Power 100
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SOME ENCOUNTERS YOU WEAR FOREVER. RINGS, EARRINGS AND NECKLACE IN BEIGE GOLD, WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS.
UGO RONDINONE
THE WATER IS A POEM UNWRITTEN BY THE AIR NO. THE EARTH IS A POEM UNWRITTEN BY THE FIRE
OCTOBER 18 - JANUARY 8
Adrian Ghenie, The App, 2022. Oil on canvas. 243.4 x 193.4 cm © Adrian Ghenie / Visarta, Bucharest 2022. Photo: Jackson Pearce White
Adrian Ghenie The Fear of NOW London December 2022
PERES PROJECTS
TAN MU
ALMINE RECH January 2023 Exhibitions
Paris, Matignon
New York
Takesada MATSUTANI
Phyllis STEPHENS
Organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément January 6 - February 18
January 12 – February 25
Paris, Turenne
Genieve FIGGIS
Shanghai
Aaron JOHNSON Justin ADIAN January 13 - March 4
January 7 - February 11 Brussels
Xin JI January 7 - February 4 London
Alejandro CARDENAS José LERMA January 11 - February 18
www.alminerech.com
Fabien ADÈLE Ted PIM Alexis MCGRIGG January 19 - February 25
Xin Ji, Moon light, 2022, Oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm, 71 x 59 in
Paris, Front Space
Rainbow Waterfall #2, 2022, oil on canvas, 274.3 × 274.3 cm / 108 × 108 in. ©️ Pat Steir. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
Pat Steir
Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls
Through 23 Dec New York, 22nd Street
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LAKWENA MACIVER A green and pleasant land (HA-HA) 12 NOVEMBER 2022 – 19 MARCH 2023
Yorkshire Sculpture Park West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG | 1 mile from M1 J38
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Lakwena Maciver, HA-HA, 2022. Photo © Elijah Taylor.
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ArtReview vol 74 no 9 December 2022
Going in circles The first member of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (pt) was the far-left art critic Mario Pedrosa. By the time he received his union card, in 1980, he was eighty (and would die the following year), but culture has long held an important place for what would become the South American country’s most successful political vehicle of the ensuing decades. Though pt has long emphasised its proletariat sensibilities – encapsulated in the much-mythologised tough upbringing and rise of cofounder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – its origins are found in a more complex alliance of labour activists, ex-guerrillas, artists and intellectuals (the second and third cardholders were literary scholar Antônio Cândido and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda). With Lula returning to the presidency after October’s defeat of the far-right incumbent – whose name ArtReview has decided to excise from its consciousness until at least 2026 – the arts will retain their foothold in the corridors of power, with Lula promising to reopen the shuttered Ministry of Culture, and the names floated to head it including actual creative people (an axé musician, a poet and an actor are all part of the transition committee). If an actual artist bears an actual political portfolio, then it is easier to bridge the gap between the nice axiom that ‘art is powerful’ and the reality of funding cuts, irrelevance and clueless self-importance that pervades, for the most part, most parts of the world. Assuming Lula’s attitude doesn’t spread beyond Brazil (most things don’t, except World Cup wins and, increasingly, Anitta), the artworld will have to make do with wielding power in less direct ways: which is where the 100 entities
Who’s no 1?
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profiled in these pages come in. After all, while this list started out some two decades ago charting those who had power within the industry, dedicated readers will note that the (mysteriously secret) committee that decides these things (led no doubt by a general mood-change through the intervening years) has concluded that the real wielders of power are now those who are able to bring art out of the hermetically sealed confines of the museum or gallery and infect the world beyond. There are those, of course (ArtReview included; it is happy to be entirely contradictory), who would argue that art should have no responsibility to anything but itself. Which may be true (ArtReview also likes to negotiate itself out of contradictions), and those people who have no interest in questions of power and influence (or at least kid themselves they don’t, until the moment they realise their lack of power, and become rightfully furious) may now use these pages as cat litter lining and merely await the January issue. For those who do think that it might be good if art could wield some influence on the politicians, technocrats, oligarchs, marketmakers and media players who really rule the world (don’t worry, ArtReview isn’t going all Alex Jones: it can’t afford $965m compensation claims), then some of the people here – from videomakers in Morocco, Thailand and Britain; artist-activists in Indonesia, Cuba and South Africa; artists pulling in indigenous thought from Guatemala, Australian and Chile; thinkers from America to China; and, hey, even some of those rich folk sitting in their Swiss chalets and Manhattan penthouses spending their gains on art instead of, say, vastly overvalued social-media platforms – offer powerful examples of how that might be achieved. ArtReview is now off for a caipirinha and a Christmas churrasco, and to dream of a time when Marxist art critics may one day rule the world. Find us online in the meantime. ArtReview
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Constelação II, 2022, light installation and bird cage, dimensions variable © Sonia Gomes
Sonia Gomes
O mais profundo é a pele (Skin is the deepest part)
New York
pacegallery.com
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Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone, 1938. Photo West Dean College of Arts and Conservation. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2022 | Salvador Dali, Mae West Lips Sofa, 1938. Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton and Hove. © Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2022 | Horse Lamp, 2006, Front Design, Manufactured by Moooi BV, Breda /Niederlande, Plastic, metal. Vitra Design Museum
Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 2016. C-print i to dele © Richard Prince Studio
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HOFFNUNG! SPEAKERS CURATED BY Francesca Bria Daniel Baumann Cédric Carles Bice Curiger Catherine de Wolf Hans Ulrich Obrist Aïsha Devi Philip Ursprung Joachim Gauck Cristina Bechtler Camille Henrot Sandi Hilal E.A.T. / Engadin Art Talks is an annual Forum Mohomodou Houssouba that takes place in January in Zuoz in the Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Swiss Engadin valley. Through its focus on the arts and culture, E.A.T. enables the meeting Ernesto Neto and exchange between international catalyst thinkers of the most varied creative and Loïc Rogard scientific disciplines. The aim is to critically address topics that define our present and Kenneth Roth shape our future. Uli Sigg HOFFNUNG? HOFFNUNG! / HOPE? HOPE! Bas Smets is the theme that frames E.A.T.’s 2023 public thus functioning as a powerful tool Barbara Solomon Stauffacher programme, for hopeful projections towards a possible better future. Especially nowadays, as we are Ai Weiwei
surrounded by alarming news about the climate change crisis and vast political instability, E.A.T. encourages a deeper understanding of hope as an intrinsically human state of mind and a fundamental driving force which foster a positive future for our world.
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Ayşe Erkmen, Ripple, 2017
Dirimart proudly celebrates its 20th year in service of the ontemporary art scene in Istanbul.
Dirimart Dolapdere Irmak Caddesi 1-9 34440 Dolapdere İstanbul Dirimart Pera Meşrutiyet Caddesi 99 34430 Beyoğlu İstanbul Tuesday – Saturday 10.00-19.00 | Sunday 12.00-19.00 +90 212 232 66 66 | info@dirimart.com | www.dirimart.com
Fabrice Hyber, Confort éternel, 2022. Collection of the artist. © Fabrice Hyber / Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo © Marc Domage
Power 100 Introduction 48 Power Players artists, collectors, curators, fairs, gallerists, museum directors, thinkers, activist movements 51
Carolina Caycedo, Sinking Fund, 2021, original utility, railroad, private company and city bonds on paper, 57 × 72 × 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
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Power 100 The List 58 Power in Numbers 99 Artist Project by Carolina Caycedo 102
Carolina Caycedo, Debt Overhang, 2021, original utility, railroad, private company and city bonds on paper, 57 × 72 × 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
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Madrid
International Contemporary Art Fair
22-26 Feb
2023 Recinto Ferial
ifema.es
JIMEI X ARLES CURATORIAL AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVING IMAGE Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL jointly launched Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image in 2021, to promote and foster young Chinese photography curators and researchers. We congratulate Jiang Feiran, who won the 1st award with the project Unnamed River, presented in Beijing and Shanghai this year with the support of the award. The 2nd Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image will be announced at the 8th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen , which opens on 25 November 2022.
You can find more info here: https://www.threeshadows.cn/jimei-arles/curatorial-award
Unnamed River Installation Image Chasing the Sun Artist: Yu Hang
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ArtReview
Power 100
and more than the totality of facts and events 47
THE POWER 100
Every edition of ArtReview’s Power 100 list begins with the same basic question: what exactly is power in the artworld? For the purposes of this list, there are some basic criteria: individuals being considered have to have an influence over the kind of art that’s being shown around the world today; they need to have an influence that goes beyond the local (although at the same time ArtReview accepts that any kind of power begins at a local level); and they need to have been active in forms that are visible or invisible over the past 12 months. It’s good to have rules. Rules makes things so simple and straightforward, don’t they? If only that were true. What is true is that different tentacles of power stretch out in different directions depending on where you are. For example, the world of art will look very different to someone who experiences it in New York compared to someone who experiences it in New Delhi. Reconciling these different perspectives into something universal (or even just global) is the pole around which much of the debate surrounding the list spins, pirouettes or dances. The tentacles of a megagallery or a major institution in New York, London or Paris might not reach so deeply into countries in the Global South as they do into the Global North. In the Global South its exhibitions and labours might be experienced online or through social media (if the recipient is in a connected area – according to German consumer data company Statista, as of April this year only 63.1 percent of the world’s population were internet users, and the statistic for the us is more than double that of India) or through catalogues and other secondary sources. As ever, what some of us take for granted is what others struggle to find. And nothing, within a city or a country, is ever as neat or as even as statistics alone can describe. In a way, what this list also measures is the extent to which the artworld (or perhaps art ‘industry’) as we know it is entirely the construction of the Global North, or whether there is room for other
48
systems and ways of organising that are more rooted in the Global South; ways of making, displaying and proliferating the ideas and practices of artists that are particular to those contexts. It’s a list that, over its two decades of existence, has measured change. Or more often during that timeframe, the lack of it. That there is some change, after almost two years of near-global lockdowns and travel restrictions, cancelled or postponed exhibitions, vanished biennials and mothballed art fairs, is in part a result of the fact that 2022 saw the ‘irl’ world come back with a bang (although, to be honest, anything irl might have felt explosive to the majority of us). Travel has been to some degree more possible (if in many cases more costly) than before, exhibitions and biennials have been opened and relatively accessible. A time in which thinking about art and what the point of making it might be, secure in the assumption that everything would cruise steadily forward, has been replaced by a time in which making it and experiencing it have become more urgent, fragile and uncertain – and as a consequence suddenly more relevant. No more theory! Nothing but practice! To a degree. As ever, there continues to be existential debate about what art is and what it’s for. Of course, we recognise that it is an asset, and that in our times, in most parts of the world, assets are governed by markets and the forces that shape them. But the interest in new forms of solidarity, in art that can actively shape or reshape society, that can address pressing issues of social or environmental equality, or definitions of care, persist. Because these are the issues that confront us in the real world, a real world in which art necessarily exists. How art deals with both the interior space of the gallery and the exterior space of the society and environment we inhabit remains up for grabs. And this year’s list continues to reveal that. It’s not a ranking of thinkers, practitioners and enablers that’s smooth or consistent.
