ArtReview Asia Winter 2021 by ArtReview

Taiki Sakpisit

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ArtReview Asia vol 9 no 3 Winter 2021

Who the… As the world starts to reopen, tentatively, towards some form of postpandemic future, as some of us begin to travel and reconnect across borders and varying worldviews, this issue of ArtReview Asia addresses a variety of works that tackle the relationships between power and geography. It looks back to the ruptured relationship between the Aboriginal Yolngu people of Australia’s Northern Territory and their cultural interactions with Macassan fisherpeople almost two centuries before they had contact with invaders from Europe. Europeans who cut short those interactions at the beginning of the twentieth century, when they denied the Macassans fishing permits, while both the Yolngu and the Macassans preserved them in their cultural artefacts and inherited traditions. Bangkok-based filmmaker Taiki Sakpisit, on the other hand, uses the techniques and history of cinema to unpack Thailand’s troubled past, using those techniques to embed a resounding, but subtly expressed, political commitment in his experimental films. Elsewhere ArtReview Asia looks back at the output of pioneering documentary filmmaker Haneda Sumiko and her equally subtle negotiations of the urban and the rural and gender stereotyping in postwar Japan. Meanwhile Cian Dayrit, whose work will be on show as part of next year’s Biennale of Sydney, uses ‘counter-cartography’ in the form of large handsewn maps that subvert normal cartographic power structures to reframe the ideals of history and heritage in his native Philippines. The same subjects haunt Shirin Neshat’s latest body of work, which focuses on her position as an ‘American immigrant’ and the possibilities and restrictions that identity offers in relation to her upbringing in Iran. Many of these artists interrogate the relationship between where we are and who we are, the restrictions on how those two things are expressed, whether through censorship or disapproval, and the ways in which those issues can be subverted or overcome to present some sort of true self. A task that all of us are going to have to engage with going forward. ArtReview Asia

Tiger

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MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SER IES 2 0 21 NEWS FROM NOWHERE

FREEDOM VILLAGE

M M C A H Y U N D A I M O T O R S E R I E S 2 0 21 MOON K YUNGWON & JEON JOONHO NEWS FROM NOWHERE, FREEDOM VILL AGE MMCA SEOUL GALLERY 5, SEOUL BOX

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Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 14

Points of View Ross Chen, Deepa Bhasthi, Max Crosbie-Jones 28

Art Featured

Taiki Sakpisit by Max Crosbie-Jones 36 Cian Dayrit by Marv Recinto 46 Haneda Sumiko by Ren Scateni 52

Fragmented Histories: the Yolngu and Macassan Exchange by Neha Kale 58 Shirin Neshat interviewed by Fi Churchman 64

page 20 Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Dark Side of the Moon, 2017, stop motion animation, 6 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artists; Tanya Bonakdar, New York & Los Angeles; Gió Marconi, Milan; Lisson Gallery, London

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions 74

books 94

The Distance from Here, by Rahel Aima Abbas Akhavan, by En Liang Khong 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, by Andrew Russeth Liquid Ground, by Aaina Bhargava Khaleejiness, by Rahel Aima 5th Passage, by Adeline Chia Danh Vo, by Ana Vukadin Crip Time, by Emily McDermott Berlin Atonal: Metabolic Rift, by Martin Herbert Mixing It Up, by David Trigg

Where at Home: Paint or Die, by Jochen Hiltmann, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Names for Light: A Family History, by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, reviewed by Adeline Chia Dark Neighbourhoods, by Vanessa Onwuemezi, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Dancer: A Biography for Philippa Cullen, by Evelyn Juers, reviewed by Naomi Riddle Strangers on a Pier, by Tash Aw, reviewed by Louise Darblay Fifty Sounds, by Polly Barton, reviewed by Adeline Chia Walk on the Water, edited by Marc-Olivier Wahler, reviewed by Nirmala Devi aftertaste 102

page 80 Cui Jie, Rainfall Pavilion, 2021, 150 × 100 cm, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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Art Previewed

Was large and handsome 13

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18 Julie Gough, Manifestation (Bruny Island), 2010, giclee print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper, 40 × 60 cm (paper 60 × 80 cm). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Biennale of Sydney

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Previewed 1 West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center, Shanghai 11–14 November 2 Art021 Shanghai Exhibition Center 11–14 November 3 Do It edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Cao Dan 4 Liang Shaoji Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 20 March 5 George Condo Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai Through 28 November 6 Chiharu Shiota Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai 18 December – 6 March

7 Karrabing Film Collective Institute of Contemporary Arts, nyu Shanghai Through 18 December 8 Tang Chao Vanguard Gallery Non-Physical Online now 9 Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai November tbc 10 Jia Aili tank, Shanghai Dates tbc 11 Maurizio Cattelan ucca Beijing 20 November – 20 February 12 Hong Kong: Here and Beyond m+, Hong Kong 12 November – 27 November 13 Isa Genzken David Zwirner, Hong Kong Through 20 November

15 Shigeko Kubota moma, New York Through 1 January mot, Tokyo 13 November – 23 February 16 Apichatpong Weerasethakul 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok Part 1: through 14 November Part 2: 25 November – 27 February 17 Thailand Biennale Various venues, Korat 18 December – 31 March 18 Biennale of Sydney Various venues, Sydney 12 March – 13 June 19 Bani Abidi mca Chicago Through 5 June 20 Xen Shin Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 18 November – 3 July

14 Damien Hirst White Cube, Hong Kong 24 November – 8 January

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Entering Frieze London, this past month, ArtReview Asia walked in not to a series of booths fronted by a series of gallerists desperate to pounce on the first passerby who even vaguely looked like a collector, but rather to a barrage of emails telling it about why it needed to be in Paris the following week – for France’s premier art fair, fiac. Then there was another set proclaiming the virtues of Artissima in Turin. And another set still urging it to preregister for Art Basel Miami Beach in December. As a collective body, ArtReview Asia may look like it gets around a lot, but in the main, the individual parts have barely left their neighbourhoods for the past two years. So, naturally, the lifestyle projected by all this barrage of

bluster and the suggested urgency of participation in it seemed at once weird, exotic and slightly hysterical. Meanwhile, back in the real world (online), Artnet speculated about what the ‘next big art destination’ would be as we ‘emerge’ from the pandemic (depending on who it asked, it was, in their order of preference: Los Angeles, Seoul, Lagos, Accra, Paris, New York and, presumably as a nod to the fact that there had actually been, and still is, a global pandemic that’s travelling a lot more than any human being at the moment, ‘where you live’). The Financial Times was proud to declare London the world’s cryptoart capital (yeah, ArtReview Asia also thought that the whole point of crypto was to get

away from traditional ideas of nation-states and their organisations). And The Art Newspaper waxed lyrical about how Seoul was going to replace Hong Kong as ‘the art capital of Asia’. (During its fair, by the way, Frieze introduced Patrick Lee – then still serving collectors at Frieze London and Frieze Masters in his capacity as executive director of Seoul’s Gallery Hyundai – as the director of its new fair in the Korean capital, scheduled for 2–5 September 2022.) Indeed, as Europe drowns itself in an orgy of art fairs, the postpandemic ‘emergence’ that seemed a tentative proposition only a few weeks ago now feels like a full-on speed race. Meanwhile, any time it’s near an art fair, ArtReview Asia’s contact-tracing app continues to ping for close-contact alerts

1 West Bund Art Center, Shanghai. Courtesy West Bund Art & Design, Shanghai

Art021 at Shanghai Exhibition Center. Courtesy Art021, Shanghai

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Art021, 2020. Courtesy Art021, Shanghai

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3 Chen Zhou, Fart, sketch. Published in Do It, 2021, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Cao Dan

faster than a Tokyo pachinko parlour. Still, ArtReview Asia is nothing if not adept a tuning into the changing rhythm of the times. And yet it seems that this moment, more than ever, is one in which those rhythms are hard to distinguish. On the one hand there’s a clear impetus to reestablish the old-world connection between global financial centres and global art centres. Which seems a bit of a turnaround to ArtReview Asia, given all the time it, and many others, spent over the past years investing in discourses related to colonialism and postcolonialism; decentred narratives and pluralisms within art’s histories; issues connected to contemporary art’s impact on the environment (through, among other things, the constant circulation

of artworks and art people around the world); and the idea that the previews it drops on you every issue were more a guide to what was going on in places you wouldn’t be able to reach, rather than somewhere you were all going to rush onto the nearest plane to get to. ArtReview Asia is starting to feel like a bit of a weirdo. Although maybe that’s because the only other person it saw over the past two years was its own reflection in its bathroom mirror. And all of the above is not to say it’s not nice to see other people and real artworks again though. It is. For those of you looking to resocialise yourselves at the deep end of art, this month sees the return of China’s two art1 fair titans, Westbund Art & Design and

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2 Art021, both of which take place in Shanghai. Both feature a lineup of local and international galleries, although China’s strict pandemic-related quarantine restrictions will clearly limit the extent of the participation of the latter. For those of you not ready to be out and about, look out for the Chinese 3 variant of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing Do It project (this one produced in collaboration with Cao Dan), which originally began way back in 1993 following a conversation between the globetrotting curator and the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. Conceived as an alternative exhibition model, the project comprises instructions by artists for artworks that audiences can make at home. Naturally it’s a format that came into its own

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4 Liang Shaoji, Snow Cover – Stranded, 2019–21, mobile phones, branches, chip, silk, cocoons, wooden board, 404 × 122 × 43 cm. Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai

5 George Condo, The Picture Gallery, 2002, oil on canvas, 127 × 142 × 3 cm. Photo: Martin Parsekian. © the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai

during the recent lockdowns. This edition features 100 instructional works by Chinese artists and artists from the Greater China region (from Cai Guo-Qiang to Chou Yu-Cheng). The book is scheduled for release late November. But be warned, even if you are avoiding the social swirl of the fair, you might want to make sure that you’re on your own before you attempt Chen Zhou’s project: Fart. Over at the Power Station of Art, A Silky Entanglement, the sixth instalment of the psa’s ‘Collection Focus’ series, zooms in on the work 4 of Liang Shaoji. The seventy-eight-year-old’s career has been dominated by what might best be described as a ‘collaborative’ practice with silkworms that results in everything from sculpture and installation to sound art

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and performance. Liang’s work fuses an interest in Chinese tradition (mulberry worms were first domesticated and used to spin silk in ancient China), the intertwining of natural and industrial processes, relationships between humans and the environment and an education in tapestry at the China Art Academy. Works on show feature chairs, chains and mobile telephones encased in silk and pupae that naturally evoke our cocooned experiences of the last two years while also encouraging us to reflect on our place in the world, its cycles of life and what we actually produce during that time. For a collection show, it’s more timely than most. A radically different view of life is on show at the Long Museum (now reopened after a

two-day closure that, according to the institution, was mandated in order to balance power consumption over September’s Mid-Autumn Festival holiday), which is hosting a retrospective of paintings by 5 George Condo. The American takes inspiration for his paintings from the traditions of Western art-history spiced up by samplings from its popular culture – comics, cartoons and music. The result is by turns cute and grotesque, but offers a notion of time and history that has more of the flavour of a buffet than a fixed course meal. Something that will resonate with those of us who are witnessing the rewriting of histories across the continent. The New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni was tapped to curate the Condo show, but the

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Long Museum turns its head back east for its next production, an exhibition of work (‘the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever’) by Berlin-based Japanese 6 artist Chiharu Shiota, which travels from the Mori Museum in Tokyo and is curated by its director, Mami Kataoka. While the early works by the artist covered performance, she is best known for largescale installations in which she constructs webs of thread or hoses around everyday objects. The end result will be an interesting coda to Liang’s exhibition, although Shiota’s output focuses on the network of human-to-human and personal relations, and the connections between psyche to space. A related aesthetic, then, but a different philosophy.

Closer to Liang’s, perhaps, is the work of 7 the Karrabing Film Collective, a retrospective of which (shown for the first time in Asia) is up at the ica at nyu Shanghai. Karrabing is a grassroots indigenous media group from Australia’s Northern Territory, all but one of whose members were born in the rural Belyuen community that developed out of what was, during the 1940s, an internment camp. Broadly speaking their work (which takes the form of films and moving-image installations) analyses contemporary settler colonialism. Or, more directly, what it is like to experience life in the communities from which Karrabings’s members are drawn and how those communities adapt their traditions to life today. In the Emmiyengal language,

‘karrabing’ describes the time at which the tide is furthest from the shore. Covered in the work are issues of land extraction and sovereignty, and notions that the land and the people who live on it are governed by systems and interconnections that are more complex than anything that can be described by a two-dimensional map. Even of the Google variety. Those of you who are into that type of 8 thing will want to check out Tang Chao’s Shimmer, the second instalment of Shanghai’s Vanguard Gallery’s ‘nonphysical’ exhibition programme, in this case accessed via the Dianping app (best known as a way of exploring Shanghai’s restaurants and food delivery services) or Baidu maps. Keywords

6 Chiharu Shiota, I hope…, 2021, rope, paper, steel, dimensions variable. Photo: Sunhi Mang. © the artist and vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021. Courtesy König Galerie, Berlin & London 8 Tang Chao, Shimmer, 2021, online exhibition. Courtesy Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai

7 Karrabing Film Collective, Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (still), 2016, single-channel video, colour, sound, 29 min 5 sec. Courtesy the artists

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provided by the artist allow viewers to virtually visit geographic locations around Shanghai and encounter a series of paintings and videos that span a mixture of natural scenes to human-made environments that accumulate into a parallel and illusory second universe. An illusory universe of another kind is on show (irl) at Shanghai’s Prada Rong Zhai. 9 There Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg present a series of works that feature the former’s clay animations and the latter’s musical scores that combine in the form of installations and animations exploring the drivers of human relationships in their basest form: jealousy, lust, revenge and greed. As in the work of Condo, the cute

meets the grotesque in a parallel universe in which humanity is stripped bare. If Djurberg and Berg work to strip back our illusions about who we are, then Beijing10 based painter Jia Aili takes illusion as his subject matter. ‘When we’re looking at a figurative painting, our usual response is to focus on the perception created illusionistically rather than on the illusion itself,’ the artist said recently. ‘It’s the same in our daily behaviour: people often use the perceptions created by illusion to understand and ponder the world and measure what they see. When we look at paintings, we need to broaden our perspective and see the illusion itself, or go farther and try to experience the whole process of illusion. That’s when

we may really begin to understand painting.’ While past works have featured apocalyptic landscapes with toppled statues of Lenin, Dolly the cloned sheep, naked figures sporting gas masks and burning oil fields as the ruined technological achievements of various heroic ages, Jia works with the illusory effects of geometry as well – a human figure and a circle creating the idea of corpulence, for example. The aim he suggests is to make us question easy perceptions of reality and lead us towards a deeper notion of truth. This month he leads his followers to a solo exhibition at tank Shanghai. Plays with illusion and delusion dominate 11 the work of Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian artist whose rise to stardom has seen him

9 Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Dark Side of the Moon, 2017, stop-motion animation, 6 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artists; Tanya Bonakdar, New York & Los Angeles; Gió Marconi, Milan; Lisson Gallery

10 Jia Aili, Hermit from the planet, 2015–16, oil on canvas, 400 × 600 cm. Photo: Chao Yang. © Jia Aili Studio. Courtesy Gagosian

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create carpets in the shape of packaged Italian cheese, sculptures of a penitent Hitler, the pope being hit by a meteorite and depressed squirrels shooting themselves in the head; and seen him gaffer-tape his gallerists to the walls of their galleries for his exhibitions and then gaffer-tape bananas to the walls of their art-fair booths to double down on the joke. All of it to great acclaim from the artworld and widespread sniggering from the world at large. Earlier this year, however, in Milan, for his first exhibition for over a decade, his work took on a more sombre tone, in the form of a journey into terror, tackling tragedy (the 9/11 attacks in New York) and death, while still unpicking some of the hubris behind monuments and memorials in works of art.

You’ll get a chance to see this pilgrim’s progress at Beijing’s ucca, where a show curated by Francesco Bonami (yes him, the man who used social media to say that he felt like a thirty-five-year-old Iranian lesbian rather than an aging white-man, and that his pancreas was prized as a delicacy and was the object of a cult in all of Asia… but in China in particular) presents an overview of the artist’s work. Perhaps Bonami is part of the joke. Or perhaps simply gives you another reason to head to Beijing and venerate. But for the big pilgrimage you’ll be wanting to head to Hong Kong, where m+, the island’s museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century ‘visual culture’ is scheduled to open its doors, almost two

decades after it was first announced and following years of delays and postponements. During the course of that time, an institution that was envisaged and promoted as being Asia’s equivalent to New York’s moma and London’s Tate, and that would both broaden and complicate the histories – and definitions of art – set out in both of those ‘venerable’ institutions, is now being looked at anew as a testing ground for the limits of artistic freedom in the wake of the recent and much discussed crackdowns on free speech and democracy in the sar. Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen (1997, part of a series of photographs showing the artist raising his middle finger at sites of authority and national identity around the world), about

11 Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996, taxidermied squirrel, ceramic, Formica, wood, paint, steel, 45 × 60 × 48 cm. Photo: Zeno Zotti. Courtesy the artist and ucca, Beijing

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13 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2015, mixed media, 338 × 360 × 300 cm. © the artist and vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne & Shanghai; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

12 Tsang Tsou-choi (aka King of Kowloon), Untitled (Partial Map of Kowloon), c. 1994–97, ink on printed paper, 88 × 32 cm. © the artist. Courtesy m+, Hong Kong

which the artist was repeatedly questioned in relation to his patriotism (‘a blatant attack on the state’, Ai records one of his interrogators saying in his newly published memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows) during his incarceration in China in 2011, has already been removed from the m+ website (although other of his works remain). Nevertheless, the depth and range of m+’s holdings (which span everything from art and architecture to popular culture, and includes collections – among them Uli Sigg’s outstanding collection of Chinese art, full documentation of the performance works of TaiwaneseAmerican artist Tehching Hsieh, the complete archives of pioneering Seoul-based web artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and the

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complete archives of groundbreaking British pop-architects Archigram, to name just the tiniest fraction – means that it has the potential to be a game-changing addition to the continent’s art ecology. The institution opens with six shows: the first focusing on the Sigg Collection (of which Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen, definitively not on 12 display, is a part); the second, Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, on the development of visual culture in the sar from 1960 to today; a presentation of Antony Gormley’s Asian Field (2003), a series of clay figures made with 300 inhabitants of Huadong Town in Guangzhou, China; The Dream of the Museum, focused on the work of conceptual-art pioneers Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Yoko

Ono and Nam June Paik; a design and architecture show, Things, Spaces, Interactions; and Individuals, Networks, Expressions, a show that promises to navigate the relations between individual and collective experience. Plus, naturally, a series of new commissions. Perhaps not all roads lead to Seoul. As m+ opens, so some of Hong Kong’s international galleries bring in the big guns. David Zwirner opts for a regional debut for one of Germany’s most influential artists of 13 the past half-century, Isa Genzken, whose work, executed in a range of media, but above all sculpture, has sought to document the relations between the individual and the forces that have shaped postmodern society, among them capitalism, consumerism and

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rapid technological development, as well as the relation between high and popular culture. Genzken’s Rose ii (2007), an 8.5-metre tall metal sculpture of a stemmed red rose, continues to poke its way out from among the booming metal skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s skyline outside the k11 Musea at Victoria Docks on the tip of the Kowloon 14 Peninsula. Over at White Cube, it’s Damien Hirst’s moment. On show are a series of sculptures from the artist’s 2017 Venice installation, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a series of ‘artefacts’ – part classical sculpture, part Pirates of the Caribbean movie prop – putatively ‘discovered’ at a fictitious underwater shipwreck alongside a new series of paintings titled Revelations.

One true pioneer having a moment right 15 now is the late Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota. Born in Niigata, educated in Tokyo (she trained as a sculptor) and off to New York in 1963 to join the Fluxus group, Kubota (who died in 2015) committed to video as a medium during the 1970s (while living with Nam June Paik, who later became her life partner), declaring that the new technology was ‘like a paintbrush’ and became one of the first artists to explore multichannel installations, the incorporation of video into three-dimensional structures and early video-processing techniques. Inspired by a meeting, in 1968, with Marcel Duchamp, she produced Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976), a wooden staircase with

video monitors inlaid into the steps displaying a female nude model descending: the first video sculpture to be acquired by New York’s moma, which currently hosts her first solo exhibition in the us for 25 years. Simultaneously, mot Tokyo hosts the first exhibition of Kubota’s work in her homeland for three decades, charting the course of her career and featuring the full suite of her Duchamp-inspired works (which also includes a series of liquid-crystal displays mounted on spinning bicycle wheels) and more of her video sculptures, which by the 1980s and 90s had expanded to include moving water and kinetic elements. Over in Bangkok, 100 Tonson Foundation is putting on a two-part exhibition of work by

15 Shigeko Kubota, Korean Grave, 1993, mixed media, dimensions variable (installation view, Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 2021). Photo: Yukihiro Yoshihara. © Estate of the artist

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one of today’s masters of moving image: 16 Thai director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Fresh off winning the Cannes Jury Prize for his latest feature film (and first English-language production), Memoria (2021), the filmmaker returns to Isan, in northeastern Thailand. It is an area that has long been politically and socially repressed; it’s also where he spent his childhood. Filmed during the recent period of pandemic-related lockdowns, the works that comprise the exhibition, titled A Minor History, juxtapose official narratives and the accounts, memories and beliefs of ordinary locals, interrogating, with references to the history of Thai cinema, the relationship between fiction and ‘history’.

