English. rs Why was that? hgh I just didn’t really understand how language could serve to better me. I just like didn’t know why the hell I was in there. Like I’m skipping school every day. Getting suspended, telling the principal go fuck yourself. And art has really been the only thing ever throughout time where I felt the most
understood. It’s funny because now, so much of my art is writing and linguistic morphism and words. But they’re like oriented in this symmetrical madness that is therapeutic for the dyslexic in me. It’s easier for me to see the space between the words than it is for me to see the words on the page. rs How has Fall River affected you? hgh Yeah, I was born half a mile up the street from where I live now. And when I was born all four generations were there in the hospital room. Harry Gould Harvey the first, second, third, and me. My family has been in Rhode Island since the 1650s. Originally, they were Quaker settlers in Narragansett Bay. I’m one of the first born in Massachusetts. And it’s that relationship to the place that made me so magnetically drawn to this place. I know everybody from the gangsters to the mayor, and I have no problems, versus going into some major city where I don’t know nobody at all, and never could, and act as if I belong there. Also there is a vernacular etymology to this region that means it becomes linguistically and ideologically schizophrenic for me to be
elsewhere, because it’s so antithetical to the linguistic cloth my family has been cut from. rs What’s an example of this speech? hgh An example would be, uh, you know, like, I mean, uh, you know, it’s like, I’m driving and my fucking steering wheel starts falling apart in my hands and standing, so I said to the guy and I said, what the fuck am I supposed to do here? The steering wheel was falling apart. I got a 67 Camaro. Fucking steering wheel never fell apart. So I go to fall river for fucking douche bags. They tell me there’s nothing he could do for it. I’m like, what do you mean you could not? So I tell them, let’s try to get this fixed up so I don’t have to fucking come in and cause any problems, you know what I’m saying? rs I see. hgh There’s no internal dialogue. It’s all outward. It’s a very different linguistic reality, where all words are visible. So you have to kind of exist in poetics. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb
An Appeal To The Young After Kropotkin Maquette For A Thought, 2021, coloured pencil, charcoal, Xerox and Time Life mailer on mat board, walnut from the Newport Mansions, cast white bronze, mdf, 110 × 86 × 4 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni all images Courtesy the artist and Bureau, New York
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Seen front-on and in profile, his look is intense in both photographs. Rows of woven hair, arrayed like shingles of a roof. A single piece of metal circles his neckline, the only ornament on his otherwise bare torso. His face, however, bears scars as intricate as birthmarks, etched into his person. In the front-facing photograph, as he looks beyond the camera, he seems cooperative, but also irritable. We can imagine this. He has been selected at random from a group of men: for the precision of his features, the finery of his scars, the undulance of his chin. He is asked to remain just so, not to move an inch, not to turn any further to the right. He is marked out as ‘special’ for the purpose of the photograph. But not for anything else. He knows this. He knows, too, he might not be designated a participant beyond this pose, this moment of being told to hold still. Or if he doesn’t know it, he’ll know it months or years after, when he tells his friends of the presumptuous stranger who didn’t even bother to give his name. Maybe then, when he tells of it later, this man, whose name is given in the archive as Nwobu, will find it funny. A chuckle of amazement at being studied for features as congenital as the bulge of his nose or the crumple of his forehead, features that marks him as belonging to an unbroken line of faces. Nwobu’s diptych appears on the website of a project entitled ‘Museum Affordances’, which reengages with the objects, photographs, sound recordings, botanical specimens and fieldnotes assembled during fieldwork in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone by Northcote W. Thomas, a British anthropologist of the colonial era. ‘What actions do they make possible?’ asks the project team on the ‘About’ page of the website, of the items gathered by Thomas. It’s a question that has spurred my appraisal, my attempt to be acquainted with an archival photograph from the region of Nigeria I’m from. Nwobu might have been a child or an adult when he received the ichi marks on both sides of his face and forehead. This is how: the ichi specialist, travelling with two assistants, arrived at his house. One assistant carries a bag of tools, containing a knife and herbs. Then he prepares
I to I
Emmanuel Iduma explores issues of absence and presence in the colonial gaze
the mat and wooden headrest against which Nwobu is to lie for the marking. The other assistant is there to hold down Nwobu’s legs while the knife is worked around his temple. The specialist begins. Nwobu’s wife – or his mother, depending on his age – is there too, passing him a piece of fish to eat, to help with the pain. And singing in Igbo: Eee, ahh. You talking up and down, allow me to do my ichi marking. I will travel to places and be widely known. Eee, ahh. You cut and sharpen the knife; are you cutting beef? ‘If he moves or shakes, he is considered to be disgraced,’ writes Thomas, who took Nwobu’s portraits in 1911. When the specialist is finished, the bruised Nwobu is left to one of the assistants, who cleans the cuts with warm
‘Nwobu’, photographed by Northcote W. Thomas in Amansea, present-day Anambra State, Nigeria, in 1911. (NWT 3479; RAI 400.20032 & RAI 400.20031)
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water and rubs in the herbs. ‘When he is properly healed he goes to the market and dances; some months after he takes a roasted crab to market and eats it there,’ the anthropologist continues. On the website where I found Nwobu’s photographs, I note a portrait of Thomas – the first trained anthropologist to be appointed to the post of ‘Government Anthropologist’ by the British Colonial Office – taken during one of his three tours to Nigeria, in which his uniformed frame is centred, his eyes obscured by the shadow of a pith helmet. I contrast it with that of bare-chested Nwobu. One photograph is a snapshot documenting a journey, the other a careful anthropometric record. I am most interested in afterlives. The extent of the anthropologist’s toil is impressive: 7,000 quarter-plate glass negatives survive Thomas, as well as multivolume reports. And I cannot dismiss the need these photographs crystallise: a need to know a time and place otherwise inaccessible to me. The inescapable shadow of British colonialism cast over the many institutions across which Thomas’s ethnographic archive has been dispersed: the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the British Library Sound Archive, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the UK National Archives and the National Museum in Lagos. History as biography: it is this possibility I attend to, studying Nwobu’s gravitas. The people of Amansea, where he’s from, could either take ichi marks as children or as adults: the former if the child belonged to a rich family; the latter when a man acquired wealth. I cannot immediately tell if he was scarified as a child or as an adult. And I cannot tell this because it is hard to ascertain if the sternness of his gaze recalls the impudence of youth or disillusionment of middle age. The signals are mixed: the hairless chin might mark him younger, but his weathered temple points to a timeworn face. I allow this disjuncture, this opening to the unknown. Only Nwobu can testify to what it feels like to be propped as a ‘physical type’, photographed as so. This is one chasmic silence between us, an exact measure of distance in the century since.
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In the early noughts I wrote about the fashion hacktivism of a brand called Andrea Crews. Designed by French artist / designer Maroussia Rebecq, Andrea Crews’s activist hacking consisted then and now of two elements: salvaging used or very cheap garments and manipulating their signature design details to obtain something new and offbeat. A discarded polo shirt reprocessed by Andrea Crews, for instance, could find its traditional three-button placket and piqué cotton knit collar shifted over to sit on its shoulder instead of above the breastbone: the new shirt is, at once, recognisably Lacoste but Frankensteined into Andrea Crews. What Rebecq told me she couldn’t figure out, however, was how to scale production up enough to make money. Taking each unique dress, coat or pair of trousers apart, recutting them and then putting them back together differently was not something that leant itself to mass production.
Deadstock
In designer Marine Serre’s dark worldview Clara Young sees hope for turning a profit
Marine Serre’s Hard Drive collection for Paris Fashion Week FW22. Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
Recently I went to see an exhibit called Hard Drive, put on by fashion designer Marine Serre at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Serre makes half of her collections out of deadstock and used clothing, and has been doing so since she founded her brand in 2017. Like Rebecq, Serre had to figure out a way to turn a labour-intensive recycling and redesign operation into something that could produce larger quantities of clothing. Serre is trying to crack that nut, and the manufacturing process she has so far devised is the centrepiece of the two-day show. Upstairs are pieces from this season’s collection, set among caravans in what looks like an encampment. Downstairs is a reconstituted atelier, looking very much like the DIY upcycling workshop Andrea Crews held at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2002, and several times since. Serre’s exhibition factory is divided into separate stations manned by white-coated personnel. While the sewing, pressing and
finishing work is much the same as in a regular factory, the sorting through bales of discarded clothing and fabric cutting depart from usual practice, especially the latter. For conventional clothing, cutters unspool yards of virgin cloth and cut out pattern pieces quickly, often using visualising software and laser; for Serre’s designs, they have to unpick seams and dipsy-doodle around stains and holes to lay out pattern pieces before cutting each out. The slug’s pace makes for output that is not too far off that of haute couture: a team can cut out pieces for 15 pairs of Marine Serre trousers in a day; for conventional brands, 300. Working with a small Portuguese manufacturer called Dcloset, Serre has taken a little over four years to design and finetune the upcycling process. In interviews she has said that designing out of existing clothes is a backwards process. Instead of drawing whatever comes out of your head and then having fabric made up to realise it, she tells sorters what to look for and then reverse-engineers what is brought to her,
both Marine Serre, Hard Drive, 2022 (installation views, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris). Courtesy the artist
April 2022
reconciling the ideas in her head with the materials she is furnished with. The constraints are many, and in patchworking old sweaters and T-shirts into new creations, Serre has worked out new tricks with old togs. She has learned, for example, that it is easier to circumvent defects by salvaging long, narrow pieces. And she has expanded beyond used clothing, to incorporate household textiles like bedspreads, dish towels, tablecloths and carpets into her collections. What is pointedly absent from the exhibit’s explanatory texts and video voiceovers is eco-vocab like ‘sustainable’ or ‘resilient’. It is as if eco-responsibility is so obvious as to no longer be worth drawing attention to. The extremely near future in which survivalist sustainability must be the norm, Serre already inhabits. Hers is an end-of-world view. It is not wholesome and climate-friendly but dark and apocalyptically avant-garde. Serre has toned this down lately in fashion shows, and the exhibit makes a case for her avant-garde business sense instead. With so many events wrenching apart supply chains, enterprises are scuttling back from farflung lands to set up shop again at home. Which is where Marine Serre already is, surrounded by the plenty of all we have thrown away.
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Three quarters of the way through his celebrated fourteenth-century account of his travels around the world, the Maghrebi scholar Ibn Battuta takes a timeout from his description of how he made his ‘escape’ from the service of the rather capricious Sultan of Delhi – who had sometimes been generous with the Moroccan, and at other times a bit scary: first by giving away his possessions (slaves and all) and hiding out, away from society, as a disciple of a reclusive, ascetic and cibophobic imam, and then (because who wants to live like that for ever?) by getting himself appointed (by the quixotic sultan) to an embassy to China (a job that came with new slaves, new clothes and new horses), during the course of which he was kidnapped and robbed by bandits – to digress on the subject of India’s yogis. ‘The men of this sect do marvellous things,’ he enthuses. ‘One of them will spend months without eating or drinking, and many of them have holes dug for them under the earth which are then built in on top of them, leaving only space for the air to enter.’ He goes on to marvel at the fact that he once met a yogi who had spent 25 days sitting on top of a platform, at the fact that yogis can ‘see what is happening at a distance’ and that the most powerful yogis of all don’t just cheat death, they deal it too. They can simply look at a man and he’ll drop dead. Minus his heart. Meanwhile, a yogi who has renounced speech and food but manages to make coconuts materialise out of thin air is obviously a Muslim in disguise. Battuta can’t get enough of those guys (he’s a bit suspicious of the girls, however, claiming that they’re the ones who tend to specialise in the deathdealing, heart-stealing business). Almost six centuries later, neither could novelist Thea von Harbou and her husband, and screenwriting collaborator, the celebrated director Fritz Lang.
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Return of the Yogi
An Indian prince, a European architect and an undead yogi – what can the centenary edition of a German Expressionist film tell us about our own times? Mark Rappolt asks
The Indian Tomb, 1921, 243 min, dir Joe May
ArtReview
While von Harbou and Lang are best known for collaborating on the German Expressionist classic Metropolis (1927), which is based on the former’s novel, they met and began what was then an affair during an earlier cinematic adaptation of one of her works, The Indian Tomb (written in 1918). That adaptation ended up being the basis of a four-hour, two-part silent movie, directed by Joe May (once he had kicked Lang out of the director’s chair) and released in 1921. Having been largely forgotten until the latter part of the twentieth century, it is now rereleased in a centenary edition. And it begins with a yogi being dug out of his hole in the ground. With its cast of browned-up Germans and a Hindu iconography that seems to incorporate aspects of Buddhism and Islam, with costume that fuses aspects of the Near and Far East (it’s like the movie was shot inside the V&A or British Museum), with gargantuan yet strangely spartan temple sets, ceremonial elephants, man-eating tigers, erotic dances and the odd snake in a basket, you don’t need me to tell you that the film is ‘rich in exotic mysticism’ (as its distributors do). Of course, you might equally figure that as crude orientalism; or, if you’re inclined another way, as merely reflecting the European attitude and worldview of the times. Where the Indian prince digs up a yogi when he wants to know how to get something done, his European counterparts (we’ll come to the characters later) consult an engraving, or one of their friends’ libraries. When the European gets to India, he strides out on a clifftop looking across the valley in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817); meanwhile the Indians live in a fog of temple incense and hookahs. But let’s not question von Harbou’s commitment to Indian studies: her marriage
to Lang would later end shortly after he (himself a serial philanderer) caught her in bed with an Indian student 17 years her junior (she went on to marry him in 1933, secretly, because the Nazi Party wasn’t into dark-skinned men). Still, you’ll be wanting to know about The Indian Tomb’s plot. By some sort of rule of the undead, the yogi is bound to serve the person who dug them up. In the case of this film that’s the Indian prince. In order to save himself some time and trouble, the prince makes the yogi magic himself over to somewhere that might be Germany or Britain in order to persuade (by trickery if necessary) the German or British architect Herbert Rowland to build a tomb for the prince’s one true love. Rowland himself has been fantasising about building a grander and more beautiful mausoleum than the Taj Mahal, an engraving of which he stares at longingly. He’s got a fiancée too. But she’s not important now. Professional desires come first. Rowland has to leave immediately to begin work on his dream job. This time the yogi and the architect travel by car and by yacht. Presumably because the yogi is using all his magic to make sure that the fiancée doesn’t reach, speak to or hear from Rowland before he has been willingly spirited away to India. It’s unclear why, other than to enforce the Faustian nature of the architect-prince bargain, such secrecy is necessary, but later it will be explained that Rowland needs to ditch his European attachments (fiancée included) in order that he might absorb ‘the blood and soul’ of India to make his tomb the most magnificent in the world. Which seems reasonable enough (although the architecture of the Indian sets featured in the film,
The Indian Tomb, 1921, 243 min, dir Joe May
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somewhat Angkor Wat-like in detail and scale, would suggest that, when it came to magnificence, a local architect would have been a better bet). Rowland then finds out that the tomb is going to house a princess who’s alive rather than dead. Although she might be soon, because the prince is determined to have his revenge on her for having an affair with an Englishman. The prince has a pit of tigers in case he needs to dispose of someone; the Englishman likes disposing of tigers for sport. Rowland’s not sure what to do. Meanwhile his fiancée manages to track him down to the prince’s palace. She and Rowland are nevertheless kept apart. Prisoners at either ends of the palace. Rowland catches leprosy while looking for her and wandering into the prince’s leper colony-cum-torture chamber. Later he’ll be cured by the yogi. Who, himself, will slowly morph from a ghoulish, zombielike henchman to an embodiment of the prince’s conscience. Before disappearing into thin air. The Englishman will be fed to the tigers. It won’t end well for the princess either. But I don’t want to spoil it for you. Perhaps what comes across most strongly when watching The Indian Tomb is not the extent to which it is a product of its time, but the extent to which, as much as it’s the product of all places, it’s the product of all times – 1341 (that’s when Battuta was running away from the Sultan of Delhi and into the arms of the infidel bandits), 1818, 1921… And hey, let’s not leave ourselves out of all this, we’re the ones to whom this is being marketed as an exotic cultural treat. Even Lego’s token ‘Indian’ figure (the Eastern kind of Indian, not the one whose accessories include a tomahawk, a headdress and a squaw) comes with turban, a snake and a pipe.
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The first time I visited the Venice Biennale was in 2001. The curator that year, as for the previous edition, was Harald Szeemann, whose typically oracular title this time was Plateau of Humankind. It was a fun, eye-opening trip; I’d never been to Venice before, and the experience of La Biennale is indivisible from that of the city. Plus, I was writing for a now-defunct Italian art magazine and had access – or maybe not official access, but I wandered in – to the international exhibition before the vernissage and so got to see how virtually nothing was ready even as the curtain was about to rise, how seat-of-the-pants this huge event can be. Which was sort of unnerving, and sort of funny. Dozens of Italians swearing at each other: the plateau of humankind, right here. During an unseasonal downpour I ducked into a tiny café and there was Szeemann, a supercurator ringed by sycophants, radiating bearish and beardy gravitas and blowing cigar smoke everywhere. Old school. Later, as the opening unfolded, there was of course a lot of blithe partying. 9/11 was three whole months away. All of this inevitably feels a few lifetimes ago, long enough for this writer at least to be pretty much done with the Venice Biennale. Certainly, there are a few things I’d like to see this time around – and no disrespect to this year’s curator, Cecilia Alemani, whose overarching title, The Milk of Dreams, vouchsafes a tenuous, if seemingly complicated, optimism that, as the geopolitical scene unravels nightmarishly, might strike one as audacious. But I probably won’t go. And certainly not during the opening: I for one am not up for multiple days of relentless cognitive-dissonance management while doomscrolling a war. Other people, stronger of constitution, surely are. As with the 2019 edition, in which, thanks to Christoph Büchel, a ship-as-readymade in which hundreds of migrants drowned sat right next to a café thronged by networkers, whatever terrible things are and have been going on in the world, artworld citizens can reliably tune it out over Aperol. This time, a percentage of politicised boycotts and withdrawals will militate against the idea that the Venice Biennale is a total bubble, and a percentage of visitors will be ignoring them.
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The Sinking Feeling
As the artworld prepares to jet off to Venice, Martin Herbert wonders what it’s all about and who it’s really for We know we shouldn’t fly there, but we do. We know we shouldn’t even be there, contributing to all the problems that runaway tourism has brought Venice. We know, looking at the superyachts in the Grand Canal, that the Biennale is a prism of wealth inequality that we’re effectively sanctioning by our gawping presence. We go anyway, get numb, tell ourselves it’s important to meet people and grasp the current narrative. But you can’t really grasp it on any kind of granular level, especially not at the opening, because the event is too big and you hustle yourself along too fast, and the person you’re texting with is on the other side of the city and you get lost trying to meet them Photo: Colin PDX. Licensed under Creative Commons
ArtReview
in the middle. It’s a Sisyphean, ethically problematic experience that peer pressure, and the commerce of opinion, insists you show up for. I can even imagine that all these downsides will be, on some level, pleasantly familiar to someone, a person assumedly skilled in compartmentalising, who’s relieved to be back on familiar (if sinking) ground after two years of pandemic hell. But I think, or I hope, that if I were to go I’d also be asking the question that’s headed nearer my forebrain over the last few editions, as the contradictions have mounted: what is this for, anymore? One might then ask what would replace it, as if there needs to be a replacement, as if there weren’t – for example – a fundamental problem with an expanding artworld continuing to try and meet somewhere that stays the same size. The nonmercantile argument for big biennales is that they ‘tell us where we are’ in cultural terms, but they can also read as calculated syntheses of currently fashionable intellectual topics and currently fashionable/saleable artists (and genre revivals: the lodestar of Alemani’s show is the surrealist Leonora Carrington). They’re outwardly noncommercial events with a ton of sales, market-shaping and hustle for exposure going on below. And meanwhile the curatorial spine is just that, the official centre of an event inflated with offsites, tie-in institutional exhibitions and more: static fogging the signal that constitutes the main curator’s proposed thematic. And next time, assuming it happens, the details will change but everything else will stay approximately the same. Just maybe bigger. One could accordingly construe the Venice Biennale as a zombie format, determined – or, at least, collectively encouraged – to stagger on until its host city is uninhabitable, because there’s no collective wherewithal to stop it and a bunch of vested interests dedicated to the event’s preservation. One might say, snootily, that its primary appeal should be to connoisseurs of extreme contradiction. But these are the thoughts of someone who’s been going for two decades and who doesn’t much like socialising either; maybe this rose inevitably loses its bloom. If this is your first Venice Biennale, or your third, well, enjoy. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll see you at the next one.