ArtReview
2022
It reveals differing ways of valuing art, different ideas about the purpose of art and different notions of what art can or should do. It reveals the kind of debates and discourse that should make us all care about and want to engage with art in the first place. All of which in a way brings us to this year’s occupant of the number-one spot. For the first time not an entity identified as coming from the Global North, and not an entity that is uncontroversial (although almost every occupant of the number-one spot is controversial to some degree, given that everyone – you’d hope – has their own ideas about that). This year’s Documenta, possibly art’s biggest international platform, was far from universally liked. Continuously mired in controversy about racial and religious prejudice (antisemitism in particular), it featured many artists who exhibited but later withdrew, as well as heated debates about historical positions and, more broadly, what a largescale exhibition can be, that went all the way to government level. This wasn’t power expressed as a smooth, seamless (and usually invisible) assertion of influence, but instead the revelation that testing the limits of a structure, an organisation and a culture has its own fractious, disruptive potency. But because of this, Documenta offered proof that what is expressed through art does have a social relevance; and that there is the possibility of evolving new systems, new networks and new structures that can change the way we think about art. Systems, networks and structures that will evolve, mature and continue to be debated in years to come. Documenta contained alternative ideas about what curating might be beyond a statement of authorship; alternative ideas about the relationship between artists and audience; and alternative ideas about what an artist might actually be. In the words of its curators – the collective ruangrupa – it introduced a new ‘operating system’ into the heart of Western art. And part of the debate will doubtless be whether or not that operating system works. And
consequently, whether or not it’s art’s hardware that really needs replacing. Debates in which many of the people in the list as a whole are, for different reasons in some cases, also involved. As ArtReview’s J.J. Charlesworth put it when reviewing this year’s Documenta: ‘Art, here, is not the product of the well-oiled and wellresourced institutions and markets that make up the wealthy art centres, but something produced by far more precarious contexts, for reasons that have much more to do with social activism and the self-representation of communities, priorities that diverge radically from the ethos and culture of the stable, enduring culture of the white cube art gallery’. Which is not to say that Documenta had no relationship to the money and power of the Global North. But rather, as Charlesworth concludes, ‘These relationships are neither inherently good nor bad, but up for debate – they’re what you negotiate when support is nonexistent in your own locality. But they of course reflect the fact that power – soft power, cultural power, of richer countries over poorer ones – is always somewhere in the mix.’ Something that might equally be said of this list itself. And this list, you’ll be relieved to hear, is not about what one reviewer or indeed ArtReview alone thinks. Rather, it’s the product of the views of more than 30 individuals, spread across the world, each of them with various, differing perspectives on and involvements in the artworld. (They remain anonymous for the reason that they inevitably work with a number of people on the list, who may or may not feature as prominently as they feel they should.) Then the poledancing starts. But what’s important is that this list is not about likes or dislikes, about judging ‘good’ from ‘bad’ (that’s the domain of art criticism, of which this list is not a part), or indeed about better or worse. It’s just about the relative prominence of current artistic debates. And of course, those who shape that. Because power, as we all know, is always somewhere in the mix. ArtReview
December 2022
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POWER PLAYERS ARTISTS What does it mean to be an artist in 2022? Increasingly, it might not be so much a question of medium or what form artists are working in, but more a question of how. While large, figurative paintings might shape the majority of what circulates at art fairs, as well as much of this year’s Venice Biennale, it’s a far cry from the community centres and project spaces where much of today’s other versions of art are actually taking place. This year, ruangrupa top the list, as the first artist collective to have done so. Artists have only been placed in the pole position five times previously, with Damien Hirst first, in 2005, and again in 2008, followed later by Ai Weiwei (2011) and Hito Steyerl (2017). Though, of course, this isn’t a competition but a long, hard look in the mirror: ruangrupa’s presence reflects a shift away from the solo artist and discrete art products, and more towards ways of working that are discursive, dispersed and, at times, contradictory. It also reflects on the importance of the role of the artist as activist, on the artist as an organising vector (see Rirkrit Tiravanija, Brook Andrew and Zanele Muholi), as well as the increased necessity to work collectively (Karrabing Film Collective and blaxtarlines). It is indicative – of what might entirely depend on your perspective – that artists make up just over a third of the Power 100 list. Some might think that the list should be only artists, given that the art is why we’re all here anyway, right? Though ask any artist, no matter how established, about how they feel and you’ll get a long list of barriers and restraints. Others might think artists have no place here at all, as the work filters through the layer cake of galleries, fairs, museums, collections and auction houses, a world unto itself of exchange. Though, despite any of that, art’s place is to celebrate, challenge, inspire, renew, disrupt: it holds a potential to both have power and be wilfully antipower at the same time. The viewing, exchange and importance of this erratic and ambivalent art is part of a web of systems that, paradoxically, ArtReview attempts each year to survey anew and remap. For the artists featured here, ArtReview’s panel considers the various strata of influence: not just if someone’s work has been exhibited and actually seen, but also the longer tail of influence beyond just the whitewashed walls of galleries and museums. A question that comes up consistently is whether an artist might be said to have their own school, of followers, adherents and imitators. This isn’t about the ‘best’ artist, or even the most successful; it’s about what art is helping to articulate the present and actively shaping the art of the near future.
December 2022
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CURATORS
COLLECTORS While this list navigates various types of power and influence in the artworld, and how they interrelate, the easiest type to understand is sheer financial clout. And if the economic contraction caused by the pandemic led to a decrease in worldwide art-buying by the rich (which may have had less to do with access to funds than to opportunity, given that fairs and galleries were closed, and online sales provided less of the social allure that often accompanies getting the credit card out), the ensuing economic contraction (helped along by the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and cost-of-living crisis for most has not halted a return of confidence among the very rich. The high-net-worth individuals surveyed by ubs and Art Basel this year revealed that on average collectors bought more last year than in 2020, and expected to buy twice as many artworks in 2022. Indeed spending in the first half of 2022 nearly doubled that in all of prepandemic 2019, with the sales of works over $1m returning to roughly the same level. Yet the amount a person has in the bank, and the amount they’re splashing out, is not the only proviso for a collector to make themselves known here: indeed, while the likes of Swiss pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann and Chinese property magnate Adrian Cheng are undoubtedly very rich indeed, and spend a lot on art, there are plenty of their even wealthier art-buying billionaire brethren whose names are absent. Rather it’s that their support for art is not just personal, or purely transactional, but results in an almost evangelical dedication to spreading the word about the artists they love (coupled, for pair the above, with a newfound zeal for nfts, joining the ubs/Art Basel collectors, who on average spent $46,000 apiece on art-based nfts in the first half of 2022), through various education programmes and their financial support of innovative and sometimes risky artistic projects or productions. For Hoffmann, Cheng, Miuccia Prada, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Julia Stoschek, this is done primarily via their private institutions, invariably staffed by museum curators lured away from the public sector, mounting intellectually ambitious projects. (Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation boasts Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tom Eccles as nonexecutive artistic codirectors; huo moonlighted from his Serpentine job again for Stoschek, curating a show on art and gaming, and for Sandretto, curating the inaugural performance on her new island setting in Venice and an exhibition by Michael Armitage in Madrid; former Nationalgalerie chief Udo Kittelmann curated a show this year for Fondazione Prada in collaboration with artist Taryn Simon; even ArtReview got in on the game, organising the group show Breaking the Waves for Cheng’s k11 Art Foundation earlier this year). For others – not least Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, Kadist’s Vincent Worms, Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, and Nicolas Berggruen – and in a rebuke to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s maxim that objects are what matter (‘only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings’), it is through backing external shows (as well as, in some cases, producing their own) and hosting residencies and conferences that they extend their influence, in the process often championing artistic practices (or indeed entire geographies) that have long been neglected or overlooked by the mainstream.
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ArtReview
‘Curators are essential,’ Koyo Kouoh told a curatorial forum at this year’s Expo Chicago. Perhaps, in that the Cameroonian-born executive director and chief curator of Cape Town’s Zeitz mocaa was recognising that there have been times when they haven’t appeared to be such a fundamental part of the artworld. Certainly, she argued, they are underfunded (despite, in the us, so many curators having a patron’s name attached to their job titles), but also their role is misunderstood. They’re not simply flower arrangers, or protective custodians of collections and legacies. Rather, ‘their curatorial practice is their way of caring for the society and its citizens to ensure their wellbeing and vitality’. We’re all being curated then. (See also: the pub at London’s Gatwick Airport called The Curator, and a brand of salted pork puffs called The Curators – presumably to give the indication that somewhere along the line there’s been some selective decision-making.)
Over the past century or so, curating has moved from being a side gig for aristocrats, to a side gig for civil servants and bureaucrats, to a side gig for art historians and critics, to the preserve of museum professionals and people determined to assert an authorial voice. Over the past 30 years or so it has become professionalised, with a profusion of academic and nonacademic courses in curating, and an increase in publications around the history of the profession. You may think that all this leads to a certain amount of trade protectionism (and it does), but equally the profusion of curators has led to an expansion of what we expect from them, which is what Kouoh was alluding to. Exhibitions and those who curate them are now expected to be demonstrations of social and environmental responsibility, whether the wider society in which the exhibition takes place is or is not actually socially or environmentally responsible. They are expected to demonstrate
a more common-sense definition of care, and are expected to shed light on what society overlooks. In short, they are expected to be interdisciplinary social projects. (You might link this, too, to the number of venues – for example the Pirelli Hangar Biccocca in Milan or the ogr in Turin – that became vaccine centres, the latter with a large Anselm Kiefer installation looming over the nurses, during the recent pandemic.) Today we want our shows, and those who curate them, to show a conscience. And it’s curators capable of doing that who are on the rise. Although that’s not stopping any number of artists (not least this year’s number one) and critics (Hilton Als, Antwaun Sargent, to name just a couple) from treading all over their toes. In either case, you might wonder if this means that we expect curators to be authorial (or uberartists), or whether it means that, despite the professionalisation of the trade, there is still some uncertainty, or debate, over what a curator actually does.
FAIRS ‘You can’t have too many people,’ David Zwirner told a reporter from The New York Times as the pair surveyed the gallerist’s rammed booth at the opening of Frieze London. Of course, just 18 months ago you definitely could have too many people stuffed into a relentlessly airconditioned tent, and it was unclear whether anyone would ever want to put themselves in that situation again. Turns out they very much do, with the number of exhibitors at the Art Basel and Frieze London fairs, the two behemoths of the market, equalling that of 2019. And although overall public attendance in Switzerland was still down from 93,000 to 70,000 (Frieze, backed by Hollywood talent agency Endeavor, has not released visitor numbers; the jammed aisles in its Regents Park tent were characterised by one collector as ‘an insane crowd of socialites’ – as opposed to serious buyers), the optimism among galleries seems to be borne out in the spending patterns of their rich customers. The ubs/Art Basel art market report (which, though the commissioners obviously have skin in the game, is conducted independently) estimates that 74 percent of collectors bought a work at a fair this year, compared with 54 percent in 2021 (which is not to say that all those expensive it upgrades were for nothing: 59 percent were still buying through art-fair online viewing rooms this year). Nor did the pandemic years weed out as many of the smaller art-fair players as some had predicted (and others had hoped). When Frieze opened its New York edition in May, it competed with seven similar events that month – tefaf, nada, Independent, Future Fair, 1-54 New York, The Photography Show presented by aipad, and Volta New York. Liste, Volta and June returned to orbit Art Basel’s original fair too.
The story is slightly different in the geographies that were most isolated – or continue to be – for better or worse. With Brazilians essentially cut off from travelling for almost two years, the already insular domestic market expanded further, with São Paulo now boasting a record number of art fairs, joining the city’s perennial sp-Arte (including rival Art Rio, branching out north; new kid ArPa; and sp-Arte replacing its separate photography fair with an event specialising in artists working in any medium, but who are based beyond the sp–Rio axis). None however are attracting the international galleries and visitors they once did (while Colombia’s ArtBo and Argentina’s ArtBa continue to be respectively primarily regional and domestic affairs). The African contemporary art specialist fair 1-54 also showed there’s an appetite for more focused events, moving beyond its original London location to operate in Paris, New York and, for the second time ever and first time since the pandemic, Marrakech. Frieze, meanwhile opened a new fair in Seoul this autumn, to much fanfare about ‘Asia’ having a new ‘art capital’. (Next year one of the other pretenders to that throne, Singapore, will host a new art fair of its own.) On the other hand, China’s zero-covid policy is a reminder of the challenges the industry has been through, and of possible continued difficulty ahead. After only two days of vip previews, Shanghai’s Art021 was forced to shut by authorities because of a single positive covid test, with the concurrent West Bund Art & Design faring only slightly better, managing three of its four-day run before it too was iced. Still, fairs are back, and despite concerns about their ecological footprints, there are advantages to having a one-stop international art shop.
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GALLERIES There’s a scene in the vintage British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous that still periodically turns up on artworld social-media accounts. In it, one of the comedy’s protagonists, ageing socialite Eddie, enters an old Cork Streetstyle gallery and demands “some art”. When the stereotypically snooty receptionist reacts disparagingly, the would-be collector rejoins: “You only work in a shop, you know, you can drop the attitude”. The gallery world that Eddie might encounter these days is even more bewildering, with dealers going to great pains to expand the definition of their business beyond a place in which artworks are shown and traded. Leading the pack are the likes of David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and Pace, with their ever-growing ventures in publishing, lifestyle, catering, education and the experience economy. Some of these are ostensibly nonprofit: browse the Hauser & Wirth website and you’ll find snippets about partnerships with local schools and sustainability conferences in rural Somerset, book fairs in la and musical performances in New York. Other propositions might be regarded as more explicitly loss leaders: both Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth publish their own magazines, full of earnestly academic puff pieces for their artists, while Zwirner has its own podcast. While much of this is undoubtedly pr, the vision of an art gallery as an expanded – and global – lifestyle brand has proved a winner with collectors, artists and artist estates, which in turn inevitably secures galleries places on this list. Others (Perrotin, Sprüth Magers, Gladstone, Hyun-Sook Lee’s Kukje Gallery, Isa Lorenzo & Rachel Rillo’s Silverlens) plough more traditional, but no less effective, furrows, in which, having established themselves as the major player in their respective national art scenes, they leverage that position to place their artists in a dizzying schedule of museum shows and biennials, necessarily expanding beyond that home territory along the way. Then there are those gallerists here who might not have the billion-dollar turnover of some, but are pursuing their own innovative models. So while Liza Essers’s Goodman Gallery has a bunch of major artists (Candice Breitz, William Kentridge, David Goldblatt), she’s also worked on setting up alliances between galleries and nonprofits across the Global South that put her in a position only really shared by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which likewise defiantly established itself beyond the traditional power centres (and represents a new generation of African artists). Similarly, Prateek & Priyanka Raja’s Experimenter puts as much effort into developing a curatorial scene in South Asia as it does into sales. What unites them is the understanding that a gallery’s success (that is, selling art to the likes of Eddie) is inextricably linked to art’s wider ecosystem (that is, all the others on this list and beyond), and if economics, politics or inherited structural issues leave gaps in that system, then it is well within their (financial) interests to plug those gaps. This might sound cynical, but the upshot of that is positive: whether it be the ability to get a decent lunch at the gallery’s restaurant after seeing a show, or financial backing for better representation of historically marginalised groups in the artworld.