Staying in Isan: Korat, one of the district’s four major cities, hosts the second edition of 17 the Thailand Biennale. Originally scheduled to take place last year, the exhibition, titled Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital, is directed by former mot director Yuko Hasegawa. As the title suggests, the project is designed to focus on the local ecologies and the ability of art to produce what Hasegawa (drawing on a phrase coined by economist Hirofumi Uzawa) describes as ‘social common capital’, that is to say spiritual and material enrichment. The producers include 54 artists and collectives from 26 countries, among them Chile’s Atacama Desert Foundation, Thailand’s Montien Boonma and Kwanchai Lichaikul, China’s

Liu Chuang and Yang Fudong, uk-based Keiken, the usa’s David Hammons and Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson and superflex. The Biennale of Sydney returns this 18 coming March, with an edition titled rīvus, curated by Colombian José Roca. The focus naturally is on rivers, wetlands and other salt- and freshwater ecosystems, here imagined as living networks with social and political agency, and drawing on indigenous knowledges that understand nonhuman entities as living beings, the right to life and the legal protections that come with personhood. Over 60 artists (see features for more on Cian Dayrit) and collectives from around the world will be entering into dialogue with these aqueous beings to ask questions such

16 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, A Minor History, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Supatra Srithongkum and Sutiwat Kumpai. Courtesy 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok

17 Keiken with Obso1337 and Ryan Vautier, Wisdoms for Love 3.0, 2021, poster. Courtesy the artists

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20 Shen Xin, The Provocation of the Nightingale (still), 2018, four-channel video installation. Courtesy the artist

19 Bani Abidi, The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared, 2021 (installation view, mca Chicago). Photo: Nathan Keay. © mca Chicago. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

as, ‘Can a river sue us over psychoactive sewage? Will oysters grow teeth in aquatic revenge? What do the eels think? Are the swamp oracles speaking in tongues? Do algae reminisce about the days of primordial soup? And are waves the ocean’s desire?’ To give art fairs their due, one can approach them by dispensing with the socialising and just focusing on the works. With peopleblinkers on, one of the highlights of this year’s 19 Art Basel was Bani Abidi’s photographic work The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), on show at Experimenter’s booth. A collection of photographs taken from news media, this archive of rhetorical hand gestures (of politicians including Mao, Stalin and Trump) collectively constitutes a mute

and empty portrait of masculine leadership. Funny and frightening at the same time, the whole portrays a relational aesthetics that doesn’t include any relations at all. This work is also included in the Berlin-based Pakistani artist’s retrospective exhibition The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared, currently on show at the mca Chicago, which focuses on critiques of power and how it is deployed, with particular reference to the fraught and sometimes idiotic relations between India and Pakistan, to gender relations and to militarism and nationalism on a more general level. Abidi’s works, which span photography, video and sound, among other media, use humour and absurdity to reveal truths about their subjects, in a way

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that is as surgical as it is often hilarious. A balance that very few artists manage to achieve. On the subject of delicate balances, this month also sees Chengdu-born, Minnesota20 based Shen Xin’s latest videowork, Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020; originally shown as part of the last Gwangju Biennale), go on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In this work, a pair of women enact what appears to be a conversation about a business deal, but then turns out to conceal another discussion about statelessness, colonialism and the erasure of histories in South Korea, giving presence to ghosts and voice to the voiceless, and testing the limits and lacunae of language and custom in addressing the subject of life. Nirmala Devi

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Points of View

Once upon a time, Hong Kong cinema was free and thriving. This resulted in many terrible films, but fast productions and faster box office allowed many filmmakers to do whatever they pleased, resulting in a sizeable number of commercial films with an artistry and fearlessness to be admired. It was under the auspices of the commercial film industry indeed that many great Hong Kong artists got their start. Wong Kar-wai’s existential musings were first glimpsed in gangster films, and Johnnie To cut his cinematic baby teeth on madcap comedies. Even Stanley Kwan, whose output has never seemed very commercial, began with star vehicles. Up to and even after the 1997 Hong Kong handover, filmmakers would not hesitate to express trepidation or fear towards Hong Kong’s absorption into Greater China. But filmmakers’ financial freedom to create had begun to wither during the 1990s. Hollywood, with its cgi spectacles and movies starring dinosaurs and superheroes, took over the world, and Hong Kong cinema lost local lustre. There have been successes in the new millennium, but with financial risk increasing, words like ‘fearless’ would be used less and less to describe the industry. The vast mainland market did arrive to rescue Hong Kong cinema financially, but there

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protest films A new wave of censorship has come to Hong Kong’s film industry. But, says Ross Chen, those who can be creative will still be able to make their voices heard

Inside the Red Brick Wall, 2020, dir Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers

was a trade-off: in chasing the yuan, Hong Kong cinema would have to cater to mainland audiences and regulatory agencies, meaning even less specificity for Hong Kongers. Films would take place in Hong Kong and feature Hong Kong stars, but the content was selfadjusted by filmmakers to suit the mainland. That’s not exactly fearless filmmaking. But still a cinema did emerge to represent Hong Kong. Locally focused movies like Adam Wong’s The Way We Dance (2013), Oliver Chan’s Still Human (2018), Wong Chun’s Mad World (2016) and Norris Wong’s My Prince Edward (2019) earned plaudits and press, and the Hong Kong government has made an admirable effort to encourage young filmmakers, such as launching the First Feature Film Initiative, which provides funding and guidance for new filmmakers; and also the Directors’ Succession Scheme, a programme partnering veteran directors with young counterparts. Considering that Wong Kar-wai, Peter Chan and Derek Yee are participating in the latter, excitement is warranted. But the creativity of these young filmmakers will doubtless be challenged. One year after the 2020 arrival of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, the Hong Kong film industry was informed of proposed amendments to its Film Censorship Ordinance. Among the proposals,

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Hong Kong films could now be censored on the basis of safeguarding national security. Filmmakers could now theoretically get in trouble for saying things or showing things in their films that might be interpreted as violating national security. For an example of what constitutes a national security violation in present-day Hong Kong, there’s the recent conviction of former waiter Tong Ying-kit, whose flying of a flag bearing a popular pro-democracy slogan was described by prosecutors as inciting secession. Politicians have been arrested for simply vowing to oppose government policies if elected. In this atmosphere, even if Hong Kong filmmakers don’t attempt political subjects, who knows when something they do will be interpreted as violating national security? The mainland’s censorship bureau has long been famous for moving goalposts, and it’s anticipated that Hong Kong’s censors will show the same mercurial tendencies. Much of this dance between artists and censors is reactionary; an increasing number of films and documentaries chronicling the divide between Hong Kong and the mainland precipitated the National Security Law. The law’s creation was a reaction not only to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, but also to the culture surrounding them. Over the past decade, the simmering discontent of Hong Kong’s activist class has spread to all corners of society. Film is now just another front in the National Security Law’s battle against dissent. Besides making film subject to national security concerns, the recent amendments also increase punishments for illegal screenings, and even allow government officials to revoke existing film approval. Everything cultural is now a nail, and the National Security Law is the hammer. Art installations, museum exhibitions, cultural symposiums – some or all could experience the same inhibiting effect. More chillingly, the boundaries of free expression in future Hong Kong films remain unknown. Obviously, any documentary covering the 2019 protests is in danger of censure, if not in the near future then retroactively: this could plausibly occur with protest documentary Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020), which had public screenings pulled in 2020 and was likely a big reason that the Film Censorship Ordinance amendments were proposed in the first place. However, while documentary filmmakers may find opposition from authorities at home, they’ll be greeted abroad with open arms. Anticipating local regulation, director Kiwi Chow premiered Revolution of Our Times (2021),

a 152-minute documentary covering the 2019 protests, at the Cannes Film Festival. Eschewing local screenings for international play is a viable option for activist filmmakers, though who knows what price they’ll pay in Hong Kong. Chow has decided not to leave and will face whatever backlash, if any, comes his way. When making fiction films, it gets dicier. You can imagine many filmmakers concocting narratives taking place in and around the 2019 protests, but the authorities are likely set on disallowing those productions, and it’s harder to work on a fiction film in secret, as Chow did with his documentary. It’s conceivable that the goalposts could shift towards a more permissible stance, but that possibility seems remote. What will we talk about one day when we think of the 2019 Hong Kong protests in film? Probably not a lot. For Hong Kong filmmakers wanting to channel this activist spirit into their fiction films, perhaps the best option is to get even more imaginative and inventive. The resources

Coffin Homes, 2021, dir Fruit Chan

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are there to make local films – so do it, don’t talk explicitly about things that are controversial and instead tell stories that creatively reflect what you can’t talk about. Probably the best current Hong Kong filmmaker doing this is Fruit Chan, whose The Midnight After (2014) captured the emotions of conflicted Hong Kongers while telling an apocalyptic sci-fi tale, and his recent Coffin Homes (2021) performs the same trick using the horror genre against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s oppressive housing market. Censors have existed since the dawn of film, and filmmakers have found a way to tell their stories regardless. Necessity is the mother of invention, and for Hong Kong cinema the need is greater than ever.

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The architecture of a ‘Gulf house’ hardly ever adheres to a particular style or school of thought, but for those even vaguely familiar with the social history of the migrant Malayali, these houses are easy to tell apart from the rest of Kerala’s building styles. According to the 2018 Kerala Migration Survey (kms), conducted by the Centre for Development Studies, 2.1 million people from Kerala were working abroad that year, employed in a range of blue-collar and professional capacities. Of these, an overwhelming majority, 89 percent, or 1.89 million, lived in the Gulf peninsular region – the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The survey estimated that one in four Indians in the Gulf was from Kerala. This Malayalam-speaking population from India’s southernmost state are colloquially referred to as Gulf Malayalis. While the migrants are spread across religions, over 40 percent are Muslims, according to kms, including the Mappila community from Kerala’s northern Malabar region.

ghost houses Kerala’s gaudy showhomes reveal more than intended, writes Deepa Bhasthi

Houses built with Gulf money tend to be huge, bigger than most middle-class homes in India. They liberally borrow elements from art deco, Palladian and other identifiable architectural styles, as well as aesthetics picked up from social media, the houses of celebrities photographed for local magazines or the homes of arbabs – masters/bosses – in the Gulf. A lot of these palatial bungalows are also vacant for up to ten months each year. According to the 2011 census figures, the latest numbers available, about 11 percent of houses in Kerala, roughly 1.19 million, lie empty. This is a lot higher than the national average of 7.45 percent. What and who are these houses for if they are only lived in for two to three months a year? Does the house, inanimate as it is, feel a sense of abandonment? Why does one build a house that may never really become a home? These are among the questions Juneida Abdul Jabber,

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Shahnaz Hashim and Zahra Mansoor, an artist, an architect and a researcher respectively, based between Dubai and Kerala, have been seeking to answer via their research project Another Empty House (2020–). All three belong to the Mappila community, and the focus of their research has, so far, been on case studies and examples from within this section of the migrant population. Their first production, an experimental video collage called Weight of Emptiness (2021), treats these empty houses as feeling entities that experience loneliness and neglect for the greater part of the year, except for the brief months in summer and winter when they are filled with people returning ‘home’ on vacation, for weddings or festivities. The three-minute video, recently screened as part of an online show for Rumman Collective – artists and researchers who promote dialogue and collaboration between early-career artists – represents a whole year, every 15 seconds standing for one month. Shots show a dead cockroach, a clock whose fading battery struggles to power the second hand, white sheets covering furniture, while rubbings made against crumbling walls are overlaid on the images. As the summer months approach, the pace picks up, suitcases are wheeled in, the family returns. There is a wedding, the laundry basket is full, as is the wardrobe. There are several pairs of footwear by the front door. The kitchen is busy, as is the dining table, where people gather. Then sheets are returned to the sofa and chairs, carpets are rolled up and covered, and the pace slows again too. The house goes back to emptiness, dust and neglect; it’s a cycle we can presume repeats year upon year. Throughout the video, a contemporary Malayalam poem by Iqbal Shamz is layered onto the images, while a soundtrack of desolation plays in the background. The words in the poem do not evoke nostalgia for the homeland, but speak matter-of-factly about the necessity of migration, of the pressure to save money to build a house and marry off daughters lavishly – the two chief objectives that drive most people in the Mappila community to work abroad – and the social cost of making such choices. The decades-old phenomenon of Malayalis in the Gulf – the peak was during the 1970s oil boom – is but a continuation of an economic relationship stretching back to the fourth century bce, when first Arab, then later Roman and Greek traders used monsoon winds to sail to the Kerala coast for trade. The demand for spices, especially ‘black gold’, or pepper – so expensive that Europeans paid for it with gold – also brought Islam to Indian shores via the early Arab middlemen. Centuries later,

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Muslims, who form the bulk of the Gulf Malayalis, would find that the influence of these old historical, social and religious ties made it easier to migrate to Arabia instead of further west. Today, the demographics of Malayali migrants are far more diverse, including women and professionals like doctors and engineers who can afford to take their families with them. For them, as too for those who are forced to leave families behind, the building of a house – not merely buying one, Jabber, Hashim and Mansoor point out – is the foremost measure of success. Jabber, Hashim and Mansoor note that the idea is hardly to create a home: the size of the building directly reflects pride and aspiration, and functions as a status symbol and display of wealth when it comes to fixing arranged marriages for children. Every effort goes towards making the building as grand as decades of savings allow. Owning an apartment does not allow for the same bragging rights. Such is the frenzy that surrounds Gulf money and the economy it funds in Kerala, the three note in their research, that billboards advertising gold jewellery and construction materials – cement, iron rods – are abundant throughout the state. Within the Mappila community that observes the purdah system, there is also a trend to build houses big enough to contain two kitchens, two living rooms and so on. Where one set of rooms are performative, male spaces, decorated elaborately to display the family’s wealth, the second set is simpler, restricted to women, perhaps more ‘homely’. Apart from requiring greater resources and space, these houses also drastically change the

regions in which they are built by driving up real estate prices and living expenses. Those who never migrated are left to bear the brunt of this inflation. Much is said about the influence Gulf Malayalis have on Kerala’s economy and politics. The Kerala Migration Survey estimated that remittances from this community in 2018 totalled about 850 million rupees, a large chunk of the state’s economy. Several migrants who have climbed up the social food-chain also enter politics, fund influential cultural events like the KochiMuziris Biennale and contribute to infrastructure projects in their villages. But not as much is said about the social impact on both those who leave and those who remain. The ‘Gulf return’, a ubiquitous term for those who come back to India because they have to – the Arab states don’t grant migrants citizenship, and their children cannot assume hyphenated identities – are barely able to hold on to their place within their families, let alone the community. They have been away so long that when they return, many don’t have relationships with children they have not seen grow up; conflict arises with wives and daughters resentful of giving up control over the household finances they managed for decades in the absence of men; there is little of the old community these migrants left behind. Having built up over the last half century or so, tensions caused by migrant Malayalis working in the Gulf are complex and far-reaching in how they have shaped Kerala. Another Empty House, even if in its infancy, sheds a sobering light on metrics of luxury and success that says more about a particular social landscape than about any individual achievement.

all images Zahra Mansoor, Shahnaz Hashim, Juneida Abdul Jabber, Weight of Emptiness (still), 2021, video, 3 min, looped (videography by Naseef Abdul Kader and poem by Iqbal Shamz). Courtesy the artists

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For a few days in late September, just after the release of South Korea’s Squid Game (2021) but before it began gulping up all the entertainmentmedia oxygen, Thailand had a contender for Asia’s next Netflix hit. On paper, Bangkok Breaking (2021) had the makings of, if not an international smash, a local hit that Thais could get behind, hold up and enjoy after the travails of recent months. Billboards for this ‘fast-paced action-thriller drama centered around the wild world of Bangkok’s road rescue services’ laced the capital’s arteries. Showbiz outlets ran clickbaity ‘All you should know about Bangkok Breaking’ articles. All pumped high expectations for the streaming giant’s second original Thai series (the first being 2019’s The Stranded) and the very first Thai series to be shot in hdr ‘for full visual immersion’. I, like many in Thailand, was anticipating what the synergy of its homegrown talents – the hard-edged action credentials of director Kongkiat Komesiri, the imprimatur of executive producer and acclaimed novelist Prabda Yoon, and the acting chops of two lakhon (Thai tv soap opera) stars – would produce. That you are probably reading about the show and its marketing hoopla for the first time

algorithm blues There’s no shortage of new Thai dramas, writes Max Crosbie-Jones, but why do so few of them make it beyond the conventions and clichés of tv shows of the past?

says a lot about how things panned out. But Bangkok Breaking isn’t, in fairness, a terrible show (or wasn’t: as I write this, its descent into algorithmic oblivion, alongside hundreds of other mediocre Netflix shows, seems assured, if not quite complete). It’s merely a pedestrian six-episode crime drama that, for all its efforts to appear international, or inter, as they say in Thai, surprised me in only one respect: its refusal to upset the worn-out conventions of lakhon. ‘Thai soaps seem a generic international product, yet their fixed characters conform to traditional moral roles,’ explains Philip Cornwel-Smith in his wide-ranging celebration of everyday Thai popular culture, Very Thai (2005). Intriguingly for an original Netflix show (ie a show free to stray from local conventions or test sensibilities without fear of alienating its entire audience, as Squid Game did by, say, adding a migrant factory worker to its otherwise monocultural characters), Bangkok Breaking mostly toes the line in that ideological regard. I say mostly because despite some awkward attempts to feign a multicultural ease and grit – a swear word here, an English loanword there – it clings tightly to local archetypes.

Bangkok Breaking, 2021–, tv series. Courtesy Netflix

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There is the pliable-yet-loveable phra ek (leading man), played by boyishly handsome heartthrob Sukollawat Kanarot. Within minutes of arriving wide-eyed from the countryside (as countless protagonists have in Thai films and tv shows of the past), he has witnessed a fatal car accident and been pulled into the orbit of two competing rescue crews. Then there’s the humble nang ek (leading lady), played by another famous dara (Thai star), Sushar Manaying. A frustrated lifestyle reporter, she is a mixed-up but virtuous soul devoted to the truth. Around them pivot a cadre of stock caricatures, from sidekicks to a mistress to a villain – all mere bit players on a stage that recasts the traditional binary ethics of the national literary epic, the Ramakien, as an urban tale of good triumphing over evil. With our view alternating between soaring drone footage of the river skyline and locations that look decidedly televisual – overlit and freshly swept – Bangkok fares little better: it feels listless and flat. But my main issue has to do with the narrow, and arguably tone-deaf, sociopolitics of a show about a ‘citywide conspiracy’. From start to finish, the world of corruption Bangkok Breaking explores is carefully

ringfenced, beginning and ending with the shady dealings of a business tycoon and his thuggish underlings. Anyone who follows Thai goings-on knows that the reality is much, much worse – more systematic, more brutal – than that. I hesitate to assert that the self-censorship that blights lakhon on Thai tv channels (most of which are owned by the state or the army), that keeps them in service to official ideology and established social norms, has won out in a Netflix series. But it certainly appears that way. This isn’t just a grim postmortem report, however: local actors, film crews, editors and postproducers got to sharpen their teeth on a big-budget production, and no doubt learned a lesson or two that will serve them well. And while every tv industry produces duds, not every tv industry produces bona fide hits for international platforms, as Thailand’s is now doing with increasing vigour and frequency. As I write this, Bad Genius: The Series (2020), a tv adaptation of the blockbuster exam-cheating thriller, has just won the Creative Beyond Border prize at Busan’s Asia Contents Awards, alongside Bangkok Breaking, 2021–, tv series. Courtesy Netflix

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Japanese sci-fi suspense thriller Alice in Borderland (2020). And the second series of Dek Mai, or Girl from Nowhere (2018–) – which topped Netflix charts across Asia back in May – beat back the otherwise dominant Korean shows to win best Asian series. Harnessing both Thailand’s talent and its state-of-being, Girl from Nowhere is the show the country did need and deserve in 2021 – a homegrown-property-turned-Netflix-sensation, yes, but also a break with the past that is fresh and timely as well as gratifyingly sanuk (fun). While past teen dramas have subverted and challenged Thai tv conventions, such as the issues-based Hormones (2013–15), the show’s cloaking of zeitgeist-capturing social critiques in a violent horror-manga aesthetic has given it young adult appeal on a global scale. Before Squid Game tapped into South Korea’s anxieties about costly housing and scarce jobs, Girl from Nowhere was mordantly channelling longstanding schoolyard disillusionment with Thailand’s education system and everything it stands for: namely a dogmatic paternalism that believes it can do no wrong. In each selfcontained episode (itself a bold stylistic break with the slowly bubbling plots of your average

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lakhon), a schoolgirl with an impish Joker-grin and ruler-straight bangs waltzes into a new classroom. After setting her books down and introducing herself with a coquettish smirk, Nanno (played with relish by Chicha ‘Kitty’ Amatayakul) gets to work exposing the corruption, lies and transgressions of her teachers and fellow students. In stark contrast to the conservatively tapered social lens of Bangkok Breaking, Girl from Nowhere feels, despite the educational setting, wide-angled and kaleidoscopic in terms of the topical issues and headline news it confronts. In the first episode of season two, the succubuslike Nanno gives a horny boy getting girls pregnant left, right and centre a taste of his own medicine. In another, she incites a wholesale rebellion against the rulebook. Episodes riff on real-life stories involving youth, including horrific car accidents, school hazing rituals and rape. Part hellraiser, part rabblerouser, part showboat, Nanno has come to teach the oppressors a lesson – a bit like the real-life schoolkids behind the ‘Bad Students’ movement in 2020, when they marched on the country’s Ministry of Education and engaged in droll

acts of defiance. But is the show’s seemingly immortal antiheroine one of them: a principled change-maker out to punish wrongdoers? An avatar of karmic justice, trapped in the purgatory of modern Thai life? Or is she just a nihilistic shit-stirrer, a snake from the Garden of Eden let loose on a postlapsarian society? It’s hard to say, frankly, as sometimes her bloodflecked acts of rebellion and revenge seem charged by a righteous rage, at other points gleefully sadistic. Her deranged and caustic laugh – the subject of earnest Reddit threads and YouTube compilations – hardly settles things, sounding more hysterical devil-child than benign harbinger of change. Resisting lakhon’s comforting character stereotypes and cathartic story arcs, Nanno’s slipperiness is part of the reason she’s my Thai cultural icon of the moment. But while her passionate fans, a large proportion living in similarly authoritarian societies, such as the Philippines and Brazil, may agree, she’s clearly not the Thai government’s first choice for cultural ambassador. Recently, reports of its plan to bolster support for the cultural economy have been doing the rounds – a plan prompted, it would appear, by the enviable

successes of South Korea and the biggest Thai-born star on the world stage. An October 11 Bangkok Post article, ‘Hard truths about soft power’, stated that the ‘singer Lalisa “Lisa” Manoban, a member of South Korea’s superstar K-pop group Blackpink, has rekindled Thailand’s soft power ambitions via the creative economy’, then asserted that ‘Thailand faces a raft of challenges to meet General Prayut’s ambitious goal’. To date, there has been no such state leveraging of Girl from Nowhere or its win in Busan, and there probably won’t be. And it’s not all that hard to see why. Lisa’s appropriation of the traditional Thai golden chada (headdress) in the video for her debut solo release has been latched onto by a grasping establishment precisely because that appropriation is nothing more than an empty signifier, a lazy placeholder for some vapid notion of ennobling ‘Thainess’. By contrast, Nanno’s sly, antiestablishment antics and violent cackle – at once a hammy sendup of the histrionics of the most melodramatic lakhons and a manic howl of exasperation at what goes down in Thailand (among other nanny states) – cannot be so easily or gainfully co-opted. Her revolution will not be instrumentalised.