The 1920s were a wild time in Brazil. This was the last decade of the Old Republic, slavery had ended three decades before and it was said that every ten paces in São Paulo you would hear a different language spoken, as thousands of immigrants from around the world came to make their fortune. Before President Vargas heralded the imminently autocratic New Republic in 1930 – and alongside it an attempted city masterplan for São Paulo – the city’s most important street, Avenida Paulista, was a mad hodgepodge of architectural styles, from faux Italian castelli to Moroccan riads, as émigrés grown rich from coffee plantations attempted to conjure up a slice of their old world. Amidst this cosmopolitanism, for one week in 1922 the municipal theatre in São Paulo saw an explosion of avant-garde activity: the Semana de Arte Moderna, designed by a group of artists, writers, architects and composers led by painter Emiliano di Cavalcanti and poet Mário de Andrade as a rebuke to the old conservative cultural establishment. While many of the artists involved were inspired by trips to Paris (or, in di Cavalcanti’s case, an interest in Italian Futurism before it had gone fully fash), on a wave of patriotism they sought to define a modern Brazilian culture untethered from Europe. Or, at least, that is the mythology. Like all epochal moments either contemporaneously or retrospectively historicised, this rupture didn’t just take place over these few days in this place; it was slow-moving and geographically dispersed. Nor did it give agency to Indigenous Brazil or Afro-Brazilian culture. These are the important takeaways from the citywide range of activities programmed to mark the centenary of the week (indeed the reason why so many Europeans were being encouraged to immigrate was the government’s desire to ‘bleach’ the population). For Raio-que-o-parta at SESC 24 de Maio, curator Rafael Fonseca brought together a team of curatorial colleagues from across Brazil with the intent to decentre Brazil’s modernist origin
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Avant-Gardes
Brazilian art’s internationalism and insularity are on full display in São Paulo, Oliver Basciano finds
Tarsila do Amaral, Landscape with Bridge, 1931, oil on canvas, 40 × 46 cm
ArtReview
story. The show also demonstrates that the fifth largest country in the world remained, at this time, a fractured one, with the avant-garde arriving at different moments, in different guises, among different communities, across Brazil’s vast territory. While the likes of São Paulo-based painter Tarsila do Amaral and her poet husband Oswald de Andrade travelled the country to document the landscape in the 1920s, Raio-que-o-parta makes clear that it was only decades later that artists from those regions themselves got their due. José Paulino’s paintings of the Gogó da Ema in the Alagoas city of Maceió show the iconic palm tree with its S-shaped trunk both intact, in 1955, and after it had fallen, in 1957. While his art remains realist, there is a strong sense of adventurous geometry to Paulino’s composition (recontextualised today, the fate of the tree feels analogous, as whole neighbourhoods of Maceió have been made unsafe to live in after decades of salt mining). One of two 1965 paintings by the Bahia-based Rafael Borges de Oliveira shows the veneration of Oxum, an orixá – a spirit – in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. A woman sits on a sharp-toothed giant fish while, before an audience, a man wades into a river to present her with an urn. In keeping with the subject, the bold colours likewise eschew classical European influence. More often, however, Fonseca and co’s message is that the avant-garde thrived outside museums: a series of figurine animals by Florianópolis-based anthropologist and ceramicist Franklin Cascaes represents one such subculture. They form a jogo do bicho set, a gambling game illegal since 1946 (but still played today if you know where to look). There’s a strong section too on the history of progressive circus and cabaret in Brazil (including Carmen Miranda’s dress and fruit-laden hat). Less famous to gringos, but as important, was the drag performer Madame Satã (Madam Satan), shown here on the cover of counterculture title O Pasquim, who plied her
trade among the seedy underbelly of 1960s Rio society (expert at capoeira, she was infamous locally for fighting singlehandedly in the streets against legions of police). Born of two freed slaves, Madame Satã’s performances mixed elements of Surrealism and Dadaism in all but name. Raio-que-o-parta also pays homage to the postcolonial immigrant communities – the Japanese diaspora in Santos from whom a strong artistic community emerged (Manabu Mabe’s surly oil-on-canvas self-portrait is a highlight) and the likes of Ukrainian-born Dimitri Ismailovitch, who arrived in São Paulo in 1927. His beguiling oil triptych, Sôdade do cordão (1940), presents a more pluralistic picture of the country than many of his homegrown peers ever managed. It features 15 gloriously vivid faces, five from indigenous communities, three Black and two white (including Ismailovitch himself), all wrought with an emotion and personality that undercuts any sense of exoticism or stereotype. Warsaw-born architect Jorge Zalszupin was another such émigré figure, one of the many Eastern European Jews who arrived during the Second World War. Since his death two years ago, the house he designed for himself has become an occasional venue for shows and events. The building, in the leafy Jardins neighbourhood, is an elegant
mix of dry stone and white plastered walls with a deep terracotta floor; it’s the venue for Every Other Week, curated by Germano Dushá. Here, do Amaral’s Landscape with Bridge (1931), a vision of green bulbous trees and deep blue river, a product of her aforementioned travels, hangs near di Cavalcanti’s 1935 Samba scene. Yet Dushá, too, troubles the canon by introducing contemporary works into the mix, drawing attention to both those who had the opportunity to show art and those who didn’t: the latter paintings, with their depictions of a respectively tranquil and joyous land, are undercut by a third, much newer, on the same wall. In the foreground of Thiago Martins de Melo’s The Crack (2020), an assemblage of less-welcome symbols – guns, skulls, a cross – stain an equally lush landscape. Anniversaries call for comparisons. In a way, Brazil has become more insular over the ensuing century: the number of artists who regularly show in the country, who were born elsewhere, is strikingly small compared to other ecosystems. This is a shame in some respects, since the radical spirit of Semana de Arte Moderna was a result of its internationalism, but it’s understandable too. Instead, if slowly, far more space on Brazil’s museum and gallery walls is being given to a much greater variety of voices, in terms of geography, race and class. For Brazil, Europe is no longer a necessity.
top Joaquim do Rego Monteiro, América do Sul I, 1927, oil on canvas, 77 × 97 × 4 cm. Collection MAMAN, Recife above José Antonio da Silva, Untitled, 1956, oil on canvas, 69 × 99 cm. Collection Vilma Eid
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June 16–19, 2022 Photograph taken at Kunstmuseum Basel
Art Featured
is that punishment settles all scores 47
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Bumps in the Night Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest works crackle and thud with a new belligerence. What is this most sensitive of artists picking up beneath the placid surfaces of his homeland? by Max Crosbie-Jones
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In the simplest of terms, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tenth feature Last October Weerasethakul claimed to be experiencing a similar film is about being alert. Not thinking about the world around you state of heightened lucidity in his homeland. The stance voiced so much as feeling it sharply, being keenly and indiscriminately publicly in 2015 – no more moviemaking in Thailand due to state present, after an awakening of some kind. At least, that’s my inter- censorship and the military-proxy government – had not changed, pretation after seeing Memoria (2021) in Bangkok, amid a flurry of but his outlook had softened. “I don’t know about feature films here, but in terms of short films and different kind of expression, Weerasethakul gallery shows. A brief synopsis: Tilda Swinton’s Jessica, a Scottish flower-seller I feel very motivated,” he told me. What had activated him was a Thai visiting her sister in Bogotá, Colombia, is woken by a loud, jolting explosion: the youth-led protest movement that shook the estabbang. Initially she blames early morning construction work, but lishment in 2020 and 2021 with its strident and satire-inflected calls when it returns with equal intensity, she realises the sound is inte- for far-reaching reforms that would, if enacted, stretch to the gilded rior… hers alone. At a meeting with a sound engineer she tries to pinnacle of society. Meanwhile, working in Colombia – a country recreate it in the forensic manner of a sketch artist: “It’s like a rumble that shares a ‘heavy history’ of cyclical political strife and asymmetric from the core of the earth,” she says as he tweaks a dial on his mixing Communist war – had reminded him that Thailand is not unique, desk. Later this search leads her into the that flawed democracies are commonStreaked throughout, like blood mountains, where her anguish in the place and utopias nowhere. “So you just flecked across a smashed face, need to focus on the beauty and grateface of this strange presentiment – a sign fulness of everyday life,” he concluded of madness? A gift of sublime truth? A lines of Weerasethakul’s poetry before calling himself out. “It sounds cosmic roar reverberating through deep implied that society had tuned out time? – turns to fascination. She becomes very cliché.” so keyed into the sonic boom that, in a hypnotic scene towards the He was right to call himself out. But the fruits of Weerasethakul leaning anew into his local environment have hardly felt maudlin. film’s final act, she leans sideways by a stream to get closer to it. As is customary for the mild-mannered Thai auteur, Memoria – a In fact, A Minor History – the two-part exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Husserlian pilgrimage that draws its enigmatic plotline from his own Tonson Foundation resulting from his roadtrip around the country’s experience of ‘exploding head syndrome’ (a bona fide sleep disorder) – northeast, Isaan, between pandemic lockdowns – surely ranks among abounds with metaphysical resonances and metempsychotic sugges- the most abrasive and forthright chapters of his celebrated trenchtion. There is an all-pervading yet unsettled sense that Jessica has, work: his dogged negotiation of Thailand’s psychogeography. as she handles prehistoric skulls, talks to lost souls who remember Part one of A Minor History was a Weerasethakul gallery show everything and is barraged by the sound over dinner, stumbled upon through and through – an immersive audiovisual experience – albeit a portal into Colombia’s past lives, or somehow slipped bodies. But one notable for its heralding a new collaboration with a pugnacious when I watch Memoria, Weerasethakul’s first foreign-made film, in poet-activist, and its invocation of an extremely ‘heavy’ news story: the late February, Jessica’s awareness and interconnectedness in that discovery of two murdered Thai anti-establishment dissidents in the moment when she leans into the earth also felt important – like a clear Mekong River in December 2018. In the foyer, pictures of Asia’s third through-line to his recent work back on Thai terra firma. longest river were displayed upside down, while footage captured on
preceding pages Beautiful Things (Liberty), 2022, giclée print, 159 × 106 cm. Courtesy the artist above A Minor History, Part II: Beautiful Things, 2022 (installation view, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok). Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
his roadtrip formed the basis of a three-channel video installation in the main gallery. Scrolling slowly upwards on a double-sided vertical screen in the centre were elegiac shots of nocturnal Isaan: the moonlit Mekong, a neon wheel turning at a temple fair, a woman silhouetted against bedroom curtains, a microphone in a radio studio. This screen partially obscured two larger opposing screens further back, upon which flashed static shots of a crumbling cinema in the region’s Kalasin province. Orientating us was not the image, however, but sound. A loud thud – resembling the sound of something or someone being struck with a blunt object – was followed by the flapping of startled pigeons. And then a deep male voice began to speak. “Its stomach was turbulent because it had swallowed a drifting corpse,” he began. “It couldn’t digest the body because the corpse was full of concrete. A dead body was stashed in a concrete mould, bundled up in ropes, metal chains and wires.” Young Isaan rebel poet Mek Krung Fah was narrating a tale of the northeast’s mythical naga serpent. And it was struggling, coughing up legs, arms, feet, a cock, organs, as a man and woman strolling along the Mekong looked on with a mixture of fascination and horror. Towards the end of the 17-minute piece, imagery and storytelling gave way to three channels of running white-on-black text. As it scrolled right to left in large Thai and English font, and to the sound of slowly grinding metal, these snippets of prose drawn from Weerasethakul’s diaries and roadtrip interviews evoked the stream of consciousness besetting a scattered nervous system – or an insomniac, perhaps, as they lie blinking in the dark. Snippets of fraught conversations flashed forth: “My dad said if you weren’t my daughter, I would have shot you”. During opening week, Weerasethakul stressed that this impressionistic piece was, on one level, an elegiac farewell to saak (remnants, carcasses) or bygone expressions – spiritual, ecological, architectural, artistic, textual – in the region where he grew up. The pulpy
backdrop of a royal throne hall on the back wall, in which pillars frame a red carpet, is the kind used by mor lam theatre troupes. The playful dramatic style, wherein the narrator gamely voices all characters, belongs to obsolete old-school radio dramas and cinema dubbing. The images of the cinema evoke his childhood memories of being enthralled by 16mm Thai dramas and Steven Spielberg spectacles. And the footage of the Mekong is a continuation of his decadelong interest in documenting its changes, particularly in light of the Chinese dams now upstream. Yet the main loss A Minor History chronicled was the disappearance of minor characters, the real-life erasure of antimonarchist activists who, having had their hands bound and bodies stuffed with concrete by kidnappers who remain at large, are now no more than ghosts “vanished into the void”. But who, the exhibition hinted, also possessed a seismic potential that could, potentially, cause the world to shift. “Was it playing?” asks a high-pitched Mek Krung Fah near the end, performing the role of the woman as she expresses concern about the naga’s condition. “No, it was dying,” replies the man. The potent symbolism of this image was only compounded by concurrent interviews, in which Weerasethakul compared Thailand’s current regime to a floundering animal in its death throes, wreaking havoc all around it. Then, in early October, 100 Tonson Foundation temporarily gave itself over to a work that, to paraphrase one of A Minor History, Part I’s ironic self-reflexive moments, felt like another ‘tiny ant-sized story’. Commissioned by the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, Silence (2021) commemorated an even rawer festering Thai wound: the 6 October 1976 massacre, when 40 leftist students at the capital’s Thammasat University were killed by rightwing paramilitaries and bystanders. In this iteration of the minimal 21-minute installation, which screened for five days to mark the event’s 45th anniversary, images of bloodied corpses, frozen in grimaces of pain, faced off with clips of mass distraction, from Bangkokers at leisure, to Payut
above, and following pages Memoria (still), 2021, feature film. © Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, ZDF / Arte and Piano
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Ngaokrachang’s cartoons, to footage from the nationalist epic The King of the White Elephant (1940). And streaked throughout, like blood flecked across a smashed face, were lines of Weerasethakul poetry that implied society at large had tuned out, been decapacitated by sweet, lulling dreams in which ‘speeches sound like music’, gunshots like ‘mysterious fireworks’ and curse words like chords (‘Asshole: C Minor 6’). ‘National Sleep Week’, he calls it. For anyone familiar with Weerasethakul’s work – a practice known for its placid realist-mystical veneer, multivalence and subliminal politics – it was as if a planet had eclipsed the sun, thrown his obstruse world into hard-edged darkness. Pain, regret and anger scorched everything. This impression was only reinforced by the implacable live-performance element of A Minor History. During Galleries Night weekend in late November, crowds headed up to 100 Tonson Foundation’s roof to watch Mek Krung Fah give a poetry recital that did not mince words. In ten years, if you are still alive Let me offer you shame and disgust! That today you pretended not to hear The voices of your slaughtered countrymen As quatrains of this fiery nature rang out in Thai over a speaker system, Teerawat ‘Ka-Ge’ Mulvilai – a performance artist and founder of the city’s B-Floor theatre troupe – ambled around a swimming pool on the floor below. Midriff bared, and donning a white mask, he slowly laid English printouts of Mek Krung Fah’s Unsubjected Verses (2021) around the edge. A few weeks later, Weerasethakul’s video documentation of this performance showed up in yet another exhibition, A Trace of Thunder, at Maielie gallery in Khon Kaen, the city in Isaan where he grew up, the son of doctors. While it is joined by photographs that further his fascination with light in all its forms, the show’s key element is text. In the role of art director, Weerasethakul has turned excerpts of Mek Krung Fah’s ire-filled words into concrete poetry. They run down
a hanging banner in oversize Thai font and, in a room where two chairs sit on wooden pallets flanked by LED spotlights, loop across the floors and ceiling in unbroken bolts. Here, amid his own injunctions to ‘stop crawling’ and ‘fight for the truth’ – some of them so subversive that the Thai words were deliberately misspelled to avoid authoritarian rebuke – Mek Krung Fah has been staging his counterREaction radio show. (Topics discussed include, among other hot-button topics, the government’s widely contested plan to tighten regulations for NGOs.) The implication of this broadcast-room installation is clear: the rousing oratory and critical debate of Mek Krung Fah and his ilk wield an electricity that can give us a transformative jolt. Like a trace of thunder coursing through the walls and floors of a building. Or as the lightbox images of digitally rendered explosions on the far wall imply (Mr Electrico (For Ray Bradbury), 2014), a neural explosion in the recesses of the brain. Over the last decade or so, Weerasethakul, now fifty-one, has often employed nonprofessional actors as discreet vessels for the nation’s psyche. In a body of work in which violence feels barely suppressed – from shorts such as Fireworks (Archive) (2014) and Vapour (2015) through to his last Thailand-set feature, Cemetery of Splendour (2015) – their presence conjures a state of mind under Thailand’s political conditions, or gestures towards collective scars. This cluster of exhibitions, however, possesses a markedly more instructive and belligerent tone than these more elusive precursors. And not simply because that’s what happens when you team up with sympatico Thai performers, poets and artists with starkly different working methods and modes of expression. One senses that Weerasethakul believes the situation calls for it. Which is not to say that his powers of abstraction and subtraction, nor his ability to imbue matters of politics and history with an intoxicating sense of mystery and ambiguity, have been diminished. Part two of A Minor History, titled Beautiful Things, is a case in point: at once subtle and searing, uplifting and destructive, minimal and expansive.
Performance by poet Mek Krung Fah at A Minor History, Part I, 2022, 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok
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The six photographic works lining the walls – again based on images taken on his roadtrip – are palimpsests representing the confusion, torpor and amnesia of local Thai reality. In one image, text floating over a river landscape seems to announce a movie doublebill: Mekong Murder Mystery VS Dreams and Delusions. Others superimpose Weerasethakul’s own photographs of Bangkok’s recent street protests over shots of peri-urban decay, or rooms where light spills from windows onto unmade beds (windows are another Weerasethakul leitmotif). Meanwhile, the inclusion of two works by young male artists from Chiang Mai strike a more sanguine tone. Suggestively obscuring the regal mor lam theatre backdrop on the back wall is Natanon Senjit’s painting Break Out of the Loop of National Conflict into Peaceful Nature: a fauxnaif paradisical landscape in which members of Thailand’s pro-democracy protest movement and their allies appear defiant, if slightly cutesy. And making a guest appearance in 100 Tonson Foundation’s officecum-annex is someone unexpected, even for Weerasethakul’s spectrally attuned body of work: a sacred lotus flower deity with four eyes, two phalluses and a bulbous head dotted with mirrored glass. According to curator Manuporn Luengaram, this sinuous red sculpture – an icon by the artist Methagod representing the resilience of the lotus flower – stands as a reminder of ‘the perpetual resurrection of Thailand’s youth movements despite being time and time again suppressed.’ And then there’s the ominous video component. While part one of A Minor History deployed a thud sound to evoke collective memories – much in the same way that Memoria does with its cinema-rattling bang – part two’s single-channel screen creeps along silently. Travelling slowly up the jet-black vertical screen is oversize Thai text, a trail of free-associative thought bubbles drifting into the ether. Punctuated by large spheres resembling fullstops, these flecks of distilled memory touch on, among other things, the meth trade (‘Soldiers distribute meth | Sell and resell | up the hills to Tais’), the temple murals of nineteenth-century painter Khrua In-Khong (‘Khrua In-Khong | utilised the skyline | and vanishing point | filling in shadows and darkness
along the tree trunks’) and the teachings of the late Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (‘I prefer looking | at nature | more than | looking at any picture | in any museum’). Some of these diaristic snippets clearly allude to throwaway thoughts or wider social truths; others appear to gesture towards formal qualities of the exhibition. Krua In-Khong, for example, was an innovator who introduced perspective, shadow and shade to the flat Thai temple mural. Similarly, the images presented here toy with our field of vision and vanishing points to get us ‘closer to reality’ – a reality full of distortions. But the most illustrative allusion, for me at least, is the veiled reference to the zen wisdom of Krishnamurti, whose meditation teachings and interior journey Weerasethakul has been pondering of late. And who tried to approach everything, from perceptions to consciousness, from conflicts to mountains, with a uniform and deeply perfected sense of quotidian wonder. Channelling Weerasethakul’s sensitivity to every plane of existence, the components of A Minor History have sought to find a similar measure of beauty – and egalitarian zen spirit – in the simple act of being keenly and indiscriminately present at a pivotal moment in Thai history. A moment when the loud rumbles of dissent have been stilled, when some protest leaders are facing charges of sedition and when a political awakening that made headlines around the world is being methodically relegated to ‘tiny ant-sized story’ status. For him, appreciating the fullness of this forest, being alert in the presence of murder mysteries, unfettered thoughts and those who dare speak truth to power, is no mere one-off gesture of solidarity or resistance. As he puts it, “It’s about surviving here, what it takes and recording memories.” ar A Trace of Thunder continues at Maielie, Khon Kaen, until 4 April; and A Minor History, Part II: Beautiful Things is on view at 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok, until 10 April Max Crosbie-Jones is ArtReview Asia’s contributing editor in Bangkok
A Trace of Thunder, 2022 (installation view, Maielie, Khon Kaen)
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Kerima Tariman Amid the ongoing orgy of extrajudicial killing in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, one resistance fighter nevertheless understood the revolutionary potential of art by Marv Recinto
Kerima Tariman, 2013. Photo: Kiri Dalena
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Rodrigo Duterte’s tenure as president of the Philippines is finally coming to an end, and on 9 May the country will elect a new leader. (Many on the left hope it will be the current vice president, Leni Robredo.) Duterte’s term has infamously facilitated the extrajudicial killings of almost 30,000 individuals, according to Rappler, whose founder and CEO, Maria Ressa, is among Duterte’s staunchest critics and the first Filipino recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Duterte has admitted to killing at least three men personally.) While the Philippine artistic community has mourned these casualties and continuously called for justice, the death of revolutionary poet Kerima Lorena Tariman, on 20 August 2021, stunned it. Tariman perished following an armed altercation with the 79th Infantry Battalion at the Hacienda Raymunda in Silay City, Negros, alongside her comrade Joery Dato-on Cocuba. Tariman was both a respected writer and leading cadre of the Bagong Hukbong Bayan (New People’s Army, or NPA), the (state-designated terrorist) military wing of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Communist Party of the Philippines, or CPP). The Philippine state describes Tariman as a ‘notorious terrorist’, but sympathetic others on the left have dedicated numerous artworks, murals and discussions to the martyred writer. Tariman was an accomplished revolutionary poet whose last anthology, Pag-aaral sa Oras: Mga Lumang Tula Tenggol sa Bago (Reflections on Time: Old Poems About the New), was lauded by CNN Philippines as one of the top books of 2017. In her foreword she writes of how many of these poems are decades old, ‘pero sa kabilang banda, bago pa rin’ (but on the other hand, new still) – reflecting on the stasis and retrenchment of the present sociopolitical crisis that has made verse from the 1990s and 2000s endure into the present. Tariman maintained a communist critical praxis against imperial, feudal and bureaucratic-capitalist forces that have sustained inequality within the country. She wrote consistently in Philippine dialects – Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan and more – in an anti-imperial act recognising the effect of the English language on the country’s psyche. Indeed, local dialects are generally the preferred mode of communication for most Filipinos despite English and Filipino holding joint status as the official languages of the Philippines. The prominence of English is a trace of America’s imperial control from 1898 until 1946, and its enduring reach. Tariman writes in deep, formal Filipino, embracing the repetitious cadence of syllables and rhymes. The English translations of Tariman’s poetry presented here are my own: literal and unofficial. Duterte’s ascent into office in 2016 ruptured the somewhat liberaldemocratic era inaugurated in 1986 with the ejection of dictator Ferdinand Emmanuel E. Marcos. Duterte’s vulgar and sexist everyman persona endeared him to many in the Philippines, reflecting growing frustration with class inequalities resulting from the oligarchic families who have retained the majority of political, economic and cultural power. However, his crimes against humanity have garnered widespread criticism: the International Criminal Court is currently investigating the drug war that has claimed the lives of almost 8,000 mostly urban poor people, while his authoritarian regime has killed over 400 peasant activists in the countryside. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on, he imposed censorship through the 2020 Anti-Terror Law, which has branded dissenters as terrorists and enabled their incarceration. Many have drawn parallels between Duterte and Marcos (whose 21-year tenure, according to Amnesty International, counts over 107,200 killed, tortured or incarcerated victims).