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MUSEUM DIRECTORS Who would want to be a museum director in 2022? After two years of pandemic-induced disruption – first with lockdowns shuttering cultural life around the globe, then the patchwork of travel restrictions slowing the return of international visitors – big art institutions have taken a battering, a reality reflected in the fact that in 2021 some museum directors dropped off the Power 100 list entirely. The negative effects of the response to covid-19 highlights how central big art institutions still are to the contemporary idea of art: committed to addressing a broader public (not just wealthy collectors or artworld insiders); international, outward-facing and cosmopolitan; and affirming the enduring value of the encounter with objects and events, to be seen by real people in physical public places. However, many of those ideas (they might even be ideals) have been under growing pressure in recent years, with the pandemic helping to accelerate or catalyse changes in the way we understand the role of museums
THINKERS While one version of power is pragmatic – physical spaces and hard cash – and large parts of the list are dedicated to the doers putting things into action, art is also about the influence of ideas and feelings. The thinkers on the list are writers, researchers and theorists who are helping to define and inspire the art being made and exhibitions being put on right now. Some, like Donna Haraway or Achille Mbembe, might not have expressly published anything this past year, but that belies where agency manifests itself, as ideas diffuse through artworks, books, discussion and the pages of this magazine. We do have some limits: fiction writers, while relevant, feel a step too far on the toes of other forms; and as a rule we recuse critics from the list – we aspire to comment on and critique power, not cultivate it. Though, like all ideas, this wasn’t how it always was: the first ‘thinkers’ to appear on the list came six years into its history, in 2007, when criticcouple Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz were both included (at numbers 60 and 61, respectively). Which was one way to reflect on art’s power: through its most prominent commentators. But the way art, and artists, work in the world has become more diffuse, and permeable: one can no longer just be armed with Josef Albers’s colour theory and the ideas of aesthetics from an eighteenth-century racist like Kant. And so a wider consideration of artists’ reading lists and checkpoints has come to shape the list, however slowly: in 2013, the only thinkers on the list were a band of philosophers who came to be grouped under the banner of ‘object oriented ontology’. Where are they now? Such ideas of the thingness of the world feel subsumed, and further politicised and contextualised,
– the nature of the things they present, and who it is they are supposed to serve. ‘The public’ is no longer an uncontested, homogeneous identity, and the contemporary artworld has become the space for the assertion of many identities, defined by race, sex and gender, so that museums (particularly in the West) have faced the challenge of acknowledging audiences they once ignored or excluded, whether these are people of colour or indigenous communities. While many (mostly Western) museums reconsider what they collect and preserve for posterity, they have been challenged to justify why they should hold onto many of the artworks and artefacts, as the ongoing arguments over restitution attest. Meanwhile, museum workers and artists continue to contest the governance of museums, questioning the role of wealthy patrons and trustees whose interests and values don’t align with those of the people who work for them and exhibit in the institutions their wealth supports. Museums, after
by concerns that are more apparent now: questions of gender, race, class, ecology, technology and a tangle of intersectional issues. In 2019–20, when permissions around bodily experience were largely restricted, we had more time to dust off some books and think about art. Theorists, therefore, were ever-present on ArtReview’s power lists in those years. What now, when experience is back? Does the thinking stop? Does new thinking about an old system fade away? We are, it is perhaps superfluous to point out, living in divided times – not quite postlockdown, maybe mid-recession, definitely posttruth. Things as they were seem to be reasserting themselves with a vengeance: some people are just too tired to keep considering real change. Bureaucracy and structure continue to assert themselves through art’s funders and institutions. But at the same time, different hierarchies of thinking and working are emerging within, and separate to, those who think they run the ship. Many of the thinkers this year tend towards a more bottom-up conception of organisation. From Anna Tsing’s integrated forms of cooperation, to Fred Moten’s articulations of slippery agency, to Sara Ahmed’s strategies of complaint, such ideas help shape the terrain for the sprawling messiness and localised collaboration that is coming to define many pockets of the artworld. Collectivism and unions are also ideas in themselves, templates that adapt and shift with each place they are formed in. What we might be witnessing is the artworld’s own version of the multiverse, as spheres of the market and real contemplation drift further apart.
all, can no longer argue for neutrality or detachment from politics, if only because many artists see art as an intervention into political and social life. But the concept of the museum is anyway changing from within: in August, the International Council of Museums ratified its new definition of the museum, from being an institution that ‘acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits’, to one that is also ‘accessible and inclusive’, fostering ‘diversity and sustainability’, with ‘the participation of communities’. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, today’s museums have to grapple with a culture that is ever more online – what, after all, is a public space if the public is increasingly to be found online? If the pandemic shut people out of ‘irl’ physical space, this prompted even greater attention to immaterial space. Virtual reality, augmented reality, the ‘metaverse’, have all started to make an appearance in the programmes of big institutions, vying to appeal to a new generation more used to clicks than bricks…
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ACTIVIST MOVEMENTS It’s easy to think of power in the artworld as a mostly benign (if often ruthless) contest of creative one-upmanship, professional career-jostling, institutional clout and, of course, money. But this would assume that the artworld stopped at the limits of officially sanctioned institutions and the art market, without questioning those limits as themselves an expression of power. But ever since the Power 100 recognised the impact of activist movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, it’s been clear that artists and others are increasingly ready to confront the power written into the artworld’s long-standing ways of thinking and operating. Since much of the artworld continues to function on the basis of an intense concentration of wealth, workers in the cultural sector have become increasingly militant about their own working conditions, evidenced by the upswell of unionisation campaigns, particularly in the us, while those campaigns are often intertwined with challenges to the ethics of governance. At the other end of the spectrum, in more restrictive regimes, cultural workers are organising to protest the conditions of censorship and political repression that make free expression difficult or impossible, as witnessed by the determined efforts of Cuba’s 27n movement. Activism, even if it doesn’t take the shape of a defined group or organisation, seems now to have bled into many aspects of the artworld’s everyday functioning. Artists, for their part, have become increasingly active in negotiating their participation in the programmes of art galleries, often insisting on their right to withdraw their work from exhibition in protest at the agendas and policies of institutions and curators – the artist’s boycott has become an effective way for artists (usually those with significant reputations, admittedly) to influence the cultures and agendas of even large institutions. But in this upswell, it’s also worth noting that the artworld’s powerful actors are themselves turning to what could be seen as forms of activism. The programmes of respectable, mainstream art venues are filled with exhibitions that deal with issues of social and political importance – environmentalism, climate change, racial justice, gender equality, to name just the most prominent issues addressed. Both in programming and policy, artworld organisations, galleries, curators and collectors see their roles increasingly as one of intervening in what are social and political questions that affect wider society. The artworld, called out in recent years for its exclusivity, indifference and privilege, has responded by putting its resources into supporting a range of social-justice issues. There are contradictions to this, of course. What happens when the artworld’s moneyed and institutionally powerful turn that power to trying to promote agendas that, by their nature, are subjects of wider debate and controversy? And is the source of that power – still largely concentrated in the wealth of the ultrarich – itself ever questioned, even if that wealth is put to ‘good causes’? No better example, maybe, of the ethical ambiguities and paradoxes of art, activism and power than the headline-grabbing acts of art-vandalism of the campaign group Just Stop Oil – scandalising the public by attacking cherished works of art in the name of climate emergency, yet funded by philanthropist Aileen Getty, heiress-granddaughter of oil magnate J. Paul Getty…
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1 RUANGRUPA
Artist Collective Indonesian Last Year 3
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even before it opened. Accusations of antisemitism in some of the works on show, and in the alleged pro-Palestine sympathies of a few of the participants, have fed (and been fed by) the German media, an ongoing furore that has caused resignations, media castigations, a major artist to pull her work from the show (this year’s number 4, Hito Steyerl), questions in the German parliament and a very public snub by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz. In a country that struggles with the historical guilt of the Holocaust, and whose lawmakers have branded the Boycott Divest Sanction movement antisemitic, such accusations overshadowed the exhibition for the length of its run, and did much to obscure any more positive consideration of ruangrupa’s vast, polyphonic, chaotic and convivial assembly of artistic voices from the Global South. All of which might make one wonder – where’s the power in all this? A reply to this might be that power, today, doesn’t only accrue to those securely at the top of their respective hierarchies, but also to those who disrupt the normal way of doing things. Documenta’s hierarchy may not have anticipated that ruangrupa’s decentred, distributed way of doing things would have caused such instability, even though it might have believed, in a general way, that hierarchies and power are intrinsically ‘Bad Things’, to be done away with. But if any lesson might be learned from ruangrupa’s great experiment with Documenta, it is that you can’t, as a powerful, hierarchical organisation, pretend to value delegation, collaboration and devolution of power only to be surprised when events no longer stay under your control. By August, Documenta’s director general had resigned and Germany’s culture minister had released plans to ‘reform’ the governance of Documenta, to bring it under closer government oversight. Power reveals itself when it’s challenged. But old models and old ways of doing things, exclusive and hierarchical, are now being challenged across the artworld. Two decades ago, a once well-known curator opined, ‘The next Documenta should be curated by an artist’. But replacing curators with artists doesn’t itself change the structure of power, only the individual who sits at the top. ruangrupa’s power has been in letting that structure unravel. Now everyone else has to work out what happens next.
ArtReview
1 Courtesy ruangrupa
This was the year of the 15th edition of Documenta, the much-watched, agenda-defining exhibition held every five years in the German city of Kassel. As directors of one of the biggest and best-resourced art exhibitions on the artworld calendar, curators of Documenta are, unsurprisingly, influential figures in the world of contemporary art. A decade ago, ArtReview first recognised the rising power of the curator (and by extension Documenta) by assigning its top spot, for the first time ever, to a Documenta curator (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev). What marked out the influence of that particular curator’s megashow, ArtReview noted, was its ambitious multidisciplinary and multivenue approach (reaching from Kassel to Kabul), and – relevant to this year’s number one – that it ‘allowed artists to speak for themselves through their work, and to make their own set of rules’. Ten years later, for the first time ever, Documenta was curated not by a single professional curator, but by artists. It was also the first time in the exhibition’s 67-year history that its curators came from Asia. With the appointment of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa as artistic directors of Documenta, artists have ‘spoken for themselves’ and ‘made their own rules’. An amorphous group of artists, architects and educationalists, ruangrupa has over its 22-year existence developed a sophisticated form of mutual and collaborative working and organising in a country where, unlike in the wealthier (in terms of arts funding) West, the infrastructure for contemporary art has been minimal or nonexistent. Working on the principles of their ‘lumbung’ philosophy (the Indonesian term for a community rice barn, a metaphor for sharing resources), they invited collaborators from all round the world to join them for the hundred-day exhibition in Germany, inviting them to in turn invite further collaborations, groups and individuals. By opening day, over 750 individual ‘participants’ were listed, rising to 1,500 in the final tally, most of them members of or participants in collectives and artist-groups. How this distributed way of working might work in the usually hierarchical form of the orthodox ‘biennial’ model has been largely eclipsed by the controversy that has raged around the exhibition from
3 UNIONS Activist Movement International new
2 Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia 3 moma employees protest, 2015. Courtesy moma Local 2110
“In so many workplaces, whether it’s in publishing or in museums or universities, people had the idea that they were lucky to be in these prestigious institutions,” Maida Rosenstein, president of American union chapter uaw Local 2110, told ArtReview. “It was a given that you should accept low salaries and poor treatment.” That acquiescence has become increasingly rare in the artworld, where union membership among artists and museum workers is booming. News of unionisation at us institutions has become a daily occurrence, and the Culture Group chapter of the Public and Commercial Services Union in the uk has seen an influx in members (who will be part of a cross-industry nationwide strike at the end of the year). Institutional-specific campaigns like A Better Guggenheim and Barbican Stories are catalysing senior-management changes, while collective action is taking shape with artists groups such as Art Workers Italia, bbk Berlin and Za k.r.u.h. Croatia, as well as other forms of self-organising across the globe, where increasingly there is a recognition of the work in artwork.
2 CECILIA ALEMANI Curator Italian Last Year 18
4 Photo: Leon Kahane
There were many who cried, during the recent pandemic and its aftermath, that the age of the mega-exhibition was over. Not so fast, Alemani might have said, as her delayed edition of the world’s biggest biennial met with widespread acclaim. ‘The most momentous biennale in living memory,’ squealed The Observer; a ‘great biennale’ thundered Die Zeit; ‘tightly argued and frequently successful’, The New York Times conceded. Venice’s curator could have relied on the evident good politics of a show that included just 22 men among the 213 artists from 58 countries. Yet Milk of Dreams wasn’t just gesture politics; it was also well designed and convincing, while ‘triumphantly emphasising fluidity’, as this magazine put it. With a focus on painting and sculpture, the curator even bucked the trend for emphasising new media. As Alemani basked in glory, the rest of the artworld, despite its fondness for inclusive rhetoric, was left to reflect on the limited space generally afforded to female artists – and a world in which the virtual was out and objects were back.
4 HITO STEYERL Artist German Last Year 17 ‘Don’t try to see everything at once. It will be a little too much,’ Steyerl said of the 23 works included in A Sea of Data at mmca Seoul, her first largescale solo exhibition in Asia. It’s an instruction the artist doesn’t pay much heed to herself, as she serially produces works that tackle the most pressing issues of the day – from economic liquidity and war to nfts, deep-learning ais and cybersurveillance – with wit and intelligence, often in a single video, digital animation or installation. Her video installation Animal Spirits (2022) debuted in Seoul and tackled the links between emotion, consumption and the financial markets, via ‘Cheesecoin’, cave art and digital guerrillas. Nor is she afraid to take that commentary beyond the work, not only pulling out of Documenta this year over the German quinquennial’s response to anti-Semitism claims, but remixing her work and screening it instead in a nearby videostore. Her long-touring survey I Will Survive moved to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in January, and her installations featured in dozens more museum group shows.
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5 FRED MOTEN
6 WOLFGANG TILLMANS Artist German Last Year 46
Thinker American Last Year 6
7 SIMONE LEIGH
Tillmans is smoothly assuming the mantle of an art elder-statesman, his investiture now complete with To Look Without Fear, a vast retrospective opening this year at moma, New York. Organised chronologically and installed, as always, by the artist and his team (over 16 days and nights, he says), it provided an easy image of the photographer’s journey from nightclub imagery to a more wide-ranging experimentation in representing the world around him (and beyond: astronomy is a passion). Meanwhile, Fragile, a show touring African cities over the past five years, arrived at its final stop across two venues in Lagos; his solo at Mumok, Vienna, closed after an extended run in August. And then Tillmans was back in London for a round of fundraising on behalf of the ica, where he has been chair since 2019. Demonstrating that his penchant for hedonism isn’t over, Tillmans outlined plans to make the art institution party central, including a licence to serve alcohol until 6am.