Girl from Nowhere, 2018–, tv series. Courtey Netflix

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Taiki Sakpisit A subtle politics meets boldly experimental film by Max Crosbie-Jones

Taiki Sakpisit. Courtesy the artist

About two-thirds of the way into Bangkok-based Taiki Sakpisit’s new black-and-white video installation, the mood shifts erratically – from bucolic calm to blissed-out to rage. Held for about a minute and a half is a static shot of a tiered waterfall. It is followed by an even more serene vision: a distant sphere of sunlight flickering on a shifting horizontal plane, the light dancing up and down to a whining note. Then we cut to raw, handheld footage from the student-led Bangkok street-protests of 2020. The camera’s eye is distorted, drunk almost, but you can just about make out riot police, the crowd in hard hats and other makeshift protective gear, a young woman wearing a waterproof poncho pushing through it. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a glitch metastasises: images from the water-cannon-drenched frontline of this progressive protest movement quickly devolve into a seething cataclysm of throbbing pixels and screaming noise. Such juxtapositions – and the lack of guidance towards their easy interpretation – are a common feature of Sakpisit’s sui generis body of

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Seeing in the Dark, 2021

experimental films stretching back to 2008. Another is an audiovisual armoury consisting of bold cuts, extreme closeups, slow dissolves, ambient noise and musique concrète. Sometimes his meticulous assemblages are searchingly personal: ornate and oneiric memory palaces built out with mental fragments and emotional debris that belong to him alone. Other works channel or index the presence of places upon which the inexorable movement of Thai history has left an indelible stain. But whatever their apparent subject, the emotional response created by Sakpisit’s dynamic and often discombobulating interplays of sound and image is paramount, gesturing towards states of anguish, paralysis or insanity, be it individual or collective. For most of its 29-minute running time, Seeing in the Dark (2021) centres on Khao Kho, a famous mountain range in Thailand’s Phetchabun province where paranoid governments and communist insurgents sought refuge at separate points during the mid-to-late twentieth century. It opens with panoramic views from Khao Kho Sacrifice Memorial, an open-air mountainside museum where the shredded carcasses of felled helicopters sit alongside rusting artillery, shell casings and dead-eyed mannequins in military garb. The camera lingers on topographic models and matériel, the images cutting or dissolving to a nagging drone sound. After focusing on the tired military legacy of the Kingdom’s protracted war against Khao Kho’s communist strongholds, attention then shifts to the overgrown cave fortress that was, for a brief spell, its official treasury. Here, at the bidding of dictatorial Prime Minister Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, one of the leaders of (what was then called) Siam’s 1932 revolution against absolute monarchy, the country’s gold bars and sacred Emerald Buddha were hidden from the Japanese during the Second World War. Something of the weight of these layers of human history, as well as nature’s indifference, is conveyed through the long take and the oceanic expanse of roiling found sound accompanying it. Flies buzz conspiratorially. A closeup of a rock face dissolves to reveal a trickling stream, then a lean-to in which communist rebels lived and, likely, died. As the bellowing sonic textures swirl and rise to a disconcerting crescendo, one gets a sense of the aftermath of past battles, but also of looming presences, new fights. While never polemical or pedagogic, trafficking in fey allusions and sensorial insinuations rather than agitprop, Sakpisit’s works often betray a resounding political commitment, particularly when it comes to obliquely (re)connecting spectators with the traumas of Thailand’s Cold War and the autocratic oppression of the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s. In Shadow and Act (2018) he navigates the desiccated remains of Chaya Jitrakorn, a defunct Bangkok photo studio, built in 1940, that Phibunsongkhram apparently frequented. To an equally ominous organic-industrial soundscape, Sakpisit’s drifting gaze homes in on small details: retired equipment; old whiteboards; passport portraits of remote society families and figures, among them the faces of two other dictators, Sarit Thanarat and Thanom Kittikachorn. A few minutes in, the whirring blades of a ceiling fan lend a scurrying, pitter-patter tempo to a white-noise feedback-loop set to gliding closeups. And suddenly we are somewhere else. Somewhere no less grounded in artifice, it would seem: the reptile house at the Thai capital’s Dusit Zoo. To the syncopated rhythms of Indonesian drumming, Sakpisit closes out this 23-minute work with slow-motion footage of green anacondas, lizards and other nocturnal creatures slithering and stirring in the wan light of their dioramalike enclosures.

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Seeing in the Dark, 2021

Shadow and Act, 2018

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Shadow and Act, 2018

Even to Thai spectators, Shadow and Act’s dislocation between a Thai photostudio and zoo might seem arbitrary. Yet its juxtaposition of images filmed at disparate locales is not without rhyme or reason. After the Siamese revolution of 1932 put an end to almost 800 years of absolute rule, it was Phibunsongkhram who petitioned King Rama VIII to open up a private park reserved for the royal family to the public. In 1938 that new municipal park officially became Dusit Zoo: a popular leisure retreat for plebeian Bangkokians. Of the genesis of the piece, Sakpisit explains: “Originally I was interested in the cult of personality surrounding dictators. Their acts and gestures. How they dress and pose. And the nocturnal zoo is, in a way, a theatre. The primal force of the animals here relates to the first part: the dictators.” Since Shadow and Act’s completion, the furtive (some would say reptilian) plotting at the heart of Thailand’s military-royalist theatre has thickened, adding to the work’s sociopolitical resonances. In late 2018 the nation’s oldest zoo was closed on orders of the current monarch, the request dovetailing with a broader, systematic campaign to efface the legacy of Phibunsongkhram’s 1932 coup d’état (and, by extension, the transition to a constitutional monarchy it hastened). By turns elegiac and unnerving, Sakpisit’s films may hinge upon such details, but their appeal is rarely contingent upon our knowledge of them. A skilled editor, he typically shoots alone using a compact, mirrorless camera, and always with the emotions he hopes to provoke or mediate through his final cut in mind. “It’s really necessary for me to be in each space alone and to absorb the energy of those landscapes and then think and try to detect tiny things and find inspiration. For me, it’s like solving a puzzle,” he explains. “Do I have enough? Will it work? It’s a dialogue with myself.” Edited using a formalist approach that favours technical aspects – particularly the sound-image tension and the rhythmic possibilities of montage – over and above any guiding sense of narrative, the resulting images are often as evocative as they are everyday, drawing our attention to the splendour of the ordinary.

above and preceding pages Seeing in the Dark, 2021

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A Ripe Volcano, 2011

Trouble in Paradise, 2019

In A Ripe Volcano (2011) and Three Kings (2011), both filmed around sites in Bangkok’s old city, Rattanakosin, during the political protests of 2010, the movements of male bodies – young boys, policeman, glistening boxers, cheering spectators – are slowed to an ominous crawl, their every glance or gesticulation charged with meaning. In the Singapore-set A Certain Illness Difficult to Name (2018), Sakpisit pans and pauses over the landscape of a city-state in transition: rotting mushrooms, folk killing time on a swaying ferry, a kettle of birds wheeling high above. And in To the Memory of My Beloved (2018), his tender meditation on remembrance set to soaring cello and industrial rhythms, images of worshippers at an Ash Wednesday ceremony are suffused with heartache. These and other films are disarmingly sensuous as well as deftly allegorical. Even without context, his uncanny vignettes of quotidian detail – particularly the intensified movements of men and animals – and synesthetic treatment of time – as a spatial construct that is viscous and volatile, if never quite fully solid – is transporting. Recent films such as Trouble in Paradise (2019), a woozy tableau vivant combining images of racing orbs of light, restless water buffaloes and a Buddhist sai sin (white string blessing) ceremony, appear fully grounded in Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that the ‘supreme ambition’ of montage is ‘to make the heart prevail over the intelligence by destroying the notion of space in favour of that of time’. Often praised by his fellow Thai filmmakers, Sakpisit is now looking beyond video art: early 2021 saw him release his first feature film to wide festival-circuit acclaim. Like its precursors, The Edge of Daybreak (2021) is both sensual and fragmented, but it draws on a more baroque palette, not least an expressionistic mise-en-scène filmed in silvery, high-contrast monochrome. It is also, on the face of it at least, a taciturn pyschodrama. Whereas many of his short films index trauma through an immersive and intentionally uneasy experimental formalism, The Edge of Daybreak is a tense psychological study cloaked in a claustrophobic, gothic-noir atmosphere of impending dread. The mood – or rather the burden of unnamed and unseen events – slowly suffocates its somnambulant characters: a family made up of women who sleep or stagger, numb and inert, around a rambling house, and of sullen men who come and go. Myriad collaborators and reference points were integral to its genesis. For his shorts, sound is the only element Sakpisit cedes a small measure of authorial control over, but for The Edge of Daybreak he enlisted professional actors, a cinematographer and an editor, as well as his most frequent collaborator, the Japanese musical director Yasuhiro Morinaga. The spare sound design, by Arkritchalerm Kalayanamit, is particularly effective: Morinaga’s organic soundscapes – which are directly inspired by the natural instrumentation and electro-acoustic timbres of Tōru Takemitsu’s soundtrack for The Woman in the Dunes, as well as the brutal cadences of the Taiko drum in Onibaba (both 1964), scored by Hikaru Hayashi – provide an eerie percussive foil to the film’s rococo symbology, crepuscular setting and quizzical exchanges (“What are you thinking about?”… “Rats in the attic”). While writing his laconic script, Sakpisit immersed himself in the dramaturgy of poetic realism and the European avant-garde, particularly Jacques Prévert’s screenplay for Marcel Carne’s Port of Shadows (1938) and Andrzej Zulawski’s The Third Part of the Night (1971). Other films cited in recent interviews include Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964). Instead of a storyboard,

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A Certain Illness Difficult to Name, 2018

To the Memory of My Beloved, 2018

The Edge of Daybreak, 2021

Taiki Sakpisit (right) in the editing suite for Edge of Daybreak, 2021

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preceding pages A Certain Illness Difficult to Name, 2018

he and his crew relied on an exhaustive, 819-page moodboard that mapped out every scene, “even down to how the beds are folded”. Among the welter of hyperstylised imagery appearing out of the chiar0scuro gloom is a peeling slaughterhouse inspired by Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s photograph The Destroyed Room (1978). Another, a naked female body that serves as a recurring motif, draws on the hauntingly corporeal work of Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere. After working in relative isolation for over a decade, the experience was rewarding – especially as the film’s human textures are, he adds, deeply personal. “The characters, the nuances, the relationships: they are drawn from my own experiences,” he says. “The film is not necessarily a political film. In a way I wanted to make something more universal… and that I would enjoy the process of making.” This said, viewers familiar with Thai modern history can hardly fail to spot its stubborn pathological conditions: the disappearances, exiles, returns, the irresolution and the estrangement. The film’s bifurcation between politically important periods, the student uprisings of the mid-1970s and the simmering tensions and street battles of the 2000s, is also an open secret, signposted in the promotional synopsis. The Edge of Daybreak is, as May Adadol Ingawanij wrote for this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (at which it won the critic’s fipresci award), ‘an unusual cinematic response to a question that has been growing in urgency among artists and filmmakers in Sakpisit’s homeland: What must art and cinema do to portray Thailand’s legacy of militarisation and impunity?’ Other Thai filmmakers, namely Anocha Suwichakornpong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, have responded to that question in a similarly enigmatic way, namely by defying linearity, embracing the cryptic nature of elliptical narratives, experimenting with temporal fluidity, exploring the boundaries between the supernatural and natural, and so forth. Sakpisit, however, is singular among the country’s more subversive filmmakers for his sustained and purposeful production of discomforting modes of heightened spectatorship. Through an expanding

The Edge of Daybreak, 2021

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palette of technical and stylistic strategies, he makes concrete the cyclical nature of Thai political history and its effects on the national psyche. In The Edge of Daybreak, the characters are sleepwalkers captive within a coiling, visceral nightmare that even a solar eclipse and gathering storm cannot shake off. In his shorts, meanwhile, the predicament in which the Thai people find themselves – the powerless recipients of 13 successful coups (and many more coup attempts) since the start of the twentieth century, and almost as many autocratic governments – is inventively hypostatised, typically through the haunting montage or irrational cut. Among the successful examples of the latter are two studies in repetition made during the early 2010s, amid the rancorous aftershock of an unelected government’s brutal suppression of the ‘Red Shirt’ protest movement: Time of the Last Persecution (2012) and The Age of Anxiety (2013). Both splice grainy footage sourced from a once-popular genre of 1980s Thai B-movie – fantasy epics such as Ka Kee (1980) and Krai Thong (1985) – into kinetic onslaughts of stuttering energy. The former, stripped of its audio track, draws its intensity from its severe juxtapositions: silently grimacing princes and princesses, crocodiles submerging, legendary Thai actor Sorapong Chatree kissing a folkloric goddess, fanged king of the demons Totsakan raining down bolts of fire. The latter is even more antagonising, images of bodies and faces appearing in strobelike flashes alongside the industrial squeals and guttural screams of Noise music. ‘The desire to change everything in the world so as to change one’s destiny was the source of emotional intensity of these obsolete films,’ wrote Ingawanij in 2013 for Cinémathèque Quarterly. In these ecstatic displays of brute force, Sakpisit registers and remembers the full magnitude and implications of this emotional intensity for Thais during that era. But like the government that sent the army in to clear protesters in 2010, or in the case of the similarly brutal street suppressions of 1973 and 1976, he also brutalises that intensity, repeats acts of violence against it, all while never quite stilling the anarchic energy and sovereign spirit at its core. This renewal and reconfiguration of latent promise and looming dangers, this urge to exploit the manifold possibilities of sound and image in order to circumscribe and evoke the recurring themes and trajectories of a nation’s scarred history, is common to large swathes of his output. Take, for example, the glitching that corrupts Seeing in the Dark’s closing section. Here we experience the brutal response of a broken system, the paranoia and paralysis of a military-royalist nexus that endures and prospers by venerating some and vilifying others. Those that challenge their grip – be it the communist insurgents of Khao Kho, the ‘Red Shirts’ or the youth ‘mob’ – are an enemy to be dehumanised and crushed. In its dying seconds, Sakpisit’s latest short film follows the base and boring logic of this depressing trope of authoritarian power to its all-too-predictable conclusion: after the chaos and fury of the crisis or purge comes a return to the status quo. Back in the caves of Petchabhun, we find the Buddhist icons, the primal creatures, the mythic stories of brave battles that are no more than barely veiled propaganda still undisturbed amid the dripping stalactites. The youth-protest leader’s promises to fight on like ‘water eroding rocks’ have left no apparent trace. Sakpisit describes, in his own indescribable language, a peculiarly Thai kind of lull or respite: a peace that thrives on distorted echoes of the past and very long shadows. ara

Time of the Last Persecution, 2012

Seeing in the Dark, sac Gallery, Bangkok, 13-18 December

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Know Thine Enemy Cian Dayrit’s artworks trace the geography of power and the course of empire in order to enable resistance by Marv Recinto

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Cian Dayrit, born in 1989 to a middle-class family in Manila, creates to dissipate farmers’ united struggle for free land distribution and socially engaged art that aims to challenge and subvert the prac- genuine agrarian reform’. The kmp maintains a list of the over 300 tices that have resulted in the systemic imbalances that plague peasant leaders and workers who have lost their lives fighting for Philippine society. Within the Philippines, the peasant (magsasaka) change under Duterte’s lethal administration. sector comprises 75 percent of the population, according to SamaDayrit was drawn to activism during his days as an undersamang Artista para sa Kilusang Agraryo (Artist Alliance for Genuine graduate studying painting at the University of the Philippines, Land Reform and Rural Development, or saka); this includes groups when he began protesting tuition-fee hikes that occurred just as the whose livelihoods primarily depend on food production – farm- Gloria Arroyo administration (2001–10) allocated significant portions workers, fisherfolk and the indigenous minority. Through commu- of the national budget to military and counterinsurgency enterprises nity engagement, Dayrit and his collaborators – craftsmen and local within the provinces. It was, he said when I spoke to him recently, community members – piece together overlooked spatial, temporal the first time he heard the term ‘extrajudicial killing’. His current and personal narratives of the oppressed via multimedia artworks and practice continues to develop in response to the nation’s politics. installations. He is, however, best known for his ‘counter-cartography’ Dayrit was a founding member of saka, which formed in 2017, textiles – large, handsewn maps of existing geographic regions one year after Duterte took office. During that first year, the presithat inspect and subvert power structures. ‘I wanted to chal- dent’s violent war on drugs had claimed the lives of thousands, and lenge the perspectives that somehow monopolised the framing the policies he promoted within the peasant sector under the guise of development continue to subjugate the majority of Filipinos. of history and heritage,’ he told A Magazine Singapore earlier this year. This past August, saka launched its online protest campaign ‘We When the Spanish Jesuit priest and cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde created the first map of Are Randy Echanis’ with Artista the Philippines, in 1734, he had ng Rebolusyong Pangkultura the help of two Filipinos, engraver (Artist of the Cultural Revolution, Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay and artist or arpak) to commemorate those killed in Duterte’s reign of terror Francisco Suárez. Known as the and the one-year anniversary of Murillo Velarde map, it engenthe death of Randall Echanis. dered an oppressive feudalist Police forces killed the longtime system that continues to shape the kmp leader and peasant-rights ways in which land is distributed within the Philippines to this activist in his Quezon City home day. Today the country’s oligaron 10 August 2020. The campaign’s premise was simple: members of chical system ensures that only a few landowning families retain these collectives photographed the majority of ownership while themselves wearing masks with millions of peasants labour to the words ‘I am Randy Echanis’, conveying the bold message that produce harvests from which over Echanis’s legacy lives. In Dayrit’s 75 percent of the produce goes to the landowner. For decades, self-portrait he wears a black politicians have made promises embroidered mask as he intently glares through his black-rimmed of agrarian reform and land redistribution with little success. glasses at the camera lens. His long hair, partially secured by Former president Corazon Aquino introduced the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program in 1986, his mask’s strap, frames his face; ‘I am Randy Echanis’ is digitally which promised extensive change but has yet to make any mean- imposed over his mask. This image appears frequently in Dayrit’s social media as his profile photo, acting as a reminder of Echanis’s ingful impact. During Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 election campaign, the candi- brutal death and Dayrit’s own convictions. The added dimension date promised to revive the long-dormant Department of Agrarian of the Philippines’ ‘anti-terror’ censorship imbues a degree of risk Reform (dar) and redistribute land to farmers – it’s a promise within these self-portraits, as these partially covered visages indithat, according to the governmental Philippine News Agency, he cate authorship and make those who wear them susceptible to has successfully fulfilled by allocating 516,000 hectares among inquiry. The members of saka write, ‘We are also one with the people 405,8000 farmers as of August 2021. Shortly thereafter, the Kilusang in demanding for just and lasting peace. But [as] long as feudal Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (Peasant Movement of the Philippines, or landlords deprive the peasantry of rights; as long as the bureaucrat capitalists maintain this dismal status kmp) released a statement saying that ‘dar only above Protest selfie for online campaign quo by clinging to imperialist powers – there pursues the distribution of government-owned ‘We Are Randy Echanis’, after the killing will be no real justice. And as long as there lands and public lands while safekeeping vast of the peace consultant and longtime activist is systemic oppression and persecution; we private agricultural lands and haciendas still for agrarian reform in 2020 will utter the words from Ka Randy’s verse: under the ownership and control of local landfacing page Valley of Dispossession, 2020, #HindiNaminKayoTitigilan We will not stop! lords’ and that ‘the dar-to-Door program is no 200 × 170 cm. Photo: Achim Kukulies. Courtesy the artist and Nome, Berlin more than a counterinsurgency program meant Justice for Echanis, justice for all!’