In spite of what many might have celebrated as an end to Duterte’s era, a new nightmare has arisen in the joint bid by children of Marcos and Duterte for the country’s most powerful political seats: Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ R. Marcos Jr and Sara Z. Duterte have joined forces as running mates for the presidency and vice presidency respectively. (In the Philippines, the president and vicepresident run independent of one another but may form such alliances, allowing different political parties to hold the top two seats, as is the present case.) The two have promised to sustain the current president’s legacy. The publication of Pag-aaral… in 2017 reflects Tariman’s acknowledgement of the country’s sustained history of struggle against Spanish colonialism, American imperialism and the corrupt governments of the twentieth century to today; its unfortunate timelessness is due to historical crisis sustaining, repeating and revising itself. Just a year into Duterte’s presidency, the revolutionary poet likely recognised that the patterns of extreme state and social unrest heralded by the president might initiate widespread revolution. However, while the peaceful EDSA I (1986) and EDSA II (2001) revolutions ejected kleptocrats Marcos and Joseph Estrada (1998–2001), they installed inheritors Cory Aquino (1986–92) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–10), who continued to perpetuate the bourgeois, dynastic politics that sustained inequality. The sanctified Cory Aquino, known as the ‘mother of democracy’, was an aristocratic housewife from the wealthy and powerful Cojuangco clan, unqualified to lead but who accepted the responsibility when her husband, Ninoy Aquino – Marcos’s political rival – was assassinated in 1983 (their son Noynoy would serve as president from 2010 to 2016). The Aquinos, despite their opposition to Marcos and sympathy for the Philippine people, were nonetheless part of the wealthy ruling class. Arroyo – daughter of former president Diosdado P. Macapagal Sr (1961–65) and vice president to Estrada – assumed the presidency following Estrada’s impeachment but was later charged with electoral sabotage for her 2004 election victory and plunder (which ally Duterte’s Supreme Court dismissed in 2016). The decades of nepotism demonstrate that these figureheads’ interests have always been in retaining their privileged status. What Tariman believed in and called for was a complete revolution of the proletariat and agrarian workers to initiate a new system led by the masses. The decades of exploitation are reflected in the timelessness of Tariman’s poems. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Pag-Aaral sa Oras’ (Reflections of Time, 2003), she writes:
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Pinag-aaralan ko ang oras Kung paano ito lumilipas … Pinag-aaralan ko Ang segundo at taon Ang pagkakataon at padron. … Matagalang digmang bayan Ay gaano katagal? Ito ba’y usapin ng bilis o bagal? … Ang tanong palagi Ay kailan magwawagi?
I studied time How it passes … I studied The seconds and years The opportunities and patterns … The protracted people’s war Is how long? Is it a matter of how quick or how slow? … The question is always When will we win?
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The ‘protracted war’ extends beyond any party, person or changing moment, such as the 2022 presidential elections. Tariman and the NPA have devoted decades to overthrowing the systems they believe have failed the Philippine people. This has made the NPA the longest ongoing communist insurgency in the world. The repetition in ‘Pag-aaral sa Oras’ is not about the singular instances of corruption, rather the prolonged revolution against the continuing systems of oppression; her poetry makes clear it is not a matter of if but when. The altercation that cost Tariman her life is just one in an ongoing clash between the NPA and the Philippine military. The NPA, founded in 1969, bases its tenets in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology; their founding ‘Basic Rules of the New People’s Army’ read, ‘It is the revolutionary army of the broad masses of the Filipino people against US imperialism, the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and the bureaucrat capitalists’. The communist army assumes a Maoist approach to agrarian revolution and protracted war to ‘seize and consolidate political power’, since 64 percent of the population during the Marcos era lived in rural areas. In 2020 half still live in the countryside, making guerrilla warfare the preferred method of revolution among Philippine communists, rather than a Leninistindustrial approach. The Philippines, United States and European Union have designated the groups terrorist organisations, but mounting frustration and animosity for Duterte and his government have renewed interest in a communist revolt. For obvious reasons, the size of the CPP and NPA’s memberships are unknown, but their growing numbers have forced the president – a former member of the CPP’s youth organisation Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth) – to initiate peace talks, though these have recently been called off. In a 2021 government address focused on countering communism, Duterte said: ‘I’ve told the military and the police that if they find themselves in an armed encounter with the communist rebels, kill them’.
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Through poetry, Tariman demonstrated the ideological reasons for joining the resistance movement. She writes explicitly of Karl Marx in ‘Aralin sa Ekonomyang Pampulitika’ (A Lesson in Political Economy, 2001), excerpted here:
ArtReview
Nang matuklasan ng isang Aleman Ang labis na halag Ay nakalkula na rin Ang lahat-lahat na.
When a German discovered The surplus value He also calculated Everything.
Halaga ng tao Halaga ng lupa Halaga ng tula Halaga ng digma
The value of people The value of land The value of poems The value of war
Kung sa loob pa lamang Ng tatlong minutong trabaho Ay nalikha na ng manggagawa Ang buong araw niyang sweldo, Ang tantos ng pagsasamantala Ay ilang porsyento? Ay, ang labis na halaga – O pagpapahalaga – Sa superganansya’t supertubo! … Bakit ba napakahalaga Ng paghahangad ng labis? Kung ang labis-labis, Ang katumbas ay krisis
If within Three minutes of work The worker has already produced their wage for the day The rate of abuse Is what percent? The cost is high – Or excessive – Of the superprofit! … Why is it so important To want excessively? If this excessiveness, Results in crisis?
Tariman introduces Marx’s concept of surplus value by highlighting the discrepancy between labour and wages to the reader and raising the question: if the worker makes their entire earnings within the first three minutes of work, where does the rest of it go? She explains that with this notion Marx inadvertently also identified the value of material, or the exploitation and reduced worth of the people, land, poems and war that form the product in the pursuit of profit. Within the next lines, the repetition of ‘value’ further enforces the mutually diminished worth of the means of production relative to the capital itself; however, the line ‘the value of war’ is open-ended: does it refer to the wars that resulted in colonial and imperial subjugation by first Spain and then America? Or does it refer to the guerrilla war waged by the rebels, fighting to augment their value? The following stanza contextualises the peasants’ labour, that any work beyond the three minutes is the surplus value belonging to the ruling classes. Tariman lastly questions whether this greed is worth the exploitation of the masses. For decades, Tariman lived in the rural areas of the country, immersing herself in the plight of those who constitute the majority of the population. In 2000, after an incomplete stint at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where she pursued Philippine Studies and was the managing editor of the campus paper Philippine Collegian, the poet was arrested in Ilagan, Isabela, for alleged illegal possession of firearms. At the time, Tariman was undergoing an education programme with the NPA in Cagayan, where she hoped to understand the peasant struggle better. Her arrest and detention were ‘an indispensable lesson on the reality of class struggle’, she said of the experience in a 2012 interview with Sarah Raymundo. The same year of her arrest, Tariman penned the following passage of ‘Malapyudalismo’ (Semifeudalism): MALAPYUDALISMO. pinagdikit-dikit na titik na sumusuyod sa ulo ito’y palaisipang kaydaling matanto: tumatanghod sa taltalon tulad ng multong tuliro, gumagapang sa mga gapas at sa nabaling araro. pinagdikit-dikit na titik, na kurok sa sikmura sa tuwing sasapit ang apit. masakit na likod kagat ng lamok iyak ng bata maganit na tuhod murang sigarilyo mahal na abono inutang na kwarta takot sa panginoon – sumada ito ng sanlakasang talinghaga sa salaysay ng Mannalon sa Pulang mandirigma.
SEMIFEUDALISM. letters glued together that squeeze your head this is a puzzle that’s easy to figure out: looking at the farms like a confused ghost, creeping towards the cotton and the broken plough. letters glued together, that make my stomach growl whenever the harvest comes. painful back mosquito bite crying child tough knees cheap cigarettes expensive fertilizer borrowed money fear of god – all these result in a powerful parable the story of the Peasants of the Red warrior.
Tariman’s blunt poetry refuses to hide behind metaphors, relying instead on reality’s details to express the circumstances of the agrarian population. This narrative device is used in witness literature to archive the historical testimonies of these largely obscured accounts. In ‘Malapyudalismo’ the poet narrates the thoughts preoccupying the peasantry as they go about their daily lives – like the sensory marks of mosquito bites or bodily pains – alongside the omnipresent dread of debt. Tariman explains how the mounting minutiae culminate in the conditions for revolution – ‘the story of the Peasants / the Red warrior’. In the 2012 interview Tariman speaks of the honesty about one’s political commitments in art, saying that ‘when one creates art without being apologetic about its political implications, one is actually being quite ethical’. As a communist leader, Tariman practised her ideology and perished defending her commitment to overthrowing imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie – systems the poet claims have created the conditions for the Philippine class struggle. In a trigger-happy country that defines dissenters as terrorist, to associate with communism is to risk red-tagging; even in this writing, I’ve omitted other sympathetic artists’ names for their safety. Admittedly, political theories of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism resonate with the liberal left and have done since the Marcos era; but this lethal administration has failed to demonstrate any boundaries in its attacks. With another potentially treacherous regime on the horizon, safety may take precedence over defiance of censorship. However, even those who don’t claim to be communists can learn something from Tariman’s relentless pursuit for equality – to look beyond the immediate presidential elections and question the long-term system as it stands. In her absence, her legacy endures in the empathetic and sincere literature she leaves behind. Tariman has encouraging words for comrades in a more recent poem, ‘Hukbo ng Maralita’ (Army of the Poor, 2017): Paano nga ba kasama Ang pabayaan ang nakaraan? Kalimutan ang ginhawa At pagkamakasarili, Panghawakan ang kalagayan Na kinakaharap, Upang mapagtibay Ang prinsipyadong pagsasamahan? Umbante nang walang pag-aalinlangan, Daakil kahit kung minsan, Naririyan ang kabiguan, Sa atin naman ang tagumpay Sa huling paglalaban.
How, comrade Do we let go of the past? Forget the peace And one’s self, Hold on to the promise Of the future, To strengthen Our shared principles? Move forward without hesitation, Because sometimes, Failure is there, Victory is ours, At the last fight.
Marv Recinto is a writer based in London
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VENICE Maria Eichhorn Tomo Savić-Gecan by Martin Herbert
WITHOUT Stan Douglas by Craig Burnett
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Maria Eichhorn
Rose Valland Institute, 2017 (installation view, Documenta 14, Neue Galerie, Kassel). © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Photo: Mathias Völzke. Courtesy Documenta
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What will an artist known for confounding expectations bring to the loaded symbolism of the German Pavilion?
Aktiengesellschaft (Public Limited Company), 2002 (installation view, Documenta 11, Kassel). © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Photo: Werner Maschmann. Courtesy Documenta
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above and facing page Entnutzte Treppe (Redundant Stairs), 1987 (installation view, Hochschule der Künste, Berlin). Photo: Maria Eichhorn. Courtesy the artist
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‘The work is accessible. It can be experienced both conceptually and zoomed out to consider the biennale as a whole: why it began, which – physically and in motion – on site.’ That’s Maria Eichhorn, talking countries it excludes, whether it remains a political metaphor for interto curator Yilmaz Dziewior about her planned work for the German national relations and how art might be ‘produced and received more Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Dziewior, the curator of independently of… constructions of national identity’. That aside, Eichhorn’s show, had asked her for three sentences describing guessing might be a fool’s errand given the immense formal variety of her intentions; the artist, characteristically, gave an economical works that Eichhorn has created over the last 35 years, from paintings response. It’s notable, nevertheless, that Eichhorn stressed acces- to skips to near-invisible interventions in the social fabric. sibility (perhaps even for nonattendees). This is the artist, after Then again, though, her projects share points of reference, for all all, who when she was invited to exhibit at London’s Chisenhale that Eichhorn has said she resists summing up her own practice. In Gallery in 2016 responded by closing an essay for the catalogue raisonné that There’s a surprising amount of the gallery for the duration of her show, accompanied a 2014 show at Kunsthaus wiggle room within the artworld as augmenting the gesture with a sympoBregenz, Alexander Alberro and Nora M. sium on labour conditions in the artAlter arranged Eichhorn’s art under the both a site of physical exhibitions world. The following statement might dual signs of ‘displacement and rediand a marketplace of ideas be a hostage to fortune, but Eichhorn’s rection… interruptions that develop over time and destabilize normative forms’, and noted that she’s Venice exhibit is likely to be something you can actually see. As seasoned Eichhorn-watchers will also guess, her fourth and most regularly applied this approach to institutional critique. The artist auspicious appearance at the Biennale is also likely to be, on some level, whose first exhibited work, Redundant Stairs (1987) – made in her midengagé. Some hints: in her conversation with Dziewior, published twenties – was a large blue structure blocking the stairs of Berlin’s on the German Pavilion’s dedicated website and conducted last year main art school, the then-Hochschule der Künste, was, by 2013, (approached for an interview by ArtReview, Eichhorn was regretfully presenting a white-on-white, barely legible wall text in Paris’s Jeu too busy finessing her Venice show), the artist expressed interest in de Paume that gave the venue’s address, along with a number of free artists who’d responded to the pavilion’s history – and thus, given the tickets to the other shows on at the same time. As with her Chisenhale 117edifice, Germany’s dark past. She also show, a critical refusal to meet the artworld’s expectations (exhibit fascist architecture of the 1938
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visibly visual art) is accompanied by a countermanding expression housing, effectively a gift to the local tenants’ organisation. In 2001, for a show at the Kunsthalle Bern, she funded repairs to the building, of the gift economy. These acts of generosity towards a wider public – pointedly larger explored and exposed the institution’s financial history, and sold shares than the artworld’s cognoscenti – have speckled Eichhorn’s career. In in the building to help secure its financial future. The following year, 1993, for example, when she was invited to exhibit at the art centre invited to ‘exhibit’ at Documenta 11 – whose curators must, by this attached to Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, her contribution was to time, have engaged Eichhorn with their eyes wide open – she used ensure the resuming of restoration work on the castle itself, using €50,000 of production fees to establish a limited company, Maria her production budget to reconstruct its northwest tower. In 1995, in Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft. She set this up, however, in a circular fashion By Train from the Central Train Station in such that all the shares, rather than being What Eichhorn’s works do not offered publicly, were transferred back to Leipzig to All End Stations and Back Again, she advertised her offer of free train tickets engage with is the commodity fetishism the company, creating a closed loop with in a newspaper, a raffle determining 21 no nefarious capitalist activity possible. of contemporary art winners. The following year, for Marram Such projects, usefully, could also reach Grass on a Public Beach, Eichhorn planted grass on a public beach near and be grasped by viewers who only heard or read them described. the Louisiana Museum in Denmark as a bulwark against shore erosion. What is espoused here, aside from Eichhorn’s ethical mindset, is What such works do not engage with is the commodity fetishism the surprising amount of wiggle room within the artworld as both of contemporary art. When Eichhorn deals with money, it is generally a site of physical exhibitions and a marketplace of ideas, and the in a way that does some public good or that refuses profit margins. In variety of fertile grounds for inspiration – even in dusty documents 1997, invited to participate in Sculpture Projects Münster, she used her – if you’re a canny, strategic thinker like her. Actual, if sometimes allotted funds to buy a vacant plot of land in the area, which she resold relatively symbolic, social change is possible using art’s bloated, cashsome months after. Under the terms of the sales agreement, the money lined, pretension-heavy infrastructure. (Meanwhile, running counter raised went to renovating buildings in a street dedicated to affordable to the seeming sombreness of her designs, note that when Eichhorn’s
5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours, 2016 (installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist
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announcement as Germany’s artist for Venice was released, attention was drawn to her subtle sense of humour. As a resident in Germany, I must admit that the bar for what constitutes ‘funny’ is lower here than in some other countries, but certainly some of the things Eichhorn pulls off, and the way she twits the artworld, can scan as dryly witty.) Not infrequently, it seems that Eichhorn’s modus is to see what that infrastructure will permit. In 1999 she began her ongoing series Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices, an expanding collection of pornographic films, from which – in the gallery – the viewer selects one to be projected: choose from, say, Anilingus, Ear Licking, Milk Bath or Breast. In this viewer’s experience, the experience is awkward and complicated, allowing the uncommon register of audience embarrassment (rather than being embarrassed for an artist), if conceptually rich. The gallery context troubles the status of pornography, which is legally supposed to be distinct from art; the porn, filmed starkly and in closeup, is not arousing anyway, and the whole has a paradoxically pedagogical air. For the aforementioned Alberro and Alter, the work is concerned with the institutionalisation of sexuality: the wide spectrum of sex reduced to a bunch of templates. Eichhorn’s collection points, seemingly, to whatever freedoms and kinks might lie outside it. This work points to the potentials of an archive or collection of documents – as, of course, do the legal papers that Eichhorn
has used to real-world effect elsewhere – and a uniquely powerful expression of this is her ongoing research project Rose Valland Institute, which debuted at Documenta 14 in 2017 and constituted Eichhorn’s last major presentation at a top-tier international expo. According to its own website, this endeavour ‘researches and documents the expropriation of property formerly owned by Europe’s Jewish population and the ongoing impact of those confiscations’, and is named after the art historian who recorded Nazi lootings among Paris’s Jewish population. The aim is not merely to explore the past but to change the present: it calls for the public to share researches into looted artefacts that have not been restored to their owners and their descendants. This is an art that deals with objects, but one that is light years removed from the speculative, financialised relationship to objecthood that permeates the artworld; one that leverages the surrounding structure, and its potential to meet a large audience, in a productive, clearsighted, principled manner. Whatever Eichhorn has planned for Venice and however it might relate to Germany’s chequered history, you can expect it to adhere to those principles too. ar Work by Maria Eichhorn is on view at the German Pavilion in the Giardini as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, 23 April – 27 November
Symposium as part of 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours (2016), at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist
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Tomo Savić-Gecan
Every day for the duration of the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale of Art, the lead story from a different, randomly selected global news source provides the data that feeds an artificial intelligence algorithm, which in turn prescribes the time, location, duration, movements, and thoughts of a group of five performers in the city of Venice to constitute Tomo Savić-Gecan’s Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022.
The artist never circulates documentation or representations of his artworks, but instead has always used a concise sentence describing each of his projects as its ‘image’. This is the image for Tomo Savić-Gecan’s Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022
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ArtReview
One of the most extreme reconsiderations of art today by Martin Herbert
With each airplane from Los Angeles that lands at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International airport for the duration of the Taipei Biennial in 2012, the level of humidity in one of the biennial’s exhibition spaces will change slightly.