8 NAN GOLDIN
Artist American Last Year 41
Artist American reentry (91 in 2020)
When Leigh received the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale – the first Black woman, along with co-awardee Sonia Boyce, to win the prestigious award – it felt like a foregone conclusion. Her prominent positions in Cecilia Alemani’s exhibition and the us Pavilion confirmed that Leigh, whose work addresses Black feminism and the legacies of colonialism, is a sculptor of uncanny magnetism, as exemplified by the five-metre-tall Brick House (2019) welcoming visitors to the Arsenale: Black womanhood as strong, imposing, immovable architecture. (ok, not quite immovable: the work previously stood on New York’s High Line sculpture promenade.) But Leigh is also a federator, extending her pavilion presentation into a three-day symposium of performances and lectures by leading Black women intellectuals – performers, writers, filmmakers, artists and activists. Organised by curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray with advisers including Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt, this historical convening echoed Leigh’s ambition to bring the Black feminist voices that influenced her into dialogue – and onto a global stage – with new voices.
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Presenting stark images of life on the fringes of society, the photographer was already one of the most important artists of her generation, but following a wrist injury, and the prescription of, and then addiction to, opioid Oxycontin, her turn to activism has reset how art institutions seek out patronage. This year her story was told on the big screen by Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival) charts how Goldin set up the activist group p.a.i.n. to hold the Sacklers, the family behind Oxycontin manufacturers Purdue Pharma, to account. Their disgrace since has been startling: this year the National Gallery and v&a in London dropped links with the philanthropists, following the likes of the Serpentine and Tate, and the Met and Guggenheim in New York. Her artwork continues to speak for itself, specifically through a retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
ArtReview
5 Photo: LaMont Hamilton 6 Photo: Georg Petermichl 7 Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis 8 Photo: Phil Penman
Although he might be best classed as a thinker – and a catalytic one – something of Moten’s uncommon range can be gleaned from a handful of recent projects: 2021’s essay collection All Incomplete, written with Stefano Harney; 2022’s Moten/López/Cleaver, a collaborative jazz/experimental/spoken-word album with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver; and the forthcoming book of poems Perennial Fashion (Presence Falling). The medium is decidedly not the message: rather, Moten – whose 2020 MacArthur Fellowship recognised his huge contribution to Black studies, critical race theory and gender studies in recent times – models unboundedness across cultural spheres. Not least, of course, visual art, where his participatory work alongside figures such as Wu Tsang, Ralph Lemon, Juliana Huxtable and Arthur Jafa inverts the historical model of artists ransacking theorists’ ideas and comes across more as a meeting of equally forward-thinking minds.
9 DAVID ZWIRNER
10 DARREN WALKER
Gallerist German Last Year 23
Philanthropist American Last Year 30
9 Photo: Jason Schmidt 10 Courtesy Ford Foundation 11 Photo: Sean and Seng 12 Courtesy the artist
Growth remains the watchword for the New York-based megagallery founded by Zwirner in 1993. Both in terms of the 77 artists his operation represents (with Huma Bhabha, the Pakistani-American sculptor, and Michael Armitage, the Kenyan-born British painter, both added to the stable in 2022) and the real estate needed to show their work. Joining the New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong galleries (as well as the semiautonomous 52 Walker, New York, directed by Ebony L. Haynes, which accommodates a lending library and is dedicated to work by artists who have historically been marginalised – without pandering to the larger artworld’s festival of inclusivity) will be a Los Angeles space opening next year. Yet Zwirner expands his empire in less obvious ways too: attempting to create an artist retreat (currently entangled in planning problems) abutting his home in the Hamptons; and in a move that aligns with his practice of publishing books beyond the expected vanity monographs, assuming the role of majority funder of hip literary mag The Drift.
When the president of the Ford Foundation was named a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters this year, the committee noted Walker’s ‘strength of conviction’, such as his involvement in realising a 2018 show concerning the role of the Black model in art at New York’s Wallach Gallery, expanded into the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, in 2019. And while Walker is in charge of Ford’s $16bn fund for social justice, his interest in art ensures cultural initiatives are given ample opportunity to pitch. Its portfolio ranges from moma’s scholars-in-residence programme and Nigeria’s Life In My City Arts Festival, to buying the archives of defunct Black culture magazines Ebony and Jet for the Getty Research Institute and Smithsonian (he sits on the Smithsonian board, as well those of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and the High Line, New York, while cochairing New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers). In October the foundation revealed details of an $80m programme to build ‘resilience’ into civil-society organisations across the Global South.
11 ANNE IMHOF
12 CAO FEI
Artist German Last Year 5
Artist Chinese Last Year 7
Having risen to the pinnacle of artworld visibility over the last halfdecade by choreographing highly Instagrammable performance pieces that engaged with the mainstreaming and exhaustion of subcultural spaces, Imhof executed a pronounced heel-turn this year, editing out her disaffected live performers and leaning into sculptural installation and ambient menace. The steely labyrinth of Youth at Amsterdam’s Stedeljik Museum was augmented with wintry, Moscow-shot footage of Imhof’s muse Eliza Douglas; meanwhile, the German artist’s darkly poetic shows at Buchholz in New York and Sprüth Magers in London felt like evacuated stages, foregrounding metal lockers (mostly closed) and multipanel paintings of billowing smoke. Imhof doesn’t seem wholly done with live events, but she told Monopol this year that her performances need, she thinks, to move outside of institutions altogether. And her work increasingly resonates in the worlds of fashion and pop culture. The artworld feted Imhof again this year – she won the €50,000 Binding Culture Prize – but it increasingly looks too small for her ambitions.
Cao’s explorations of new technologies and digital culture neatly envelope the viewer’s own utopian or dystopian prejudices towards the subject. Embracing the Metaverse, vr and online living with vim, the artist also negotiates the alienation that accompanies these new worlds. Her 2018 film installation Asia One, part of this year’s solo at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, takes a fully automated sorting-office as its subject, and our exploitation by capitalism as its theme. Cao is never didactic, however, and embraces opportunities beyond art: having previously designed an ‘art car’ for bmw, this year she created a digital artwork – a synchronised graphic display lighting up the car’s interior – for the marque’s new suv. Her solo show at maxxi, Rome, closed this May; her ‘reimagined’ Louis Vuitton trunk landed in New York in October; her work was included in the Aichi Triennale, a group outing at Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Leeum Museum’s displays during Frieze Seoul. She even had time to share her recipe for Singapore laksa with the readers of Wallpaper in the summer.
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13 ANNA L. TSING
14 WU TSANG Artist American reentry (73 in 2020)
Thinker American Last Year 2
It is a testament to how in-demand Wu Tsang is that when the artist wanted to retell the story of Moby-Dick in feature-length-film form, opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic materialised. moby dick; or, The Whale, which premiered at Teatro Goldoni during the opening week of the Venice Biennale (and received backing from seven major art organisations, including Luma, Superblue and the Whitney Museum), is an orchestrascored feature in which the artist, who explores marginalised identities and queer histories, refits the action as a queer love story and allegory of race. A long list of international screenings followed, but the artist’s interest in Herman Melville’s classic didn’t end there. Also in Venice, projected onto a 17m-wide screen in a shipping yard, was Of Whales, an epic looped film installation; and for the Whitney Biennial she convened her Swiss-based performance gang Moved by the Motion (cofounded with Tosh Basco fka boychild) for extracts, yet another exploration of Moby-Dick, this one through installation and live movement, and featuring critical theorist (and longtime collaborator) Fred Moten.
16 DONNA HARAWAY
15 OLAFUR ELIASSON Artist Icelandic-Danish Last Year 15
Thinker American reentry (71 in 2020)
Being dubbed ‘the Bob Ross of light art meets climate change’ by Artnet is a backhanded compliment, but like the late American tv personality, Eliasson has enormous appeal. His big hits might be behind him (for now at least), but the voracious mingling of art, architecture, ecology and new technology continues unabated. A solo exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, which featured old classics as well as new commissions (including Under the Weather, 2022, a huge elliptical patterned screen hanging above the building’s courtyard that changes as the viewer moves about), was also a chance to launch a trippy ever-changing colourfield virtual-reality nft (commissioned by Beeple collector Metakovan). The artist’s aim – whether he’s producing gallery shows (in Seoul, Madrid, Los Angeles), institutional exhibitions (additional solos at Castello di Rivoli and Munich’s Pinakothek), largescale outdoor commissions (for a Californian winery, or in the Qatari desert) or magazine covers (produced for Time ahead of cop27) – is to make the viewer acutely aware of their – and the – environment.
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Talking to The Art Newspaper about her Venice Biennale, Cecilia Alemani said she wanted to ask questions about the ‘morphosis of the body and the definition of humanity’. If that sounds familiar, it’s down to the popularity of Haraway’s thinking. So while there were no new books, her legacy breezed through Venice and beyond: the title of Manifesta 14, in Prishtina, also paid homage to the professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies programmes at the University of California, Santa Cruz with it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise, and she continues to be namechecked in exhibition blurbs the world over. As artist Anicka Yi explained of Haraway’s thinking: ‘It’s just so much in my dna… the layers of her education for an artist like me has become so deeply embedded that you wake up and don’t even actively think about it specifically anymore. It’s become so much a part of the paradigm.’
ArtReview
13 Photo: Feifei Zhou 14 Photo: Flavio Karrer 15 Photo: Lars Borges 16 Photo: Rusten Hogness
It’s increasingly apparent that staving off environmental disaster requires coming up with new planetary narratives that put humankind in better alignment with the natural world. Among those forging new ways of storytelling, perhaps none is more adept, or influential, than Tsing, whose 2015 publication The Mushroom at the End of the World continues to be a point of reference for artists and curators interested in ecosystemic thinking and rhizomatic forms of collaboration. Tsing’s aura extends well beyond the artworld: this year she took part in the Prada Frames symposium at Milan Design Week and was a keynote speaker at a symposium held by Syracuse University’s architecture department. Elsewhere, the Dubaibased public arts advisory firm Alserkal Initiatives cited the anthropologist’s work as an impetus for an international public art programme titled A Feral Commons (after Feral Atlas, the collaborative online research platform Tsing cofounded) across Dubai, Kingston, Johannesburg and Athens. Tsing continues her professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, alongside fellow Plantationocene thinker Donna Haraway.
17 Payot (left), Manuela and Iwan Wirth (right). Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke 18 Photo: Rankin Photography Ltd 19 Photo: Ari Marcopoulos 20 © Roe Ethridge, 2016. Courtesy Gagosian
17 IWAN WIRTH, MANUELA WIRTH & MARC PAYOT
18 THEASTER GATES
Gallerists Swiss Last Year 26
Artist American Last Year 4
It would be underselling it to say that the couple, alongside company president Payot, run a gallery, as Hauser & Wirth continues its pivot to high-end lifestyle brand. Sure, you can buy art from their us (with a second la space launching in early 2023), uk, Switzerland, Monaco, Hong Kong and – opening soon – Paris galleries: with the work on offer now including that of newly represented artists Allison Katz, Angel Otero and storied painter Pat Steir. But their operations in Somerset and Menorca mimic the aesthetic of art institutions (while their nonprofit foundation gave away $700,000 in grants to archival projects), complete with cafés, bookshops and residencies, and in la they hold book fairs and, more recently, launched a recurring performance festival (the Performance Project). It is, then, this year, a natural segue to buy a London pub and restaurant, as well as the Groucho members’ club, to go with a hotel in Scotland, packing each of the ventures with work and design commissions by gallery artists.
While the artist’s first museum survey opened at the New Museum, New York, in November, another debut came earlier in the year, when Gates became the first nonarchitect solely commissioned for a Serpentine Galleries pavilion (David Adjaye’s architecture practice helped with the realisation). The resulting Black Chapel (2022) was, according to press materials, influenced by the sacred forms of Hungarian round churches, voodoo circles and roda de capoeira. All social spaces, you will note, the sort of references typical for an artist who has revolutionised social practice while finding a way to integrate it within the commercial art market. So while exhibitions of his wall works and ceramic and tar sculptures at Gagosian in Basel and White Cube in West Palm Beach bring in the cash, the real social work is done back home within the myriad community projects he has initiated in Chicago, including the ongoing $10.35m transformation of an old school into a space supporting artists and creatives of colour, and the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, a collaboration with Miuccia Prada, offering mentorship programmes.
19 KARA WALKER 20 LARRY GAGOSIAN Artist American Last Year 11
Gallerist American Last Year 25
A quieter year for Walker, but quiet is relative for an artist whose career has been stratospheric since 1997, when she became one of the youngest MacArthur Fellows. Walker’s European touring show A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be closed its second stop, at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, in January, before opening for Dutch audiences at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, in July. Australians also got a taste of Walker’s practice, with a show at the National Art Gallery, Canberra, while a survey of her drawings opened at Sprüth Magers, London, in the summer. Although her vast drawings, cutout black paper silhouettes and monumental sculpture ostensibly concentrate on the history of North American race relations and the traumas and resilience of African Americans (and are shown widely across the us, appearing in over 24 group shows this year alone), her influence can be felt beyond her home country, teasing out moments of the Black experience with subtle ease – not least in her recent turn in the Afrofuturism-themed In the Black Fantastic at London’s Hayward Gallery.