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At a recent conference hosted by the Transnational Coalition for He told gma News, in Filipino, ‘Like any other indigenous commuthe Arts, Dayrit presented on behalf of saka, saying that ‘the peas- nity, they have been pushed to the peripheries of society. Landantry is the mass-based and primary force fighting for sovereignty, grabbing, red-baiting, harassment of armed forces, they’ve been democracy, and social justice – and it is in this context that saka exploited. I just could not ignore the Aytas…’ exists… It has developed into an anti-feudal alliance of art, culture, Building upon this research and further informed by current and knowledge workers who support and advance the peasant agenda events, Dayrit’s Valley of Dispossession (2021) maps the region of Central for genuine agrarian reform, land development, and food security.’ Luzon (which includes Bataan) in a large cartographic textile embroiThese words echo in the foundations of Dayrit’s own artistic practice, dered with geological features, provincial boundaries and areas of as he told A Magazine Singapore: ‘Activism taught me that by learning hegemonic ravage. The map’s legend in the bottom right corner from and putting to the fore the narratives of the deliberately silenced explains the various abuses of land and people; gold talismans embossed with bullets or burning bahay kubos (nipa huts or indigemarginalised sectors, social justice can be realised’. The audience for Dayrit’s multimedia artworks is often the nous stilt houses) indicate military presence; gold talismans with tree community with which he collaborates: their narratives inform his stumps or sombreros indicate aggressive development projects and/ or largest landholdings; and gold practice. His involvement with actstars indicate Chinese landgrabs – ivist groups allows him to gain The audience for Dayrit’s multimedia particularly referencing the West insight into and share in the issues artworks is often the community Philippine Sea dispute. Red bloodthat plague them firsthand. As part with which he collaborates: like stains illustrate the mining of Busis Iba’t Ha Kanayunan (Voices tenements that riddle the coasts in from the Hinterlands), an exhibition their narratives inform his practice particular. A central banner towards in Makati City resulting from his 2017–18 residency at Bellas Artes Projects’s outpost in Bataan, Dayrit the top of the tapestry reads, ‘Peasant and Indigenous Struggles in developed a timeline mural of the local Ayta history in the province Central Luzon Philippines’, flanked by a haloed farmer on the left and based on oral histories, interviews and historical sources collected similarly haloed archer and child on the right. More symbols and words from the Ayta community. The Ayta are a group of Negrito people frame the land mass – phrases like ‘Agrarian revolution is justice!’, indigenous to Luzon, thought to have been the earliest inhabit- ‘Land to the tillers!’ and the words of Apo Alipon, a respected indigants of the Philippines. However, centuries of oppression have enous Ayta elder who lived to one-hundred-and-twenty-three and displaced them from their ancestral lands, which are often subse- also appeared in Dayrit’s 2018 Busis exhibition, encourage mutual care quently destroyed in illegal logging, mining and slash-and-burn between community and nature with the intention of highlighting farming. Dayrit sprawled these significant moments narrated to him the hypocrisy of the neoliberal, neocolonial and semifeudal systems into a horizontal display of these chronologies, his distinct hand- of power that have devastated these lands. qr codes stitched around writing – which can be seen across other works – also recording inci- the textile lead to videos, reports and data gathered by human rights dents of land-grabbing and encroachments on ancestral homelands. groups in a time and country where the government cannot be trusted.

Against the Stream: A Protest Art Exhibition for Our Fisherfolk, 2020 (installation view, Bacoor, Cavite). Courtesy the artist

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Neocolonial Landscape, 2020, embroidery on fabric, 156 cm × 125 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Tropical Terror Tapestry, 2020, mixed media on textile, 198 × 358 cm. Photo: Haupt & Binder. Courtesy the artist and Gropius Bau, Berlin

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The various layers of Dayrit’s composition visualise the synchronous to make a counter-map, such as ‘Draw your general idea of the space forces that continue to oppress the overlooked peasant majority. you occupy. You can start with roads, rivers, creeks, lines’ and ‘Label As part of his social art practice, Dayrit hosts counter-cartography and write your experiences here. Particularly the spaces of fear, pain, workshops with these marginalised communities, in which he others.’ These instructions, Dayrit explains in the drawing, ‘narrate encourages participants to create their own counter-maps. He hopes our personal accounts of abuse, land-grabbing and other forms these programmes will encourage communities to reevaluate of aggression perpetrated by the so-called authorities’. their spatial narratives. In a text entitled ‘Counter-Mapping for Since 2016, Dayit has worked closely with Henry Caceres, an emResistance and Solidarity in the Philippines: Between Art, Pedagogy, broiderer whose family business is based in Pasig Palengke. Where and Community’, Dayrit and his academic coauthors write: ‘These Dayrit draws the maps onto the textiles, Caceres embroiders these traces projects may rupture rigid cartographic narratives of city projects and and, in a playful joke, is credited as ‘Henricus’ in the work. Regardless regional masterplans by exposing contested histories, relations and of the medium he uses, Dayrit ensures a large portion of each sale is rebodily experiences that have been silenced for the sake of particular turned to the groups he collaborates with and learns from. Lately, hownotions of progress and developever, Dayrit has become increasingly Dayrit has become increasingly aware aware of his own complicity within ment’. In one example, from a 2017 workshop in Zambales, commuthe global market, expressing, when of his own complicity within the global nity member Johnny Basilio draws we spoke, his doubts regarding the market, expressing, when we spoke, his doubts art object and its disappearance his hometown, San Jose, Tarlac, regarding the art object and its disappearance from the communities it depicts and with clear military occupation – on the bottom right, he writes, in intends to serve once it is bought from the communities it depicts Filipino, ‘…we are ready to fight or institutionalised abroad. As a for our ancestral land for the next generation’. Basilio’s counter-map result, the artist is embarking upon a master’s degree in geography at demonstrates this hands-on community approach is productive and his alma mater, with the hope of mapping out new ways for his current educational, emboldening and exposing Basilio to the structures that practice to be more engaged in the communities he serves: “If anything, affect him and his community. Over the past year, while confined I’m looking to gain a more structured approach to effectively analyse to his home, Dayrit wanted to make these instructions accessible to networks and spaces in which power is used or misused. I’m also more people and developed Pagsasanay sa paggawa ng isang counter-map looking to adapt existing methodologies while developing new ones (Instructions on How to Create a Counter Map, 2020) for the geograph- that respond to the needs of marginalised communities,” he says. ara ical activism collective kollektiv orangotango’s book This Is Not an Atlas. In the centre of the page, Dayrit has drawn an imagined landWork by Cian Dayrit will be included in rīvus, scape with roads, buildings, trees and farmlands, which juxtapose the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, on view 12 March – 22 June a large text, ‘Lupa! Buhay! Hustisya! (Fight! Live! Justice!). Text wrapping around the central drawing includes instructions on how Marv Recinto is a writer based in London

Pagsasanay sa paggawa ng isang counter-map (Instructions on How to Create a Counter Map), 2020. Courtesy the artist

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The Films of Haneda Sumiko

Women’s College in the Village (still), 1957, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center

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Long neglected in the West, one of Japan’s most prolific and important postwar documentary filmmakers created poetic works attuned to the cycles of rural life, colonial history and the roles of women in society by Ren Scateni

The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (still), 1977, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

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In 1950 Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten branched out into together with Tokieda Toshie – was invited to direct her first film, producing nonfiction films and founded Iwanami Productions to Women’s College in the Village. Shot in a village in the Shiga Prefecture, work on educational and public-relations documentary projects the film was conceived as part of a government education project, for cinema and television. Thanks to the trailblazing work of Hani for which both the Ministry of Education (who funded the project) Susumu, one of the studio’s young filmmakers, whose Children of and Iwanami arguably tokenised Haneda’s gender. Women’s College the Classroom (1954) and Children Who Draw (1955) marked a concep- in the Village depicts children doing their homework in an unstaged tual watershed in the history of Japanese documentary, Iwanami’s manner similar to Hani’s films, but it also looks at the wider social filmmaking style was soon associated with acute subjective aware- landscape and its dynamics of domestic and agricultural labour. ness and spontaneity. Hani’s rejection of staged setups in favour of a Combining a verité style with artificial vignettes in which characcloser relationship to his subjects ushered in a rupture in the modes ters perform gestures taken from instances of quotidian life, the of educational film in Japan, one that encouraged nonjudgemental film remarkably turns the spotlight on women, who have an opporobservation and a continuous effort in keeping the subjectivity of the tunity to speak for themselves. Despite the studio’s restrictive practice of assigning projects to filmparticipants at the forefront. Women’s College in the Village looks at the Haneda Sumiko’s oeuvre can be makers, thus limiting their freedom ascribed to the same framework. wider social landscape and its dynamics of to pursue their creative interests, Unjustly overlooked in the West, it’s possible to detect, weaved into domestic and agricultural labour the film’s texture, the themes that her films are now being rediscovered and screened at festivals like London’s Open City Documentary Haneda would continue to examine throughout her long and prolific Festival and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, and a symposium on the career. Alongside the exploration of a vanishing rural Japan – magnifilmmaker – ‘Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko: fied in later films such as The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (1977) and Authorship and Gender Discourse’ – has been recently organised Ode to Mt Hayachine (1982), both indebted to Haneda’s comprehensive in partnership with Birkbeck, Japan Foundation, bimi (Birkbeck understanding of and proximity to the profilmic space – the filmInstitute for Moving Image), the Japan Research Centre at soas and maker’s attention to women and their roles within society is often Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. embedded into her late productions. Born in 1926 in Dalian, the southernmost city of Manchuria, It is also interesting to reflect on Haneda’s positionality towards Haneda joined Iwanami Productions in 1950, working first as editor her subject matter. In the case of Women’s College in the Village, the of the Iwanami Photo Library (1950–58) – a publication that served as filmmaker’s social status and cultural upbringing made her radia training platform for the studio’s young filmcally different from the women in the village. makers – and as assistant director a few years Hence, hers is the point of view of an outsider, Women’s College in the Village (production still), later. It wasn’t until 1957 that Haneda – one of of a city dweller who had the means and the 1957, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami only two female directors active at Iwanami, Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center ethnographic curiosity to document life in a

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The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (still), 1977, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

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Dedicated Treasures of Horyuji Temple (still), 1971, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Iwanami Productions. Courtesy Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center

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rural area of Japan. However, for Haneda such a condition is critically around which revolves most of the village’s activity. Focusing on complicated by her own personal history. As a Japanese person born the trunk, the camera follows the motions of insects and organin Manchuria, Haneda de facto belongs to a Japanese community isms creeping along branches and roots while the film’s whispering existing outside her home country, whose fragile status is dependent voiceover conjures up chthonic tales from under the soil. The mysteon a geopolitical equilibrium soon to be further problematised rious figure of a high-school girl seems to connect the worlds of the by Japan’s heightened colonial ambitions. In A Story of Manchurian living with the one of the dead as she’s visually associated with the Settler Communities (2008), a visit to the memorial to the Japanese image of a bridge and the dark burled wood of the cherry tree. settlers built by President Zhou Enlai in Fangzheng (China’s premier, The abstract presence of a schoolgirl is also registered in one a veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War, reasoned that the settlers, of Haneda’s early works, Dedicated Treasures of Horyuji Temple (1971), like the Chinese who died under Japanese rule, were also victims of which she directed when she was still at Iwanami. A companion to Japanese imperialism) is the occasion for Haneda to connect with war Hani’s cinematic tribute to the Horyuji temple – Horyuji (1955) – orphans, whose harrowing stories make up the core of her documen- Haneda’s film once again focuses on the poetics of temporality. The tary. Through several interviews, temple’s treasures are scrutinised Hers is the point of view of a city dweller who by Haneda’s camera in an act that the film unveils not only the atrocities the settlers had to endure had the means and the ethnographic curiosity confers upon the film a tactile feeling until one last artefact during their mass exodus after to document life in a rural area of Japan dissolves into the girl’s melanthe war, which resulted in around 80,000 people left behind, but also Japan’s despicable refusal to take cholic visage. A similar, almost sacred, attention to objects of art responsibility and offer support to its own citizens, especially to the anticipates the filmmaker’s 2008 art documentary Into the Picture Scroll – The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa. In the film, through careful handling of orphaned children brought up by Chinese families. Haneda’s interest in territoriality manifests itself ecocritically in the parchment, precise editing and rhythmic pacing, Haneda evenOde to Mt Hayachine and The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms, the film- tually turns on its head what she once called the “filmed image” maker’s first independent film. Whereas the former is at once a piece of (‘Documentarists of Japan Series: Haneda Sumiko’, Documentary Box stunning ethnographic cinema observing the tradition of the kagura 1, 1992). By that name, Haneda meant those early documentaries that dance in Iwate Prefecture and a contemplative poem on the passage were thoroughly staged, hence subject to the dictates of propaganof time, The Cherry Tree is an alchemical work experimenting with dist means. By transforming a static picture scroll into a stirring cineorganic textures and symbols. Both films look at the deep interrela- matic experience that oozes vitality, Haneda epitomises the notion tions between nature and human life, pointing at humanity’s imper- of moving image itself. ara manence amidst fertile seasonal cycles. In particular, The Cherry Tree concentrates on a singular millenary cherry tree in Gifu Prefecture, Ren Scateni is a film critic, curator and programmer based in Bristol

Into the Picture Scroll – The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (still), 2005, dir Haneda Sumiko, prod Jiyu Kobo

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Fragmented Histories A new project pieces together a 500-year exchange between the Indigenous Australian Yolngu and the Muslim seafaring Macassans by Neha Kale

Western history likes to imagine Australia as an island ‘discovered’ during the late eighteenth century by an intrepid group of British explorers. But Diane Moon has long been curious about the narratives that lie beyond this official version of events. In 1983 she relocated from Sydney to Arnhem Land. It’s a place where beaches fringed by ochre clifftops overlook the Arafura Sea, a shimmering expanse of turquoise that connects the northeast tip of the country with its neighbours across the Indian Ocean. Here the traditional Indigenous custodians, the Yolngu, once traded with sailors from Macassar, a port city in South Sulawesi, part of the Indonesian archipelago. These communities forged a relationship that spans more than 400 years. “I [learned about] lunggurrma, the cloud that heralded the Macassans’ annual arrival, [and] objects of trade including knives and swords, and [saw] the beautifully decorated poles representing the masts of the [Indonesian sailboats], or perahus,” says Moon, who resided in a community called Ramingining until 1984 and was based in Arnhem Land again between 1985 and 1994. She’s served as the curator of Indigenous fibre art at the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (qagoma) in Brisbane since 2003. “In Arnhem Land, people made lipalipa, or dugout canoes, and sails [called] dhomala used to propel them,” she says. “Ways of working metal and rigging sails were introduced by the Macassans. Before Yolngu learnt to use these tools and techniques, they bartered for the wooden canoes, which allowed them to travel and hunt on the open seas. These are not just ‘stories’ but part of a real history that’s not widely known or taught.” Indeed, Moon has dedicated herself to exploring this relationship more deeply since she acquired a 1958 bark-painting for qagoma soon after starting there. Titled Balirlira and the Macassans, by the renowned Yolngu artist Larrtjanga Ganambarr, the work depicts the spirit man Balirlira interacting with the Macassans over five centuries, against a backdrop that owes its optical power to the Yolngu crosshatching, associated with specific sacred knowledge, known as rarrk. It’s a journey that has led her to curate, working closely with Bugis artist Abdi Karya as cocurator, the Yolngu/Macassan Project, part of the tenth edition of the Asia Pacific Triennale (apt10).

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Australia’s careful colonial calculus insists on a country shaped entirely by European settlement, a myth that erases 60,000 years of continuous Indigenous occupation, and one that also bypasses the histories of migration that have left their mark on this continent: the camel drivers who were brought by ship during the 1860s from countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, to transport people and goods across the Outback until the 1920s; the hawkers and labourers from India who arrived in the late nineteenth century as British subjects, until the White Australia Policy, introduced in 1901, restricted nonwhite arrivals. And of course the Macassan traders, who started making voyages to Arnhem Land from the fifteenth century onward. These Muslim seafarers, many of whom belonged to the Bugis, the largest ethnic group in South Sulawesi, sailed to Australia on monsoonal winds each December. They lived for months alongside the Yolngu on local beaches, where they exchanged knowledge and oral and visual traditions, and worked together to source trepang, a sea cucumber prized by the Chinese. The Yolngu/Macassan Project features works such as Dhomala (2019–20), a Macassan sail spun from woven pandanus and bark string by Margaret Rarru, a senior artist and master weaver. There’s Baine/Bayini, a 2021 video performance by Abdi Karya that explores the importance of cloth in Macassan and Yolngu society. It also includes a series of pots made in Sulawesi and painted by the late artist Nawurapu Wunungmurra in the zigzag patterns that belong to the Dhalwangu, a Yolngu clan group. “A mutual respect developed between the Macassans and the Yolngu,” says Moon. “Importantly, they formed ‘family’ relationships, which meant [Macassans] were absorbed into Yolngu society with shared responsibilities and rights.” She adds that the Yolngu sometimes accompanied the Macassan back to Sulawesi, where they started families of their own. But the project is less about an anthropological representation of history and more a celebration of the aesthetic culture these communities created together. “The room will be beautiful, with luminescent pale blue walls and mounds of pure white sand supporting ceramics and potsherds,” Moon says. “My hope, as always, is that the audience will gaze in wonder and appreciation at the work of Aboriginal artists.”

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The making of a Karoroq/Gharuru (Macassan perahu sail)

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Nawurapu Wunungmurra (Dhalwangu/Narrkala people), Mungurru (Ocean water) Dhalwangu clan memorial pole (detail), 2008, wood with natural pigments, 323 × 19 cm (diam)

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Dhuwarrwarr Marika (Rirratjingu people), Macassan-style swords and long knives, 2021, natural pigments on bark, 132 × 72 cm

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Larrtjanga Ganambarr (Ngaymil/Dathiwuy people), Balirlira and the Macassans, c. 1958, natural pigments on bark, 158 × 65 cm

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In 1906, five years after Federation, the new Australian govern- the sail in Djirrit (2021), an intricate work on etched aluminium, on ment, under pressure from Christian missionary groups, banned show at apt10. “Gunybi is such a powerful artist – not only can he trade between the Yolngu and the Macassan. Will Stubbs, the co- get you out of a life-threatening situation with his genius, but he can ordinator of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, an Indigenous-owned art centre make an incredible artwork showing you that scene in a completely in Yirrkala, a remote community in northeast Arnhem Land, has new way,” he says. “The contemporaneous presence of the Macassan stumbled across fragments of Macassan pottery buried in the sands actually saves his life.” of Bawaka, a Yolngu homeland, for decades. Stubbs believes that the story of the Macassan in Australia is also “The Yolngu have a nostalgic love for the Macassans and their a story of cultural exchange that’s long predated white Australia. relationship – they didn’t come on a boat to push people around “It is very inconvenient for the Anglo-Australian project to underlike Europeans did, pretending to be nice and giving trinkets,” stand that they are not the second-longest occupants of the continent says Stubbs, who is a longtime member of the Yirrkala community and but the third,” Stubbs says. “It’s completely to do with the European is married to a Yolngu woman. “They treated [the Yolngu] like their notion that history only happens when a white person is present.” betters. The ban ravaged communities that were reliant on that trade. The story of the Macassan and the Yolngu is also an antidote to It caused complete economic collapse.” an Australia that polices its borders “They have been broken and rudely Stubbs worked closely with Moon and too often regards its conversations and Karya to realise the Yolngu/ with Southeast Asia as a new phenomfixed, but we are embracing the parts. Macassan Project. The Macassan pots enon – rather than a centuries-old The pots are also symbolic of repair” that will be on show at apt 10, he says, connection rooted not just in mutual are a visual symbol of the relationship. “In the course of making geography but in profound cultural ties. “Every other civil society in the pots, I’ve been sending them to Sulawesi and back,” says Stubbs. the world has embedded into an understanding of itself that there “They have been broken and rudely fixed, but we are embracing the is a group of people who may look different and talk different,” he says. “The history of Australia is the history of human beings on parts. The pots are also symbolic of repair.” The presence of Macassan culture among the Yolngu, says Stubbs, the continent. It has been embedded in our mind to start history isn’t limited to material fragments. Balanda, the Yolngu word for at a random point, whether it is 1770 or 1778. And that that is a deeply European or outsider, stems from the Macassan word for ‘Dutch’ flawed approach.” ara or ‘Hollander’. Yolngu song lines riff on Bugis creation myths that may no longer be voiced in their place of origin. Stubbs tells me the The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (apt10), story of Gunybi Ganambarr, a Yolngu artist from the Dhuwa moiety, including the Yolngu/Macassan Project, is on view whose car broke down while he and family members were hunting at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, for turtles. Abandoning the car for a small boat, they sewed their 4 December – 28 April shirts together to form a Macassan sail and were eventually found by a police boat on the lookout for the missing family. He depicts Neha Kale is a writer and editor based in Sydney

Nawurapu Wunungmurra (Dhalwangu/Narrkala people), Macassan pot, undated, earthenware all images © the artists. Courtesy qagoma, Brisbane

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Shirin Neshat Interview by Fi Churchman

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The Iranian-American artist’s Land of Dreams is a multifaceted and highly personal portrait of the us circa this very moment

Land of Dreams (detail), 2019, two-channel video installation, hd video monochrome, 23 min 58 sec

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Before the pandemic, another kind of travel ban was implemented in the us. At the end of 2017, President Trump’s Executive Order 13780 prohibited entry to nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen on the basis of protecting the us against extremist terrorism. Though this was to last 90 days, a further proclamation extended the ban indefinitely. By 2020 varying degrees of prohibition covered nationals from North Korea, Chad, Venezuela, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria and Tanzania. Some of those not permitted to enter the us were those who already held Diversity Immigrant Visas (also known as the Green Card Lottery visas). The ban, which critics called out as anti-Muslim, was revoked in 2021. Somewhere between these two points in time, Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat began working on a group of works collectively titled Land of Dreams (2019–), comprising 111 black-and-white portraits, a black-and-white two-channel video and a feature film shot in colour (these last following a central character named Simin). Each of these might be looked at, or watched, separately – but they are also jigsaw pieces that, when fitted together, form a bigger picture. Neshat’s early photoworks (Unveiling, 1993, and Women of Allah, 1993–97) and videos (Turbulent, 1998, Rapture, 1999, Soliloquy, 1999, and Women Without Men, 2009) focused on providing a critical voice against the sociopolitical impacts of Islamic law on women in Iran and

are informed by the artist’s experiences of returning to a home much-changed since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (following an encounter with law enforcement officials in 1997, she has not returned). Always semiautobiographical, those early works of Neshat’s mostly reflected on her Iranian heritage alone. This latest body of work, however, might be the most representative of her status as an “American immigrant”, as she says, a position she has long held but never quite explored. In Land of Dreams she turns her lens towards what it is to live in the us as someone who is not white. Where the idea of those titular dreams (of success, money, a better life) are sold to the many, but granted to few. In the videowork and feature film (the latter premiered at Venice Film Festival this past September), Simin is a ‘dream catcher’. She is also Iranian-American. In the video she works for a secret Iranian organisation stationed in a bunker, but in the film she is an employee of the us government (for whom, at one point, she is asked to spy on a reclusive Iranian colony). Based in New Mexico, she travels to different households on assignment to collect the most recent dreams of their occupants. Most of the time, they are willing to tell her. Sometimes they’re not. When she likes a dream, Simin asks if she can take the subject’s portrait. She goes back to a motel room, dresses up as the person, switches on a webcam and recounts the dream in Farsi to an anonymous audience. By association, Simin is also the

photographer of the pictures that make up Neshat’s Land of Dreams portraits – each featuring a handwritten background of Farsi-translated dreams. Along her journey, Simin is met with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, finding herself straddling two different identities, never quite accepted by either her Iranian audience or by the country in which she was raised. The release of a feature film that highlights themes including immigration, belonging, racism, trauma and surveillance brings into focus what Neshat has been attempting to build for nearly four years: a world – or land – in which a critique of white American values, prejudices and the American Dream is reflected in its own constructed and absurd nature. Speaking to Neshat, it’s sometimes hard to know whether she’s talking about Simin or herself. artreview asia Land of Dreams (2019–21) includes portraits of real people that you yourself interviewed, some of whom appear in the video and film, together with their photographs, which it is implied have been made by the protagonist Simin. What are we to make of this slipping between worlds – or ‘lands’? shirin neshat It was a real experiment for me because I used to keep everything separate: the photography from the video, the video from the movie. The beginning of that experiment was to photograph people in New Mexico and introduce myself as an Iranian citizen before asking them to share their dreams with me.

Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film

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It was about trying to relate to people from different backgrounds, whether they were Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans or white Americans. Trying to create this human bond between an outsider and insider through this idea of living in America, living in the land of dreams, sharing our dreams and nightmares. Then came the video, in which this fictional character of Simin became a sort of alter ego of mine, who goes to these households and takes pictures of the residents. In the video there is a different kind of fictionalised Iranian colony compared to what’s shown in the movie. In the movie, the American government plays a sinister role. I think that there is a thread of continuity in all three mediums: that is the Iranian woman living in America in exile. She is a photographer and she is after people’s dreams. I also had this question: how can we take this theme and make it communicate different ideas to different audiences through different artistic languages? The art of photography, calligraphy, the direct gaze of the sitters, the video and the enigmatic and poetic relationship between the two worlds. The movie is still fresh, and not many people who have seen the movie have any idea that there is an artwork that comes with it, and people who have seen the artwork might have no idea there is a film. ara That’s a sort of act of translation then – or interpretation, which is maybe a more pertinent term in

relation to dreams. This also relates to the idea of revealing and withholding (some of the characters in both the Land of Dreams video and film are willing to tell their dreams, while others are not). Is this withholding important to you? sn It’s related to the culture of Iran. I often refer to the veil as an architectural emblem. I don’t like to generalise, but in the Islamic world we like to build walls around us. Things that we want to share and things that we want to keep private. In previous work, I think the

“Often, as artists, we worry too much about things making sense. I like the unbelievability of poetry and dreams” veil for me is really symbolic of a male dominated society, the way that veils create barriers between what is personal and what is public, and what can or cannot be shared. What was the word that you used? ara Withholding. sn Withholding. It’s exactly that. Ironically, on the other hand, I find the veil interesting in the way that it can give a lot of power to women, because as much as you have to conceal your body, you could also use the veil in an extremely

erotic manner. The eye contact, the slightest exposure of the skin, becomes very erotic in a way that a naked woman on a beach isn’t. The idea of temptation and sexual provocation within the parameters of these boundaries becomes very pointed. To me it’s about how over the course of history, especially within Iranian culture, we’ve been repressing so much due to censorship, lack of freedom of expression, dictatorship, and yet we always find ways of being vocal and saying everything we want to say. That’s really what my work is about. For example, even in the video Turbulent, Sussan Deyhim is not supposed to sing, but then she sings a song that has no ties to a specific language and it’s so guttural. It’s really about revolting against all the codes. I think that ties into how I feel about the state of feminism in Iran: how women, ultimately, can still be rebellious within all the boundaries that they’re dealing with. ara In the West, Iranian women are often perceived to be oppressed and without any power to express themselves. sn Many people in the West don’t understand. It’s difficult, this question of translation of ideas and cultures from one to the other. It’s almost like you fail all the time. I still have a lot of stereotypical readings of my work, which is pretty frustrating after all these years, because from my point of view I’ve always tried to show that women are constantly rebellious, defiant

Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film

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Herbie Nelson, from Land of Dreams portrait series, 2019, digital c-print with ink and acrylic paint. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

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Denise Calloway, from Land of Dreams portrait series, 2019, digital c-print and acrylic paint. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

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or breaking the rules. A lot of people look at work like Women of Allah [1993–97] and say they feel sorry. They think that I’m reiterating the oppression. The subjects [women, violence, defiance] that I’ve chosen for my work, they really are exposed to different kinds of interpretations depending on who is looking at the work, where they come from, what their relationship is to art and conceptual art. A lot of people in Iran also misunderstand it. They think that I’m just trying to sensationalise some of these issues to bring attention to myself, but that’s older work. I don’t work with the veil anymore. I don’t make work about the revolution. I’ve moved on. ara Translation is still very much part of your work. Farsi is a recurring feature – from early photoworks in Women of Allah to the Land of Dreams project. In the latter photo series, though, the script is behind the subject, rather than written onto the body. And again, there is a degree of withholding, from those who can’t read Farsi. sn The fact is any Iranian would know the meaning of the text. But I’ve lived longer in the us than I’ve lived in Iran, and although my work goes back to my Iranian roots, it’s never meant to stay only within that culture or that regional discourse. So the relationship a Western audience would have with a text they don’t understand is still as valuable. In the Land of Dreams photographs, what is written behind the subjects are

interpretations of the subjects’ dreams. These are original texts and illustrations, but that tradition goes back to a very ancient book of dream interpretations [Khab-gozari, c. twelfth century] from Persian culture. Although they might begin with and constitute a very ethnically specific source, they transcend those issues of locality, the cultural specificities.

“I don’t see anything in any form of absolute. On a personal level, I’m full of dichotomies and feel conflicted by the parts of me that I like and respect, and the parts I absolutely hate, which I find demonic” Beyond that, the works also incorporate the idea of paradox: black-and-white film, male and female, natural and urban environment, mysticism and poetry, violence and politics. ara What is it about the idea of dualities that you’re drawn to? sn I don’t see anything in any form of absolute. On a personal level, I’m full of dichotomies and feel conflicted by the parts of me that I like and respect, and the parts I absolutely hate, which I find demonic. I find that I’m always working

against my own evils – the selfishness, the egotism, the narcissism, all of that stuff. But it’s also about making friends with those strengths and vulnerabilities. And then I’m a person who lives between East and West. I’m emotionally Iranian, but my character is very American, very Western. I’m always serving two audiences. ara How is that duality reflected in the character of Simin in Land of Dreams? sn The whole film is about this Iranian woman mediating between her Iranian past and the American culture she was raised in. But it is also about mediating between her interior life and external life, and dream versus reality. There’s a lot to do with crossing boundaries. Simin is a very strange character who doesn’t really belong here or there. For me, it was an interesting idea to develop. For example, her relationship to the Iranian community is only through social media, where she uploads videos of herself, but social media also furthers this distance. If you speak Farsi, you will understand that she has an accent, so she’s not really fluent in the language. But she’s also not quite American. While Simin is dealing with her interior world, she is also confronted by the expectations of other people. For me, this duality is about being in between, and then having to translate that idea for others through a work of art. Iranian people don’t understand my work so much because it’s so conceptual. Then American

Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film

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people don’t quite understand it for its cultural specificities. There’s always something lost in translation. ara But those gaps in understanding also add another dimension: a sort of mystery. Is this a case of something gained? sn In the video, the mystery doesn’t lie only with the main character, but with the whole thing – in its bizarreness and absurdity. With the feature film, I feel that most of the mystery lies with who Simin is as a character. It’s difficult to figure her out. What are her intentions? What are the reasons she does certain things? Why does she get a job at the Census Bureau collecting dreams? What is her ulterior motive? The mystery unravels itself and then at the end there is some kind of conclusion, but still, the intention was to create a character that is really hard to read. In other words, she doesn’t show many emotions and she holds something back all the time. ara So why dreams? What is it that draws you to them? sn Dreams are so telling. They’re just so powerful. First of all, I have to say, I’m really interested in the work of Man Ray, Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau. All this surrealism, it’s so beautiful the way fictions unravel when you have one foot in reality and one foot in illusions. It’s wonderful to put a film in front of people where

nothing makes sense. Then the people begin to realise that in their own dreams nothing makes sense. Often, as artists, we worry too much about things making sense. I like the unbelievability of poetry and dreams. Dreams are truly a reflection of our subconscious. Our subconscious is so inundated with our anxieties, our fears and our desires. Maybe, in the end, the way Simin relates to human beings is in their subconscious mind, because she herself has so many fears and anxieties. For a woman who never really fits into society, relating to people through their dreams made a lot of sense. I had a brother who unfortunately died young. I always felt that he was a person who never quite felt comfortable in the world. There are people who have a really hard time fitting in. In this case, art or creative imagination or impersonating someone else can help you to find a way of coping with your inability to cope with reality. ara Do you think this relates to the concept of the American Dream, and fitting in? sn That was another layer of the intention behind the film. It not only follows the journey of this single woman and her obsession with dreams, but it is also a parody about America. The more political side of Land of Dreams is about identity, and how that identity is being compromised, and the more demonic image of a country that once was something. It’s a little bit like all

of my work, because while it is very personal, it always has a leg in the political. With the Land of Dreams movie, the intention was that while we are following the life of this woman who’s haunted by these two worlds – Iran and us, dream and reality – we are also really understanding the malice of a society that is spying on people’s subconscious for whatever selfish reasons. There is definitely a question of collecting data on people, but also there’s a lot of references to racism, bigotry, political injustice, poverty. Every household that we chose to depict represents an aspect of American society. These were all really carefully worked on as self-contained ‘stories’ outside of Simin’s world. With the artwork [the video], those moments were much more about the people Simin visits, and she’s more like a bystander; they are like little poems. But with the movie, we had the opportunity to build all those layers, where each visit to a household was like a short story. I enjoyed developing that a lot because it was like six short stories, and then the main three characters moved in and out of them. As Simin travels through those stories, through other people’s dreams, she slowly transforms, and eventually, by the end of the movie, she is changed. ara Shirin Neshat: Living in One Land, Dreaming in Another is on view at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 26 November – 24 April

Land of Dreams (detail), 2019, two-channel video installation, hd video monochrome, 23 min 58 sec all images but two © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town & London

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The Distance from Here Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai 8 September – 22 January Earlier this year, as part of Hiwa K’s remarkable retrospective at the Jameel Arts Centre, a concrete staircase was installed in the courtyard between the centre and the Palazzo Versace hotel. The stairs led to a small, wall-less room furnished only with a single bed and an antenna. It was devastatingly effective as a twinned invocation of place, namely Kurdish cities under neoliberalism and the increasingly unaffordable bedsits of Dubai. It finds ghostly resonance in Do Ho Suh’s Staircase-V (2008), which occupies a double-height gallery inside the centre. This flight of stairs is a red gossamer recreation of the staircase that connects his New York apartment with his landlord’s. A couple weeks prior, at Neon in Athens, I saw a pink-and-blue recreation of the apartment itself. The multiple cities and shows begin to whirl together like a Mr Krabs meme. The liminal space, the interstitial, the barzakh. Temporary spaces filled with, in Gulf Return novelist Deepak Unnikrishnan’s phrase, ‘temporary people’. All fitting if somewhat tired metaphors for Dubai, which also serve as the subject of this thoughtful, subtle show, despite its extremely trying description that cites ‘isolation, movement, boundaries, displacement, confinement and waiting’ among several other bromides. Gulf Return, or the wider feedback-loop of migration from Kerala to the Gulf states and beyond, is writ large in Anup Mathew Thomas’s Nurses (2014), a grid of 48 colour photographs covering one long wall. In each, a woman wearing scrubs poses in an outdoor setting close to the hospitals or care facilities in which they work. We see a variety of landscapes, from sand dunes to the verdant fields and barren wintry forests of more temperate climes, and a range

of expressions, too, from stoic to smiling. Nearby, two copies of a small accompanying book provide more information about each person and their migration routes. We learn for example that Shinumol K Pulickal, who is shot hands on hips against a scrubby desert, is currently a cardiac icu nurse at the Zayed Military Hospital in Abu Dhabi and has previously worked in Bangalore, Kochi, Mumbai and Al-Taif. Remarkably, the wide, stylised shots and exterior setting mean that these images of dislocation and neoliberal circuits of remittance don’t immediately invoke covid-19, despite the subject matter. But the pandemic seeps through in the palpable economic anxiety and desperation in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s A Letter Can Always Reach its Destination (2012). Here, spam emails – fantastical solicitations, pyramid schemes, desultory scams – are performed by amateur actors. They appear as holograms superimposed onto a video in which the other actors line up to await their turn to perform, as if to listen and offer silent support. Even as the work feels a little, well, mean, this backdrop crowd creates a powerful sense of a speaker at a rally or a politician giving a press conference. These are epistolary communiqués from real individuals, yes, but also emissaries of an entire global system of asymmetric access to power, money or simply having your voice heard. A similar dynamic of entreaties from the Global South to the West – and in turn to the post-West of Dubai – suffuses the show. Among the loveliest works on view come from Sreshta Rit Premnath’s project that links Bangladeshi rose sellers in Rome and Polish conceptualist André Cadere. The latter was best known for

his Barres de Bois Rond (1970–78), segmented lengths of doweling that he would surreptitiously lean against the wall at the openings he attended, like immigrants in other people’s exhibitions. In Recto/Verso (2017), images of Cadere holding a striped rod in various city settings are juxtaposed, on the facing page, with images of Premnath, who replaces the rod with a long-stemmed rose: the immigrant artist, then and now. He is further invoked in Premnath’s The Law of Identity series (2017), which collapses the distance between the rose and the rod. Here, painted lengths of wood lean against lined paper featuring short poems: ‘There are two languages one for love another for commerce. Two Euros is a suitable price,’ for example. Later, I realise that its red margins are drawn on and ruled at a leaning diagonal. Disparate bodies disintegrate into each other in Mona Ayyash’s Folding Bellies (2020), a newly commissioned video in which five participants practise movement exercises. The gestures are small and repetitive, and the video evinces a generative, almost algorithmic accumulation reminiscent of the stock videos filmed for cheap in several more marginalised elsewheres and used as training data for machine vision. But bodies are never so present as in their absence in Hrair Sarkissian’s Background (2013), an elegiac paean to the fading regional tradition of studio portraiture. Posed in front of these backlit images of backdrops, you could be anybody, anywhere: a scuba diver, a piano player, a bibliophile, a patriarch in a single ornate chair. Here, displacement gives way to a familiar feeling of stasis and resignation: of being stuck, making the same old moves in an in-between space. Rahel Aima

Yto Barrada, Lyautey Unit Blocks, 2010, wood and paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Do Ho Suh, Staircase-V, 2008, polyester and stainless steel tubes, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Abbas Akhavan curtain call, variations on a folly Chisenhalle Gallery, London 14 August – 17 October How might we visualise the passage of time? In the work of Tehran-born, Montreal-based Abbas Akhavan, it becomes a bizarre kind of filmset, through which we move, back and forth: history as a tangled, nonlinear stream of images. His latest installation considers how ancient Palmyra – the once-great merchant city of the Roman Empire, situated in present-day Syria – has, in recent years, come to represent a strange kind of disaster tourism. In 2015 Islamic State entered the citadel, razing its temples, theatre and Arch of Triumph dating back to the third century; the militants also murdered the site’s eighty-two-year-old head of antiquities, Khaled al-Asaad, displaying his corpse among the ruins.

And yet, a year later, Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph rose again. This time, 3d-printed, at two-thirds scale, in Egyptian marble and put on display in London’s Trafalgar Square: the rendering – intended as a compelling statement of civilisation, a document of its mutilation and salvation – was a joint venture between the universities of Oxford and Harvard, and the uae’s Museum of the Future. Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, used the diminutive replica’s unveiling to proclaim that ‘Antiquities like this belong to all mankind and it is imperative we all strive to safeguard our common heritage’. Critics decried it as little more than an aesthetic move that elided the human costs of the conflict.

‘Who inherits the ruins of war?’ Akhavan wonders in the accompanying notes to his Chisenhale Gallery installation. With this contested mission of establishing civilisational hegemony in mind – the uses and abuses of Palmyra – Akhavan’s curtain call, variations on a folly (2021) takes the form of the colonnade that once approached the ancient city’s Arch of Triumph. But the closer you get, the less it makes sense. Akhavan has fashioned the monumental pillars out of cob, a construction material (with an ancient history) composed of subsoil, straw and water – it hits you with a musty, earthy scent, evoking the natural and sepulchral. The effect is to accentuate the winding nature of the past: as you get

curtain call, variations on a folly, 2021 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London

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closer, it seems unclear whether the pillars are emerging from or falling into ruin. It’s an image that is suggestive of the object’s vulnerability, and its impending annihilation – a counterpoint to the architectural overreach that has accompanied Palmyra’s recent resurrections. This technique of dirt ramming is something that Akhavan seems to have made his own, foregrounding the fleeting, inconclusive nature of monument-making. (We see this in his previous work Variations on Ghost, 2017, in which soil and water are packed into the form of the claw of an Assyrian deity, the Lamassu.) Such precarious composition (relative to the fixity of stone) offers a cautionary tale in shallow reconstruction: the vested interests embedded in the ways in which we choose to reproduce heritage. And as the title of his Chisenhale commission implies, Akhavan’s reconstructed colonnade also draws on the visual history of the architectural folly: often

more than just mere decoration, follies can be statements of power too – situated in ways that often conjure an effect of visual estrangement. Akhavan’s objective is to call into question the veracity of images, a play on the folly’s own theatrical, deceptive charms. If this was in doubt, the colonnade is perched on top of a lurid green platform that curves upward at one end, as if beginning to fold in on itself. By drawing on language associated with the technology of cinema – the green screen and infinity wall – Akhavan gestures towards a ‘portal’ through which this fragmented relic of the ancient world might be transplanted again and again, reemerging through trickery in an endless sequence of scene changes. Green screen promises a forever future for the ancient city. And yet the result is kept resolutely analogue – it hints at the potential for new versions of ancient Palmyra to come,

rather than showing any visual effects in their own right. Narrative richness is bonded with technical flatness. Displayed in this way, Akhavan castrates the logic of the green screen: it becomes pure material, no longer a conduit. Meanwhile, the gallery pulses with an indistinct hum – the artist pipes in a soundtrack of low bass and pink noise, to produce a sonic bleed without observable cause. And there is a beautifully useless coda to the installation, which can only be seen from an impossibly elevated perspective. The phrase ‘cat’s paw’ – taken from Jean de La Fontaine’s 1679 fable The Monkey and the Cat (a cautionary tale about being used as a dupe) – is painted on the gallery’s rooftop. Learning of that unseen message – to be read only from the skies above – not only evokes a militarised way of seeing, but also transmits a sense of vertigo to us below. En Liang Khong

cat’s paw, 2021, white temporary graffiti paint. Courtesy the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London