This is the image for Tomo Savić-Gecan’s project at the 2012 Taipei Biennial
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If you visit the Venice Biennale this year and want to see the work of Tomo Savić-Gecan, who represents Croatia at the storied event, here’s a tip: look anywhere but the Croatian Pavilion. That venue is likely to be closed, or at least empty. Instead, Savić-Gecan’s project will locate itself unpredictably in other pavilions and exhibition spaces, and you may experience it without even realising it. Four times a day, five performers will be given instructions by an AI algorithm – which is in turn responding to information in the lead news story from a randomly chosen news outlet somewhere on the planet – about where to position themselves, how long to stay there, how to move, even what to think about. They won’t be shouting or dancing; expect subtle, but not quite natural, movements like head-tilting, pretending to be touching a wall or moving in slow motion: humans impelled by artificial overlords, maybe. You can, if you like, cheat a little by visiting an information kiosk on the via Garibaldi, where someone will tell you where the performances are happening that day. Or you can drift through the biennale and hope you see something. But if you don’t see anything, that doesn’t mean you haven’t, in a way, partaken in Savić-Gecan’s Untitled (Croatian Pavilion) (2022) – all the Dutch-Croatian artist’s works since he left art school in Milan in the mid-1990s have been effectively untitled – and if you do see something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve experienced his artwork. If that sounds contradictory, bear with me and buckle up. Savić-Gecan’s practice is one of the most quietly – an appropriate word – extreme reconsiderations of the practice of artmaking you’re likely to find today. In some ways it intersects with classic 1960s conceptual strategies of dematerialisation, since his art is primarily not object-based or permanent; and yet it’s also strongly materialist (it needs people, places, all kinds of other things). The fact that there are no illustrations for this article – Savić-Gecan’s preference, in catalogues, magazines and elsewhere, is for a blank space where an image should be, or an image-text that describes the artwork’s operations – doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to see in his art, though sometimes there’s not much and often you might feel like you’re standing in the wrong place. Instead, there’s another place to think about. For example: 17 years ago, when Savić-Gecan made an earlier appearance at the Venice Biennale, he presented a line of text on a gallery wall that informed the viewer of a relationship between the number of visitors entering an art space in Amsterdam and the temperature of a public swimming pool in Tallinn. Also in 2005 Savić-Gecan ‘showed’ at a Brussels gallery by removing the front window, sending it to Slovenia to be powdered and turned into 150 glasses, and in turn offering these as drinking vessels for the show’s run. By this point he’d put in a decade’s worth of reductive, evasive gestures. In 1994 he covered a gallery entrance in Ljubljana with a white wall; in 1996 he sealed off an area of exhibition space in Cleveland with hazard tape. For institutional exhibitions in 2011 and 2020, any phone calls received by the curator triggered changes in the temperature of the gallery space. Such interventions verge on the infinitesimal; as when, in 2006 in Austin, Texas, visitors were informed that Savić-Gecan had collaborated with a Dutch art magazine to publish an issue that was exactly 1mm smaller than its usual size. Meanwhile, the viewers were in an American city just over 8,000 kilometres away. You’re cued, then, to ask who is having the art experience. The answer, in ontological terms, flip-flops. If you’re holding the art magazine in Amsterdam, you’re not standing in the show in Austin, thinking about Savić-Gecan’s philosophical ideas. In such a way, and in
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various manners, the artist has raised the possibility of creating works of art that are impossible to fully experience (and thus, not at all irrelevantly, commodify even as a document) – a part of his works tends to be already gone by the time you show up. In 2005 Savić-Gecan participated in a group show in Brooklyn, for which he used a hidden gizmo to record visitors’ entries and exits; two years later he used that information to adjust the controls on a thermostat in another show he was participating in; and then, a decade later, he used the data again on another thermostat, in another gallery, to adjust the humidity in the space. Hands up if you saw all those shows. If you did, maybe SavićGecan will use the info again, in a show you’ll miss. Anyway, this is just part of it. Savić-Gecan also absents himself from the interpretative process of his work. It’s a self-erasure that constitutes an enlargement, since Savić-Gecan accordingly opens the readings of his art while at the same time destabilising them. He encourages curators to promulgate their own interpretations, and as they do so, something fundamental – the ‘truth’ of what his art means – is seemingly allowed to escape, to dissolve. Instead, the art is populated by the beliefs of the curators at hand; and then, in turn, those of the viewers. The art, as with a number of his projects, becomes a marked-out empty space. It could be, as the pavilion’s curator, Elena Filipovic, has suggested, that ‘the “exhibition” might not be the name for a location and duration to show anything at all, but instead the name for a place where a public has come together to both individually and collectively allow an aesthetic experience to be created’. The more you think about Savić-Gecan’s art, the more the contradictions both proliferate and sit in counterpoise. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing to look at; and yet the work occupies space (and time). On the other hand, the art’s maker – or instigator – refuses to have it documented, so once the timeframe is over, it’s gone. Then again, it may be revived, albeit differently. It would be foolish to miss the playfulness in all this, also the absolute seriousness, and the continual inventiveness. Savić-Gecan, after all, is – as far as I know – the only artist who has taken a sample of air from a gallery in Amsterdam, had it sent to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, where it was then turned into antimatter. Is the art in this case the air, the antimatter, the process, the idea? Make a choice, and Untitled (2018) slips through your fingers. Untitled (Croatian Pavilion) partakes of all the intersecting angles on Savić-Gecan’s art. It is also, of course, open to curatorial interpretation. To me, Filipovic framed the project in technological terms: as well as exploding the concept of a national pavilion, she said, “it comments on the strange and insidious ways technology increasingly controls us (and our passive acceptance of it), but also, in our own post-truth era, it is an incredible commentary on the news and its relationship to power, nationhood, distribution channels, etc.” However persuasive that view, of course, it’s just Filipovic’s opinion, which in turn constitutes a structural component of the work. The latter waits to be filled in by the viewers who see it, who may in turn think of those who experience it as a rumour, which may not be a lesser mode of reception. And, of course, if you see someone moving a little robotically in a national pavilion this year, that means you’re not standing in another national pavilion, seeing another performer. In that moment SavićGecan, and his art, have slipped into freedom once more. ar
ArtReview
Savić-Gecan’s Untitled (Croatian Pavilion) is on view on via Garibaldi and elsewhere, as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, 23 April – 27 November
During the 51st Venice Biennale of Art, the entries of visitors to W139 Center for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, determines the change of the water temperature in a public swimming pool in Tallinn, Estonia, by 1°C.
This is the image for Tomo Savić-Gecan’s participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale
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A Tale of Two Lagoons – A Dialogue by Craig Burnett
above Stan Douglas, Helen Lawrence, 2014, performance stills. © the artist
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facing page Stan Douglas, Jewels (from the Blackout series, 2017), digital c-print, 91 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
Late in the afternoon of 29 February 2048, on a bench overlooking Lost Lagoon, Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, a retired curator, Reid Shier, is reminiscing with the brain of the artist Stan Douglas, which is suspended in a gravityresistant MindGlobe Murky waves lap at the cold feet of a Canada goose. Above the firs and cedars, the buzz and zip of countless drones. Reid Shier sits in silence on a shiny plastic bench, staring out across the lagoon, while Stan Douglas’s disembodied brain floats nearby, shifting restlessly in the warm afternoon light. “Two hundred years ago today, a series of revolutions erupted in France and spread across Europe,” says Stan’s brain. “And yet here we are, living in the age of the quadrillionaire cult, with an Amazon warehouse on the moon. Plus ça change.” “It’s your first week in your MindGlobe and you still want to talk about minor histories and failed utopias? Let’s enjoy the view of the lagoon. The buffleheads are back this year.” “I’m haunted by my failures. Humanity remains subjugated.” “Failures? Twenty-six years ago we were in Venice, almost celebrating, despite the rumblings of the Third World War. La Serenissima was abuzz with your vision.” Orange bubbles gurgle from the back of Stan’s brain. “Stan? Are you listening?” “I’m listening to Miles’s Black Satin. The production has an allover quality. I never expected to appreciate Miles even more, but this spherical existence enhances my perception of the music. I can see, hear everything, from all directions, all in simultaneous flux.”
“And Venice?” “You included my work in the first show you ever curated, and we collaborated on many projects over the years, but Venice 2022, the Canadian Pavilion, the show 2011 ≠ 1848, that was our greatest – ” “Come on, Stan – you’re the artist. I was your linebacker, clearing paths for your ideas.” As a scruffy raccoon walks indifferently past the stiff goose, a shaft of sunlight bounces off a silvery electrode attached to Stan’s brain. “I still have ideas.” “Of course you do. But let’s remember what you achieved in Venice. In the Canadian Pavilion, that angular shack in the Giardini, four largescale photographs, each one a recreation of the various, seemingly unrelated riots and protests that swept the world in 2011, each one constructed on soundstages, using multiple exposures, a composite photograph that combined meticulous research and vivid reinvention. In 2017 you made the Pembury Estate picture, based on the London riots in summer 2011, sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan, a Black man shot by the police. You compared the London riots to the Arab Spring, making a picture of the protests in Tunis, people on the streets talking politics late into the night, their candlelit vigil. And finally, the picture of the protester from Occupy Wall Street – a movement you thought was inspired by the Arab Spring – on the Brooklyn Bridge, being dragged by cops into the back of a paddy wagon. The detail and historical accuracy of those photographs was extraordinary. Polyphonic visions reminiscent of Bruegel.”
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“I used a Phase One, 150 megapixels, unimaginably huge at the time. Multiple exposures, months of postproduction. Now I can snap pictures of almost infinite size from almost infinite angles right from this globe. Navigating the sublime horizon of information with aesthetic judgement is the challenge of our present age. By the way, let’s be clear: protesters are not hooligans. In the footage I saw of the London riots, there was no real vandalisation, there was instead the spontaneous joy of challenging injustice. And you forgot the Vancouver picture.” “Ah, yes… the Stanley Cup riots. All those hockey fans, busting windows and torching cars in front of Vancouver’s old post office, right up the street from this murky lagoon.” “The riot was a spontaneous eruption of class tensions, the hockey game merely the fuse. Central Vancouver represented an unattainable space, impossibly expensive. Now look behind us. Substantial blocks of social housing integrated into downtown Vancouver. Department stores as artist studios. Cooperatives at every corner. The revolution of 2041 busted monopolies, restored our urban spaces. But remember that all revolutions are temporary – Amazon owns the moon, after all. New generations must remain vigilant.” “Art helps maintain that vigilance. When the banks collapsed in 2008 there was a brief hiccup of terror, but months later execs were getting fat bonuses again, sucking at the teat of quantitative easing.
Fury started brewing worldwide. In 2011 rage spilled into the streets. You made connections between 2011 and 1848. Art is both our collective memory and our vision of the future.” “One action nudges another,” says Stan’s brain. “News of the Vienna uprisings travelled by steamboat from Trieste to Venice, plodding across the Adriatic. Even without frictionless technology the fury spread across Europe like a Siberian wildfire. The truth will find its dock. In 2011 news of riots spread via social media, when smartphones were clunky slabs of anticipatory illumination. In the present day we are all omniscient, with infinite information available all day, every day, yet still our consciousness is distorted, alienated. Contagion travels at the speed of light. Art is our only filter.” “Consciousness and data are indistinguishable. We live in a perpetual panopticon. It’s paralysing.” “I repeat: art is our only filter. And I repeat again: I am haunted by my failures. By our failures. We must harness the eternal return of the revolutionary moment.” “In Venice we created one of those moments. Remind me what you showed in Zattere. Wait, I remember – a video installation in a grimy old warehouse.” “Not that grimy. A critic at the time described the work as pharaonic.”
Stan Douglas, Doppelgänger, 2019 (installation view, May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019). Photo: Jack Hems
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“‘Grimy and pharaonic.’” “Sounds plausible. It was a largescale video installation, complex and recombinant, typical of my work. Weirdly, I can’t remember much either.” “MetaGoogle it. I left my OmniTab at home.” “Let’s live in the present. Our subjective experience of time is our only freedom. And art. Difficult art.” Waves tickle the legs of the unmoving goose. A warm breeze rustles the cherry blossoms above; a large clump of pink petals fall onto Reid’s lap. A child, accompanied by a MindGlobe, passes behind them. “Speaking of my failures,” says Stan’s brain, “you know I wanted to write a script based on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions, the young protagonist Frédéric has two mentors: one in the artworld, one in business. The ethical and existential dilemma presented by the novel is even more pressing today. Amidst the fury of the Parisian riots, surrounded by death, Frédéric felt as if he were watching a play. In the present age, everything is aestheticised. Violence is art.” “Hold on, Stan. You did write that work, a couple years after Venice. In fact you made a film, showed it London and New York in 2026.” Stan’s brain shudders in its MindGlobe, drops to the earth, buzzes along the mud and pops up again. “Reid, you’re right. I need to reboot my MemoBulb.”
“And I’m pretty sure I remember a line in the script: ‘In the present age, nothing is aestheticised. Art is violence’.” “All aphorisms are interchangeable.” A weak smile shifts under Reid’s white beard. Stan’s brain emits something like a sigh. “Do you remember”, asks Reid, “when we worked on Journey into Fear in 2002? In those days you often quoted Marx: ‘We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead’. It seems to me that nowadays we suffer far more from the dead than the living.” Reid drifts off into empty thoughts, glances at the drones. A couple of buffleheads paddle along the shore, occasionally plunging their luminescent heads under the water. The goose lets out a mechanical squawk, snapping Reid back into the moment. On the lookout for Stan’s brain, he swivels his head. Ah, there he is, mumbles Reid to himself. He’s dancing. Under a willow tree, beside a fellow MindGlobe, two of them dancing like a couple of loose moons in the violet light of dusk. ar Stan Douglas’s 2011 ≠ 1848 is on view at the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, 23 April – 27 November. A second installation by Douglas will be presented simultaneously in Magazzini del Sale No. 5, Dorsoduro 262. Both are commissioned by National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Craig Burnett is a writer based in London
Stan Douglas, Doppelgänger, 2019 (installation view, May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019). Photo: Jack Hems
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Hassan Khan Blind Ambition Centre Pompidou, Paris 23 February – 25 April A sense of topsy-turvy begins even before reaching Hassan Khan’s dedicated exhibition space at the Centre Pompidou. PIGGIE PIGGIE LONGHANDS GROWL GROWL (2019), installed in the venue’s vast lobby, presents a cartoonishly oversized pig’s head paired with a stretchedout-yet-shrunken body, its face dotted with black eyes and digitally printed pasted-on fangs. The grotesque creature is at once jarring and a little alarming, a peculiar mix of plush harmlessness and unexpected menace. This rogue slant from the norm provides the theme of Blind Ambition, a major presentation of new and old works in which recognisable signifiers are rendered unfamiliar. The exhibition landscape of modulated light-wood platforms provides a scenographic device uniting some 40 formally diverse pieces – many shown in France for the first time – as one vast experience. From glass sculptures to prints on aluminium to a photographic portrait of the artist’s mother, the experimental nature of Khan’s practice is expressed in a wide range of contours and scales: a variety that’s playful but also ultimately defiant, as if refusing to participate in any one framework. A sound installation, The Infinite Hip-Hop Song (2019), ushers the visitor into the space with unending algorithmic remixes: a rolling sonic experience created from material provided by 11 Egyptian rappers. It sets in motion Khan’s view that seemingly anything can mutate.
Khan came to art having studied English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. After his studies he worked as a teacher, translator, magazine editor and video producer, while also playing with various bands and producing soundtracks for theatre. Given this trajectory, it’s perhaps unsurprising that language so often permeates his works, be it his video The Dead Dog Speaks (2010) – in which language is rendered as an absurdist back-andforth patter – or 2013 Curtain Remix (2021), in which text messages pulled from an exchange with a virtual AI chatbot festoon a bright orange curtain (‘You never know what it’s like to be someone, or what they really go through,’ one text bubble states). In both these works, communication appears slippery and shifty. The Agreement (2011), a series of short-form narratives printed on the wall, highlights the incomplete nature of storytelling by virtue of what is occluded. Each story abruptly cuts off right at the brink of what its narrative builds up to: two schoolboys digging for something unknown, five informers contending with an officer, a smoking man running late to meet an acquaintance he looks down upon. A slew of peculiar novelty items are lined below the vignettes. Pairing the stories with these miscellaneous and elusive objects – like the hindquarters of a horse, or a photographic image of a fountain printed on loose-leaf and anchored by four miniature paperweights – adds perplexity as
to what innuendos they draw out of already truncated stories, especially since none are cited in or obviously resonant with the texts. The spectator-turned-reader is likely more confounded than enlightened by the ensemble. But perhaps that’s precisely the point of Khan’s exhibition, which seems, at each turn, to refute the possibility of a ‘revelation’, or even cogent codification. The Alphabet Book (2006), which pairs nonillustrative images alongside the 26 letters as a kind of randomised abecedarium, highlights how linguistic associations could be reimagined to be equated with almost anything: such associations and parameters are malleable. In Khan’s series Sentences for a New Order (2018), he customised electricity boxes with LED lights blinking warnings of ‘SUDDEN CHOLERA’ and ‘TREMBLING WORLDS’, rendering a pragmatic appliance one of existential panic. Similarly, the brass sculpture Banque Bannister (2010) – an untethered handrail that anchors nothing and leads to nowhere – turns a banal architectural detail into a folly with a splash of Dada humour. The cumulative effect of these pieces, reinvesting and twisting reality, is jest mixed with malaise. Blind ambition prevents people from seeing what’s happening around them. In Khan’s survey, it seems to point to our own inability to realise what’s happening around us – the sinister impact of technology, the loss of meaningful connections with others and the looming of ecological horror – until it’s already too late. Sarah Moroz
DOM-TAK-TAK-DOM-TAK, 2005, light and sound installation (mixer, amplifier, speakers, light program, show controller, vinyl text on wall) © the artist. Photo: Serkan Taycan. Courtesy SALT, Istanbul
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Sentences for a New Order: SUDDEN CHOLERA, 2018, LED lights on Gewiss GW68003N electricity box, 44 × 22 × 10 cm. © the artist. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
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The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 Museum of Modern Art, New York 20 February – 2 July MoMA’s eye-opening exhibition documents modern architecture across Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka via more than 200 models, sketches and audiovisual materials. The earliest projects were realised at the end of the British Raj, the most recent for the 1985 South Asian Games, held in Dhaka. While the influence of celebrated Western architects such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn is on display when the exhibition deals with government buildings, where the show really vibrates is in presenting South Asia’s midcentury architectural boom not as a West–East confluence but a homegrown, at times grassroots, endeavour. So whereas in certain projects the raw concrete (béton brut, which gave name to brutalism, a late-modernist movement that evolved out of the work of Le Corbusier) afforded the monumental scale
for projecting the long-term, future-gazing ambitions of newly formed independent nations, in others the same concrete, exposed brick and local materials served a more immediate socioeconomic function, addressing the dire refugee and housing crises triggered by Partition, in 1947, in which 13 million people were violently displaced. The architects highlighted here combined breakthrough techniques, such as Le Corbusier’s brises-soleil, with traditional elements, for example inner courtyards, to provide solutions uniquely fitted to hot climates and local social needs. In the monumental vein, Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations and Halls of Industry in New Delhi (1970–72), designed to celebrate 25 years of Indian independence, exudes a technological confidence while remitting to a cosmic order.
Kuldip Singh, NCDC Office Building, New Delhi, India, 1978–80, exterior view. Photo: Randhir Singh
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Water, as a harmonising element, and brisesoleils appear in documentation of Geoffrey Bawa and Ulrik Plesner’s Ceylon Steel Corporation Office Building, Oruwala (1966– 69); dramatic punctured grids in Balkrishna V. Doshi’s Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (1977–92); and turbulent curvatures in Daniel C. Dunham and Robert G. Boughey’s Kamalapur Railway Station, Dhaka (1968). The College of Arts and Crafts, University of Dhaka (1953–56), by the father of Bengali modernism, Muzharul Islam, integrates curvilinear flow, floating stairs, pilotis, louvres and delicate terracotta jalis (latticed screens). Islam’s compact brick structures at Chittagong University, and Achyut Kanvinde and Shaukat Rai’s squat ones in Maharashtra, are prime examples of local architects adapting to inclement terrains
and fickle ecosystems, from hilly forests to monsoon-stricken plains. With a roof that references ancient lunar observatories, the Parthenon, Hindu temples and modern cooling towers, Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh (1951–62), part of a complex for Punjab’s capital, is prophetically new, yet timeless. It exemplifies the Swiss architect’s fluidity between European and Asian regionalism: the rugged concrete hollowed out by deep shadows and strict geometries broken by a wavy parasol setting up dialectical textures. But the project also embodies the inherent contradictions of utopian urban planning. As stressed in a clip of Alain Tanner’s 1966 documentary, Une ville à Chandigarh, the complex was “carried on the heads of women”, seen toiling under endless baskets of heavy concrete. Built by workers who did not live in it, and ill-fitted to local cultures of mixed use, this segmented ideal city exposed the limits of the era’s progressive urbanist schemes.