The man who invented the megagallery – by growing his gallery each and every year, this year adding a permanent exhibition space in Gstaad and a ‘boutique’ fourth site in London to the operation’s 20 addresses – knows he adds value to any artist. ‘I think if you are not aggressive in business you are not going to go very far. It’s the only way I can function,’ Gagosian told the Financial Times in February. Just ask painter Anna Weyant, whose works were selling for $400 three years ago, but since her embrace by Gagosian now fetch $1.6m at auction. This year the gallerist picked up established names too, including Ashley Bickerton, Jadé Fadojutimi, Jordan Wolfson, Stanley Whitney, Harold Ancart and Deana Lawson. And there were debut shows for photographer Tyler Mitchell and Awol Erizku, as well as the usual bigshots. Gagosian’s own rags-to-riches tale is set to be immortalised in a forthcoming unofficial biography. And given rumours circulating about the gallery’s impending purchase by lifestyle group lvmh, perhaps by the time it’s completed he’ll be richer still.
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22 CARRIE MAE WEEMS
21 KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE
Artist American Last Year 9
Artists Indigenous Australian / American Last Year 8
23 MARC GLIMCHER
First acclaimed for The Kitchen Table Series (1990), in which Weems staged scenes around a family table and photographed herself at the centre of each image to highlight female identity and the gendered space of the home kitchen, the artist has long investigated how art can be used to express trauma and resilience. After debuting a series taken at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial in her retrospective at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (which has since travelled to Fundación Mapfre in Madrid), Weems was awarded the €15,000 Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize in Germany. The recognition of her influence for younger generations of artists came this year with her appointment as a board member at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and her receiving the Harlem Stage Transformative Artist Award, given to artists of colour who have ‘shifted paradigms and charted new paths’ in their field. Weems also presented a major show with photographer Dawoud Bey, opening at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan in January before travelling to Tampa and Seattle.
24 CHRIS HO & JOHN TAIN Curators Hong Konger /American-Taiwanese Last Year 12
Gallerist American Last Year 32 Having shared representation of James Turrell with Kayne Griffin, Glimcher’s Pace this year swallowed the la gallery and closed Pace’s Silicon Valley address in Palo Alto. Not all the artists made it over to Pace’s books, but among those who did were Mika Tajima and David Lynch, joining 2022 newbies Gideon Appah, Huong Dodinh, Virginia Jaramillo, Acaye Kerunen, Kylie Manning and Matthew Day Jackson. Don’t think Pace’s relocation signals a move away from tech. The gallery’s nft platform (a collaboration with Art Blocks, with new projects by the likes of John Gerrard, Tara Donovan and Jeff Koons) operates alongside eight physical galleries across three continents. Nine if you include Glimcher and Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst’s Superblue, the immersive art experience in Miami (a London version quietly closed). Ten if you include the new project space by Pace paterfamilias Arne, who came out of retirement to found his own ny operation. If this sounds very Succession, well, Marc is entering the satire business too: bankrolling a tv show for Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, aka Instagram artworld-funpoker @jerrygogosian.
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After abandoning a search for new premises for Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive – which Ho directs and at which Tain is head of research – the duo, together with aaa founder Claire Hsu, renovated the library, improving the space in which the public can browse 120,000 art-historical records. A very small selection of these were installed at Documenta in Kassel over the summer: footage relating to the postcolonial Faculty of Fine Arts in Vadodara, India, and to Womanifesto, a Thai feminist collective; and ephemera from performance-art festivals that emerged in East and Southeast Asia. Yet the real work of the archive is often more modest in scale, whether talks from aaa grantees on Punjab-era communist publications, the opening of Guangdong pioneer Huang Xiaopeng’s archives or a mobile library travelling from town to town in Nepal. The archive has fans too: this year it received $25,000 from the Hauser & Wirth Institute to process and digitise the papers of multifaceted Pakistani modernist Zahoor ul Akhlaq.
ArtReview
21 The Jealous One (still), 2017. Courtesy Karrabing Film Collective 22 Photo: Audoin Desforges 23 Photo: Suzie Howell 24 Courtesy Moving Image Studio (Ho); Courtesy Asia Art Archive (Tain)
Karrabing Film Collective, made up of 30-plus Indigenous members based mostly in Australia’s Northern Territories (and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, who joined during the 1980s), is a model for grassroots collective-organising and how to harness film and art installations as tools for consciousness-raising. Often shot on handheld cameras and phones, their films reflect the enduring impact of colonialism on the life of indigenous communities in stories where mermaids, zombies and ancestral spirits critique Western capitalism, exploitation and state institutions. A quieter year in the artworld – the collective showed at Hawai‘i Triennial and the Cornell Biennial, New York – was likely to focus on initiatives such as ‘Mapping the Ancestral Present’, a project that aims to reconceptualise our relationships to (and representations of) the land outside Western forms of mapping; while the Karrabing Art Residency for Ancestors (involving the Serpentine Galleries, London, the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority and the Indigenous Language and Arts Program) looks to protect local ecologies and produce art that honours ancestral heritage.
26 ARTHUR JAFA
25 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Artist Collective International Last Year 19
Artist American Last Year 20
25 Photo: Oliver Chanarin 26 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery 27 Photo: John Russo 28 Courtesy the artist
“Where subjectivity is required of the artist or scientist, the investigator must be objective. Our work starts by trying to break that dichotomy… the way you achieve that is through the field of aesthetics,” Eyal Weizman, head of this London-based collective of artists, architects, journalists and investigators, told ArtReview. That breaking of boundaries can be felt not just in their multifaceted investigations, presented as digital and spatial reenactments of various human-rights abuses and environmental crimes (the most high-profile of which this year was supplying evidence that slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately shot at by the Israeli military), but in the manner they make their work public. Museum shows (at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and the Museo de Antioquia, Medellín) and biennial appearances (in Berlin, Warsaw and Survival Kit 13, Riga) reach a certain audience, but their collaborations with media organisations, ngos and activists achieve even an greater attention to their vital findings.
Few artworks capsule their moment in the way that Jafa’s emotive 2016 filmic collage Love is the Message, The Message is Death did when Black Lives Matter arose during the mid-2010s. Since then, the former cinematographer’s position as one of his generation’s most signally influential artists has become self-evident, not least in Jafa’s forging of an intentionally Black multimedia aesthetics that resists being ‘owned’ by viewers. Live Evil, his substantial retrospective at Luma Arles this year, put all Jafa’s powers on display: it moved from landmark moving-image works like The White Album (2018) to vacuum-formed reliefs of scars on a former slave’s back, giant chain-wrapped tyres and imagery of fallen star Whitney Houston, counterbalancing the registering of historical injustice with a quality of internal slippage and abstract mutual inflection. Or, as Jafa told Le Monde as the show opened, ‘I like works that have an open ending, because Black identity has an open ending’. rhamesjafacoseyjafadrayton, Jafa’s first institutional Italian exhibition, opened at ogr Torino in November.
27 STEVE MCQUEEN
28 ZANELE MUHOLI Artist South African Last Year 54
Artist British Last Year 21 ‘Sometimes we have to be specific in order to be general’, noted McQueen to London’s Evening Standard of his ongoing conversations around race, conversations that have long taken him beyond the gallery and into television and Hollywood. While those latter commitments are timeconsuming (a McQueen-directed, a24-backed documentary about Amsterdam under Nazi occupation is soon to be released, and he is currently shooting a film about Londoners during the Blitz), the artist made space this year for a retrospective at Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, a reboot of his covid-curtailed 2020 Tate Modern show, now including Sunshine State (2022), a video installation splicing a recollection of a racist attack that his father experienced with the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, about a musician who performs in blackface. McQueen was presented with the Vantage Award by la’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was the subject of a symposium at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and topped the year with a knighthood.
The self-styled visual activist once explained the urgent motivation behind their photographic work, typically stark portraiture of fellow Black queer South Africans, with the words: ‘I’m boiling inside, like any great man I want to be counted in history, I want to produce that history, I want to say this is me’. Their work eschews exploiting experiences of trauma, however, and is in its way celebratory. It has also led to Muholi being celebrated: recent solo exhibitions include Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Fotografihuset in Oslo and gl Strand in Copenhagen. The artist was also honoured at the International Center of Photography’s annual Spotlights benefit. Muholi has been experimenting beyond the lens, following a series of lockdown paintings with new sculptural busts based on their imagery. They are also inspiring the next generation, opening the Muholi Art Institute this year, which offers studios and residencies to disadvantaged artists from both Cape Town and rural South Africa.
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30 MONIKA SPRÜTH & PHILOMENE MAGERS
29 CECILIA VICUÑA Artist Chilean reentry (17 in 2020)
Gallerists German Last Year 66
29 Photo: William Jess Laird 30 Photo: Christian Werner 31 Photo: Marie Rouge 32 Photo: Sean Wang
When Vicuña lived in exile in Bogotá during the late 1970s, and then in New York, things were often so hard that she had trouble affording food. But she and a band of anticapitalist, proto-ecofeminist, misfit friends were committed to the idea that art and poetry could offer political resistance, even if indirectly, and that was its own sustenance. This year she returned to Colombia for one of the multitude of retrospectives she has been offered of late. The mamu exhibition was the amuse-bouche to a year that also featured a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; a star turn at the Venice Biennale (where she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement); and the annual commission by Tate Modern to fill the London institution’s Turbine Hall. As the links between the climate emergency, extractivist capitalism and a patriarchal society come to the fore, so too has Vicuña’s unique blend of sculpture, Land art, painting and word play.
31 PAUL B. PRECIADO
This year Sprüth – who established her gallery in 1983, before being joined by Magers during the late 1990s – was awarded the Art Cologne Prize for her work in raising the profile of women artists. It speaks to the duo’s legacy that they represent four of the women artists on this list – from Barbara Kruger to a younger, just-as-radical generation that includes Cao Fei, as well as Kara Walker and Anne Imhof, who took turns presenting work at the gallery’s London space. The gallerists also inaugurated their first New York space with a show for the late icon John Baldessari, while Jon Rafman staged a nightmarish, ai-infused exhibition at their cavernous Berlin space. When the Venice Biennale opened (including works by gallery artists Kruger, Louise Lawler, Rosemarie Trockel and Kaari Upson), the pair took a temporary lease in the city to show new Murano glassworks by Andreas Schulze, while its Los Angeles address ticked over too, showing Hanne Darboven and Nancy Holt.
32 APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL Artist Thai Last Year 27
Thinker Spanish Last Year 34 If a decade ago Preciado was best known for his transition memoir Testo Junkie (2008), he’s since settled into the role of unbridled public intellectual, attuned to the interweave of politics and gender – and, additionally, read widely in the artworld, which the Spanish-born, Paris-based Preciado dips in and out of as a curator (of public programmes at the Palais de Tokyo) and artists’ collaborator. Following on from his 2019 book of newspaper columns, An Apartment on Uranus, when Preciado has broken cover lately it’s been with stylised, hopeful screeds on political struggle and the possibilities of resistance: broadsides against rightwing revanchism in France or on falling colonisers’ statues and concerted acts of defiance in Russia and Iran, which the author reads as revolutionary acts of love. Meanwhile he is presumably still working on his autobiographical film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, announced in 2021 – a passion project, no doubt, but that description increasingly applies to everything Preciado does.
During the 24 years since he began exhibiting video installations in galleries and the 22 since his first feature film, Weerasethakul has played by his own rules in terms of both form and content. In the last year he pivoted from a Cannes prize-winning piece of cinema, the Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria (2021) – with its resolute one-cinema-at-a-time, no-streaming rollout – to a retrospective of his films at the Centre Pompidou and other Paris locations; and his multiyear travelling exhibition A Minor History has made its way from Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Foundation to the artist’s homeland of Isan, northeastern Thailand. Meanwhile, for an artist drawn to dreamlike overlaps between the spheres of the living and the dead, it makes sense that he’d turn to the intimacy, plasticity and empathetic potentialities of virtual reality. At the Aichi Triennale, Weerasethakul debuted his first vr piece, A Conversation with the Sun (2022): interactive light waves, a Ryuichi Sakamoto score and encounters with phantasmal figures and sick and sleeping bodies, presented – with typical concern for preserving the specialness of the art experience – for just a handful of viewers at a time.
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34 HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Artist British new
Curator Swiss Last Year 40
When Boyce won the Golden Lion for her British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, it was the culmination of a career that has not always received the recognition it deserved. Part of the Blk Art Group of artists who resisted the reactionary government of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, Boyce has long carved her own path, not least educating generations of students across British art schools. Earlier this year Boyce presented Radio Ballads, a project for the Serpentine Galleries and Barking Town Hall, the fruit of half-a-decade’s work within a community setting; she also opened her inaugural solo show with Simon Lee Gallery and a public commission for Cork Street, both in London. Boyce is the subject of an episode of the bbc documentary series Imagine that was broadcast in November, following the artist as she prepared for the Venice Biennale. All this while continuing to teach as professor and chair in Black Art and Design at the University of Arts London.
35 KOYO KOUOH
The artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London remains a fixture of panel discussions (Art Basel’s Paris +, Milan Fashion Week, gq’s ‘Heroes’) and prize juries (the Art Explora residency in Paris and an art competition coinciding with the cop27 climate summit in Egypt). His latest book, Remember to Dream!, relating to his Instagram projects, dropped this autumn. How he balances his commitment to the climate emergency (showcased in Back to Earth at the Serpentine Galleries) with his interest in nfts (and all things digital: at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf he curated Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age) and the requirements of travel (Louis Vuitton invited him to design his own luggage this year) is something he interrogates publicly. He also sits on the Luma Arles advisory committee, is senior artistic adviser at The Shed in New York and helped inaugurated Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s new space. Later he was on hand to console fans about the timeout called by his buddies in Korean boyband bts.