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11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Seoul Museum of Art 8 September – 21 November After more than 18 months of coronavirus purgatory, we could all use a getaway. And just in time (actually, one year delayed, but never mind), the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale has arrived, ‘inspired by ideas of escapism’, as its introductory text says. Entering the Seoul Museum of Art, you are greeted by a gargantuan, pixelated wall painting of a mountainous landscape by Minerva Cuevas. A solitary figure is perched on a high rock above the clouds. It looks like pure bliss. On a small screen hanging before it, two actors are kissing with abandon on a beach, as the camera swirls around them – a 1995 restaging of a shot in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) by Brice Dellsperger, who stars in drag, as part of his ‘Body Double’ series of film remakes. Airy sanctuaries and passionate love: we are in paradise. Alas, reality will soon intervene. One Escape at a Time, organised by former M+ and Pompidou Centre curator Yung Ma, takes an expansive approach to its capacious theme. Spaciously installed and admirably accessible,

this satisfying exhibition shows how, in difficult times, artists – and laypeople – are finding fertile means of escape in communities, the past and, perhaps most of all, art. Escapism’s dark side is here too. Ma has tapped about 40 artists to present some 50 works, which tend towards compact productions rather than grand statements – fitting for a period of confined movements and indefinite waiting. Some read like snippets of daily life. (The show’s name refers to the Netflix family sitcom One Day at a Time, 2017–20.) The mood is frequently bittersweet, even melancholic, punctuated by radiant bursts of optimism and rebellion. In a trio of short videos, Li Liao films himself strolling the nearly deserted streets of Wuhan in early 2020, balancing a red plastic bag atop a long pole, amusing himself as he delivers this tidy metaphor for the precariousness of the pandemic. Bani Abidi’s The Address is from 2007 but feels of-the-moment: ten photos (one on a monitor) of spaces with a tv displaying the same

empty chair and microphone. In some, people gaze at it, awaiting an announcement that will never arrive. In an era of brutal isolation, Ma’s show convincingly argues that art – creating it, reworking it, just experiencing it – can be a means not only of escape but also of connection. It is a place where we can try to understand each other, and ourselves. Friends have a wild night on the town in a music video by the charismatic musician Amature Amplifier (“Please keep dancing in front of me for one million years,” he sings in another), and Amy Lam and Jon McCurley’s sitcom-style Life of Life of a Craphead is a painfully accurate look at life as a young artist, balancing creative pursuits and a horrible job. Meanwhile, six Swedish art students assembled by artist Ming Wong under the name C-U-T present a K-pop-style music video, Kaleidoscope (2021), that is so lovingly produced that what might sound like parody becomes a sincere tribute to

Li Liao, Unaware 2020 (detail), 2020, three-channel video installation, colour, sound, 6 min 52 sec, 10 min 39 sec and 16 min 45 sec. Courtesy the artist

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cross-cultural influence. In a behind-the-scenes interview, a C-U-T member acknowledges their influences, but explains, “We’re trying to find our own way”. We find our way – we escape – with, and through, others. Pilvi Takala films a Helsinki startup conference in If Your Heart Waits It (remix) (2018), where would-be tech barons network and impart bromides. “Hire quickly, fire quickly,” one intones, in this portrait of personal delusions leading to collective degradation. Wang Haiyang’s Apartment (2019) is a grainy video of men meeting under cover of night at a Beijing construction site. Two embrace. In brief voiceovers (altered to cloak identities) men talk about mundanities, desire, sex. It is screened awkwardly, in a cramped storage room beneath a staircase, which lends intimacy to its viewing but also uncomfortably mirrors the marginalisation of the work’s subjects: shunted out of sight again. There are forays into fantasy, but towards political ends, not self-indulgence. The duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries offers a seven-episode video series that tells a story, with rapid-fire text, of a Samsung salaryman who dies at his desk (“like dying for your country”) and is then reincarnated as a Samsung smartphone,

a napkin and more. It is an uproarious, discombobulating indictment of intense, hierarchical work cultures. Hansol Ryu’s ten-minute showstopper of a low-budget horror film, Virgin Road (2021), has a bride in a white dress rip open her head, tear apart her innards and smash her organs (along with fixed notions of gender and any sign of civilisation) underneath her high heels. It is revolting, cleansing mayhem. The exhibition astutely foregrounds how images come into being and circulate today: in alluring fragments, as potent memes and on countless screens. De Palma sparks Dellsperger. A viral video of three Black Americans debating looting becomes the heart of I Understand… (2021), a raw video essay about the limits of empathy by Hao Jingban. Alongside footage of a Catholic reliquary procession, Justin Bieber turns into a godlike presence in a concert excerpted in Paul Pfeiffer’s Incarnator (2018–21); thousands raise their phones to snap photos for their followers. The biennale has mirrored this mass distribution by including tiny bits of the show at about 100 Seoul cafés and shops: a poster of the C-U-T crew in an ice-cream store, an Oliver Laric video next to bespoke cakes. An enormous screen at the coex Artium devoted to luxury ads hosts

occasional screenings. (I enjoyed Bieber hawking Balenciaga while awaiting a sly, seductive piece by the curatorial outfit Tastehouse and the graphic-design outfit Works.) In a bracing visualisation of the current digital panopticon, Yes We Cam (2012–16), Kim Min arrays on a wall snapshots of South Korean police recording protests and documents from his indictment after attending a demonstration. Much of the time our escapes are fleeting or illusory – a level of distraction achieved by scrolling infinite feeds, buffeted by advertising and notifications, on networks optimised for pleasure, commerce and surveillance. And so the most indelible piece in Mediacity, for me, depicts that whole regime melting away. In Kang Sang-woo’s lush video Forest Neighbor (2021), lightning hits a powerline in a rural area, and the lights go out in a nearby home. A young man tries to remedy the situation as his sister ventures into the surrounding forest. Amid its shadows, she happens upon a film shoot. “We are almost done,” a worker tells her. Suddenly its bright lights cut, and her phone illuminates her path. A snake slithers by her, but she has her eye on something else: a mushroom. She crouches down and picks it. Andrew Russeth

Kim Min, Yes We Cam (detail), 2012–16, photography and printed document, dimension variable. Courtesy the artist

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Liquid Ground Para Site, Hong Kong 14 August – 14 November Launched in 2018, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam’s ‘Lantau Tomorrow Vision’ – a hk$624 billion development scheme proposed with the intention of solving Hong Kong’s housing crisis – has become a subject of much controversy. The project, which entails the construction of artificial islands near Lantau Island, aims at creating a new economic hub for the city by 2030. Critics of the scheme have highlighted the severity of the environmental damage it will cause, as well as condemning it as an example of reckless fiscal expenditure. At Para Site, however, it’s the inspiration for an exhibition (complete with a makeshift wooden structure that presumably represents the idea of an island), curated by Alvin Li and Junyuan Feng, that takes land reclamation as a point of departure to explore the aforementioned criticisms, all the while revealing various facets of the relationship between humans and nature – from reverence to ruination. Lantau Island inhabitants Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks, part of the artist-and-anthropologist duo Zheng Mahler, demonstrate the significance of local Lantau wildlife and sensory limits to the human experience with Bubalus bubalis 16 – 40,000Hz (2021). The mixed-media installation contains an intricately constructed sculpture, consisting of water rippling between two Chladni plates, serving as a visual representation of frequencies only water buffaloes (native to Lantau) can hear and that are essential for herd communication. Known as wetland landscapers or ‘terraformers’, the buffaloes were once used as agricultural labour in Lantau, later released into the wild, turning wasted farmland into a biodiverse wetland. The necessity of creating a visual rendering of a sonic capability beyond human capacity speaks to the limited scope of our anthropocentric view of the natural environment. Issues that, as the fate of Lantau is being determined, seem more pertinent than ever.

One of the most imposing installations, Lee Kai Chung’s Sea-sand Home (2021), elicits a revelatory irony. Here Lee discovers that sand for ‘Lantau Tomorrow Vision’ (and other reclamation projects in Hong Kong) is likely from Qinzhou, Guangxi, in mainland China. Further highlighting the environmental concerns of the curatorial premise, the work also prompts revelations about the larger geopolitical context. Human-size replicas of sand-mining storage towers and pipes rise above the gallery floor; at their base, an image of salt pans is projected over salt spilled out in heaps. While the title references the process of desalinating sea sand before it’s incorporated into construction materials, it also visualises the financialisation of land, at the cost of its extractionist relationship to water. Another strong work by a newly formed collective, The Centre for Land Affairs, boldly takes on one of the most prominent developers and art patrons in the city, New World Development (nwd). A pair of pink rubber slippers lies on top of a magazine, the cover of which features The Pavilia Farm, a luxury residential venture by nwd. The slippers, among other found objects included in Installation 1: On Art and Developer Hegemony (2021), are from dispossessed villages on land that nwd was involved in purchasing. Taking an investigative approach, the collective displays nwd videos alongside government reports, town planning documents and photographs taken by drones documenting their methods of acquiring land. The wider point here concerns the use of art to legitimise commercial projects and, conversely, the extent to which art infrastructure depends on opportunities provided by these developers. Beyond Hong Kong itself, Chinese mythology emerges as a common motif, most emphatically in work by Yi Xin Tong and a collaborative work between Future Host and Heidi Lau. Featuring sculptures (Petrified Sea: Aquatic Dragon and Rolling Eyes, both 2021) and

facing page, top Lee Kai Chung, Sea-sand Home (detail), 2021, metal and salt sculpture, publication. Courtesy the artist

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a video (The Birth of Julung-julung: The Aquatic Dragon, 2019–20) that document Tong’s travels to the tourist-ridden Dinawan Island in Malaysia, the installation conjures the aquatic dragon Jiaolong to illustrate the artist’s own jaded frustration with Western erasure of Southeast Asia’s indigenous spiritual and ecological heritage. The small sculpture Rolling Eyes depicts eyes set in stone that appear to be rolling in an exasperated (but static) manner, echoing the artist’s own facial expressions in the video. Heidi Lau’s Resentment Sleeve (2021) elicits a visceral reaction to the deceptive, grungy metal-chain-like appearance belying its ceramic consistency. Presented in conjunction with Future Host’s performance video Worlding Hands (2021), in which the artist choreographically reenacts a Chinese creation myth, in which a goddess made men by moulding yellow clay, Lau’s sculptures (The Fountain, 2021, in particular) visually mimic primordial ocean imagery loosely corresponding to the video. The main inspiration for the two works stems from Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), a fourth-century bce Chinese text that presents the mythological possibility of a world in which harmonious living among different species thrives. Here Shanhaijing’s creation myth is reimagined as a pathway to a truly sustainable future. Overall, the exhibition presents thoughtprovoking and impactful works that grapple with complex, insightful ideas, with a compelling local (as well as a regional and global) resonance. Yet by comparison, the wooden island motif on and in which works are displayed seems a crude anchor and clumsy form of scenography. As the ‘Lantau Tomorrow Vision’ project unfolds amid unaffordable housing prices and developer monopolies that financialise land despite the effects of global warming and rising sea levels, there are lessons here to be learned. Aaina Bhargava

facing page, bottom Yi Xin Tong, Rolling Eyes, 2021, air-dried clay, pigment. Courtesy the artist and Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai

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Khaleejiness Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi 31 August – 10 February The Qatar diplomatic crisis recently ended with a grudging rapprochement with its Gulf neighbours. Still, the impasse did provoke a groundswell of crossborder fraternal feelings, and a renewed interest in Khaleeji, or Gulf citizen identity. The photo exhibition Khaleejiness brings together 12 (very) young artists making work on the subject. It is organised by uae-based publishing collective swalif and was prompted by a concurrently released book of photos and essays, Encapsulation Volume One. What a time to be alive in the Gulf. The show opens with a section on the city and the desert. We know this because there is a tall vitrine half-filled with sand. Inside, against its back wall, are four large double exposures from Emirati Shamsa Al Mansoori, in which a woman in white flits around in front of some rather lovely old metal gates. Nearby,

some sepia-toned collages by Qatari Hamad Al-Fayhani also superimpose the body onto the city, but here low aerial views replace street scenes. The figures are headless, but the effect is less Acéphale and more malfunctioning Zoom background. A second, larger gallery focuses on more intimate, interior feelings. Its exhibition design is inspired by Omani photographer Abdulaziz Abdulah Alhosni’s photo Nadi Al Habayeb (2020) (not on view). To enter, you pass through a panelled telephone-booth door into a hot-pinklit vestibule with rotary handsets dangling from the ceiling, which curator Sarah Al Mheiri tells The National is inspired by the older generation’s favoured mode of courtship, reading poetry to each other over the phone. The back of the door is covered in tagged scribbles, which range from initials in hearts and yt/ig self-promo to

messages like ‘Eternal unconditional love For the Khaleeji Youth, Visionaries of the Collective’ and ‘simp free zone’. The large space features pumping Khaleeji music, fuchsia-lit aubergine walls and a mauve-carpeted floor, a departure from the soft pink and blue pastels of Alhosni’s photograph. It is broken up by several seating areas consisting of patterned area rugs, coffee tables and colourful embroidered cushions. One corner is lined with shelves scattered with bottles. Upon buying your ticket outside, you are handed a small bottle containing a slip of brown paper tied with twine. Why? Because “Khaleejis aren’t good at expressing emotions”, I am told by the desk person; visitors are asked to write a “message of love” on the paper, stuff it into the bottle and add it to this installation. A placard on the tables seems to suggest that

Abdulaziz Abdulah Alhosni, Raised by the Wolves, 2021, photograph. Courtesy the artist

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the work is by Alhosni, eliding the fact that it’s rather the curator’s experiential interpretation. Misleading, but a remarkably Khaleeji move all the same, except here it’s the state that operates as curator, instrumentalising artists into its own total artwork. The works installed in this gallery offer a Khaleejiness that feels softer, more gender-fluid and, above all, extremely Gen Z. The better works have a dynamic fashion-photography feel, such as Omani photographer Mahmood Al Zadjali’s portraits of Balooshi culture, or Khaleejis with ancestry from the Balochistan region. In Saudi artist Khaldoun Khelaifi’s The Protector (2021), a man wears a pinstripe jacket and ghutra, whose characteristic red and/or white patterning is cast in a rainbow gradient. His hands cover his eyes, with evil eyes painted onto the nail beds; below the image, a hot pink phonograph crackles with dead air. Khaleeji identity has historically been a richly woven tapestry of language, culture and tribal-familial connections that long predate the establishment of its nations. With time, the

state replaced tribal structures as the definers – and regulators – of identity. Each generation had its shared experiences: eking a living from unforgiving land and sea; the 1958 discovery of oil and breakneck, if asymmetric paces of development in the following decades; the Gulf War and the endless mediation of the 1990s that resulted in Gulf Futurism; and now, especially in the uae, Qatar and Kuwait, how to negotiate being a demographic minority (albeit a powerful and privileged one) in countries primarily populated by people who hold other passports. The book, to be fair, does include contributions from other Arabs and South Asians alongside earnest, if lightly edited pieces of personal writing. On view here however in the nation’s capital is a smaller selection that is limited to bona fide citizens of the Gulf. The show’s overproduction, all blown-up images, italicised quotes and awkward experiential add-ons, does these very young artists a disservice. qr codes that link to each artist’s Instagram make plain that this is not a collection of work

so much as of people. I wonder how much better the show might fare in a pared-back project-space setting or just installed at a more human scale. But perhaps that’s forcing an exhibition-reading on what is first and foremost a branding exercise. To be a Khaleeji artist today is to be conscripted into a chimeric, too-big-to-fail machine where soft power meets cultural tourism and national identity. Some artists navigate it admirably, making work with the same rigour that they did in the decades before the consultants flew in and assured leaders that, yes, these new institutions and mammoth international art events absolutely would scale. Many others fall victim to the arrested development that’s the result of artists being materially – but rarely discursively, critically – supported and pushed onto large institutional and international stages in what feels like a fundamental misapplication of scale. I want to believe that the same won’t befall this younger generation. But this show, despite an enticing premise, is deeply discouraging. Rahel Aima

Mahmood Al Zadjali, -k-h-a-l-e-e-j-i balushi, 2021, photograph. Courtesy the artist

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5th Passage: In Search of Lost Time Gajah Gallery, Singapore 23 September – 24 October A common mantra for survivors of trauma is ‘I am not what happened to me’. Could a vilified art group attempt a similar recovery? This seems to be the case for this exhibition, which wants to tell a story of 5th Passage that doesn’t revolve around its central controversy. Founded in 1991 by three young artists, Suzann Victor, Han Ling and Susie Lingham, 5th Passage occupied the fifth floor passageway in Parkway Parade Shopping Centre and was one of the first multidisciplinary art spaces in Singapore. Running for five years, it organised a wide range of activities, including exhibitions, readings and talks, but it came to be defined by one infamous performance: Josef Ng’s Brother Cane. In 1993, together with another art collective, The Artists Village, 5th Passage organised the Artists’ General Assembly, a weeklong arts festival in which Brother Cane was presented. The performance protested an antigay sting by the police, in which ten men were arrested and caned. One of the actions by Ng was to turn his back to the audience, pull down his pants and snip off some pubic hair. A reporter was present at the event, and a salacious picture of Ng’s half-covered buttocks ended up on a newspaper frontpage the next day. The fallout was quick: the artist was fined for performing an obscene act in public, 5th Passage was evicted from its premises and barred from all government grants, and the National Arts Council started a no-funding rule for performance art that lasted ten years. 5th Passage never quite recovered from the ordeal and subsequent stigma, though it clung on for a while staging shows in other venues. A sitespecific exhibition held in a hospital in 1996 became its last show. Over time, Brother Cane came to be known as a seminal work in local art history and 5th Passage became a footnote in that mythical narrative. As a pioneering artist-run space in Singapore, its prominence has also been eclipsed by other groups, such as The Artists Village and Plastique Kinetic Worms, which were also active during the 1980s and 1990s. This despite the established names of its cofounders: Victor went on to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and Lingham became the director of Singapore Art Museum (2013–16).

In Search of Lost Time aims to rehabilitate 5th Passage’s good name, but instead of a conventional art-historical showcase of works produced during the collective’s heyday, curator John Tung got ten artists involved with the group to produce new works reflecting on their memories of 5th Passage and the nature of time and memory. This approach has the benefit of showing how former members have processed the experience. Photographer-filmmaker John Clang, who had his first solo at 5th Passage at the age of twenty, has a wistful take in The Waning Crescent Moon (all works 2021 unless otherwise stated). He returned to the site where the arts group once was – now an empty black wall with a fire hydrant – took a picture and blew it up. This huge digital print forms the backdrop against which grainy stills from a video call with his ailing elderly mother are superimposed. The message is clear: things pass, people age. But it’s not all water under the bridge for all the artists. Kai Lam’s installation, We Are All That’s Left, contains, among other things, the title spelled out using party balloons on the wall. Meanwhile, Lingham chose to revisit an old performance, Renunciation (1994), in which she hammered nails into a wicker chair, in reference to a practice of hammering nails into sacred trees to transfer woe or disease. For the show, she made undoundone #1 – #4, which includes three charcoal drawings of that chair. The first drawing is a detailed, almost-photographic rendering; the second is more faded; and the last one is bleached white, with only the nails remaining. In general, the exhibition feels more like an exploration of the members’ internal states than a critical examination of 5th Passage’s relevance. This is partly due to the decision to include remakes of old works done during 5th Passage’s days rather than the originals. As a result, the exhibition feels oddly distanced from the past it aims to investigate. We don’t get a sense of what was powerful or immediate about the original in its context, only an emotionally metabolised version that has had its edges smoothed out by time and distance. For example, in 1994 Victor created a trilogy of installations that used props to stand in for the absent human body due to the prohibitions against performance art. Exhibited at another

mall, Pacific Plaza, one of the works was Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1994), in which a lightbulb dangles from a long wire centimetres off the ground, where there is a mirror. The wire is connected to a baby rocker, which makes the lightbulb bounce gently up and down, and chink repeatedly against the mirror. The work’s title comes from a Shakespearean sonnet on postcoital self-loathing, and a similar sense of dejectedness is present in Victor’s work, which simulates feeble self-pleasuring rocking movements while alluding to narcissism (the mirror) and the glare of public exposure (the lightbulb). For this exhibition, Victor has arranged 20 lightbulbs in a circle (Shadow Work). Instead of a mirror at the foot of each bulb, there is an engraved lens bearing a scene from photographs of diverse activities held at 5th Passage’s space. While the work celebrates the overlooked multifaceted identity of the group, it also comes across as oddly conciliatory and anodyne, just one more adaptation of Expense, a work Victor has remade over the years in different scales and configurations. The only ‘old’ work in the show is Ray Langenbach’s video singapore sub liminal (1994– 2015), featuring interviews with 5th Passage members about their dreams shortly after the court trials, new works made during this period and actual footage of Brother Cane. Having the shaky quality of a home video, the film captures the woozy irreality of a group of friends trapped in a waking nightmare; people who are, as the opening crawl text says, ‘scripted into the government’s nightmare of “new art forms” that “pose dangers to public order, security and decency”’. The video is shown at the back of the exhibition, probably to downplay the Brother Cane reference. Nonetheless, the film highlights an important fact: on a fundamental level, Brother Cane and 5th Passage were in the same boat. They were the victims of a punitive state. In the background of the crawl text, we hear a voice saying, “They were guilty and given ten strokes”, interspersed with thin, whistling sounds followed by sharp pops. Near the end of the video, you see what’s happening: Ng during his performance, hopping around devilishly with a cane, whipping the ground. Adeline Chia

facing page, both Ray Langenbach, singapore sub liminal (stills), 1994–2015, single-channel video, colour, sound (stereo), 11 min 36 sec