Despite the shortcomings, South Asia’s modernism was an inspiring creative incubator. In affordable housing, modularity became functional, and practical concerns, such as communal spaces, replaced the idealised attempts at harmony. Notable in this section of the exhibition is the community-centred work of the British architect Laurie Baker, who settled in India: several hand-drawn pamphlets, such as ‘Are Slums Inevitable?’, demonstrate the ways in which he made his progressive ideas accessible. Among expandable-nuclei constructions are Rewal’s Asian Games Village in New Delhi (1980–82) and Charles Correa’s Belapur Incremental Housing in Navi Mumbai (1983– 86). Mostly absent in civic and governmental engineering, the South Asian pioneering women architects – Yasmeen Lari (Pakistan), Minnette de Silva (Sri Lanka) and Hema Sankalia (India), the last with a modular 50 Bed Women’s Hostel, in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh (1979–80) – are prominent in the housing section. In a regional ethos, de Silva combined concrete and
brick materials with terracotta, and favoured traditional woodwork, mats and ornamentation; meanwhile Lari and Sankalia built boxy housing around inner courtyards and rooftop terraces, blending radical modern design with traditional local vernaculars. The Project of Independence touches on the complexity of urbanist utopias, whose legacies – and survival – are by no means guaranteed. Brutalist ruins can be shrouded in nostalgia, particularly as some iconic buildings come under threat from governments and commercial interests. Rewal’s colossal hall was demolished in 2017, despite protests by preservationists (a number of South Asian buildings by Kahn may suffer a similar fate). Yet far from single-mindedly enshrining brutalism, MoMA reminds viewers that, while brutalist monumental structures were often conceived by egalitarian, cosmopolitan elites, they’re inseparable from the histories of exploitation, social control and inequality. Ela Bittencourt
Charles Correa, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Municipal Stadium, Ahmedabad, 1959–66, exterior view. Photo: Randhir Singh
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Donna Huanca CUEVA DE COPAL Arnolfini, Bristol 5 February – 29 May Donna Huanca’s site-specific multimedia installation CUEVA DE COPAL (‘Copal Cave’ in Spanish) welcomes visitors coming in from the luminous space of Bristol’s Floating Harbour in a penumbral embrace. A heavy, electric-blue strip curtain separates the installation site from the busier corners of the ground floor at Arnolfini, activating sensorial and tactile responses from the body right on the exhibition’s threshold. Inside, a narrow corridor leads viewers towards an expanse of bone-white sand that reveals the triangular shape of the room. Four monumental oil-and-sand paintings – CUEVA DE COPAL #1–4 (all works 2021) – are hung at the farthest end from the entrance and act as the installation’s focal point, while a concoction of stimulations both aural (the entire space vibrates with sounds of sloshing water, rustling
wind and chirping birds, creating a hypnotising soundscape) and olfactory (Huanca’s self-made ligneous aroma permeates the space, referencing scents used in spiritual-cleansing rituals of native Central and South American cultures) envelop the audience. Previous installations by the BolivianAmerican artist incorporated live performances in which the painted, naked bodies of Huanca’s models became textured canvases. However, in these pandemic times, those body paintings have been made behind the closed doors of Huanca’s studio. Photographic traces of the models’ presence can still be found in CUEVA DE COPAL, hidden beneath layers of natural pigments in the paintings, forming a celluloid palimpsest over which organic materials create rapturous combinations of colours.
CUEVA DE COPAL, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Lisa Whiting Photography. Courtesy Arnolfini, Bristol
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Two anthropomorphic sculptures inhabit the space – Vipassana Journal (Ripped Torso, 2021) and Arbol de Sapito (Sapito Tree, 2021). Similar sculptures are recurrent elements in Huanca’s shows, which the artist describes in the exhibition guide as ‘stand-ins for the body [...] acting both as camouflage and shelter for performers and audience members’. These relationships between the sculptures and the physical bodies are further accentuated by two large mirrors placed behind them, which are reminiscent of the two-way mirrors built into the walls of the studio Huanca occupied at Malmö’s Konsthalle for her six-week performance RAW MATERIAL in 2013. There, it was Huanca who was scrutinised by the audience. Here, in the absence of other performers, we are at once observers and observed. For a transient moment, we are passersby invited to not only look upon but also within ourselves. Ren Scateni
Ashley Bickerton Seascapes at the End of History Lehmann Maupin, New York 27 January – 12 March A Remote Summer of Their Own O’Flaherty’s, New York 27 January – 5 March What does one make of – and at – life’s end? ‘I might be dying, I don’t know,’ Ashley Bickerton offered in a recent interview with Los Angeles Magazine. Two simultaneous exhibitions in New York – one a classy blue-chip-Chelsea affair, the other more fitting of Bickerton’s gritty East Village origin story – offer a moment to revisit the life’s work of the artist, who has lived in Bali for decades, and was recently diagnosed with ALS, an incurable illness. Somewhere between Waterworld and Donald Judd, Bickerton’s work in Seascapes at the End of History incorporates the visual language of survival. Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide 1) (2022), a harvested slab of resin-encased beach dotted with his family’s petrified steps in the tide, are prepped for our aqueous, post-climatechange future. The sculpture becomes a raft of life, with oatmeal-coloured stainless-steel floats bolted on, conjuring the absurd, but perhaps plausible idea of a future in which our descendants encounter a mysterious floating fossil
adrift in the endless sea. Closeup, the sculpture encases the mesmerising glint of sun-dappled water and gentle wakes. The survivalist themes persist with Bickerton’s wall-mounted life rafts, such as River Vector: Big White (2022), which contains a mirrored display case, filled with bits of beach trash, and waterways etched on the glass surface. Across town at O’Flaherty’s, a new artistrun space in the East Village, A Remote Summer of Their Own displays earlier Bickerton sculptures and wall works, from the 1990s to the 2010s. Many revel in being garish things, especially works like Red Scooter Nocturne (2010–11), whose aesthetic, if it had one, might be called dirtbag tropicália. On a wooden panel, shaped like an altarpiece and bored out like Swiss cheese, a psychedelic digital print: a blue, obese man rides through the Balinese night with two naked women, rainbow hair and makeup caked on. Bickerton’s signatures cover the panel like NASCAR sponsors, and the work
conjures associations with sex tourism, Gauguin and absurdist fantasies of the other. O’Flaherty’s prides itself on self-aware unprofessionalism, sometimes opening late because its proprietors are hungover, and becomes an ideal space for this art, which might rankle liberal sensibilities of propriety. Works from this period of Bickerton’s career, so far from the heady austerity of his 1980s Neo-Geo paintings, are outrageously bad, like John Waters’s filth. At the onset of our postpandemic future, a moment of climate-change catastrophe and escapist visions of privatised spaceflight, Seascapes at the End of History offers contemplative restraint, a meditation about what comes next not just for Bickerton, but humans. The exhibition at O’Flaherty’s, by contrast, looks back. Severity and absurdity, poetry and debauchery, polish and grime, all coexist in this reflective pair of exhibitions, where contradictions are on full display. Owen Duffy
River Vector: Big White, 2022, oceanic flotsam and beach detritus, stainless steel, etched glass, rubber, brushed aluminium and plywood, 231 × 231 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul & London
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Hawai‘i Triennial 2022 (HT22) Various venues, Honolulu 18 February – 8 May Though a citywide project, the intended scope of the Hawai‘i Triennial is far greater: bounded in space by the Pacific Rim and in time by a future that its curators – Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick – speculate will unfold in contradistinction to the previous century, controlled as it was by an American regime that, per the catalogue, imposed a ‘transAtlantic… economic and cultural supremacy’ on a global scale. This third outing (the previous two as biennials) of the island event is titled E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea, which reduces to Pacific Century in translation. No surprise then that the shift that the curators predict is towards the other side of the planet, and the rise of ‘the Asia-Pacific’ to a level of sociocultural preeminence across the hemispheres, with Hawai‘i at the centre of the action. Broderick points out in his catalogue essay that the geographic position of the Hawaiian archipelago forms the navel of the Pacific, an apt description for a hub where ‘competing worldviews have energetically intersected for centuries’, and where pehea ko piko? – how’s your navel? – is a common greeting. Posed at Richard Bell’s Embassy (2013–), a mobile forum for Aboriginal people held during the triennial’s first days, the query prompted discussions on the annexation
of Hawai‘i by the United States; inspired tributes to deceased community members; and challenged notions of the other. One participant, the filmmaker and educator Meleanna Auli‘i Meyer, argued that the virtues of aloha – profound, universal love – could save humanity from self-made crises both sociological and ecological. The cultural and historical significance of the assembly was further highlighted by its proximity to Iolani Palace, where Hawai‘i’s last monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, was placed under house arrest in 1895 by a court order relating to the American seizure of the Hawaiian Kingdom. During the months she spent incarcerated, she received bouquets of flowers (their newspaper wrappings providing her with intel on current events) whose blossoms came to symbolise resistance, the preservation of the queen’s dignity and, by extension, that of the Hawaiian people. An inventory of those blossoms kept by the queen, wherein she dedicated specimens to loyal supporters, served as the basis for Jennifer Steinkamp’s Queen Lili‘uokalani (2022), an animation projected onto the facade of the palace. Unseen until dusk, Steinkamp’s projection drapes the building in luminous garlands that appear as delicate as lei; each of the building’s columns is illuminated by flowers, yet the
Momoyo Torimitsu, Somehow I don’t feel comfortable, 2021, (installation view, Royal Hawaiian Center, Waikīkī, 2022). Photo: Lila Lee.Courtesy the artist and Hawai‘i Contemporary
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architecture – seen in a new light – recalls the bars of a prison. This monumental work evokes the imprisonment story, as well as the cultural trauma of occupation, and reflects the poetic manner in which the queen linked devotee to flower in her botanical inventory of resilience. While the inclusion of artists such as Ai Weiwei and Theaster Gates adds blockbuster cachet to a programme composed of 43 artists, many others are indigenous to Polynesia and, like the curators (especially Broderick, who hails from O‘ahu), intent on representing regional art-histories. At the Hawai‘i State Art Museum (HiSAM), the duo Piliāmo‘o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf) presents a selection of photographs from Ē Luku Wale Ē: Devastation Upon Devastation (1989–), their ongoing documentation of and reactions to the H-3 highway in Kāne‘ohe, O‘ahu. A verse taken from a kanikau (dirge) written by Landgraf is displayed on the gallery walls and introduces a series of photographs that depict physical trauma to the land: images that show stunning vistas gouged by the road, or evidence of the ecological waste and cultural loss wrought by transport infrastructure that annihilates the land it seeks to ‘develop’. In adjacent galleries, vitrines are dedicated to publications by ‘Elepaio Press,
active since 1976 (and cofounded by Hamasaki), which provided a platform for Indigenous voices during its first decade in operation, when alternative publishing outlets for creative expression were largely absent from Hawai‘i. Surrounding the vitrines, examples of concrete poetry associated with ‘Elepaio’s formative years emblazon walls. These words-as-images bring to life a moment when Hawaiian artists utilised the small press format to distribute their work across Oceania, contributing to the development of the region’s arts and letters in the last decades of the twentieth century. At HiSAM visitors can also watch the documentary videos of Joan Lander and Puhipau, a filmmaking pair operating as Nā Maka O Ka ‘Āina (‘The Eyes of the Land’) until the latter’s death in 2016, who recorded myriad aspects of Hawaiian culture associated with social- and environmental-justice actions during the 70s. These videos establish a dialogue with Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s painting, film and costume design installation Aue Away: The Language of Flowers (2022), at Honolulu Museum of Art, which aligns modern Indigenous resistance with the American civil-rights movement and other twentieth-century humanitarian protest movements, while deconstructing appropriative tiki aesthetics through a queer Polynesian lens. Over at the Royal Hawaiian Center shopping mall in Waikiki, an empty shop transformed into an exhibition space recalls a cultural trend for
exhibitions mounted in complexes across Asia, described by Melissa Chiu during a private tour, which despite its commercial (and therefore cynical) implications, also renders access to art more democratic. This conclusion seems crucial when accessibility provides connections to artists dispelling hegemonic normativity. Case in point is Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia I–V (2016–21), a video depicting erotic encounters between young men and jungle ferns, projected on repeat. Enthusiastically and ambitiously perverse, Pteridophilia puts aloha to radical practice by inspiring interspecies love, giving new definition to the term ‘eco-friendly’ – all in stark contrast to, say, the destruction of nature in order to build a highway. Moving-image works dominate the Bishop Museum, notably Ahilapalapa Rands’s Lift Off (2018), a three-channel video installation addressing the issue of scientific intrusion atop Mauna Kea, the holy mountain located on Hawai‘i Island. Two channels show Mauna Kea in an unbroken panorama, its summit dotted with astronomical observatories. Subversive hilarity ensues when a crudely drawn figure, introduced in the third channel, plays an ipu heke (a double gourd percussion instrument), causing the telescopes in the affiliate channels to bounce, spin and explode in synchrony with the rhythmic drumming. Behind each beat on Rands’s soundtrack one can detect a vehement “No!” – an expression of solidarity with those protesting the construction of yet another observatory on Mauna Kea, the
Thirty Meter Telescope, who argue that the structure would further desecrate the site. The Hawai‘i Triennial highlights local issues for a global audience but tries to avoid navelgazing by examining the archipelago’s history within a transregional context and from a decolonising perspective. Moreover, it wants to initiate, from Honolulu, manifold alternative and more equitable social topographies through art. Yet for all of its awareness in these regards, and its curatorial insistence that persistent, constructive and critical dialogue laps away at rigid, age-compacted injustices like waves redefining a coastline, it has relied perhaps too greatly on the excitement the conceits inspire. The result is an exhibition populated by artists extraordinarily well versed in injustices stemming from long-term social inequality but encyclopaedic on the matter to a point that risks both historicisation and atomisation. It asks its audience to speculate about such possibilities without end and from a place located in a present contending with an unjust past. This could be its undoing: the programme is too varied and locked into the moment for one to gain purchase on any given solution. Or this could be its most generous resolve: myriad possibilities that confront today for the benefit of tomorrow means there are myriad possibilities on the horizon – a solution in and of itself. The predicament alone, born of the question of possibility, lends credence to the latter opinion, and only in the latter does a hypothetical century become a conceivable future; that is, a promise fulfilled. Patrick J. Reed
Ai Weiwei, Tree, 2010, wood; Iron Tree, 2020, iron tree sections; and Tree, 2010, wood (installation view, Foster Botanical Garden, Honolulu, 2022). Photo: Lila Lee. Courtesy the artist and Hawai‘i Contemporary
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Younès Rahmoun Madad Galerie Imane Farès, Paris 24 February – 23 April Younès Rahmoun’s latest exhibition is composed of visual codes and motifs that hint at an unexplained internal logic. Nevertheless, you are left in no doubt that the artist is attempting to engage with big subjects: belonging, spirituality and the substance of light itself. These concerns, it appears, are best articulated on a humble scale. The largest work, Madad-Tayf (Madad-Spectrum, 2022), comprises ten columns of multicoloured blown glass cylinders, 77 in all, casting a spectrum of shadows onto the back walls of the opening gallery. Glimpsed from the street, it has the air of an object in an interior design showcase – an aesthetic at odds with the rest of the exhibition’s contents. Much more successful are works that dwell on the theme of domesticity – again, belonging – and its absence: throughout, we encounter palm-size resin models of houses resembling
enlarged, transparent Monopoly-board properties, a succinct visual shorthand for the notion of ‘home’: in Manzil-Fatil (2021) the model is perched on a shelf, high above eye level; in Manzil-Hawd / Manzil-Jabal (House-Basin / House-Mountain, 2022) it has been placed atop a ziggurat of upturned traditional copper cooking vessels of the kind ubiquitous in Rahmoun’s native Morocco; in Nôr-Manzil-Nôr (Light-House-Light, 2022), meanwhile, the house is positioned in the centre of a projection of rippling golden light. These allusions to rootedness meet their opposition with Hajar-Dahab (Stone-Gold, 2022), a bowl containing a collection of pebbles Rahmoun has amassed in his travels. Bringing objects sourced from disparate territories together in a new setting is both a kind of ritual for the artist – whose past performances have
frequently involved similar gestures – and an open-ended political statement. Viewed in the context of the refugee crises unfolding on Europe’s fringes, these stones are a simple but affecting metaphor for migration. Small amounts of gold are used sparingly throughout, with thin strands of gold leaf inside the resin houses, a small golden egg in among the pebbles, gold sequins on the hem of a woollen cloak hanging from a wall. The subtle, reflective glow of the metal against the walls gives the display a quality of the devotional, an apparent allusion to the artist’s interest in Sufi faith and philosophy. This spiritual dimension to Rahmoun’s practice is an attempt to grapple with the sublime, with ideas of a magnitude beyond the confines of language; on the whole, he does so with great nuance and delicacy. Digby Warde-Aldam
Manzil-Hawd / Manzil-Jabal (House-Basin / House-Mountain) (detail), 2022. Photo: Tadzio. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris
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Cooper Jacoby Sun is Bile The Intermission × Fitzpatrick Gallery, Piraeus 14 January – 26 March In the refurbished 1920s premises of The Intermission in Piraeus, the port city in Greater Athens whose harbour has been used continuously since antiquity, American artist Cooper Jacoby summons a local practice that has been dormant here since the early days of Roman Christians. Like a contemporary Pythia, the Delphic oracle who inhaled bay-leaf vapour while voicing riddles envisioning the future, a set of four wall-mounted panels literally heat up and cool down, augmented with digital displays that emit lines of drunken poetry. ‘Mirror Is Engine, Sun Is Bile,’ reads one. Epoxy-encapsulated with reflective surfaces, approximately the height of a full-length body mirror, each is fitted with an AI-modified thermostat that also generates text on its display in real time. Reminiscent of the musings of horoscope columns, these are writings that we are ourselves scripted to project onto, mirroring our own
biases, fears, hopes. As the temperature changes, meanwhile, the chromogenic-paint hue mutates within a saturated autumn palette, coppers to greens to blues, in expression of temperamental affect. And as the sentient surfaces become aware of their own temperature fluctuations – a circle within circles, a closed system not unlike climate itself – the very meaning of consciousness is brought to the foreground, as is a history of existential cyclical allegory stretching from Narcissus to Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–68), a sealed Perspex box with a changing opacity, depending on its surrounding temperature. Pointedly, amid a context of unpredictable heating and predicting, the title of this series asks How will I survive? (2022). A metre above our heads, as if both observing and illuminating us, four pastel-coloured simulacra of streetlamps protrude from the walls. In the glass of each, diffusing a blurred
beam of coloured light, are what look like fungal growths, abstractions or, wait, abjections. These are clear-silicone cast animal intestines and organs, like miniature islands in a puddle of backlighting. Harking back to haruspicy, divination by reading animals’ entrails, a practice dating to Ancient Rome, this flickering iridescence is of a down-sampled projection of video behind the silicone ‘prism’, which diffuses it further, tinting the pulsing organ shapes, like enlarged microscope imagery in an animist flurry of ancient activity. In a time of dense futurology, conspiracies and technological fetishism, it’s salutary to be reminded that humans have always looked for answers beyond their own logic – whether through discursive technology or irrational divination. We did it then and, as we tragically avoid facing the magnitude of our environment’s cascading crisis, we do it now. Athanasios Argianas
Apopheniac (infancy), 2021, polyurethane enamel, steel, fibreglass, silicone, LED array, 165 × 92 × 34 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris
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Faith Ringold American People New Museum, New York 17 February – 5 June It has become commonplace to state that the battles fought by American artists of the late 1960s and 70s against institutionalised racism and misogyny are depressingly relevant today. Yet the first rooms of Faith Ringgold’s timely retrospective at the New Museum suggest an illuminating difference between her own protests against institutional power – as delivered through six decades of paintings, textiles, sculptures and performances – and those of a new generation who would dismantle it. Take the acrylic-and-graphite-on-paper Freedom of Speech (1990), in which the stripes of the US flag are replaced by the opening sentence of the First Amendment and its stars overlaid by the names of those (ranging from Dred Scott to the KKK) whose persecution or toleration
offends those stated ideals. The work is one of a series of flag works that followed Ringgold’s conviction, in 1970, for ‘desecrating the American flag’ as a co-organiser of the People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in New York. Yet Ringgold’s citation of the flag illustrates a faith in its principles that endures beyond any merely symbolic defacement (to put it another way: to adapt the flag to one’s own protest is to avail of the freedoms it is supposed to enshrine). As Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panthers to enforce the constitution, so Ringgold’s anger seems directed not towards the overthrow of American institutions so much as against their continued abuse. This offers one lens through which to read Ringgold’s prodigious output. Among the most
American People Series #20: Die, 1967, oil on canvas, two panels, 183 × 366 cm. Collection MoMA, New York
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powerful of the early works in this show, for example, is a mural commissioned for a women’s correctional institute (For the Women’s House, 1972). Responding to suggestions from the incarcerated women, the eight quadrants of the square wall depict women working in jobs ranging from policewoman to president. Again, the political thrust of the work is to highlight the injustices that obstruct disadvantaged women in their pursuit of the conventional aspirations of American life. These inequalities are documented and decried by the ‘American People’ series of figurative paintings beginning in 1963. Foregrounding female and Black perspectives on a turbulent society, the series ranges from bluntly satirical portraits – the ninth in the series is titled The American Dream
(1964) and depicts a genteel white woman flashing a diamond ring – to more complex commentaries on how power shapes the way we see. The 2.4m-wide The American People Series #19: US Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power (1967) depicts a hundred faces – Black and white – in a design for a postage stamp that might superficially seem to celebrate American diversity. Yet two messages are hidden in the painting’s composition. The first, easily spotted, is the legend ‘BLACK POWER’, which runs on a diagonal across the grid of faces. This might seem at first like a celebratory or defiant stamp, until you look more closely and realise that the thin lines that separate one face from another collectively spell out the disguised phrase ‘WHITE POWER’. Where Minimalism and Pop art claimed to empty art of political content, Ringgold works in the opposite direction: she reveals how even mundane commodities like stamps and the supposedly neutral form of the
grid are structured at a deeper level by the realities of power. This narrative impulse is apparent in everything from the soft sculptures that Ringgold incorporated into didactic performances such as The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976), which drew on the history of West African masquerade, to the painted textiles that give to Black women the central role that the Tibetan and Nepalese scrolls by which they were inspired reserved for Buddhist deities (the polemical Slave Rape series of 1972 being one powerful example). As those examples suggest, Ringgold has claimed for herself the modern artist’s right to draw on diverse cultural traditions in freely expressing her own experience of the world. This resolve is apparent in the extraordinary suite of 12 painted quilts, collectively titled The French Collection (1991), that run around the New Museum’s fifth floor. Beginning with the image of four Black women dancing through the