36 MARC SPIEGLER & FLORIAN FABER Art Fair
Curator Cameroonian Last Year 38 ‘I belong to a generation of African professionals… who inhabit the world from a pan-African perspective and who, first of all, talk to Africa,’ the director of Zeitz mocaa in South Africa told an interviewer this year. When We See Us, a survey spanning 100 years of Black figuration, is typical of her ambition; as is Indigo Waves and Other Stories, which drew connections between artists from African, Asian and Australasian countries on the Indian Ocean. This deep dive into art’s relation to geography, history and politics was also on display outside the continent in Currency, Kouoh’s edition of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, which asked pertinent questions around circulation and value. Kouoh has also been vocal about the need to fund curatorial endeavours, positioning the discipline as being about ‘caring for the society and its citizens to ensure their wellbeing and vitality’; currency was also probably what drove Kouoh to organise the museum’s first fundraising gala, in partnership with Gucci, under the sign of ‘Art & Opulence’.
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French-American / German-Swiss Last Year 70
The pandemic hit Spiegler’s Art Basel hard, following an already rocky financial patch for Faber’s parent company mch. Things now look somewhat rosier, after the successful launch this autumn of Paris+ by Art Basel. The aggressive takeover of longtime French fair fiac’s traditional Grand Palais venue and date led to the chief of Art Cologne hitting out at Art Basel’s ‘colonialism’. As Spiegler steps down from the company in December, and Noah Horowitz returns from a brief role at Sotheby’s to take on the position of ceo, the expansion and search for profit continues. At the start of the year, mch reacquired a stake in Singapore’s Art sg fair, though Art Basel Hong Kong, with a volatile political situation and many lockdown measures still in place, saw just under half the 2019 number of galleries take part. Exhibitors at Art Basel in Basel returned to prepandemic levels, and the fair is hosting its largest-ever Miami edition, with rumoured plans for a year-round selling platform to come.
ArtReview
33 Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery 34 Photo: Andrew Quinn 35 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town 36 © Art Basel (Spiegler); © mch Group (Faber)
33 SONIA BOYCE
38 SAIDIYA HARTMAN
37 Photo: Collier Schorr 38 Photo: Jai Lennard 39 Photo: Heike Huslage-Koch / Wikimedia Commons 40 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore
37 JUDITH BUTLER
Thinker American reentry (9 in 2020)
Thinker American Last Year 37 When the veteran feminist philosopher arrived at the Complutense University of Madrid to give a conference on Nietzsche and Kafka, she was greeted by graffiti decrying her as antifeminist for her support of trans rights. If Butler was looking for a quiet life in her sixties – she almost certainly wasn’t – then it’s not to be, as her writings on queer theory, subjectivity and biotech are more widely cited, expanded on and argued over with each passing year since the publication of Gender Trouble (1990). Her thinking is ubiquitous in galleries and museums, referenced by artists (overtly this year in work by American artist Tony Cokes, Argentinian collective Chiachio & Giannone and Italian artist Marinella Senatore) and in group-show curatorial texts (from The Condition of Being Addressable at Los Angeles’s Institute of Contemporary Art to New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Vulnerable Critters at La Casa Encendida, Madrid).
Writer and academic Hartman might be only tangentially involved in the artworld, helping to shape artist Simone Leigh’s celebrated ‘Loophole of Retreat’ conference as part of the Venice Biennale, but her work has been crucial in precipitating such a moment. This year sees a new edition of Scenes of Subjection (1997), Hartman’s landmark text on the legacies of slavery, to mark its 25th anniversary. ‘By shifting from the spectacular to the everyday,’ she wrote recently about the book, ‘I aimed to illuminate the ongoing and structural dimensions of violence and slavery’s idioms of power.’ Such a shift is common throughout her work, particularly in her influential Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), in which she details the daily experiences of several urban Black women of the early twentieth century. Her self-described use of ‘close narration’, which evolves from extensive research to draw on methods of fiction to revive and reinvigorate figures from the past, has proven a potent template for artists everywhere to give neglected histories space in the present.
40 EUGENE TAN
39 ACHILLE MBEMBE Thinker Cameroonian Last Year 14
Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 75
Philosopher Mbembe continues to be an intellectual point of reference not only for artists and curators concerned with the colonial past and postcolonial future of Africa, but heads of state too: last year, the Cameroonian thinker was charged by France’s president Emmanuel Macron to come up with a report on how to radically rethink relations between the former colonial power and African countries, on a more mutual and equitable basis. Several months of ‘dialogues’ involved cultural figures from Africa and the African diaspora, including Zeitz mocaa’s Koyo Kouoh and architect David Adjaye, pointing to Mbembe’s ability to network politics and culture on a continental scale. Mbembe’s report, presented in October 2021, proposed a swathe of initiatives including the just-launched Innovation Foundation for Democracy in Johannesburg, and plans for a major new multidisciplinary arts and cultural organisation in France, centred on Africa and the diaspora.
A year into Tan’s appointment as head of Singapore Art Museum, the institution has become more plugged into global conversations. On the exhibition calendar, Lonely Vectors explored capitalist flows of labour and ideas; Can Everybody See My Screen? delved into how virtual and analogue realities intersect. This year Tan oversaw the opening of the museum’s new home at the portside Tanjong Pagar Distripark and its biggest showcase, the Singapore Biennale. Tan continues his duties as director of National Gallery Singapore, which charted new narratives in local and regional art history: modern painter Chua Mia Tee’s retrospective was told through the lens of Singapore’s struggle for independence, while Singaporean sculpture and sculptural practice got its first historical survey in 30 years. This summer, ngs launched its latest educational programme, Roving Art Truck, which travels to primary and secondary schools across the country and invites students to participate in artmaking in an effort to move beyond the museum’s walls.
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41 BROOK ANDREW
42 MAJA HOFFMANN Collector Swiss Last Year 50
This year the Wiradjuri and Celtic Australian artist, writer and curator added dramatist to his cv, premiering what he called ‘posttraumatic theatre’. gaban opened at Gropius Bau in Berlin and explored the site of an anthropology museum – and the inevitable links to colonialism, cultural expropriation, violence and cultural subjugation – through a series of ‘Powerful Objects’: characters based on objects commonly found in Western museum collections. Ahead of a restaging at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the play’s themes were unpacked further in a solo exhibition of photographic works at the city’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Andrew had other solos elsewhere in Australia, plus Toronto and Paris). Moreover, the legacy of the Biennale of Sydney Andrew curated in 2020 lives on in the huge visibility granted to Australian indigenous art and the idea that an art exhibition might provide something of a reckoning for local historic injustice (not least in the forthcoming Liverpool Biennial, in which Andrew features).
Luma, the pharmaceutical heiress’s foundation, has now had a full year to settle into its ambitious campus in Arles (it also has an exhibition space in Zürich), and the run of workshops, forums, exhibitions and research programmes it hosts. Many of the artists on show have previously been associated with Hoffmann’s resident advisory circle, which includes Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf, and, since 2020, artists Ian Cheng and Sophia Al-Maria, as well as philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Arthur Jafa, long championed by Obrist, was the subject of a solo exhibition this summer (which earned him a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize), alongside Sky Hopinka, whose solo exhibition addressed the collective memories of Native American culture, and Gary Hill, the video art pioneer, while the foundation was one of the commissioners behind Wu Tsang’s ambitious retelling of Moby-Dick, which premiered in Venice in April. Hoffmann has been pursuing new interests, not least nfts and blockchain tech (cofounding with Art Basel the blockchain platform Arcual).
43 ADRIAN CHENG
44 AMY SILLMAN Artist American Last Year 48
Collector Hong Konger Last Year 24 This September, the founder of the Hong Kong-based k11 group was awarded France’s Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite. This was not just in recognition of k11’s unique method of fusing commerce and culture (via a series of shopping malls with galleries and art spaces integrated within them), or because of the announcement of k11’s first major cultural-retail development in mainland China, the k11 ecoast in Shenzhen, which will total 228,500 sqm, nor because of the partnerships Cheng has formed with the Palais de Tokyo and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. But also because Cheng has consistently championed the arts: incubating emerging artists in greater China through the k11 Art Foundation; leading the fundraising for M+ as chair of its Gala Board; hosting the Hong Kong-based k11 musea’s current Love of Couture exhibition (in collaboration with London’s v&a), operating residencies for Chinese artists at the Royal Academy, London; and overseeing a public art series that spanned Hong Kong and six cities in mainland China.
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Painting is everywhere, you may have noticed, and abstraction is beginning to supplant figuration again. But few of its contemporary practitioners come close to Sillman’s jolie-laide visual nous, perhaps because her work springs from unusual, twined roots: the unfettered vibrancy of Abstract Expressionism and the pop mobility of animation (which, along with zines, she also makes and exhibits on iPads). That she’s contributed to revivifying her medium was reflected in Sillman’s presence in Cecilia Alemani’s international exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, where the American painter’s big paintings on dangling paper moved like a filmstrip, her restless compositions semaphoring suggestions of human and animal bodies. Meanwhile, for latecomers, images from that show fold into a soon-to-come reissue of her terrific 2020 book of selected writings, Faux Pas. It’s been a long ride since her career’s mid-1970s outset, but Sillman is finally being recognised as a multitalented modern master.
ArtReview
41 Photo: Giacomo Sanzani 42 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 43 Courtesy k11 44 Photo: Calla Kessler. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Artist Wiradjuri/Australian Last Year 45
45 MIUCCIA PRADA Collector Italian Last Year 36
46 EMMANUEL PERROTIN Gallerist French Last Year 52
45 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 46 Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley 47 Photo: Carlos Idun-Tawiah 48 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han
For a long time the doyenne of fashion liked to keep her business activities separate from her love of art, and certainly Fondazione Prada’s private institutional spaces in Milan and Venice maintain church and state separately: exhibitions this year were dedicated to Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset in the former, and Human Brains, a game-changing group show concerning neuroscience curated by Udo Kittelmann in collaboration with artist Taryn Simon, in the latter, which perhaps announced bolder ambitions for the Fondazione’s future, part of which is its ongoing collaboration with Theaster Gates on Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab to support ‘compelling and creative thinkers of color’. Increasingly Prada is letting art seep into the main gig: her flagship store in Tokyo has its own exhibition space, which hosted Simon Fujiwara this year, and for Miu Miu’s spring 2023 show, Miuccia invited artist Shuang Li to conceive the set. One other passion? Sailboat racing – she’s sponsoring a team for next year’s America’s Cup, at which the crew will wear Prada sneakers designed by Cassius Hirst, Damien’s son.
47 IBRAHIM MAHAMA
After catching a performance by the Cirque du Soleil, punters at the Bellagio Resort & Casino can head down to Perrotin’s new printand bookshop in the Las Vegas entertainment complex. Adept at both publicity-seeking and highwire risk-taking, the gallerist has long been a ringmaster of the artworld circus. After all, his was one of the first Western galleries to set up shop in newly fashionable Seoul. Perrotin opened his first gallery there in 2016, in the historic area of Samcheong-dong, but this year he inaugurated a second, in trendy Gangnam. With a Dubai gallery also due to open, this brings Perrotin’s grand total of addresses to 11 in seven cities (not counting the bookshops). That gives him space to do a Daniel Arsham exhibition in Tokyo and an Aya Takano show in Shanghai, while taking Paola Pivi to New York and inviting Xiyao Wang on her first rodeo with the gallery at home in Paris.
48 BYUNG-CHUL HAN
Thinker German Last Year 55
Artist Ghanaian Last Year 63 For Oude Kerk, situated in Amsterdam’s oldest (deconsecrated) church, Mahama produced a series of casts and rubbings of the gravestones, alongside those of the floors and walls of Dutch forts along the Ghanaian coast. If Mahama was just shining a light on colonial pasts, it would be one thing, but his practice intertwines with ideas of renewal, evident not least in the three institutions he operates just outside his home city of Tamale: Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Volini. (The latter is described as an ‘institute for archaeological memories, ecological ideas/forms and thinking future forms’.) This is decolonialism through self-initiated workshops, exhibitions and talks programmes (which scca held this year under the title Existing Otherwise – The Future of Coexistence). It’s given him a prominent voice in the old colonial centres too, with his exhibition at frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, the latest in a long line of Western museum shows.
The inverse of an ivory-tower philosopher, Han is sharply attuned to the deleterious effects of neoliberal capitalism: burnout, depression, self-exploitation, multitasking, psychological disorder, societal collapse. (The very title of 2021’s Capitalism and the Death Drive might seem to capsule his outlook.) That Han has found a wide audience – to the extent that he might be considered the key cultural analyst of the moment – might be to do with his pithy, aphoristic style, itself suited to an age of abundant distraction. In this year’s Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy, he argued that the greatest danger today lies in the prevailing illusion that we are free, when we are, in fact, continually surveilled, directed, controlled. What’s a concerned citizen to do? When Han espouses nonconformist ‘idiotism’ and purposeful idleness, it’s unlikely to diminish his audience or his influence.