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Danh Vo Massimo De Carlo, Milan 7 September – 30 October Since 2019, Massimo De Carlo has been housed on the ground floor of Casa CorbelliniWassermann, an iconic Milanese building designed by architect Piero Portaluppi in the early 1930s. Considered a prime example of rationalist architecture, its spacious interior is bedecked in an astonishing variety of marble, which runs as a linear thread throughout the gallery’s rooms along the skirting boards, floors and doorframes. When Danh Vo first saw the space in preparation for his solo show at the gallery, he thought it was incredible. ‘When they give you a space, you have to analyse it: you can decide to work against it, or together, or play with it,’ the Danish-Vietnamese artist said in a recent interview. ‘I wanted to accentuate the marble, which is everywhere here, but not refined marble like this one, I wanted the scraps.’ These scraps come in the form of antiques sourced by Vo in Europe – he is an avid collector of all manner of objects that may or may not be of use in his art – and marble pieces recovered from dismantled graves and a quarry in Bolzano. Disfigured by time, they are relics from a distant past that act as a humble counterpoint to the opulent rooms they now inhabit. They invite close attention. In one of the smaller rooms, a salt-and-pepper granite bench lies in front of an exquisite fireplace made of three different types of marble that frame an interwoven surface of copper alloy strips. The bench fits in so aptly that you would be excused for mistaking it for the original furnishing. A small sculpture has been carefully placed on the bench, balanced without glue, screws or nails. It is made up of three elements: a slightly

yellowed Carrara-marble lion head that could have been a corbel in a past life; an H-shaped wood structure into which the upper ledge of the lion’s head has been slotted; and, on it, a sleeping bronze human head, recognisable as such only once you walk around the sculpture and discern it in the back. The features seem to intimate this could be Jesus Christ, or perhaps it’s some other sleeping, historical bearded man. Something about the two antique elements hints at sea wreckage, or simply the sea itself – perhaps because of the softness of the erosion and the nature of the discolouration. The title – untitled, like most of the works in the show – certainly offers no clues. This marine element appears to be hinted at in the adjacent room, at the heart of the gallery. Here, three sculptures lie on a low square platform or floor composed of nine white Carrara and Lasa sheets. One of the ‘readymade’ sculptures is made up of a single stone leg, flanked by a fierce sea creature on one side, and a fragment of a foot on the other. The room also contains the latest version of Vo’s signature item in exhibitions: the farewell letter the French Catholic missionary JeanThéophane Vénard wrote to his father in 1861, while calmly awaiting execution by beheading in Vietnam (2.2.1861, 2009). Vo’s father, Phung Vo, who is Catholic and does not speak French, has been faithfully reproducing the letter in beautiful calligraphy for over a decade, and will do so for as long as he is capable. Even for those who are familiar with the letter, it remains an astonishing example of human resilience and faith: ‘A light cut of a saber will separate my head

[from my body], like the gardener cuts a spring flower for his pleasure. We are all flowers planted on this earth that God reaps in His due time, some earlier, some later. May it be the purple rose, the maiden lily, or the humble violet.’ Flowers take on a newfound meaning here, via a new photographic series. Since moving to the countryside outside Berlin, Vo has been dedicating his time to nature, growing a new garden around his studio and challenging himself to get to know, nurture and recognise the names of flowers. Each flower is captured in a quietly satisfying photograph, like something from an old botanical textbook, and labelled with its Latin name by his father. They are grouped together in two separate rooms, offering both a delightful lesson in phytology as well as injecting the only bright colour into an otherwise stone-coloured show. Anyone who has taken a stab at growing plants will recognise the feeling of freedom, unpredictability, wonder and frustration that such a project can engender. In Vo’s case, it suggests a symbolic liberation in the creative process, overcoming all the traditional boundaries of the definition of art. Vo installed all the works in situ, interlocking them in a careful balancing act, without glue or nails. Ever the collector of histories as well as objects, he offers here an elegiac and humble homage to Italy, where marble and relics inevitably become imbued with the context of the country’s often imperious historical and artistic past. Offering no explanation, simply themselves, Vo’s works quietly testify to the passing of time and the frailty of everything, even stone. Ana Vukadin

untitled, 2021, pencil on paper and c-print, writing by Phung Vo, 45 × 32 × 4 cm (framed)

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untitled, 2021, Carrara and Lasa marble, wood, 78 × 400 × 400 cm. both images Photo: Nicholas Ash. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo

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Crip Time Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 18 September – 30 January With the phrase ‘crip time’, academic Alison Kafer refers to the imperative for a new way of thinking about and understanding time in a way that acknowledges different lived realities. By borrowing a phrase most often associated with disability studies, this sprawling show with 41 artists, almost all of whom experience disability, aims to explore what it means to have, care for and value bodies and minds with different needs – an approach in which definitions are often set aside in favour of seeing things anew and from different perspectives. Some works play explicitly with the notion of time itself, including Shannon Finnegan’s clocks that are divided into days of the week rather than hours and have hands moving at various tempos (Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?, 2021) as well as Sharona Franklin’s Crip Clock (2021), which features six silver spoons holding pills arranged like six stationary clock hands, the spoon handles meeting in the centre and extending outward so the bowls appear where one might expect to see 12, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10; time here is marked not by seconds or minutes but by a medication schedule. Other pieces, meanwhile, address different spectrums of

disability – everything from modes of communication to interdependency to the cost of medical care to the effects of hiv/aids, depression and substance addiction. On the ground floor, Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s two papier-mâché sculptures show her guide dog, London, standing on hind legs as if dancing, welcoming visitors to the exhibition. The works are backdropped by Christine Sun Kim’s giant mural Echo Trap (2021), which uses musical notation to concretise the American Sign Language sign for ‘echo’. In another room, Liza Sylvestre, in her video Wha_ i_ I _old you a _ _ory in a language I _an _ear (2014), recounts a childhood memory about hearing: she would turn on a boombox, place her hands on the speakers and turn the volume up to the maximum level. In the video’s first half, she stares into the camera, focused, enunciating every word clearly, but in the second half she recounts the memory by enunciating only the parts of each word that she can hear (“with so much”, for example, becomes “wi_ _ _o mu_ _”), the sentences turning into fragmented letters and sounds as tears well up in her fixated eyes. Nearby, golden-wrapped candies from Felix

Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993) spill out from a room that is usually accessible only via stairs; by covering the stairs with candy, the piece renders the space inaccessible to all. London, meanwhile, later makes another appearance in a series of Gossiaux’s drawings, one of which combines their bodies, a reference to their dependence on each other and inseparability. Over the next two floors, personal experiences continue to be reflected in works like Michelle Miles’s video hand model (2018): images of hands holding objects are paired with audio and corresponding captions that relate her engagement with a modelling agency which, after receiving her headshots, wanted to sign her. When they discovered she used a wheelchair, they revoked the offer and said she was of no use to them, to the industry. Both Jesse Darling and Emily Barker point to the burden and cost of healthcare systems. For Epistemologies (Part of a series) (2019), Darling filled eight archival binders with blocks of concrete, alluding to the psychological weight of navigating healthcare systems. Nearby is Barker’s Land of the Free (2012/21), a framed bill from Northwestern

Michelle Miles, hand model (still), 2018, video, colour, sound, 1 min 47 sec

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Memorial Hospital for $506,088.35, the amount due after her insurance company had paid their share for her stay at the hospital. This is complemented by Death by 7865 Paper Cuts (2019), a towering stack of only three-years’ worth of Barker’s photocopied medical bills and life-care plan. Elsewhere, in the six-minute video Black Disabled Art History 101 (2015), Leroy F. Moore Jr. offers exactly what the title suggests, telling the abridged stories of people like Skelly, Wise and Apple, aka Israel Vibration, aka three people who met in a rehabilitation centre, were kicked out for their beliefs in Rasta, found themselves homeless and started singing on the streets, and are now regarded as the founders of reggae. But among these explorations of experiences and ideas surrounding contemporary disability discourse are more obscure pieces. Take, for example, wall sculptures by Franco Bellucci. His beautifully and tightly wound knots of socks, rubber tubes, old tires and pipes convey a sense of pent-up anxiety, of rage, of determination. A toy pistol is contained in one, a dinosaur in another. Rather than his artworks, though, Bellucci’s biography appears to be what landed him in the show: he suffered a brain injury as a child and spent most of his life confined to a closed psychiatric ward. Another curiosity is a wheelchair covered with a sheet of mirror foil by Isa Genzken (Untitled,

2006), who is diagnosed bipolar. The wheelchair could be read as a comment on the relationship between mental and physical health, or evident ‘disabilities’ compared to those unseen, but when placed alongside works by artists who are wheelchair users, it takes on a different air. The accompanying exhibition booklet, which offers indispensable insight and useful background on the vast majority of works in the exhibition, especially those that are more conceptual, problematises the work even further: Genzken is among the artists who were apparently deemed ‘too famous’ to warrant an explanatory text (the others missing are Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin and John Akomfrah, though Tillmans’s photograph of his medications, Goldin’s video installation about substance abuse and her sister’s suicide, and Akomfrah’s film on illness and death are autobiographical and more self-explanatory). With these inclusions, the show veers into the territory of tokenisation, seeming to categorise work solely based on biography or materials used. Moreover, the only reference to contemporary disability issues in Germany is in For the 12 disabled people in Lebenshilfehaus (Area of Refuge) (2021), by Chloe Pascal Crawford, an American artist whose site-specific installation is a homage to the group of people with disabilities who

died during the floods in southern Germany earlier this year. And in this context Gerhard Richter’s Tante Marianne (Fotofassung zu wv 87) (1965/2018) – depicting himself as a baby with his then-teenage aunt, who was later diagnosed schizophrenic and then murdered during Nazi euthanasia programmes – feels like an abrupt, unnecessary aside. Furthermore, both Richter’s and Genzken’s works point to the fine line between disabled artists and nondisabled artists who have relationships with disabled people. This line must be navigated carefully, from both curatorial and artistic perspectives: when it’s not, the result risks coming across as appropriation. Zooming back out, to understand the show as a whole it is important to recognise ‘disability’ as ‘a site of questions rather than firm definitions’, as Kafer writes in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013). At its best, Crip Time succeeds in exposing social and political injustices related to disability, as well as in helping a viewer reframe their own perception of what ‘disability’ is, notably through its refusal to provide definitions or neat categories. But to understand and appreciate a site of questions, there must also be a clear framework of the topic at hand. Here, the deeper I engaged, the more that framework – already vague and raw to start – seemed to slip away. Emily McDermott

Pepe Espaliú, Paseo del Amigo, 1993. Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy Pepe Cobo y Cía, Madrid

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Berlin Atonal: Metabolic Rift Kraftwerk, Berlin 25 September – 30 October The annual festival Berlin Atonal – which focuses on interdisciplinary art practices with an emphasis on sound – was established in 1982, though it took a 23-year disco nap after 1990 while founder Dimitri Hegemann focused on running legendary techno club Tresor. The latter’s main home, and that of Berlin Atonal since it rebooted eight years ago, has been the Kraftwerk, the vast, unrefurbished former East German power station in the city centre. Since early 2020, for obvious reasons, Tresor has been sleeping again. But for an event involving rather fewer bodies, the Kraftwerk recently reopened for Berlin Atonal, which this year involves not only a month of performances but also an ‘art parcours’ (the organisers’ phrase – they also use the description ‘ghost train’) that uses the work of 28 artists to lead audiences through the whole building. Considering myself

as fond of dramatic postindustrial aesthetics spackled with clanks, rumbles, clicks and bursts of light as the next subscriber to The Wire, I signed up. The first phase of the show – through which one is hustled in groups, doorways glowing yellow when it’s time to move on – constitutes a sequence of installations in variously scaled concrete chambers. These spaces, barely lit and corridorlike, offer a gnomic hors d’oeuvre: videos on monitors depicting immobile figures, a little melting ice block and a parade of welded-together industrial sculptures, all zipping by without there being time to find one of the hard-to-see, unlit information plaques. This, in turn, gives way to computer-art pioneer Lillian Schwartz’s fast-paced video collage of drawings of faces, made in her nineties, when she was half-paralysed and near blind, set to

battering breakbeats by Chinese producer Hyph11E. Yet the opening section’s inarguable affective highlight is Cyprien Gaillard and American electronic musician Hieroglyphic Being’s Visitant (no dancing 2020–2021) (2021). Here we enter a huge vaulted space where fluttering techno plays through the Killasan, a legendary Japanese-made sound system central to Berlin nightlife. Dancing to it, meanwhile, is nobody except an enormous greyish winddancer figure, which gradually inflates and then undulates unpredictably, at once triumphant and tragicomic. While unabashedly on-the-nose as an evocation of clubbing’s current state, it’s a spectacular use of the space. In evoking bodies and apartness, this work is also smartly sequenced as a precursor to Tino Sehgal’s seemingly untitled, transitory contribution. Leaving the chamber, you arrive

Berlin Atonal: Metabolic Rift, 2021 (installation view, Kraftwerk, Berlin). Photo: Frankie Casillo. Courtesy Berlin Atonal

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at the base of a tall stairwell, a woman performer one flight above you cooing in a vaguely seductive, faintly spooky manner. As you ascend, she does too – craning your neck, you see a delicate trailing hand on the banister. A halfdozen levels later, perhaps wishing you’d brought your asthma inhaler, you find her at the top doing a brief, elliptical performance that combines more wordless singing with abstract mouth noises – pops and clicks – and slowly opening a door. And then, ferried not across but up the Lethe, you’re out of the ‘parcours’ bit and into a free-for-all. The viewer is now high up in the building, atop a stack of openplan expanses, turbine halls stripped of turbines. These, which you steadily navigate and descend through at your own pace, are infused with dry ice and dotted with artworks – videos, sculptures, spotlit 2d pieces on temporary freestanding walls – illuminated oases in the gloom. Congolese sculptor Rigobert Nimi’s Explorer 5 (2021) is a cityscapelike kinetic sculpture, nested with little figures in capsules and festooned with multicoloured lights

like a giant toy; its futuristic and playful aspects appear to serve as speculative urban planning for the artist’s home city of Kinshasa. In an annex, Adameyko Lab – which researches the mechanistic qualities of live organisms – and Finnish musician Sasu Ripatti, aka Vladislav Delay among other aliases, offer a seemingly untitled octet of videos projected down onto circular glass screens, paired with chuntering minimal electronica intended, it seems, to complement the morphing microspecies on film. A suite of early-1970s drawings by Liliane Lijn, mean-while, presents blueprints for fantastical architectural constructions – cones, towers – that were never built. In one sense, then, the show is rich in hopeful evocations of organic and inorganic growth, setting them against the modernist ruin-porn of the cavernous building – itself a model of new usage – which is not only the backdrop for the show but gets little focused showcases here and there. One of the control rooms, full of vintage knobs and buttons, is

suffused with changeable coloured light and, again, dry ice, the effect falling somewhere between Dr Strangelove and a hair-metal gig. Unpredictable growth, hopes for the future: these constitute the bassline of Metabolic Rift, whose very title suggests a momentary and not necessarily disabling fissure in a system. In other respects, the show either requires a tolerance for feeling lost, for the show as gesamtkunstwerk, or an inconsistent concern for authorship, titles, etc. The website lists a half-dozen artists (and described works) that I never find; nor is it apparent who made the Ballardian installation of crashed cars with sound systems in their boots, or that thing resembling something out of Alien if Ridley Scott’s budget mostly just ran to plastic laundry baskets lit from within. Perhaps appropriately, then, one must repeatedly take Metabolic Rift as a kind of abstract analogue of a club experience. Unless you’re a total nerd, you don’t try and discover the name of every track that moves you. You just dance in the dark. Martin Herbert

Cyprien Gaillard & Hieroglyphic Being, Visitant (no dancing 2020–2021), 2021. Courtesy Cyprien Gaillard; Jamal Moss aka Hieroglyphic Being; Killasan Soundsystem and Berlin Atonal

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Mixing It Up: Painting Today Hayward Gallery, London 9 September – 12 December Painting is having its temperature taken again, and evidently the patient is in rude health. Cramming 135 works into London’s Hayward Gallery, Mixing It Up: Painting Today is an exuberant multigenerational survey bringing together 31 painters ostensibly connected by nothing other than a commonality of medium and that they all work in the uk. Curator Ralph Rugoff explains his rationale in the catalogue, writing that the artists ‘share a significant interest in mining their medium’s exceptional multiplicity, and exploiting its potential as a format in which things can be mixed up as in no other’. Put another way, there is no discernible theme here, just an exhibition boldly living

up to its title. The result is a joyfully disjointed testament to painting’s unswerving vitality. Walking around the galleries, one is struck at just how materially conventional the selection is. It’s been more than 70 years since postwar artists began probing painting’s boundaries by expanding it spatially and materially, yet most works here are resolutely bound to the medium’s historical, market-friendly parameters. Nonetheless, some outliers are found amidst the preponderance of stretched canvases, such as the hip-hop-inspired works of Alvaro Barrington; his Ikea-inflected brutalism ditches cotton duck for carpet and wooden stretchers for unwieldy concrete cubes. Another is Samara

Scott, whose inclusion is perplexing since she describes her concoctions of toilet cleaner, shampoo and cooking oil on the wall text as ‘almost a total resistance to painting’. In a show where painting’s heterogeneity is repeatedly demonstrated from within conventional confines, her works feel like interlopers. For some, a commitment to traditional forms reflects a desire to engage with and subvert the pictorial history of painting, particularly its alliance with the white male Eurocentric gaze. Lubaina Himid, in The Captain and The Mate (2017–18), riffs on James Tissot’s 1873 painting of the same name, replacing its

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white sailors with black figures in reference – we’re told – to the infamous nineteenthcentury slave ship Le Rodeur, from which 39 African captives were thrown overboard following the outbreak of a mysterious eye disease. Elsewhere, Somaya Critchlow’s sensuous portraits of nubile black women rewire Western tropes of the female nude, calling up references from Renaissance portraiture to 1970s pinups. Conversely, the gentle interiority of the two boys who roam backwoods and explore ruins in Matthew Krishanu’s quietly taut scenes inspired by his Bengali childhood redress the historical objectification of brown bodies by the likes of Paul Gauguin and others. Since many of these artists treat their canvases as sites of assemblage, where references from diverse territories and time periods commingle, the principle of collage provides another possible through-line. Take Hurvin

Anderson’s richly textured paintings, which draw on his Jamaican-British heritage to demonstrate painting’s capacity for collapsing time and space. The sense of geographic dislocation and interplay of figuration and abstraction in Anderson’s works owes much to his former tutor Peter Doig, a vastly influential figure who inspired a generation of painters and is represented here by a surprisingly underwhelming selection. Upstairs, in one of the show’s most coherent and satisfying groupings, Oscar Murillo’s moody manifestation paintings (2019–20), with their dense and vigorous marks scrawled onto patchworks of canvas, velvet and linen, meet the gestural, rhythmic lines of Jadé Fadojutimi’s luminous semiabstractions and Rachel Jones’s dazzling, intensely variegated compositions that appear wholly abstract but actually depict flamboyant teeth grills.

Death is a prevalent theme in painting, and many works here allude to life’s fragility: from Graham Little’s decomposing fox meticulously rendered in gouache, to Barrington’s hulking portrait of the recently deceased American rapper dmx, to Rose Wylie’s imposing stealth bomber painted in thick impasto. The spectre of death hangs heavy over the paintings of Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami, who draws on harrowing memories of the tumultuous period following the us-led invasion of his homeland in 2003. The disquieting canvas Infection ii (2021) presents an open door, its dark shadow partially obscuring a poster of Saddam Hussein, leaving visible only the dictator’s upraised arm. In the foreground a green spider plant casts a shadow suggestive of a deadly black widow. Ambiguity prevails: this doorway could lead to death, or perhaps offer an escape to a new life. As for painting itself, death’s door has never seemed so distant. David Trigg

Rachel Jones, lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021, oil pastel and oil stick on canvas, 250 × 160 cm. Photo: Eva Herzog. © the artist. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

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Books Where at Home: Paint or Die by Jochen Hiltmann, Zeno X Gallery / König Books, €29.95 (hardcover) While it masquerades as something between a monograph and a biography, Where at Home is ultimately uncategorisable. It’s also partly an art-theory text (covering everyone from Goethe and Kant, Adorno and Agamben, to Qing-dynasty landscape painter Shitao and contemporary China’s Ai Weiwei, and to poets such as Kim Chi-ha and Aimé Césaire, with a heavy dose of Gregory Bateson sprinkled over the top), part environmentalist screed, part manifesto for nonhuman rights and partly an attack on the information age (and David Hockney’s iPad). And then, underneath all that, it’s a text written by a husband about his wife. The wife in question is German-Korean painter Song Hyun-Sook. Her husband is the German sculptor Jochen Hiltmann. You could also call this a love letter of sorts, although the book is rather more academically subtitled ‘an account of the life and work of the painter Song Hyun-Sook and the cultural background of her emigration’. The ‘life’ mainly accounts for Song’s rural upbringing among the paddy fields and silkworm farming of Muwol-li, in North Gyeongsang, Korea, her emigration to West Germany in 1972, aged twenty, to work as one of the approximately 10,000 ‘Korean angel’ nurses who arrived in the country during the 1960s and 70s, and her subsequent training and work as an artist. It begins with their first encounter, in 1973, on a train from Bonn to Hamburg, when Hiltmann initially mistook Song for a boy, and then a monk, was fascinated by her packed lunch and her handling of chopsticks, before, when the truth about her sex was eventually revealed, Hiltmann pronounced that she was ‘strangely beautiful but she wasn’t a beauty’. Hiltmann attempts to be broadly analytic in his narrative. His record of their first encounter appears more an attempt to recognise his own (and West Germany’s) cultural naiveté (instances of straight-up racism are largely absent here, although Hiltmann does recall how the chief nurse on Song’s ward simply called her new charge Maria, after the nurse she replaced). In the chapters that follow he is fastidious in his description of the environment of Muwol-li during the period of Song’s childhood, from the storage pots, tools and furniture in houses, to the cultivation and irrigation of the hillside rice fields. The general impression is of people