Louvre, the series uses words and pictures to tell the fictional story of Ringgold’s alter ego, Willia Marie Simone, as she moves through turn-ofthe-century Paris. Black figures are inserted into the foundation myths of modern art, and so we see Joséphine Baker as Manet’s Olympia (served, in an inversion of the original, by a white maid), while another imagines James Baldwin sitting cross-legged at Gertrude Stein’s salon. The suite is both a celebration of the freedoms from which what we call modern Western art emerged and a critique of the failure to extend them beyond privileged white males. In a satisfying art historical loop, Willia can be seen modelling for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), the painting besides which Ringgold’s own response to Guernica (American People Series #20: Die, 1967) was positioned when MoMA was rehung in 2017. The abiding impression of this survey is that Ringgold’s work does not hasten the dissolution of the modernist canon, but dramatically expands and revitalises it. Ben Eastham
Matisse’s Model: The French Collection Part I, #5, 1991, acrylic on canvas, printed and tie-dyed pieced fabric, ink, 186 × 203 cm. Collection Baltimore Museum of Art
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Patrick Goddard Pedigree Seventeen Gallery, London 4 March – 16 April To watch Animal Antics, the 2021 film that forms the centrepiece of Patrick Goddard’s exhibition, viewers have to find themselves a seat in an installation-cum-viewing enclosure constructed of straw, logs and metal caging in the backroom of Dalston’s Seventeen Gallery. Huddled in this darkened animal enclosure, they find their situation reflected in the onscreen action, where talking-dog Whoopsie, a pedigree Bichon Frise, visits a zoo with her owner, Sarah, sometime in a near future where Florida is flooded and the ‘wild’ has ceased to exist. Providing a sharp tonal contrast to the film’s wistful black-and-white footage of animals in captivity, Sarah and Whoopsie’s debates offer a barbed and very funny commentary on a series of related topics – including extinction, animal consciousness and the resonances between
speciesism and xenophobia. A furry fascist, Whoopsie continually argues that her pedigree as an English-speaking animal separates her from the other species she mocks in their enclosures. But nestled among the straw of their own zoo, viewers are not permitted to distance themselves from other animals. They are situated as part of a constructed environment where there is no ‘outside’ left, a model Anthropocene where human and nonhuman life is terminally entangled. Such lurking awareness of the ways ecological systems confound human attempts to control or even conceptualise them echoes throughout the show’s other pieces. It’s most striking in the large installation Plague (Downpour) (2022), where 200 unique lead-cast frogs tumble down a wall. This storm of
contorted amphibians draws in a whorl of references that augment Whoopsie’s musings: frogs as the biblical plague visited upon Egypt as punishment for enslaving Israelites; as markers of the swarms of invasive species and novel zoonotic diseases engendered by anthropogenic habitat change; as vulnerable bodies that, like humans, are susceptible to the toxic lead that seeps into their bodies from decaying infrastructure. This is one of the heavy-metal chords of apocalypticism humming below Goddard’s playful animal capers. He presents plagues as the counterpoint to pedigrees: they are the resurgent force of modified-but-untamed ecosystems striking back against any misplaced sense of a superior cultural or biological inheritance. Samuel Solnick
Animal Antics, 2021, single-channel 4K video with 5.1 sound, 37 min 54 sec. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London
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Giorgio Griffa Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome 22 February – 22 April Giorgio Griffa’s paintings are instantly recognisable: lyrical compositions in distinctive pastel colours brushed onto raw unstretched canvas. They’re painting pared down to basics – lines, arabesques, numbers, letters – revealing how even the simplest of forms can achieve complexity and beauty. Griffa started out in 1960s Turin, a city teeming with avant-gardists including Alighiero Boetti and Giuseppe Penone. Despite these affinities and friendships, though, he has – as this show of works from the 1970s to the present affirms – eluded categorisation, forging a path of his own that he has stuck to since 1968, when he started working directly on unstretched canvases, favouring acrylics over oils. So watery they need to be applied to the canvas laid down on the ground, Griffa’s colours – reminiscent of fifteenth-century frescoes,
which he studied – are almost iridescent. (‘Oil paint has its own internal light,’ the artist said in a 2018 interview, ‘but water-based paint reflects the light and changes as the light changes.’) Each work is pinned to the wall with nails and, once a show is finished, folded and stored; the folds invariably become part of the painting, their delicate grid lines giving dimensionality to the works, as well as portability and temporality – the painting thus suggests a life of its own beyond these gallery walls. In the large Tre linee con arabesco n. 33 (1991), three unruled cerulean blue lines cross the canvas horizontally, stopping short of the border. Below and above, purple and turquoise arabesques trail off playfully, resembling a child’s pre-cursive exercise books, interrupted midsentence. Bordering the purple arabesque,
pink brushstrokes appear to fall thick and heavy until vanishing entirely. Time, here, is linear and circular, infinite and suspended. Griffa often cites modernist poetry and music as inspirations, and this is most evident in paintings from the past decade. In Cumoskom (2019), one of his smaller canvases, the nonsensical word is repeated as though an incantation, elegant capital letters grouped together around horizontal shapes and marks, colours shimmering. From a distance it could easily be mistaken for a musical score complete with breves, barlines and quarter notes. Such canvases offer cues for deep reflection: they’re at once playful and meditative, minimalist and intricate. Endlessly, on this evidence, experimenting with the language of painting and the limits of knowledge. Ana Vukadin
Canone aureo 894, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 139 × 96 cm. Courtesy Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome
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Tori Wrånes Mussel Tears Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 29 January – 12 March A perennially maligned staple of Nordic folklore, the troll has been repurposed for the current moment. Notoriously base and mean-spirited, trolls now sneak into your Twitter feed like they once snuffled out from under bridges to snare billy goats, their intent to disrupt and derail. Trolls feature prominently in Tori Wrånes’s work, but the Norwegian sculptor and performance artist challenges the stereotypes that define them, repositioning these spectres of Norse mythology and the dark corners of the internet as iconoclasts; their dirges mourning the environmental collapse that remains largely unaddressed by the planet feeling its effects. At Shulamit Nazarian, she performed a new
iteration – each performance is improvised – of her 2018 work ECHO FACE in costume, with buggy eyes and wing-nut ears plastered below her own and wearing a comically tall cowboy hat. Wrånes is celebrated for her work as a vocalist, performing trancelike melodies in a tongue she describes as ‘troll language’. While live (and particularly extemporised) performance always carries an element of risk, much of Wrånes’s performance work places the artist in physical danger: she has performed in costume as a ‘troll’ of her own fashioning while a massive rock swung centimetres from her head (Stone and Singer, 2014), into the muzzle of a flare gun (Solo, 2011) and while hanging from
ECHO FACE, 2018 (performance view, VEGA / ARTs, Vega Scene, Copenhagen, 2020). Photo: Frida Gregersen. Courtesy the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles
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a construction crane 12 metres in the air (The laying of the cornerstone, 2016). The artist and her performers variously don prosthetic ears, noses, tail, skin treatments, mullet wigs and other cosmetic enhancements, and appear in contemporary clothes or full furry bodysuits, but they are always conspicuously ‘other’. However in Mussel Tears the artist’s sculptural practice is given primary importance, her sculptures serving as physical embodiments of the iconography that shapes her visions. Here, we absorb at close range the irregular beings previously seen lurching, creeping or gliding through her performances, as well as the themes that inform them. Just as the
doubled facial features of Echo Face suggest hybridity and fusion, Wrånes plays with physical boundaries in these static works, fusing the bodily appendages of several constructions to suggest near-continuous loops. In the front gallery the viewer encounters Fifth Leg (2022), a sculpture in acrylic-painted resin, urethane foam and steel, of a cat and a dog whose gazes meet above their shared tail. Mothers and Child (2022), a massive sculpture composed of Lucite, urethane foam, PVC, birch, concrete, paint and textiles, dominates the main gallery. In keeping with the artist’s interest in extravagant gestures, the 6.5m-long work features two giant sprawled and crouching figures wearing jeans, hoodies and other articles of clothing that could be mistaken for commercially fabricated except for their twice-lifesize proportions. The duo are joined both by their melded fingers and a fleshy-hued
recorder that extends from the mouth of one to that of the other before exiting between her legs as a trumpet bell, the effect suggesting both an umbilical cord and an extraordinarily long phallus. Nearby a jumpsuited, sneakered baby extends its four arms towards the bell as if clambering for it; however, the pair are absorbed in their song. As if emitting from the second figure’s asshole, a piped recording of Wrånes playing an alto recorder permeates the room. The absence of the child’s head echoes the hood-obscured faces of its mothers. While tender, the work implies fomenting disconnect and discord. This striking sculpture is joined by wall works, all titled Mussel Tears (2021), featuring mussel shells encased in teardrop-shaped concrete that serve as memorials to the molluscs that once thrived in Kristiansand, Norway, the artist’s birthplace. In the 40-some
years since her birth, the area’s coastline has experienced environmental change so profound that these natural filters of the sea have all but vanished. The theme of tenuous interconnectivity is everywhere, as is the implication of the dire consequences of any one corroded link. Like the baby left on the floor, disregard for that which sustains and regenerates life permeates the exhibition. I have a recurring dream of stumbling and falling, unable to walk, and thus to escape my assured demise. By contrast, Wrånes’s trolls – which she uses as a shorthand for any beings that go against the grain – are fully ambulatory and independent, yet irrevocably linked to the ecologies of the sites in which they appear. Unencumbered by convention, these mythical disruptors are perhaps better suited than us to convey the consequences of indifference. Cat Kron
Mussel Tears, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Ed Mumford. Courtesy the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles
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camp After Media Promises Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin 25 November – 27 February While being interviewed for American television in 1982, Nam June Paik offered a characteristically unconventional idea: if you make “a big television set, tv can become very profound”, and “you can stop and think”, he said, as one of his installations glowed behind him. That intriguing notion may or may not have been sincere, but it came to mind while viewing the video centrepiece of this exhilarating show, presented by the Mumbai-based media group camp as a result of winning the 2020 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. In its central work, footage from some two dozen of camp’s multifarious projects – endeavours that tend to unite technologies with disparate collaborators, to examine metropolises, trade, corruption
and surveillance with a gimlet eye – are projected onto eight gargantuan screens set at slight angles, like panels of a folding screen. The production is largescale and yet intimate, inviting you to imagine a better world, where citizens hijack digital tools to play, connect and hold power to account. A dash of the early internet’s optimism is present. camp, founded by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjay Bhangar in 2007 (but now comprising seven members), billed this audiovisual feast as a ‘moving panorama’, reconceiving that nineteenth-century-landscapepainting format as a twenty-first-century platform for surveying the expanse of their diffuse practice, which ranges from videoworks
After Media Promises, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Roh Kyung. Courtesy Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin
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to software development. In snippets of Khirkeeyaan (2006) women in Delhi speak to each other via closed-circuit cameras, microphones and televisions set up by camp: monitoring equipment being used to communicate. Another video details the basic workings of Pad.ma, an online program for archiving and annotating videos. And in one more, titled Capital Circus (2008), people who signed legal releases wander in and around a shopping centre in Manchester, England, on a rainy day, their movements tracked by 206 cctv eyes commandeered by the group. It is a sly explication of a Big Brother state that looks comically prescient now that many
unthinkingly carry tracking devices with them at all times. The works come one after another, and the pace is so fast, with so much action on the screens, that it is often not quite possible to keep up with brief texts that explicate the footage. (Luckily, a dedicated microsite for the show provides this background information.) Regardless, what unfolds is an intricate vision of contemporary working life in an era of high capitalism, assembled through lucid images: cargo containers being moved at a Guangzhou port, boats at sea, a presentation about real estate during an event hosted by CAMP on the rooftop of their Mumbai workspace. One mesmerising chapter was shot last year via a CCTV camera installed on the 35th floor of a building in that city. It pans around the area, taking in soaring highrises, crowded makeshift structures and a sprawl of green grass, where a man talks on a cellphone, perhaps
(given the context) directing flows of capital or even the movement of container ships. (A rollicking protest song by the late activist Vilas Ghogre and the group Avahan Natya Manch accompanies the deadpan images. “What sort of rule is this?” it goes at one point. “This is the rule of liars!”) As the panorama rolls along, two signature CAMP moves become apparent. One is to initiate (or isolate) a situation and then watch, very closely, as things transpire, an approach marrying John Cagean indeterminacy with an ethical commitment to bear witness. Another is to crack open some old tool for new uses, and see how people perceive their surroundings afresh as a result. For the art centre, CAMP loaded about 175 videos of Paik into Pad.ma, potentially aiding future research and uncorking little-known gems (like the Paik quotation above). They also affixed a camera to a building in a fast-developing
area of Seoul, and set it to shift its gaze repeatedly over one choreographed hour. (The feed is broadcast online and in a gallery in the museum.) Twenty-four times a day, it alights on the same spots: N Seoul Tower, a patch of graffiti, tall apartment buildings, a vacant lot, a security camera. Depending on the hour, you might catch people buzzing about on the street, a magpie landing in a tree or a garbage pickup underway. It just keeps coming. It’s delirious, a tangle of sights that journalists, historians and city planners could spend lifetimes investigating. It seems to ask: how can we improve a city? And before that, how well can we actually even know it? One night, tuning in from my own apartment, about three kilometres away from that camera, static suddenly engulfed my screen. It was hard to make out anything. Then I glanced outside. It had started to snow. Andrew Russeth
After Media Promises, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Roh Kyung. Courtesy Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin
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Before I met you the world seemed like such a big place… now there is only this shop Sweetwater, Berlin 5 February – 26 March The lust for escaping from a life suffused with dull tristesse is a recurring motif that sprawls from literature to art, music, fashion and every other cultural category in which romantic sorrow can be channelled. This four-artist group show seems to stream through a comparable canal. The title is taken from the English subtitles for Luchino Visconti’s film Ossessione (1943), wherein Giovanna, wife of a petrol station owner, tries to escape from her gloomy life and starts an affair with a vagrant. The film closes with Giovanna’s killing; her attempt at freedom ends in an inescapable cul-de-sac, preceded by a short-lived amorous reverie. How long do these kinds of romanticisation
of stirring love (affairs) last for the subjects who are involved in them? While it is obvious that, when seen in cultural forms, they are often terminal and intrinsically not meant to endure, their ephemerality also provokes the presumption that the sheer substance of these relationships might never have been real. They seemingly end up consisting as much of a counterfeit material as Kayode Ojo’s sculptures here, which play with juxtaposing expensive fantasies with cheap realities. For Untitled (2018/2022), Ojo places a square-shaped mirror plate underneath three bottles of inexpensive German sparkling wine, on top of which another mirror is positioned.
The upper mirror is covered with a pyramidal stack of champagne coupes; above them, in turn, hangs a crystal raindrop chandelier whose candles are made of metal. Wandering around the sculpture, first made with plastic glasses and updated with glass champagne coupes in 2022, consists of an unavoidable encounter with endless reflections of yourself caused by the facing mirrors. In Ojo’s case, as opposed to Giovanna’s, no tragic death transpires, rather an inevitable confrontation with your own, most likely partially wishful, image of yourself, your peers, your lovers and your world. You cannot escape the mirror, or the low-priced, almost tacky
Kayode Ojo, Untitled, 2018/2022, mixed media, 170 × 61 × 76 cm. Photo: Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy the artist and Sweetwater, Berlin
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sparkling wine paired with (the dreamy idea of drinking it out of) champagne glasses. After embedding viewers in this mise-en-abyme narrative, the artist’s second exhibited work, He’s younger than you (2016), a few-seconds-long scene from the romantic comedy Alfie (2004), plays every ten minutes, explicitly referencing problematic romances (as the title suggests) and their adhesive long-term effects. In the film, Jude Law’s Alfie is replaced with a younger, and perhaps also longer-lasting, substitute. Yet the relation between – or even identification of – original and replacement in the film is as ambiguous as in Ojo’s chandeliers, which were first exhibited in Berlin at this gallery last year. In the earlier exhibition, however, five out of eight chandeliers were made of acrylic instead of crystal. It was impossible to identify the ‘original’, which might suggest the implication that counterfeits have acquired a status of
originality in an age where it is hard to tell if a public romantic relationship is as facetuned as its corresponding Instagram posts. Counterfeits become originals and originals become counterfeits. In Jesse Stecklow’s work Untitled (10:37:12) (2014) a clock is permeated with air samplers, which at the end of the exhibition will be sent to a laboratory to process the data they collected throughout the exhibition period and subsequently inform future works by Stecklow. In his practice, the artist recontextualises information by letting different people interpret it. These data systems are then encoded in new works. Thereby he underpins the idea that you cannot escape the past – a cultural truism that potentially elicited omnipresent longings for fanciful escapes. Just like the light of Constantin Thun’s lamp Untitled (undated) in the back of the room will always remain on – or at least until the
exhibition ends – the beckoning glow of the past cannot be turned off. The repurposed lamp was used before and therefore contains information from the past that now gets intertwined with information from the present to inform the future. The works in the exhibition suggest a romantic perception of the world in a formal attire. While a classic understanding of romanticism is suspicious of science and rationality, and relentlessly glorifies the past, the exhibition only extracts certain aspects from this worldview. It is not a riposte to romanticism, yet partially opposes it due to the visual clarity and reduction. Romantic affairs surely make it possible to escape from one’s life for a fleeting moment, but they are cheap counterfeits doomed to break. Giovanna’s and Alfie’s stories burn like tinder, whereas this exhibition operates in a romantically sober way. Claire Koron Elat
Kayode Ojo, He's younger than you (still), 2016, video, 29 min 52 sec. Photo: Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy the artist and Sweetwater, Berlin
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Alegria, uma Invenção Central Galeria, São Paulo 12 February – 26 March In a book he wrote in 1928, the Brazilian modernist author Paulo Prado described his country’s supposed melancholic condition. ‘In a radiant land lives a sad folk’, he began Portrait of Brazil, articulating how colonialism and slavery had cast a black shadow on the country’s psyche. The book remains controversial and, as with any attempt to define a national character, inevitably deals in generalisations. Nevertheless, it is arguably still relevant – although as Brazil continues to address its colonial and extractivist history, the sadness Prado pointed towards has probably hardened into anger, especially since the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro on the political scene. Prado’s text is also the basis for this 25-work group show, according to notes by its curator, Patricia Wagner, which knowingly navigates two clichés: the sad nation and the exoticised Brazil of samba and dancing. As Carnival is
once again placed under covid-19 restrictions (though less severe than last year’s), the street party of Alegria, uma Invenção (Joy, an Invention) emerges here as a cathartic manifestation of both fury and merriment. Guy Veloso’s photograph Zé Pilintra (2017) shows an immaculate, dapper young man, reminiscent of Zé Pilintra, a patron saint-like figure in Afro-Brazilian religions, often protecting botecos and other low-fi venues, nonchalantly leaning on a stick while, behind him, flames lick amid the remnants of a street protest. One of the best and strangest inclusions, Nilda Neves’s oil-on-canvas Lampião Faz o Povo Dançar Nu (Lampião Makes People Dance Naked, 2015), depicts a local barn dance, yet one in which everyone is casually naked, carousing on a starry night. All good fun, but there’s an imminent threat standing at the edge: a group of men on horseback with guns. Police? Gangsters? Possibly a mixture of the two,
Nilda Neves, Lampião Faz o Povo Dançar Nu, 2015, oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Central Galeria, São Paulo
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but there’s no doubt that a fight is about to pop. There are cowboys, too, in Vivian Caccuri & Gustavo von Ha’s eight-minute music video Vivian & Gustavo (2020), which sees the artists miming and dancing to a gloriously camp sendup of sertaneja, the ubiquitous, charttopping music of Brazil’s hinterlands and a genre that is both highly lucrative and a bastion of conservative values. This is an election year in Brazil, and one thing for certain is that it won’t be an easy ride. As such, opavivará!’s Flora Treme (2016) might come in handy. A metal treelike structure, with pots and pans attached, it’s a machine for panelaços, the pot-banging protests that are both furious and fun. Given the circumstances, however, Felipe Cohen’s Quarta-feira de Cinzas (Ash Wednesday, 2014/22) might be of more use: a granite brick, ripe for throwing, inlaid with carnival confetti. Oliver Basciano
Hayv Kahraman Gut Feelings The Mosaic Rooms, London 25 February – 29 May The gut, often referred to as the body’s second brain, is a site of somatic intuition and processing. In Hayv Kahraman’s work, it is a place where pain can be acknowledged, examined and ultimately accepted. In Gut Feelings the artist takes a physiological approach to trauma and othering while drawing on her experiences of acclimating to life in Sweden as a refugee from Iraq during the Gulf War. Kahraman uses exposed, knotted intestines as a visual metaphor for trauma to explore the process of coping with the impacts of distressing events as she highlights the inalienable connection between mind and body. The show also considers links between neuroscience, the microbiome and how the body carries trauma through the artist’s work with bacteria. Across three galleries are paintings portraying women in Kahraman’s typical style, which draws on Persian miniature and Italian Renaissance influences. The
interaction between the female figures and the innards emerging from their bodies creates a tension over who is ultimately in control of this process of untangling and healing. In the first gallery, jars of torshi – pickled vegetables served in Middle Eastern cuisine – sit on shelves opposite the painting Entanglements with torshi (2021), in which their fleshy pink brine is used to paint an intestine connecting four women. Bacteria, central to torshi’s fermentation, were one of the starting points of Kahraman’s research. It led her to work with a new material – wispy flax fibre, harvested through dew retting before being woven into linen. This process involves laying flax stalks on grass so that dew and bacteria in the soil gradually rot away the stalks’ woody exterior to reveal the hairlike fibres within. In the second gallery, small growths of these flax fibres, preliminary sketches and notes sit among finished paintings on linen canvas.