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49 BARBARA KRUGER 49 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 285 × 285 cm. Courtesy the artist, The Broad Art Foundation and Sprüth Magers 50 Photo: Sebastian Böettcher 51 Photo: Ai Weiwei Studio 52 Photo: Thierry Bal
50 SHEIKHA HOOR AL-QASIMI
Artist American new
Curator Emirati Last Year 57
Thanks to social media, we all aspire to speak in shareable aphorisms now, but Kruger was doing it decades ago, and her truth-to-power reflections on consumerism, sexism and structural violence speak to our moment as cogently and urgently as they did in the 80s. In the lead to and after the us’s historic decision to overule Roe v Wade, Kruger’s iconic 1989 posters for abortion rights reappeared all over the country, charged with renewed urgency. Her signature wraparound, printed-vinyl, black-and-white slogans – embellished with deadpan smiling and frowning emoticons – were seemingly everywhere in 2022: they touched down loudly in Venice’s Arsenale, in a largescale commission for New York’s moma and all over the floor of Berlin’s newly reopened Neue Nationalgalerie. And Kruger’s aesthetic is everywhere, her vintage classic white-text-on-redplus-found-monochrome-image template being by now a popular meme format as well as a T-shirt and poster fixture. Few contemporary artists have such cultural reach, so it’s a good thing the messages accompanying Kruger’s networked artworks are ethically unimpeachable.
Al-Qasimi’s Sharjah Art Foundation is still playing catchup after the pandemic, with its 15th biennial shifted back to next year. Many of the artists have been in place for some time, with the curatorial concept drafted by Okwui Enwezor before his death in 2019. The foundation’s president will fulfil Enwezor’s legacy with Thinking Historically in the Present, featuring the likes of Carolina Caycedo and Kerry James Marshall. That’s not to say it’s been quiet: there was the postponed March Meeting to host, the biennial conference, as well as solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum for Aref El Rayess, Khalil Rabah and camp. The foundation has also reached out internationally, bringing Kamala Ibrahim Ishag to London’s Serpentine Galleries and a collection show to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Al-Qasimi remains president of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial Foundation (next edition also in 2023) and continues to serve as the president of the International Biennial Association, using some of her many platforms to point out the hypocrisies of the Western world’s varying responses to crises depending on geographic proximity.
52 ISAAC JULIEN
51 AI WEIWEI Artist Chinese Last Year 39
Artist British new
If Ai’s artmaking feels like a footnote to his media activism, don’t be fooled. The Albertina in Vienna staged his largest retrospective to date; while Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, had a smaller exhibition; and his gothic La Commedia Umana (at more than 8-by-6 metres, one of the largest Murano glass sculptures ever made) hung in Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore during the Biennale. Of course, at each of these outings Ai used his platform to address political subjects dear to him: ‘We are talking about many, many things. We are talking about immigrants, about deaths, about the war,’ he told the Associated Press in Venice. He used the launch of a limited-edition rug to rally against animal cruelty; an installation in Quebec City to return to the plight of refugees; his production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot (1926) at the Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, to support Julian Assange; and his win of Japan’s ¥15m (approx £90,000) Praemium Imperiale to bemoan the death of free speech in the West.
Julien’s ambitious film-installations and videos, which blend archive images with reenactments to offer constellationlike portraits of historic Black figures, have become cult references among artists seeking to engage with Black histories and the legacies of cultural domination, migration and the diasporic experience. A new commission from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia saw him juxtapose founder Albert C. Barnes’s interest in African art with the writing of Harlem Renaissance figurehead Alain Locke in a largescale video installation. The subject harks back to Looking for Langston, Julien’s 1989 homage to Langston Hughes, which this year was given a permanent pavilion at the Inhotim sculpture park in Brazil, as well as being screened in Julien’s Kaiserring art-award show at the Mönchehaus Museum in Germany. The recently knighted Julien also contributed to the catalogue for Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Phantom Zone, and had a place of choice at the March Meeting in Sharjah as well as in Life Between Islands, a critically acclaimed survey of British art from the Caribbean diaspora held at London’s Tate Britain, where he’ll follow up with a solo next year.
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53 ARI EMANUEL & SIMON FOX
54 GLENN D. LOWRY
‘Everything is event driven. If it’s not, no one cares,’ one anonymous gallerist told Artnet on the subject of postpandemic art fairs. Fox, the chief executive of Frieze, and his boss Emanuel, of parent company Endeavor, know that what Frieze provides is more than just a venue, it’s pomp and pr too (Endeavor, after all, makes most of its cash in Hollywood). Essential to launching the inaugural Seoul edition of the fair, therefore, was not just booth space but also column inches (less about the art, more about bts and Squid Game actors wandering the booths). With the fate of Art Basel’s Hong Kong edition still uncertain in the current political climate, Frieze’s decision to open in South Korea proved astute – even if, once inside the fair, you could have been anywhere (that’s par for the course). Luck factors in business too: the London fair, held in a royal park, fell outside the royal mourning period. Elsewhere, the much slimmed-down New York edition, now held in central Manhattan, ticked over; while the company announced that the next la edition will move to Santa Monica Airport.
Last year the $2.2m-a-year director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art dropped off this list for the first time since its inception two decades ago. The reasoning? A museum director doesn’t have much power if their museum has been forced to close. moma is recovering since the pandemic, but slowly, with visitor figures recorded by The Art Newspaper still 42 percent down on 2019 levels. A critically acclaimed survey of Wolfgang Tillmans; a retrospective of twentieth-century Swiss surrealist Meret Oppenheim; a study of iconic African-American gallery Just Above Midtown; and a public-friendly survey of the relationship between videogames and art have only partially reversed the drop in footfall. In reaction, moma – or rather the owners of long-term loans to the museum – are selling work; the family of former cbs boss William S. Paley, for example, auctioned off 29 paintings by the likes of Picasso and Bacon to fund an expansion of the institution’s digital offerings.
55 CANDICE HOPKINS 56 SUHANYA RAFFEL & DORYUN CHONG Museum Director / Curator Australian / South Korean
Curator Carcross / Tagish First Nation / Canadian Last Year 61 Invited (again) to curate this year’s edition of the Toronto Biennial, Hopkins brought together 38 artists and collectives for the main exhibition, and oversaw an expanded programme of events led by 51 participants. As executive director of Forge Projects, she’s been busily building the art collection of the Native-led organisation (which is dedicated to Indigenous art, decolonial education, land justice and food security). This year it hosted the inaugural agriculture-arts-culinary programme developed by nonprofit Sky High Farm on an acre of revitalised land that presents a ‘food justice-centered approach’ via ‘educational events rooted in group activity, community support, and practical skill-building’. Hopkins and her team are currently working on a publication that can be used as a ‘rematriation guide’ by Native communities who are campaigning for the return of cultural belongings that are kept in museum collections. It’s no surprise then that she was the corecipient of Independent Curators International’s Leo Award for her ongoing work in promoting Indigenous art and ideas.
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Having been set back for years by construction delays, the multibilliondollar m+ museum finally opened in November 2021, only to be closed in January by the return of covid. Despite quarantine policies limiting international tourism, the ‘first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Asia’ was attracting 10,000 visitors a day even before the opening of the largest Yayoi Kusama retrospective to date outside Japan. Nor have these been the only obstacles that Raffel and Chong, as director and chief curator respectively, have had to negotiate: when the museum reopened in April, it was noted, in the context of the National Security Law, that three politically charged paintings had been removed from display. Amidst all this, they continue to construct new networks in the region (partnerships with the Sydney Opera House, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and hk’s Power Station of Art), to increase the visibility of Asian artists and deepen the contexts in which their work is understood. In doing so they have established m+ at the centre of contemporary Asian culture.
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53 Courtesy Endeavor (Emanuel). Photo: Casey Kelbaugh (Fox), courtesy Frieze 54 Photo: Peter Ross. © 2021 Museum of Modern Art, New York 55 Photo: Thatcher Keats 56 Photo: Winnie Yeung / Visual Voices. Courtesy m+, Hong Kong
Museum Director American reentry (7 in 2020)
Art Fair Directors American / British Last Year 73
57 ANICKA YI Artist Korean-American Last Year 44
58 LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE Artist British Last Year 65
57 Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York 59 Photo: Daniel Cabrel 60 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi Contour
“Why do we feel so disconnected when our inventions are meant to connect each and every one of us?” asked the artist during her ted talk this year. If Yi has a mission – citing Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing – it’s to recognise the interconnectedness of humans, nonhuman life and machines. At her talk, the artist was joined by a single ‘aerobe’, from the fleet of autonomous floating robots she premiered at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year. More interspecific friends were present at her retrospective at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, this time microscopic soil bacteria and algae growing in Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica) (2022). It’s telling that, such is our alienation from the nature surrounding us, Yi’s paintings at her shows at Gladstone’s New York and Seoul spaces appear as digital abstractions, not the depictions of ‘blood cells and fish eggs, scratched and ruptured skin, polyps and crustaceans’ they actually are. Yi was also invited to take part in a yearlong residency at Stanford University, where she will engage students and faculty with her research.
59 ADRIANO PEDROSA
If recent times have seen a huge uptick in visibility for Black figurative painters, Yiadom-Boakye’s contribution can’t be overstated. The British artist (and writer) now looks like an outrider and ground-preparer of a more egalitarian artworld, as showcased by her recently reopened (after being closed by covid, and travelling to Moderna Museet, Stockholm, k20 in Düsseldorf and Luxembourg’s Mudam) Tate Britain retrospective, full of ‘portraits’ of Black people who technically don’t exist – but who, through Yiadom-Boakye’s hugely empathetic limning of faces and knowledgeable rooting in European portraiture traditions, absolutely feel like they do. She’s often downplayed race-related readings of her art as ‘easy answers’, saying her process is rooted in painting itself. Viewing her work, experiencing its timeless quality of encounter and connection with others, that makes sense: Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings speak to the moment (and are inspirations to everyone from musician Solange to writers such as Caleb Azumah Nelson), yes, but they also feel built for the ages.
60 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO
Museum Director Brazilian reentry (96 in 2015)
Collector Italian Last Year 71
From a look at the director’s programme for the Museum of Art São Paulo, it is clear that he has not only diversified an institution historically based around European art (recently appointing three indigenous curatorsat-large) but also offered a not-so-subtle rebuke of Brazil’s rightward political lurch. While Pedrosa’s Histórias series (Histories; in which a group show sets the theme for 12 months of programming) has occasionally missed (the current Brazilian Histories has been scorned and was engulfed in a censorship row), this is outweighed by the hits, most importantly Afro-Atlantic Histories. First staged in 2018, it has since toured North America, including to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, this past April, with a stop at lacma slated for December. Work by us artists has been added along the way, with an already tour-de-force inventory boasting contemporary and modern art, historic artefacts and archive documents tracing the traumas and legacies of slavery, as well as the culture of resilience that arose in its wake.
The patron champions artists long before they have become circuit favourites, not just buying work but bumping profiles by staging shows at her foundation in Turin and nearby Guarene (eagerly watched no doubt by the numerous museums for which she’s a committee member). This year was no exception, with both French video artist Caroline Déodat and Peruvian Daniela Ortiz exhibiting. It’s therefore no surprise that the patron chose nonbinary Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça to stage the performance that laid the foundation stone of her new arts centre on a Venetian island (to open in 2024) during the opening days of the Biennale. Hans Ulrich Obrist was tapped to curate that and a show of Michael Armitage’s new paintings and drawings organised by the foundation in Madrid. Meanwhile, its curatorial pedagogy continues in the residential programme campo (in Turin and Madrid) and Jonas Staal’s summer exhibition in Turin (a ‘training camp for the future’). Exhibitions of works from the collection were held at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.
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61 ELVIRA DYANGANI 62 OSE MARIANE IBRAHIM Gallerist Somali-French Last Year 67
Museum Director Spanish new
“I’m surfing in a different geographic zone. I deal with contemporary, but I deal with art from the African continent, and the African diaspora,” the gallerist told an art-fair audience in Paris this year, going on to criticise the city’s institutions for the lack of opportunity given to artists from the Global South. Frustrated by the art scene in France, Ibrahim turned to the us, opening her gallery first in Seattle before moving to Chicago in 2019. Last year she felt France was at last ready for her and opened a three-storey premises in the capital. Consequently her artists – who include portraitists Amoako Boafo (whose first European solo exhibition took place at Ibrahim’s Paris outpost this year) and Raphaël Barontini – have been accruing market and institutional attention, while Ibrahim herself is becoming a permanent fixture at art-fair talks and on best-booth lists. Why? ‘We take the risk of nurturing young artists; mega galleries won’t change diapers,’ the gallerist informed The Art Newspaper at her debut showing in Art Basel.
63 AARON CEZAR
64 LIZA ESSERS
Curator American Last Year 72
Gallerist South African Last Year 74
In April Delfina Entrecanales, the patron who founded and gave her name to London’s Delfina Foundation, where Cezar has been director since 2007, died. Her legacy, however, is secure, and Cezar continues to shape the direction of the foundation, as he has done for some time. The formula remains the same: gather groups of artists, curators and writers from around the world, to live, eat and work together at the foundation’s headquarters, located just outside the walls of Buckingham Palace; and invite local curators and critics into this convivial atmosphere, to attend what Cezar terms a ‘family lunch’. Collectors (whom Cezar describes as ‘cross-pollinators of ideas and resources’) have their own dedicated residency programme. While exhibitions have remained on pause since the pandemic, Delfina regularly programmes public events, both at the foundation and offsite; and with his network, Cezar is a continuous presence on international panels and talks programmes.
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The director of Goodman Gallery continues to find new ways of amplifying the voices of African artists and rerouting power from the artworld’s established centres. Launched by Essers to bring together artistic communities from across the Global South, the online South South initiative presented a selling exhibition at sp-Arte in São Paulo, hosted its first curatorial residency and launched a $40,000 fund for new media work. Its first recipient was El Museo del Barrio in New York, which used the funds to buy Coco Fusco’s lauded contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the content and ownership of which was transferred as an nft. Back in meatspace, there were shows in Cape Town by El Anatsui, in Johannesburg by Yto Barrada, and in London by William Kentridge to coincide with the artist’s major survey at the Royal Academy. In January, the gallery opened a pop-up space in Miami with Marianne Boesky Gallery, and then repeated the collaboration in the summer with a joint exhibition across London and New York.