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working together, with their families, their local communities and to the rhythm and demands of nature itself. And yet the description of Song’s upbringing, told from the perspective of an all-knowing narrator (explaining local customs and Korean vocabulary), with interfamilial conversations (which presumably were related to Hiltmann by Song sometime after the fact) occasionally in speech marks, and an intimate knowledge of Song’s infancy, gives the section something of the feel of fiction. And of someone compensating for their ignorance at that first encounter. Which is one way of expressing love. But this lengthy account of Song’s childhood also serves a different function. After studying art at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg between 1976 and 1981, Song returned to South Korea in 1984 to spend a year studying Korean art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju. While this may appear to have been a means of reconnecting with her roots, Hiltmann describes a subsequent return to Muwol-li as something of a shock. Two years after Song had left the town, electricity arrived. By the time she returned, the tools that Hiltmann so lovingly describes in the opening chapter are lying, redundant, outside the house. Electric water pumps now irrigate the fields and stone shrines and markers have disappeared. Along with many of the town’s younger generation, who, no longer required to labour in the rice fields, have gone to the city in search of work. Everything that had a clear purpose and place in life has been displaced. In a sense then, Song, an immigrant in her new adopted country, was now equally an alien in the place of her birth. ‘Asked “Where were you born?”’ Hiltmann writes, ‘Song Hyun-Sook replies ‘“In the year of the hare.’” What follows, in the second half of the book, is a series of diatribes about the ruptures caused by the advent of modernism (which for Hiltmann, in terms of art, is a reaction against industrialisation as much as it is against nineteenth-century academicism), and its effects on traditional worldviews, notions of community and the relations between the human and the natural world. There are comparative studies of philosophies of the East and the West, of art traditions in the East and the West (trees planted in Honam with ingrown rock markers, dangsan-namu, are juxtaposed with an oak and basalt marker

planted by Joseph Beuys in 1982 as part of his 7000 Oak Trees project for Documenta in Kassel) and of the disruptions to both caused by capitalism, industrialism and the impact of the information age. ‘More and more people are calling for a change in a culture whose main value is marketability,’ Hiltmann howls. There are moments too when Hiltmann’s desire to describe his wife’s position between East and West seems to go a little too far, as when he writes of Song’s contracting of tuberculosis, shortly after arriving in Germany, as being like a ‘shamanic journey’. And throughout, it remains somewhat unclear whether these are Hiltmann’s own ideas or a transposition of Song’s thoughts. Eventually we get to know Song’s art. Her use of egg-tempera techniques (learned through her training in the West) and a philosophy and mode of working that connects closely to calligraphic traditions from the East. The way in which she titles a number of her works after the number of brushstrokes used to make them (the number of strokes is generally minimal and Song often refers to her paintings as haikus). ‘In East Asia the one brushstroke was all of life,’ Hiltmann proclaims. But amid what is an intriguing attempt to account for the mixed influences on Song’s art and the ways in which one culture can understand another, other aspects of her life fade into the background. Her political positions in relation to South Korea’s oppressive military dictatorships, for example, or the effect on her of the Gwangju Uprising. We learn that she dreams about travelling by train from South to North Korea to make a pilgrimage to Geumgangsan Mountain, but we don’t learn a lot about her position on Korean unification. We learn that exiled dissident artists in Germany were kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned by the South Korean cia, but we don’t really learn how this affected Song, who, with her husband, was in contact with and supported many of them. That Song is attuned to politics and their effects on the lives of ordinary people we do learn in passing, and that it impacts on her work and position. But for the main part this remains a subcurrent to the flow of navigating East and West and articulating a position that is somewhere in between. A portrait of a marriage in that sense, but one that demands a volume two to come. Mark Rappolt

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Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint Graywolf Press, us$16 (softcover) At a book reading by a writer who wrote about his immigration experience, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint felt ‘a dull panic’. She writes, ‘The author is telling a story about the flight from the country of the author’s birth to this country, where the author now lives. The story is linear. The plane flies from one country to another.’ Thirii’s memories of departure from Myanmar and arrivals in different cities en route to Bangkok and then the us are foggy, jumbled; her experiences of living in these places marked by an unresolved sense of self-exile. This memoir, which ostensibly narrates her family’s movement in episodic vignettes, tries to articulate these experiences in a way that honours their lack of a telegenic narrative. Indeed, many immigrant stories cannot be ordered in the decisive, unilateral direction of heroic escape. Her shuffled chronology – featuring stories ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages long – features a cast of relatives going back to her great-grandparents, and takes on a folkloric quality (several family members supposedly reincarnate as others), given the frequent lack of proper names, and the skeletal dating and contextualisation of key historical and political events. The main thrust of a story about a grandfather who joined the Burmese Independence Army as a lieutenant to fight the Japanese centres on how, in the midst of a guerrilla jungle war, villagers gave

him a chicken. He became so focused on cooking it that he inadvertently sat out a battle that killed most of his men. On one level I respect Thirii’s refusal to pander to the usual voyeuristic thrills of migrant literature. To her, such reader expectations are another type of violence inflicted upon her, a form of ventriloquism: ‘I am afraid I have been given the opportunity to speak only because I am saying what you want to hear, what you wish you could say, what you are saying now, through my body, behind the protection my body offers with its brown skin, black eyes, and black hair.’ What Western audiences (the book is published by an American house) want her to say is how lucky she was to have left an oppressive culture for one that is better, freer. The reality, of course, is more complex. She approaches this by weaving family lore and her personal recollections into poetic snippets and musings that have moments of beauty and sadness. Her vivid childhood memories of outsidership in the us, which come in a glut near the end of the book, are heartbreaking, especially given her matterof-fact tone. Having no friends in school, she passed recess by walking briskly from place to place, pretending she had somewhere to be. But such directly moving confessional passages are few; on the whole the book drifts around in desultory, wan prose that circles

issues of origins, identity and belonging without engaging deeply with them. (‘This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced. Displaced is where we moved to, displaced is where I grew up, displaced is where I am from.’) While she does not want to be associated with only her immigrant identity, neither is she keen to reveal the other parts of herself. She flits between first- and third-person narration in the book, with the most personal sections rendered in the latter. As a result, reading this book is an occasionally illuminating but mostly alienating experience. An account of her first love, which supposedly sparked ‘the beginning of herself’, is told bloodlessly and anonymously (‘She loved, but her love was unrequited’), highlighting only the mundane: buying a bicycle together; writing emails to each other. The contents of which, by the way, are never even hinted at. At some points it feels as if the writing simply reflects her feelings of dislocation as a result of unprocessed trauma. (‘Sometimes, it even felt like she was looking into her own window, her own life, which she could not enter.’) At others it articulates a conscious decision to withdraw. (‘The more she learned about the world, the less she wanted to be any part of it.’) Ultimately, it’s as if Thirii is not only suspicious of the immigrant memoir genre but the concept – or the possibility? – of memoir itself. Adeline Chia

Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99 (softcover)

It’s strange to say it when confronted by a bookful of them, but you walk away from this one with the feeling that words are elusive things. Not to say that Vanessa Onwuemezi doesn’t exploit words to their full allusive potential in her debut collection of seven short stories. She does. But in one sense Dark Neighbourhood documents a struggle with words. With what they are. With words as stand-ins, exchanged for physical objects, for sensations, emotions and memories. Indeed, there are times in most of these stories when words are not enough. They’ve gone missing. Leaving behind nothing more than an empty white space. Not so much that sentences lose their meaning – ‘I take this body and I be alone with it’, for example – but enough to make

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you wonder about that space, in the caesura it causes. We’re warned in the opening tale (after which the collection is titled), which revolves around a group of people queuing in some sort of postapocalyptic purgatory, waiting to be admitted to someplace else through a gate. Punctuation is occasionally spelled out and placed in parenthesis. An aide-mémoire, or an instruction to take a breath. Whether it is addressed to author or reader is, like much else in this book, ambiguous. ‘Interpretation is anyone’s to make,’ warns the narrator. In ‘Cuba’ a migrant hotel maid muses over what happens to the words recited in a series of clandestine meetings to unionise the precarious labour force when confronted by the reality

they are supposed to improve: ‘The same words are affirmed every time, sisterhood, solidarity, love, freedom, truth bleed into the daily rhythm of work: curtains pulled, sheets stretched…’. In ‘Bright Spaces’, one of several meditations on loss and death, a university education is reduced to another form of exchange – a new, fancy vocabulary replacing the everyday old: ‘divinity, ontology, petrichor…’. For all that this might make Dark Neighbourhood seem like an attack on language, the collection is illuminated throughout by Onwuemezi’s own precise and lyrical use of words and the rhythms they create. It’s a dangerous game, in which meaning can sometimes battle the author’s love of form, but she pulls it off with some aplomb. Mark Rappolt

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The Dancer: A Biography for Philippa Cullen by Evelyn Juers Giramondo Publishing, aus$39.95 (softcover) The Australian dancer Philippa Cullen died in 1975, in the Indian town of Kodaikanal. She was just twenty-five. By then, though, Cullen – also a choreographer, performer, musician and teacher – had become a key figure in the Australian experimental art scene. At the forefront of the electronic music movement, she worked with composers, engineers, mathematicians, academics and artists to construct movement-sensitive floors and theremins. In addition to India, she had travelled to Germany, the Netherlands, England, Ghana and Nepal. She had danced in opera houses, trains, country towns, galleries and parks. And she had taught dance to conventional students, inmates at Long Bay prison in New South Wales, psychiatric patients and at children’s summer camps. In her essay ‘Towards a Philosophy of Dance’ (1973), quoted here, Cullen wrote: ‘I would define dance as an outer manifestation of inner energy in an articulation more lucid than language’. A key aspect of Cullen’s vision was her approach to the relationship between movement, technology and composition. Influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, she investigated methods for using biosensors and computer algorithms in performances, and experimented with directional photoelectric cells to transform improvised dance into sound. For Australian audiences at the

time, these performances proposed inventive new ways of thinking about dance. As the title suggests, the book is for Phillipa Cullen, and as such, it is far from a conventional biographical narrative. Its own choreographic feat, it charts not only Cullen’s life, but also her ancestry, the settler-colonial history of Australia and the larger sociopolitical context of Cullen’s time, interspersed with literary references, quotes and dream sequences. Set among this is Cullen herself, who kept diaries, recorded her research, notated dreams, made diagrams for dances and sent letters. Juers has chosen to italicise direct references within the text, so the reader must continually switch between the presenttense ‘I’ of Cullen and the ‘she’ of Juers: ‘She needs to be patient and devote herself utterly to her work. Sacrifice myself to it.’ This gives a sense that Juers is writing alongside Cullen, instead of speaking for her, and Cullen’s voice – strident, funny, restless, elated, critical – announces itself on the page: ‘I haven’t met anybody who accepts what I do without question’. The result is a sensitive and profoundly moving account of the young artist’s life – her discoveries and joys, her devotion to her work and her vision of dance as an ‘integrative art’. Throughout The Dancer, Juers pays careful attention to the web of academics, artists,

writers and performers that Cullen, directly or tangentially, interacted with. These include the Austrian dancer, teacher and choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (whose dance school Cullen attended as a child), the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (with whom Cullen had a lengthy affair) and Mirra Alfassa, founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the ‘universal township’ of Auroville, which Cullen first travelled to in 1973. For Juers, the complex lives of these individuals – their histories and trajectories – feed into larger concerns, whether the aftershocks of the Second World War or the aspirations of 1970s countercultures. Juers’s eye is not uncritical though, and she repeatedly draws attention to the ways in which art movements, such as modern dance or the postwar avant-garde, are entangled in their broader historical context. Cullen’s work was featured as part of the group exhibition Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia in 2020. In the accompanying publication, the artist Diana Baker Smith lamented that ‘Cullen’s legacy has become as ephemeral as folklore, reliant on oral histories and a handful of old photographs and video tapes’. The Dancer offers a rejoinder to this absence. It is a vast tapestry, woven together by the energy of Cullen’s own voice – alive, and in the present tense. Naomi Riddle

Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family by Tash Aw 4th Estate, £8.99 (hardcover)

‘Where are you from?’ This haunting question is at the root of this moving family memoir (originally published in the us in 2016), which also serves as a lens to tell the wider story of migration in Southeast Asia. Born in Taipei to Malay parents and second-generation Chinese migrants, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur, navigating between English and Malay at school, and Mandarin and Cantonese at home. If for a long time he thought of himself as Malay, the question of his identity became apparent through the eyes of others: immigrant ‘is something others describe you as’. Weaving together stories collected from his family members and fine observations on the fastmoving history of modern Asia, this brief book

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is an introspective and inquisitive quest for an answer. It starts with Aw’s grandfathers, the titular ‘strangers on a pier’, whom he imagines on their respective journeys from Southern China to the Malay peninsula. It is a hazy, fantasised image in want of a more defined one, for, as is often the case in Asian migrant families, their past remains shrouded by ‘opacity’: silenced and erased in the name of integration, upward mobility and, as Aw’s father points out in one of their few conversations about his past, shame. The latter is also a driving force in the ‘editing’ of national narratives in Southeast Asia, leaving out the ‘messy blotches’ of colonisation or civil

wars that ‘don’t sit well with the clean lines of our reinvention’. Peppered throughout are reflections on the psychological impact of leaving the place one calls ‘home’, from the high suicide rate observed among first-generation migrants to the guilt and estrangement he experiences with his own family as the educational gap between them grows. Yet, as Aw notes, that distance is a measure of the success of social mobility, and the validation of lives defined by self-sacrifice and separation. To write about them, this poignant book suggests, becomes a way to reconcile these existences, asking us to remember them regardless of how messily they sit with one’s story. Louise Darblay

ArtReview Asia

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Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) In recent years, Japanese-to-English translator Polly Barton has emerged as an interesting figure for the Japanese female authors she translates. Through her, the Anglophone world was introduced to awardwinning writers Aoko Matsuda, Tomoka Shibasaki and Misumi Kubo. In short, seeing Barton’s name attached to any novel has become a mark of quality female-led fiction, so it was with curiosity that I approached her own debut, which won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Competition. A genre-bending nonfiction tome that anatomises, in passionate detail, her obsession with Japan, Fifty Sounds combines elements of memoir, essay, philosophy and linguistics. Literary translators are famously invisible, but this book pulls back the curtains in style, revealing an intellectually rigorous and soulful writer who not only thinks deeply but feels deeply, too. Here are thoughtful tracts on Wittgenstein’s theory of language-as-use, dissections of social etiquettes in Japan and England, self-flagellating reckonings of her own gaijin privilege and erotic interludes. Ostensibly the book is about her journey to fluency in Japanese, but it is ultimately about achieving a different kind of mastery: a hardearned ease that comes from the attainment of self-knowledge and acceptance. Japanese supposedly has the most onomatopoeic words of any language: a rich and expressive arsenal that can imitate sounds and even describe feelings and

actions. To Barton, this sound-symbolic vocabulary ‘is where the beating heart of Japanese lies’, and her ambition is to ‘speak the kind of Japanese which takes mimetics as its beacon: a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, or embodied reality’. Each of the book’s 50 chapters is titled with an onomatopoeic Japanese word, accompanied by a cutesy translation pitched somewhere between a koan and clickbait. Chira-chira, for example, is ‘the sound of the mighty loner and the caress of ten thousand ownerless looks’; sa’pari is ‘the sound of a mind unblemished by understanding’; bin-bin ‘the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality’. As each chapter unfolds, Barton unpacks the memory or feeling attached to the soundsymbol and, in the process, gives an account of her time in Japan, from when she arrived from England as a language teacher at the age of twenty-one, to discovering her calling as a translator. Again and again the book takes on the messy, lived reality of learning and speaking a language, and explores how language, in turn, shapes one’s identity and experience of the world. Barton’s admitted self-consciousness and hypersensitivity are strengths here, especially in her thorough elucidations of social nuances, power asymmetries and minor feelings. For anyone who has had to navigate a foreign tongue and cultural environment, many of her

experiences will strike a chord. These include the frustration of debating in a language in which you are not strong, having arguments over accents and the ambivalent, comingled feelings towards her much older Japanese lover, Y: was her affection towards him or towards the Japanese he spoke, or both? Given how Barton embraces the visceral and affective modes of language, it is no surprise that Fifty Sounds is deeply personal. Her doomed affair leads to a belated but necessary breakdown, and a slow process of healing. One of the last chapters of the book, on ho’, which is about the redeeming power of friendships, begins with a diatribe against Japanese people who say, ‘I like travelling but I prefer Japan’ (‘lazy patriots, uncritical, boring, scared people who lived oblivious to their own privilege’). But through the comfort she found in her new pals, she ‘was able to accept (gradually, unwillingly, problematically) that it was okay to want safety’. The chapter ends with her looking back at photographs of an enjoyable group outing and thinking, ‘this is what normal people feel like when they look at pictures of themselves… I looked how I looked, and for the moment that was okay’. The hard-won revelation is worded with cool restraint (which is very Japanese? British? Or maybe just typical of people used to being hard on themselves), but it is nonetheless a sweet ending for a companionable narrator for whom one has grown to root. Adeline Chia

Walk on the Water Edited by Marc-Olivier Wahler Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Genève, €36 (hardcover)

Around 100 academics recently signed a petition demanding the dismissal of Musée d’Art et d’Histoire director Marc-Olivier Wahler following, among other things, the institution’s displays of ‘historical nonsense liable to mislead the public’. In Walk on the Water, Wahler argues that he is remaking the home of Switzerland’s oldest art collection as a space that reflects contemporary ways of looking. That’s achieved, he states, via exhibitions, and more precisely this one, the first in a series of displays that give carte blanche to a visiting personality, in this case Austrian artist Jakob Lena Knebl, to reimagine the collection. In one sense this book is a manifesto; in another a record. Through both Wahler seeks to present curating as a creative act.

‘The more displays are adjusted,’ he proclaims, ‘the more the interpretations are multiplied.’ Before mentioning that mediums and profilers (performing the role of curators) are among the figures on his revolutionary hitlist. Knebl has a track record of mingling contemporary with historical works. She uses humour and seduction to remove the distance that defines encounters with the objects in museums. Her mah display includes a nineteenth-century plaster sculpture of Venus at Her Bath (Jean-Jacques Pradier) placed in a shower cubicle, while a blown-up print of a man in bathing trunks from Henri-Edmond Cross’s pointillist painting The Ballaster (1908) appears to leer through the screens. Paintings (dealing with

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nature) are hung on the walls of garden sheds; a colossal statue of Ramses smirks in a velvet-lined bedroom. The exhibition’s title refers to a 1444 altarpiece by Konrad Witz (featuring Jesus walking on Lake Geneva) and a song by British metal band Deep Purple (recorded by the lake in Montreux). Which is why, reflecting the spirit of the exhibition, the catalogue includes an interview with barefoot water-skier Laurent Albisati. Also present is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘There Are More Things’ (1975), about a man’s encounter with objects with which he thinks he is familiar, but turn out to be the stuff of nightmares. The point according to Knebl is to find out whether your response to the new is to run away or find out more. Nirmala Devi

21/10/2021 14:37

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Words on the spine and on pages 13, 35 and 73 are by G.A. Henty, The Tiger of Mysore (1896)

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With the arrival of the winter season comes an excuse to eat more tong yuhn (湯圓), a dessert that loosely translates as ‘soup spheres’. These sticky glutinous rice balls, typically filled with black sesame, peanut or red bean pastes, are served in a clear sweet ginger soup perfumed with osmanthus flowers. While they now come in a great variety of flavours and combinations (including chocolate, matcha, durian, etc), that trio of traditional fillings remain a stalwart of Hong Kong’s tong sui po menus; after a day spent amid the throngs of city life, there are few things more comforting than sitting in one of those late-night dessert diners and breathing in the floral, spicy steam of gingerinfused soup. Enjoyed across mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, variations on the dessert can also be found in Southeast Asian countries to which different Chinese ethnic groups have migrated and set down roots: Vietnam’s chè trôi nuóc (meaning ‘floating tea’) is commonly filled with mung bean paste, while in the Philippines ginataang bilo-bilo is served in coconut milk, as is Thailand’s bua loi. Despite being enjoyed year-round (as evidenced by the entirety of one of my freezer draws), the making and eating of tong yuhn is most often associated with the Lantern Festival, which marks the end of Lunar New Year celebrations. In 2022 it will fall on 15 February, when the first full moon of the lunar year forms.

Aftertaste

Tong Yuhn by Fi Churchman

Tong yuhn make an appearance in the Han dynasty legend of Yuan Xiao, a young maid who lived in the courts of Emperor Wu, and whose name is often used to refer to the rice balls in northern China. Yuan Xiao was skilled at making these little balls, but she was never allowed to leave the palace to see her family. Homesick and alone, Yuan Xiao stood at the edge of a well and contemplated suicide. Before she could throw herself into

it, a trusted adviser to the emperor, Dongfang Shuo, who had heard her weeping, took pity on her and offered to resolve her predicament. Pretending to be a fortune teller, he began to tell the people of the city that the God of Fire would sweep through their houses and destroy the palace, burning the city to the ground. News reached Emperor Wu, who asked his adviser what to do. Dongfang Shuo told him that to appease the god, the emperor should hold a magnificent city-wide celebration with lanterns and firecrackers (so the city would appear aflame) and lots of tong yuhn (the fire god’s favourite food) on the 15th night of the first lunar month. That evening, the city’s residents gathered together and poured through the palace gates to watch the festivities. And Yuan Xiao was reunited with her family in the crowds. The tale is one of the reasons tong yuhn have come to represent the reunion of family and friends. The other reason is much simpler: these glutinous rice balls are shaped to resemble the full moon, a symbol of wholeness. The coming together of families is a particularly important tradition of Dung Zi (‘winter’s extreme’, known in the West as the winter solstice), during which nighttime is at its longest and tong yuhn are eaten at the end of a large family meal to celebrate the approach of the lighter days of spring. The festival, which has its roots in rural traditions, usually occurs around 22 December, and though it doesn’t enjoy the widespread attention and festivities of Lunar New Year (Macau is the only region that celebrates the winter solstice as a public holiday), it is considered by many to be the true marker of the new year, since it signals the passing of the darkest of days. Good news for those of you who can’t wait until the Lantern Festival to slurp down tong yuhn. I never do. Time to get rollin’. ingredients Glutinous rice flour Boiling water Black sesame seeds Honey roasted peanuts Sugar Lard Ginger Yellow rock sugar Goji berries, optional Osmanthus flowers, optional difficulty: 3

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