In the final gallery, where the paintings are all completed on flax fibre and suspended midair, the material seems to double as a symbol for the fragility of the process – addressing one’s own trauma – depicted on it. Although this process may be delicate, Kahraman’s women are less so. There is a defiant calm in their faces as they work through what is inside. This countenance is shared by the four figures crouching to support the weight of a burdensome collective gut – or trauma – in Entanglements with torshi in the first gallery. It is maintained in other paintings as insides transition from raw pink cords to black, gnarled masses that entrap and suffocate. However, a flicker of triumph is present in the faces of those who have mastered, and now almost command, what once held them captive. Eventually a balance is struck, a symbiosis achieved, with what is unquestionably part of them. Salena Barry
Play Dead, 2021, 0il on linen, 203 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
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Bernard Piffaretti Ridgeline Kate MacGarry, London 4 March – 9 April For Bernard Piffaretti, bisection is key to creating the repetition and continuity central to the visual and theoretical makeup of his paintings. This show presents a collection of works created during the mid-1990s and in 2021 that feature brightly coloured painterly abstractions ranging from simple patterns with lines, dots and basic shapes like triangles and circles to more irregular forms suggesting an automatist approach. They have all been created through the artist’s ‘Piffaretti system’, which he has been honing since the 1980s: he halves his canvas with a vertical line; then creates an abstract composition on one side; and finishes by replicating it on the other, as if marking both sides with the same stamp. This duplication is inexact; we are expected to perceive the idiosyncrasies of the twin compositions – a fainter brushstroke on the right, a more rounded line on the left. The resulting works, simultaneously
divided and whole, question the presence of originality and referencing in painting, while suggesting some things cannot be copied or repeated. We can consider the works not only as imperfect mirrors of each other, but as two steps in a larger motion. If we assume movement along a historical or chronological trajectory, then it is understandable that we perceive only slight differences between the two sides of the canvas, as we would between one second and the next. This calls into question what came before, or rather what inspired the first side of the canvas Piffaretti painted, and then what preceded it, and so on. Eventually this line of questioning leads the viewer to interrogate the presence of originality in the medium of painting itself. The philosopher Parmenides famously argued that nothing comes from nothing, but the obverse of this statement
Ridgeline, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Angus Mil. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London
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– something comes from something – seems to speak more to Piffaretti’s practice. For an artist working in the same way for decades, risking being perceived as monotonous by his viewers, testing the possibility of ex nihilo originality while drawing out its contradictions may be the point. The two sides of his canvas speak to the inescapability of making reference, whether it be to oneself, another artist or an external event. However, Piffaretti’s initial freehand line, which parts his canvas, highlights the primary unit of all painting: a unique gesture in a specific moment in time. In creating paintings in a systematic way, almost as if he were trying to eliminate the medium’s fundamental component, he shows the impossibility of this task. Instead, he underscores the creative impulse that both links and differentiates all painting. Salena Barry
Flora Yukhnovich Thirst Trap Victoria Miro, London 1 – 26 March A painting might not represent anything, but this doesn’t make it ‘abstract’. In Flora Yukhnovich’s big, dazzling canvases, strokes and marks coalesce in clumps and nebulae, these arranged so that they look like the foregrounds to background washes of pastoral greens, oceanic blues and cumuluscloud whites. You don’t need to be told that Yukhnovich’s canvases might refer to old Renaissance and Rococo masterpieces to get the sense that there are images hidden somewhere in plain sight here. Take Crème de la Mer (all works 2022): its composition echoes Fragonard’s famous and ridiculous The Swing (1767), with its aristocratic fête galante couple tittering at the loss of a dainty shoe, flung high in the air from the lady’s stockinged toes as her beau reclines, snatching a look up her voluminous pink skirts as she flies. Thankfully Yukhnovich’s play with feminine clichés – the myth of Venus is offered as a thread
through these paintings – rips up the sexist prurience and the voyeurism of old paintings of pale naked goddesses, flinging everything into a delirious contemporary bacchanalia of painterly excess in which voluptuousness takes on a more monstrous, excessive form. Maybe She’s Born with It has an explosive trunk of purple and pink bursting into the centre of a vaguely grassy surrounding, scattering transparent bubbles all about it against a distant horizon – Yukhnovich knows how to drop enough of a visual cue to trigger a sense of scale, space and matter. In a sense, she is only rediscovering the melting, dissolving visual erotics that already hide inside Baroque and Rococo painting’s taste for naked bodies. Veiling and revealing, then, are ambiguous here, since we’re not offered the trickier ethics of pornography, even as the exhibition’s title seems to hint at the
games of erotic provocation and denial spawned by selfie culture. But it’s hard to see these fantastical scenes as anything but wholesome – it’s the old ambiguities of sexual power, perhaps, that Yukhnovich’s ‘abstractions’ in fact seek to censor, or abolish. Pillow Talk, a frenetic ascension of fleshy entities out of a rocky sea, seems to find its source not only in Noël-Nicolas Coypel’s celebratory The Birth of Venus (c. 1732), but also Coypel’s more violent The Abduction of Europa (1727). Yet the female protagonist at the heart of these is somehow not even hinted at in the centre of Pillow Talk – an absence in the midst of the ecstatic tumult. There is a strange conversation in Yukhnovich’s otherwise felicitous fantasies: about how desire and visuality are nowadays negotiated, in acts of showing and concealing, of erasure and sublimation. J.J. Charlesworth
Bombshell, 2021, oil on linen, 220 × 186 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice
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10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 4 December – 25 April APT10 brings together 69 projects by artists and collectives from more than 30 countries. In celebrating art practices across what is referred to in Australia as the Asia Pacific region, APT10 avoids not only the inwardness that might come with a national show (such as Sydney’s biennial The National: New Australian Art), but also the lofty ambitions of a global survey (as is the case for many a biennale). Indeed, it is APT10’s regional focus that gives the exhibition its vibrancy – it allows for an expansive and specific investigation into the diverse forms of artmaking across the Asia Pacific. While this triennial does not shy away from our era of polycrises, it also considers the potential of an imagined collective future. APT10’s lead curators are listed as Tarun Nagesh, Reuben Keehan and Ruth McDougall, but this is a deeply collaborative exhibition. Indeed, APT10 draws on the knowledge of multiple ‘interlocutors’, partner institutions and researchers, while also aiming to showcase a variety of community-led projects. It is this level of care and attention – and also the generosity in the sharing of cultural knowledge – that adds depth to what is often described as Brisbane’s ‘blockbuster’ cultural event. Such a framework means that APT10 has several exhibitions-within-exhibitions, many of which have a specific focus on First Nation perspectives. Between the Earth and Sky (curated by Etan Pavavalung and Manray Hsu) considers the land, ecology and cosmology in the work of eight Taiwanese indigenous artists, while the Yolngu/Macassan Project (curated by Abdi Karya and Diane Moon) explores the historic connections between the Yolngu of northeast
Arnhem Land and the Macassans of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The risk in adopting a more dispersed mode of curating for such a substantial exhibition is that it could appear too disparate and unwieldy. But here the opposite is true. Much of this has to do with the way the triennial doesn’t compress a vast array of artmaking practices – which stem from so many regional locales – into a single overarching theme. Instead, APT10 revels in a kind of heteroglossia: multiple dialogues, preoccupations and cross-cultural resonances occur simultaneously, and because of this, thematic crosscurrents can surface of their own accord. To take one example: a preoccupation with water recurs again and again, whether via Salote Tawale’s 13.5m-long raft in No Locations (2021), Alia Farid’s five oversize receptacles for In Lieu of What Was (2019) or Kaili Chun’s expansive installation Uwē ka lani, Ola ka honua (When the heavens weep, the earth lives) (2021). In these works, among others, water is configured as supply channel, mode of escape, migration route, commodity or spiritual connector. Many of the works across APT10 explore the region’s histories, its colonial and imperialist incursions and occupations, and the future threats of ecological collapse. But the exhibition also celebrates artmaking as a vehicle for remembrance, ritual, renewal and joy. In this way, APT10 looks both forward and back: there is Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s two-channel videowork Garuda Berkepala Naga (The Dragonheaded Garuda) (2021), which uses the mythological figure of the Garuda as a locus for investigating Jakarta’s coastal shores, or Bani Abidi’s sound installation, a tribute via
3AM, Graduated Uneducated, 2021, photograph on paper. Courtesy the artists
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song to the one million Indian soldiers who served in the First World War. Alongside Abidi’s soundscape, a selection of letters from soldiers are housed in lightboxes, with each typed A4 page glowing like a beacon. (One soldier, Ser Gul, writing home in 1915: ‘I have no need of anything, but I have a great longing for a flute to play. What can I do? I have no flute.’) Then there is Subash Thebe Limbu’s standout NINGWASUM (2020–21) – a futurist videowork that sees two members of the Yakthung (Limbu) community of Eastern Nepal timetravelling through space. Challenging Western narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, NINGWASUM envisions a speculative future in which an indigenous nation combines its knowledge, culture and ethics with time-shifting technological discoveries. APT10’s commitment to futurist possibilities is no mean feat, given that the triennial takes place at a time of heightened geopolitical tension. The USA is pivoting towards its ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Australia has signed up to the controversial AUKUS deal, China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand, and the new QUAD alliance between Australia, the US, India and Japan proffers itself as a regional counterweight. But the artists and collectives that make up APT10 are both attuned to, and disparaging of, the ways in which nation-states continue to co-opt this region as a ‘sphere of influence’. Indeed, part of APT10’s strength lies in its refusal to accept the construct of the nation-state – as opposed to indigenous sovereignty – as the dominant paradigm. As Thebe Limbu’s narrator says in NINGWASUM: “It’s a shame you can’t see through your silly little flag”. Naomi Riddle
Lee Paje, The stories that weren’t told, 2019, oil on copper mounted on wood, 244 × 300 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Tin-aw Arts Management Ltd
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Ho Rui An The Economy Enters the People Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok 6 January – 20 February In 1995 a Chinese delegation was dispatched to survey Singapore’s media apparatus. During the weeklong study trip – one of many such bilateral exchanges since the late 1970s – a team led by the Communist Party’s then head of propaganda, Deng Liqun, was shepherded from public broadcasters to news centres, cinemas to bookstores. The mission? Gleaning lessons from the politically stable city-state about regulating a nascent internet and better controlling society. Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s latest installation offers us a seat at a table just like the one these technocrats sat at on this trip. Bangkok CityCity’s large gallery is now a clinical conference room, replete with a book trolley lined with Chinese books on Singaporean economics and
two semicircles of grey modular desks. Bisecting them is a huge LED screen displaying archival images and footage, while a recording of Ho’s recent live lecture-performance plays on six desktop monitors. The implication of this mock high-level meeting is that we are somehow active stakeholders in the story being told. But watching Ho ruminate, in impeccably enunciated tones, for 83 minutes, our seat at the table feels increasingly like an ironic gesture: technocrats – not we, the people – call the shots in his discursive account of Singapore’s role in China’s turn towards authoritarian capitalism. Central to the narrative are official photographs of this trip, particularly one in which the
The Economy Enters the People, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok
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attendees sit at a “large, mostly empty table that stands at the centre of the room”. For him, this scene evokes “an overwhelming sense of lack” – absent are the people they represent. During the post-Tiananmen period, he explains, the Communist Party was striving to reshape an unruly public “into the rational, self-possessed individuals required by the market economy. And to do so, the people must first be moved from the scene, leaving us with an emptiness, a void.” Boasting the ingratiatingly smooth tone and slick production values of a motivational TED talk, Ho’s lecture traverses themes he has explored elsewhere, including neoliberal capitalism’s fixation on speed and spectacle, and the organisational paradoxes of China’s “socialist market economy”.
But iconographic storytelling, economic and journalistic analyses, archival footage and digital animations are here used – alongside Ho’s deadpan rhetorical style and witty turns of phrase – to unpack the geopolitical dialectic that exists between Singapore and China, or whimsically illustrate the political concepts and progress buttressing them. At one point he deconstructs a photo from 1959 showing Singapore’s first cabinet seated in front of City Hall, all clean white smiles, shirts and slacks. Ho speculates (with irony?) that their gleaming, ghostly presence embodies the city-state’s vaunted anticorruption drive, and then he segues into a discussion of the spate of corruption-themed mid-1990s Chinese films with the word ‘black’ in the title. At another point he draws our attention to a picture of President Trump sitting awkwardly, legs akimbo, at a storied table used at the recent North Korea–United States summit in Singapore.
“Was he somehow being rejected by the table symbolising the rule of law?” he quips. Later he pinpoints four types of Chinese film centred on the factory: from films of “workers leaving” or “never leaving” factory gates, to “workers never arriving at” or “protesting outside” the factory. Displayed in split-screen diptychs and drawn from sources as disparate as the Lumière Brothers, Chinese propaganda films and surveillance cameras, these movingimage montages power a circuitous account of late capitalism that ends with ‘the worker’ being displaced by ‘the people’ in recent capitalist critiques. Movements like Occupy Wall Street have, by calling themselves the 99%, “acquired a visibility that the Chinese worker would never attain”. In Singapore, meanwhile, such protests “made up exactly 0% of the population”. In terms of his own politics, Ho tends to keep his cards close to his chest. He avoids value judgements, dispassionately presents historical
facts and confidently triangulates opposing perspectives and ideologies. Yet both this exhibition’s seating arrangements (sit at the top half of the table and you see everything; sit at the lower half and you are essentially persona non grata, only archive photos arranged on the otherwise bare desk visible) and its speculative visual metaphors speak volumes. The most striking example of the latter takes place at Singapore’s National Gallery in the present day. The place is empty, the people “too busy working”. Equally striking to Ho, however, is the glut of paintings of the revolutionary masses of the last century: workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, artists, shopkeepers, industrialists. For him, this interplay of absence and presence shows in no uncertain terms that “the time for dreaming is past” – the Singaporean economy, in having pacified as well as entered the people, has won. Max Crosbie-Jones
The Economy Enters the People (still), 2021, video. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity, Bangkok
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Books At Home in the World: A Memoir by Ibrahim El-Salahi Skira Editore, £35 (hardcover) Before he was widely celebrated as one of the pioneers of African Modernism, Ibrahim El-Salahi lived a life that featured unemployment, imprisonment, various instances of straightforward racism, lengthy periods of not really showing his work and a long exile from his native Sudan. So you’d be forgiven for feeling that the now-nonagenarian painter has a rather curious idea of what being ‘at home’ means. And all the more so given that his artistic influences – and the philosophies he developed out of them – blend Arabic, African, European and North and South American traditions in a way that doesn’t find a home, in terms of standard art-historical mapping, in any of them. Naturally, then, this memoir is one that turns on the examination of alternate definitions of ‘home’. It begins with a detailed description of the author’s (extant) childhood home in Omdurman, one of three towns that make up Khartoum. From there El-Salahi traces his education, both religious (his father ran a Qu’ranic school) and secular; his rebellions against the unjustly wielded authority of his teachers (hurling a stone at the forehead of a schoolmaster who was preparing to whip him); and the more general impact of a colonial education. This last meant lessons exclusively in English during secondary school, where ‘every effort was taken to make us feel that we were distinctly different from the rest of our folks… the future effendis of a new Sudan under British rule’. As El-Salahi proceeds to tell it, the patterns established in his youth would go on to repeat through the rest of his life. For now the future effendi turned to studying art, first in Khartoum, then moving to London to study at the Slade on a government scholarship between 1954 and 1957. During that time Sudan became independent and the artist married his first wife, an Englishwoman, and fathered his first child. Despite his encountering England’s endemic racist attitudes, El-Salahi’s time in London is productive. In addition to his artistic endeavours he becomes involved in student organisation, being elected secretary of the Sudanese Students’ Union. In that capacity he organises a visit to the Third International Youth Festival in Warsaw, in 1955 – despite attempts by the Sudanese government to discourage him – after which, having left behind the work he took to show
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there, he boards the wrong train and ends up in East Berlin, where he spends his first, albeit brief, period of incarceration. And yet despite his evident enjoyment (prison aside) of this exposure to an international artworld, the artist struggles to reconcile his experiences abroad with the realities of home when he returns to Sudan (to teach art). Much of El-Salahi’s early study had involved trips to heritage sites in his homeland and in Egypt – learning about the land in addition to his formal education. Now he becomes acutely aware that the easel painting in which he has trained is not part of the artistic traditions of the Nile Valley. And is consequently something that might not resonate with the people of a newly independent postcolonial nation. ‘I personally felt that a bridge had to be built to close the gap between the two parties,’ he declares. And then sets out to travel around Sudan to find out what people actually hang on their walls. What he discovers are two elements that were familiar from his own childhood home: Arabic calligraphy, and African motifs and decoration. All of which leads him to think about art as a triangular relationship: ‘me’ (the message of the artist and the satisfaction of the creative process), ‘others’ (the society and culture from which one has borrowed) and ‘all’ (humanity and society at large). While this research directs El-Salahi, on the one hand, to experiment with calligraphic and decorative motifs – and to his part in the founding of what became known as the School of Khartoum – on the other it becomes a formula by which he lives his artistic life. On UNESCO-funded research trips to the US, he is just as interested in the opinions of ordinary people (taxi drivers, soldiers about to enlist to fight in Vietnam) as he is in the aesthetic development of fellow artists (African-American modernists such as Jacob Lawrence), religious and civil rights leaders (such as the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, whom he visits at home in Chicago), and sports stars such as Muhammad Ali (while impressed by his embrace of Islam, El-Salahi struggles to get over the boxer’s ‘enormous’ fists). When he meets sculptor Richard Hunt in Chicago – just after having reported that, during the mid-1960s, the city shrugged its shoulders and went back to normal after the 10,000 people summoned by Martin
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Luther King during his Freedom Campaign marched to City Hall – they discuss ‘how people in Africa felt about African Americans who wanted to belong and to revive their African roots, going to the extent of wearing robes, imagining that they were African in origin in contrast to the others who wanted to be recognized as Americans’. At the same time, El-Salahi makes efforts to experience how indigenous arts are preserved, visiting, for example, the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Arts in New Mexico, where an encounter with Navajo sand paintings coincides with his ideas for the preservation of dying crafts in Sudan. Indeed, his curiosity about and engagement with cross-continental dialogue is relentless: there are further research trips to China, São Paulo and Mexico, all seeking insights that might inform the development of modern art in Sudan and create alliances and solidarities on a global level, many of them dedicated to fights against tyranny in whatever form it takes. That being said, in this narrative El-Salahi steps back from any overt analysis of the political messages inherent in his own work. Back in Sudan, El-Salahi graduates from teaching art to increasingly bureaucratic governmental work: after a spell as a cultural attaché back in London, he is eventually appointed Undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Information in 1975. Soon after this, he is suddenly – and without trial – imprisoned for allegedly participating in an antigovernment coup. His incarceration lasts six months and eight days, during which time he isn’t allowed to write or draw. Nevertheless, he finds a way, drawing on fragments of food bags that he buries daily in the prison yard (never to be retrieved). Upon his release, this generates in turn a new way of working, by creating wholes from fragments. Having been reinstated in his former job as though nothing had happened, he nevertheless goes into self-exile in 1978 to work for the government of Qatar, until his activities there are curtailed by a sudden regime change. He now lives in Oxford, fully focused on his art. Yet on the basis of this engaging, acute and at times almost incredible account, it might be more accurate to say that little bits of him live everywhere, or that little bits of everywhere live in him. Mark Rappolt
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Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani New Directions, $16.95 (softcover) ‘Are you sure? I always thought it was Finnish,’ says Knut, one of the narrators of Yoko Tawada’s sweet and lopsided novel, Scattered All Over the Earth. Hiruko, the novel’s central character, has obviously heard this before. ‘sushi not finnish,’ she replies without missing a beat. Newly translated into English, Scattered All Over the Earth is the first instalment in an expected trilogy (the first two books have already been published in Japanese) in which the nation once known as Japan has apparently ceased to exist. Tawada’s characters, guided by memory and hearsay, can only speculate about the realities suggested by its lingering, ghostly culture. In their world, China has stopped exporting, and English-speaking immigrants to Europe fear deportation to the US, which is now in need of a larger workforce. The novel’s alternating narrators come from Denmark, Germany, Greenland, India and that unnamable ‘land of sushi’. Hiruko left home to study abroad in Sweden, but a few months before she was meant to return, ‘her country disappeared’. Her memory of her culture and language fading, she speaks in her own made-up, pan-Scandinavian language. Hiruko finds a willing ally in Knut, a fellow logophile, who volunteers to help her find other Japanese speakers. They are joined, now and again, by the other characters (Akash, Tenzo/
Nanook, Nora, Susanoo), as they follow one another across Northern Europe in search of truth, romance and umami. The universe Tawada has created feels incongruous: it’s at once borderless and carefree, and at the same time feels heavily regulated and policed. The characters turn up in Oslo and the South of France at the drop of a hat, fuelled by a carefree Euro-trip vibe: a crush is reason enough to join strangers on a transcontinental quest, and the world seems to run on a logic of serendipity. Yet the world outside Europe is impossibly far away and walled off, and the lack of access to information about Japan suggests some larger plot to erase it from global memory. It’s odd, for example, that despite the existence of the internet and smartphones, Hiruko doesn’t use them to contact other people stranded outside Japan. But one line provides a hint: one of the narrators works in a sushi restaurant, and though he isn’t Japanese, his customers pepper him with questions about the religion and other ‘realities’ of Japan they’ve constructed out of guesswork; researching Buddhism online, he finds that the web pages disappear not long after he checks them. The lore surrounding Japan is at times mundane: ‘I had heard something once about people sleeping standing up in crowded trains – wasn’t that in the land of sushi?’ Or more oblique:
‘I once heard about a garden somewhere on the other side of the globe where flowing water is expressed entirely in stone without a drop of moisture’. Hiruko recalls that in her culture ‘sexual hormones had died out’. The line comes as part of some amusing commentary on Hiruko’s hypercharged encounters with European men, but considering Japan’s very real declining-population crisis, it’s also an unsettling clue. Tawada has lived in Germany, away from her birth country, for nearly 40 years, and writes both in Japanese and German. Here she paints a moving depiction of an immigrant’s anxiety and the fear of permanent displacement. If the plot is driven by a central mystery – what exactly happened to Japan? – the novel’s central question is: what happens to a language and its speakers without a home? In Copenhagen a sushi restaurant is run by a guy from China trained in Paris, who employs someone from Vietnam and a nonspecific Asian American. ‘When the original no longer exists,’ says the chef, ‘there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy.’ It’s a hopeful idea – that the legacy of a culture could be carried on without its direct descendants. But ultimately the novel seems to disagree: without the original, what’s left is only a patchwork of simulacra, stereotype and conjecture. Thu-Huong Ha
Shamans of the Blind Country: A Picture Book from the Himalaya by Michael Oppitz Galerie Buchholz, €30 (softcover)
During the late 1970s, German ethnographer Michael Oppitz visited the Northern Magar people of Nepal. As a subgroup of the Magar people (who make up seven percent of the country’s population), the Northern Magar lead a seminomadic lifestyle in the foothills of the Dhaulagiri Massif, speak Kham (rather than Nepali) and practise shamanism (instead of Hinduism or Buddhism). The rituals, customs and mythologies surrounding their animist healing practices inspired Oppitz to direct the four-hour documentary Shamans of the Blind Country (1980) in the village of Taka and release a corresponding photobook of the same title comprising black-and-white photographic and written documentation – now published for the first time in an expanded Englishlanguage edition.
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Via Oppitz’s lens, we follow village shaman Master Bal Bahādur as he is called to treat the sick and ailing, performing rituals to summon malicious spirits and offering gifts in return for good health. Alongside images of these practices are photos of women weaving and tending cauldrons, shepherds herding, children playing and couples laughing. Opposite each is a page of text that Oppitz, in his detailed accompanying essay, carefully distinguishes as ‘exposition’ rather than ‘explanation’. (Oppitz’s painstaking analysis of his methodology is an unnecessary academic hangover in this context, but a later essay offers a useful insight into Northern Magar culture and value systems.) The Northern Magar rely on an oral tradition of passing stories to following generations; creation myths, folklore and legends of
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supernatural beings are chanted or sung during healing rituals and festivals. Woven into Oppitz’s observations of Bal Bahādur’s daily rounds are translations of those stories: the creation of the first shaman and his pact with the nine witch sisters (the main culprits for ill health and bad fortune, who demand a blood sacrifice as payment for allowing the shaman to cure the sick) accompanied by an image of two decapitated sheep heads, for example; or how dangerous spirits come to be, as in the story of Kubirām, a boy who, neglected by his stepmother, turns into a vengeful bird-child, presented alongside a photo of a group of men huddled under a fishnet used for protection against murderous spirits. Oppitz’s associative words and images capture a culture in which myth, magic and the everyday merge. Fi Churchman
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti Harvill Secker, £16.99 (hardcover) A novel that seemingly tries to be subversive for the sake of it, Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour is a philosophical fable without a philosophy, a glossy and depthless rumination on mysticism, a narrative that has cast aside the shackles of realist literary convention but also engagement. It’s one of the worst books I’ve read in some time, and if that seems hyperbolic, there’s plenty more overwrought statements to be found in the novel. Titled after the documentary In Search of Pure Colour: Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) (1984), Heti’s book takes inspiration from the painter’s permeable, unfinished compositions in various ways. Its conceptual premise is that God, an artist, is tired of the first draft of the world and is looking towards the second – a transition facilitated by the incoming ecological apocalypse. This also conveniently posits Pure Colour as a fragmentary first draft, a construction too fragile for the overtly judgmental critics of the Twitter age that it rails against, instead situating its narrative in some fabular, preinternet Toronto. Its protagonist, Mira, her love interest, Annie, and her dying father are all flat characters allegorised according to bird, bear and fish personality types. Mira and Annie are aspiring art critics who both attend the American Academy of American Critics, yet are fated to diverge from each other due to
the fact that Mira is a bird obsessed with beauty (shining lamps and jewels, just as Bonnard is with luminous interiors), and Annie is a fish obsessed with collectivity. Art and art criticism in the novel loosely signify faith of sorts: bird, bear or fish types are also art critics – Platonicstyle vessels through which a truth about God may be revealed. As Mira’s grief at her father’s eventual death unfolds, she becomes mystically transfigured into a leaf, a form she is stuck in for some time. If this sounds rambling, that’s because it is – shifting continually between an omniscient first-person narrator musing about the contemporary fallen world, a stark third person revolving around Mira, and a collective ‘We’. Through these various admixtures of pointsof-view, Pure Colour gradually gestures towards an ill-defined cosmogony that could generously be read as performatively rerevising itself as it unfolds, or ungenerously as a kind of late-night rant in a bar. If mystical experience in essence is beyond language, then perhaps Heti’s style is trying to point to this abstraction, but what comes across is more a jumble of mysticismlite: the transmigration of souls, the presence of the divine in the mundane, divine birth, and union with the divine all fly around like untethered thematic kites, showing their positive green sides while their darker obverses
are ignored. No theodicy or cosmodicy here – unlike, for example, in For The Time Being (1999), Annie Dillard’s mystical reckonings with the nature of evil and suffering, or more contemporarily, the complexity found in Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2021). Pure Colour is staged as a more impersonal drama than the autofictive style Heti has been associated with, as in her previously lauded Motherhood (2018). I don’t think we’re meant to care for its allegorised, flat characters, but neither then do we care for its spiritual questions, which at times read like aphoristic Instagram posts, and are presented in a dialogic style that I can only describe as extremely online. Which is ironic – given the novel’s turn away from the internet – but I think its central preoccupation is what the right kind of connectivity might be, rather than metaphysics. In vaguely exploring this, the thinness or first-draftness of Pure Colour’s contents and style shuts out any connection to the reader – can this really be merited as a conceptual breakthrough? Writing that imparts knowledge formulates what it knows by letting its problems drift into our somatic registers of experience, through the sensorial and affective. Heti does not do this: we finish empty and unmoved – or in this case, unenlightened. Lucy Mercer
Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World by Jonathan Crary Verso, £12.99 (hardcover) ‘If there is to be a liveable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism,’ begins visual theorist Jonathan Crary. Scorched Earth is a polemic in a hurry, by a writer who for 30 years has developed a thoughtful analysis of the power of capitalism and technology over the human subject and body. Scorched Earth rails against the disastrous ubiquity of what Crary terms ‘the internet complex’, all of whose ‘touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts’, an ‘implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration’. Crary’s fierce indictment of digital capitalism is one many of us will recognise in our everyday
lives, and what he does best is to remake the case for social reciprocity and interpersonal encounter as the prerequisite for any radical political possibility – ‘there are no revolutionary subjects on social media’, he insists. Scorched Earth’s most convincing moments are to be found in Crary’s precise takedown of how interpersonal life screened through the network degrades longstanding cultures of human selfhood and sociability: ‘Corporate-designed forms of social media have eliminated the possibility of an ethical relation to otherness’, disabling ‘one’s aptitude or patience for the frustrations and inconclusiveness of meeting, speaking, and being with others’. Where Crary comes unstuck, though, is in his alternatives for a better future, a hodgepodge vision of ‘zero-growth’ ‘eco-socialism’. Ranging away from his own more subtle insights, he signs
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up to a crashing, faddish denunciation of a capitalism that is all-powerful but also on the verge of collapse; that is about ‘continued growth and accumulation’ and the stripping of the planet’s resources, yet paradoxically only seems to produce austerity and misery. You get the feeling that Crary, like many disillusioned boomers, downright hates modern life and its benefits, rather than capitalism and its iniquities. Symptomatic of this is his raging against billionaires who want to live forever, while staying mute on the short, diseased lives humanity lived for millennia before the modern age. It’s not a postcapitalist world Crary longs for, but a romanticised premodern one, where interpersonal authenticity is conducted in a restored ecological equilibrium, and at least there are no smartphones, or too many of us to stare at them. J.J. Charlesworth
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Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood Chatto & Windus, £20 (hardcover) Now in her eighties, Margaret Atwood is at a stage in her career when she is treated as something of a prophetess by the general public and the media alike. And not without reason. The totalitarian society founded on religious fundamentalism and the control of women’s bodies described in her now-cult The Handmaid’s Tale (1984) was adapted for TV the year Donald Trump was elected president, at which point it felt a little too close to the mark; she started work on her novel Oryx and Crake, set in a postapocalyptic world devastated by a virus, in 2001 – it came out during the SARS-epidemic in 2003; and in the year leading up to the 2008 financial crash, she was preparing the lecture series that would be published that November as Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. All of which might explain why, in this engaging though unequal selection of some 60 essays, lectures, obituaries and speeches written over the past two decades, she is often asked by a variety of universities and associations to offer responses to some of life’s more open-ended questions, such as ‘How to change the world?’ or ‘What will happen next?’. As you’d expect of someone whose reflection is powered by constant interrogation of the world around her, most of the more geniuinely ‘burning’ ones are posed by the author herself: why have citizens in many Western countries been willing to
surrender their freedoms without protest? Are we in debt to anyone or anything as a result of the bare fact of our existence? Why are women so scary to men? What kinds of stories can writers tell about our increasingly desperate situation? Atwood returns cyclically (and somewhat repetitively, given that this is an edited selection of texts) to her own hobby horses: the advancement of women’s rights, freedom and totalitarianism, ecology and the climate crisis, the role of the arts in society and the creative act of writing. This last is the subject on which she’s at her most engaging: Atwood is a brilliant storyteller even when she’s not writing fiction, at once witty and accessible, with a particular talent for turning the particular into the universal. People remember stories better than facts, she explains, and so she paints her arguments in metaphors, classical myths and personal anecdotes. ‘Show. Don’t state’, she advises would-be writers in one of her lectures; when reflecting on humankind’s exploitative relationship with nature in general and forests in particular, she draws on everything from Greek mythology to Charles Perrault’s fairytales to the works of Shakespeare to illustrate our ancient ambivalence towards the woods. In a lecture titled ‘Scientific Romancing’ that probes the intersection of science and fiction, and the
difference between speculative and science fiction, she calls on Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell (‘the majority of dystopias have been written by men’, she points out); a selection of reviews and obituaries, meanwhile, sees Atwood pay tribute to the other writers who have influenced her (Karen Blixen, Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Munro) as well as to environmentalist Rachel Carson. If Atwood reveals herself in these pieces as an insightful critic and reader of this long lineage of storytellers including some of her contemporaries, this reviewer would have loved to see the prophetess’s take on more recent and diverse literary references (here she rarely turns her attention to authors based outside the West or under her age). Perhaps that’s because, as many of her burning questions suggest, Atwood’s eyes are locked on the future (of freedom, of the environment, of the arts) rather than on the dismal present. ‘As once solid certainties crumble,’ she writes, ‘it may be enough to cultivate your artistic garden – to do what you can for as long as you can do it; to create alternate worlds that offer both temporary escapes and moments of insight; to open windows in the given world that allow us to see outside it.’ Therein, Atwood suggests, lies the power of fiction. Louise Darblay
Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu Wildfire Books, £16.99 (hardcover) On the face of it, Melissa Fu’s debut novel follows three generations of the Dao family between 1938 and 2005 as they collectively (and rather circuitously) journey from China’s Hunan Province through to New York, and from prosperity, to migrant and refugee status, to multicultural citizens of a globalised world – all of which states are variously problematic. Many of the histories it engages with along the way – from the devastating destruction of the Second Sino-Japanese War and then China’s Civil War through the White Terror in Taiwan, to the legacies of McCarthyism and Tiananmen Square 1989 – have been widely covered in fiction and nonfiction in recent years, producing, at times, the sense that it is more
than literally treading old (but nevertheless painful) ground. Where the novel truly comes to life, however, is when it reaches the near present, with characters burdened by a sense of belonging to places that no longer exist, connected to people whose languages they no longer speak. Indeed its primary theme, which builds through the family’s constant shedding (in turns by compulsion and choice) of one life for the next, is one that speaks to the status of immigrant and refugee communities everywhere: how much of the person you are today is the product of the people and cultures that came before? Or as the author puts it, what do you do when your logic of survival means that ‘facing any one way means turning your back on another’?
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It’s appropriate – as each character’s past in turn attains the status of legend – that the book draws its title and most of its more poetic thematics from a fifth-century fable by Tao Yuanming, in which a fisherman stumbles across a utopia hidden behind a forest of peach trees and a rocky grotto (the title, Tao Hua Yuan, has since become a standard term for utopia) that you can leave but never return to. And that it’s the tale’s various retellings that form a thread connecting one generation to the next. One way of looking at all this is that nothing ever changes; the other is that life is a process of coming to terms with constant change. Whichever path you chose, Fu offers an emotional yet elegant ride. Nirmala Devi
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on the cover Design by Pedro Cid Proença, typeset in Nizioleti, designed by John Morgan and Adrien Vasquez, 2011–17, and available at abyme.net. Nizioleti is a reflection of Venice’s sign system, painted letters stencilled within white plaster panels directly onto the city walls, in use since the early nineteenth century
Words on the spine and on pages 27, 47 and 77 are from Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, 1894
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An update on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just blinked into my newsfeed: ‘Russia bombs Mariupol art school sheltering 400 people’. It’s only the latest atrocity to be inflicted on the southeastern port city, which looks likely to have been reduced to rubble by the time you read this. Back on 24 February, at the beginning of the siege and before a series of escalating massacres, Russian troops cut off water, electricity and heating supplies, and blocked incoming transports of food and medical aid. Not long after that, Mariupol mayor Vadym Boychenko was on the radio describing how trapped citizens were grateful, at least, for the snow, because it provided water to drink. The impending starvation of Mariupol’s residents grimly recalls the Soviet Union’s Holodomor (‘death by hunger’), a man-made famine that killed between seven and ten million ethnically-Ukrainian people in the region between 1932 and 1933. Now, people in Mariupol are drinking from puddles. The day after the invasion began, food NGOs and initiatives like World Central Kitchen (WCK, founded by Spanish chef José Andrés) set up emergency food stations across Ukraine and in neighbouring countries where refugees continue to travel. Local chefs and restaurants in 12 cities including Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and Mykolayiv have been able to partner with WCK, which is supplying those chefs with fresh ingredients to feed citizens who have remained in their cities, as well as the Ukrainian military. A month ago, chefs like Ievgen Klopotenko, Kharkiv-native Igor Mezentsev, Kyiv-based Eleonora Baranova and Volodymyr Yaroslavskyy were on the cusp of launching a ‘revival of ethnic Ukrainian cuisine’; now they are cooking for their country’s survival. Elsewhere, chefs including UK-based Ukrainian Olia Hercules and Russian Alissa Timoshkina are organising fundraisers to gather financial support for UNICEF, using social media and #cookforukraine to encourage others to join in. For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about a passage from Susan Sontag’s ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ (2003) in which she describes war experienced as ‘living room sights and sounds’. She’s talking about the way in which stories, photos and footage of human crises and war have come to permeate our everyday lives – images of bombed blocks of flats flickering onto our TV screens, for example – which we absorb from the safety of our own homes. As much as she urges the audience not to turn away, but rather to consider looking continuously and directly at the tragedy as a form of empathy or witnessing, she also warns that ‘watching up close… is still just watching’.
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Aftertaste
Borscht by Fi Churchman
News footage broadcast by the BBC, not long after Ukraine was invaded, showed a woman spoon-feeding a toddler soup. She could have been his mother, his aunt, his older sister. She was holding a brown paper bowl of steaming liquid, not looking at – or noticing – the camera trained on her, her focus entirely on getting the little boy to eat. He was fidgeting a little, but silently gulping down mouthfuls of thin red broth. Both were wearing puffer jackets, because it is cold outside at the voluntary food station in Lviv where they had stopped for nourishment before moving on (perhaps they will stay in the far west of Ukraine; perhaps they will seek shelter in a neighbouring country: their future, like that of so many others, is unsure). A volunteer ladling out bowls of hot soup tells the reporter, “It’s borscht, it gives us strength”. Borscht is typically recognised as an earthy, soured, bright-red soup stuffed full of beetroot, carrots, onions, potato, cabbage, a little meat, and served with a dollop of sour cream. Its countless variations are noted in Hercules’s 2020 cookbook, Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine – from green (sorrelbased) and white (rye-based) broths to meat and vegetarian versions, to the inclusion of different acidic ingredients such as sour cherries,
fermented tomatoes and apples, or unripe apricots and plums. Borscht, made across Ukraine, its Eastern European neighbours and Russia, speaks as much to the diversity of cultures among the Slavic countries as it does to the similarities in their culinary traditions. Though it’s difficult to disentangle that latter from the homogenisation that such cultures underwent within the Soviet Union: tasked with pulling together a national Soviet cuisine, Stalin’s commissar of the food industry, Anastas Mikoyan, produced The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), which swallowed Ukraine’s borscht, along with other nations’ and cultures’ dishes, including Georgia’s beef-soup kharcho and the Ashkenazi Jewish honey-drenched pastry teiglach. UNESCO is currently deciding whether or not borscht will be included as one of Ukraine’s items of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The application was made in 2021 and spearheaded by Klopotenko, who along with a team of researchers (including historians, folklorists, ethnographers and philologists) has been championing his country’s claim to the soup. (That assertion is largely based on historical accounts predating the Russian Empire, where original recipes called for borscht’s eponymous ingredient, pickled borshchivnyk, or hogweed, and was first mentioned in the diary of the Dominican monk and merchant Martin Gruneweg in 1584 – the signature beetroot wasn’t introduced until about 200 years later.) While Klopotenko risks brushing aside other countries’ affinities with the soup, his effort is singularly focused on resisting Russia’s attempts to claim borscht as their national dish. In mid-March Klopotenko posted a video showing himself and other chefs at a WCK tent in Lviv, stirring a massive vat of borscht. The thing that struck me about this and other images of volunteers preparing food for people was that in making this gesture, they somehow weren’t strangers to one another anymore; they were connected through the simple transfer of sustenance from one hand to the other. It’s hard to imagine what will become of Mariupol’s people – whether more citizens will be able to evacuate, and if they do, what condition they’ll be in. Watching up close is still just watching – until it makes you act. Donations to World Central Kitchen can be made at https://donate.wck.org/ give/236738/#!/donation/checkout #cookforukraine is fundraising for UNICEF at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/ cookforukraine/