ArtReview
61 Photo: Inés Baucells 62 Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim. © Fabrice Gousset 63 Photo: Tim Bowditch 64 Courtesy Goodman Gallery
‘The museum I want is dissident… but it will not only be a place of rage and rebellion, it will also be a place of awareness and care,’ the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona told eldiario.es. Following this ethos, Ose is looking to open the museum’s architecture up to the street, building on a preexisting expansion project due by 2024, and making its education programme more prominent to passersby. This commitment to the immediate surroundings also manifested in a series of events dedicated to the ‘aesthetics… around Barcelona’. None of which is to say that Ose isn’t also internationally focused, with the museum’s big 2022 draw being a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition she curated, as well as a trip to Mexico to organise Oaxaca’s Hacer Noche art festival (she is also part of the group that originally selected ruangrupa to helm Documenta, whom she defended amidst all the controversies).
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65 PRATEEK RAJA & PRIYANKA RAJA Gallerists Indian Last Year 76
Artists American / British Last Year 82
As, respectively, a former handloom textile dealer and a Procter & Gamble strategist, the husband-and-wife duo’s journey to gallerists was not traditional, but perhaps it helped shape the innovative model of their Experimenter gallery. While they are major art-fair regulars, they also find room for less obviously commercial artists such as collective camp and Naeem Mohaiemen (one of most frequent biennial exhibitors of the past five years). Moreover, the gallery also operates a curators’ hub (an annual conference that this year featured Brook Andrew and ruangrupa’s Ade Darmawan among the speakers); a learning programme (with salons, lectures and children’s events); and a digital platform that includes guestcurated Spotify playlists. They do exhibitions too, of course, across two sites in Kolkata and one in Mumbai, including solos for filmmaker Bani Abidi and photographer Sunil Janah, and a collaborative offsite group show at Sadie Coles in London in May.
68 VINCENT WORMS Collector French Last Year 31
Artist Collective Cuban Last Year 88 Power takes strange forms, and on the face of it, imprisonment and exile should render an individual powerless. For Cuban artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Hamlet Lavastida, their repression at the hands of the state has catalysed collective action. When in 2018 the authorities in Havana announced a new law designed to silence artists, Decree 349, Alcántara became the figurehead of the San Isidro Movement, named after a neighbourhood of the city. For this he has been repeatedly persecuted, and having been on hunger strike in prison without trial, this year he was sentenced to five years for the crime of ‘insulting national symbols’. The prosecution cited a series of Alcántara’s artworks featuring the county’s flag. While Alcántara is one of more than 700 people currently imprisoned over the four-year-old protest, Lavastida, a member of the 27n collective, is one of the many more now living outside the country, winning an Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award.
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The Silicon Valley venture capitalist invests all over the world, from Israeli defence startups to Bangalore web companies, and his Kadist foundation is similarly international. As well as sponsoring the foundation’s bases in San Francisco (where Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça followed a six-week residency with a solo exhibition) and Paris (where filmmaker Filipa César completed a residency this autumn, and from which Xaviera Simmons’s spring solo exhibition travelled on to Konsthall C in Stockholm), Wormsthrough-Kadist pours money into offsite initiatives too. These range from a group show at Pivô in São Paulo (whose artistic director, Fernanda Brenner, acts as an adviser to Kadist, alongside the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Zoe Butt, Miguel A. López and Christine Tohmé), to funding Michelle and Noel Keserwany’s film for the Lyon Biennale and supporting American Artist’s show at redcat, Los Angeles. That last stemmed from a Kadist programme organised by Adam Kleinman, the nonprofit’s North American curator.
ArtReview
67 Photo: Reynier Leyva Novo 68 Photo: Chase Hall
67 SAN ISIDRO MOVEMENT / 27N
As intrepid and active explorers of the digital landscape, musician Herndon and technology researcher Dryhurst have, alongside their own music, software and digital experiments, been nurturing and narrating the growing community around blockchain, nfts and digital art. They recently released a folky cover version of Dolly Parton’s Jolene made using Holly +, the vocal deepfake ai tool they opened up to public use last year. While such tools raise questions of authenticity and authorship, which the pair calmly and cheerily blur, they have also been vocal explorers of the ethics of Web 3.0 and the questions of what data is being used to train these nascent intelligences. In September they launched Spawning, a new venture billed as ‘ai tools for artists. Made by artists’, offering spaces where creators might consciously opt in to, or out of, the datasets that shape ai. Not to mention their weekly podcast Interdependence, where artists like James Bridle and Simon Denny and digital pioneers like Harm van den Dorpel and Emad Mostaque have helped discuss the future of art and creativity.
65 Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata 66 Photo: Boris Camaca (Herndon). Photo: Suzy Poling (Dryhurst)
66 HOLLY HERNDON & MAT DRYHURST
69 MAMI KATAOKA 69 Photo: Ito Akinori. Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 70 © Anna Kucera. Courtesy mca Australia 71 Photo: Sarah Franklin 72 Photo: Nicole Tanzini di Bella
Museum Director Japanese Last Year 59
70 MICHAEL ARMITAGE Artist British-Kenyan new
Still Alive is an on-the-nose title for an exhibition that was prepared during the pandemic, but Kataoka’s Aichi Triennale was interested in questions of resilience, be it environmental, economic or cultural. With 60 percent new commissions, much of it in dialogue with the local craft traditions of the prefecture, the likes of On Kawara, Cao Fei, Chiharu Shiota, Gabriel Orozco and Kader Attia were also brought onboard. Questions of survival abound, too, at the Mori Art Museum, the private Tokyo institution where Kataoka has worked since its inception two decades ago, and as director since 2019, which staged group show Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning: Our Wellbeing since the Pandemic and the rambunctious collective Chim Pom’s largest-ever retrospective. One thing she doesn’t have to care quite so much about: her tenure as president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Art ended in November.
When it was announced this March that David Zwirner would now assume corepresentation of Armitage alongside White Cube, it confirmed that the Kenyan-born artist moves in the biggest leagues. Armitage, though, surely has his feet on the ground. Two years since he founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute to promote the work of underseen East African artists – which he’s showcased in his own international exhibitions – he’s still clearly wedded to his bicontinental studios, minting luminous painterly amalgams of memory and invention centred on politics, history and dissent in his homeland. This year saw a much-admired exhibition of recent paintings at Kunsthalle Basel; Armitage paired with Goya in a Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated show in Madrid; the South Bank Sky Arts Award; and his election as a Royal Academician. If you already thought Armitage’s work gets around, wait until next year when a new £1 coin goes into circulation: no prizes for guessing the designer.
72 KADER ATTIA
71 SARA AHMED Thinker British-Australian Last Year 60
Artist French-Algerian Last Year 69
An activist-scholar in the vein of Audre Lorde, Ahmed’s books – from Queer Phenomenology (2006) to Living a Feminist Life (2017) – and long running blog Feminist Killjoy have provided a practical approach to applying feminist and queer thinking to our personal and professional lives. While often writing from the perspective of academia, and how she has negotiated the regressive restraints of an institutional framework, her work has proved invaluable in inspiring artists and art workers negotiating the issues in the parallel institutions of art schools, galleries, museums and peer networks. Last year’s Complaint! (2021) followed the process of filing complaints in universities, and the explicit and implicit means by which concerns were silenced and the status quo remained. On the back of the success of that book, this year it was announced that her next would take the title The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, indicating a continuance of Ahmed’s philosophy of intimate activism.
The artist-curator of this year’s Berlin Biennale said his show, Still Present!, sought to make visible a ‘world of wounds’, and while critics noted that its concentration on ‘the blind spots and unthought sides of western modernity and its correlatives – colonialism, slavery, imperialism – made it heavy going for the average visitor, many also agreed it was an urgent task. Naturally this is tricky territory, and Attia soon hit controversy after three Iraqi artists, and one of his curatorial team, quit the show over the work of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Lebel and his blowups of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison images. Attia apologised, but to no avail. The artist, whose sculpture and installations also deal with postcolonial identity, no doubt found life easier with the day job, closing a solo show at Mathaf, Doha, in March, and exhibiting at the Aichi Triennale in Japan, and in yoyi! Care, Repair, Heal at Gropius Bau, Berlin.
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Museum Director British reentry (9 in 2019)
Artist American Last Year 95
‘A museum can hold dissent’, the Tate director told the Financial Times this year. Just as well, because institutions have become fraught places, from falling visitor numbers (Tate Modern’s footfall was 81 percent down on its prepandemic level) and funding controversies (the institution dropped the Sackler name from its London sites) to accusations of discrimination (a six-figure settlement case with three artists, to which the gallery has not admitted liability) and questions over historically problematic artworks (shifting Tate Britain’s restaurant from a room decorated with a 1926 Rex Whistler mural containing racist imagery). While others might understandably quit (Tate Modern director Frances Morris resigned in October), Balshaw says she relishes the challenge. The job after all has its upsides: from Cecilia Vicuña’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern and the Life Between Islands survey of British Caribbean art at Tate Britain to Ad Minoliti showing at Tate St Ives and a well-received Turner Prize at Tate Liverpool.
The artist’s work often includes multiple versions of herself, presented as avatars and through actors, to investigate – with satirical humour – the experience of the Black body in the digital realm. It would be useful for the artist if she could replicate herself irl, given her exhausting schedule this year. Winning the Future Fields Commission, she presented a new work at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, which then moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That was after having closed two museum solo shows at Bergen Kunsthall, in January, and Fridericianum, Kassel, in February, and before opening another two at mca Chicago and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, New York. The latter is timed with her first foray into feature film (to be streamed on Mubi), The African Desperate, a satire of the artworld, and of art education, set at Bard and starring Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York gallerist, and artist A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, as her fictional professors.
76 BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG
75 HYUN-SOOK LEE Gallerist Korean Last Year 79
Curator Cameroonian Last Year 84
Lee is uniquely well placed to take advantage of the buzz surrounding Seoul since the arrival of Frieze art fair and the attendant suite of blue-chip galleries. Kukje, the gallery she founded in 1982 under the Korean word for ‘international’, long ago established itself as a dominant player in a city now being touted as a hub for galleries seeking a base in Asia. Her track record as a bridge between domestic and international art scenes is remarkable – not only did Lee introduce a number of historically significant artists to Korean audiences, she has also been instrumental to the careers of artists including Haegue Yang (who won this year’s Benesse Prize) and helped to establish the reputation of Dansaekhwa as a movement. The programme at her two spaces in Seoul and outpost in Busan continues to mix Korean and international artists, with shows this year by Ugo Rondinone, Park Seo-Bo, Jenny Holzer and Gimhongsok.
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When Ndikung was named director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2021 – he takes the reins next year – few people wondered how he’d fit it in. The curator/writer/biotechnologist/devoted multitasker has run Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary since 2009, teaches in Berlin and pops up consistently elsewhere – this year, for example, as artistic director for Malian photo fest Bamako Encounters and on the Venice Biennale’s jury. For all that, he’s not afraid of taking a stance: he and the entire curatorial team for Sonsbeek 20–24 Quadrennial walked out in November over alleged racism, sexism and ‘unbearable’ working conditions; while in October he became entangled in Germany’s debate over bds, and then about the use of Christian symbolism (and its relation to colonialism) at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum. At hkw, Ndikung has a remit to roam across ‘art, music, theatre, performance, film, natural sciences and literature’, as he tabularised in a Frieze interview last year, adding that ‘we have the possibility of weaving these disciplines together and finding ways of going beyond the narrow confines in which they’ve been put’.
ArtReview
73 Photo: Hugo Glendenning 74 Photo: Hedi Slimane. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London 75 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul 76 © Silke Briel
73 MARIA BALSHAW
74 MARTINE SYMS
77 GUILLAUME DÉSANGES
78 DAVID ADJAYE
Museum Director French new
Architect Ghanaian-British reentry (83 in 2006)
77 Photo: Antoine Aphesbero 78 Courtesy Adjaye Associates 79 © Sirin Simsek 80 Photo: Bernice Mulenga
When Désanges was appointed director of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo in January, it came to some as a surprise. Though no stranger to one of Europe’s biggest art centres (notably curating a survey for Neïl Beloufa in 2018), the art critic and curator hasn’t really been on the traditional museum-director circuit. Instead Désanges, who has for the past decade served as curator of La Verrière-Hermès in Brussels and the Méthode Room, an artist residency in Chicago, has acquired a reputation for using institutions as laboratories for experiments that place the visitors at its centre – which might be exactly what Palais de Tokyo needs to restore some of its original edginess. For its 20th anniversary, Désanges celebrated with a series of events including a festival curated by Marinella Senatore, a symposium gathering other Paris institutions to talk ecological transition and a therapy session of sorts to probe the Palais’s history and via an art and wellbeing programme. Through his curatorial agency, Work Method, he now also directs the long-running Salon de Montrouge, which showcases emerging artists every October.
“What could a museum be for the repatriation of objects?” the architect asked at the March Meeting in Sharjah. “What would a museum mean in [Benin]... an extraordinary city with a thousand-year history destroyed in the nineteenth century?” Adjaye is designing the Edo Museum of West African Art, set to open in 2025, as a final rebuke to institutions in the old colonial powers who refuse to hand back looted objects. His words are testament to a design practice that moves beyond merely providing vessels in which others programme, to a far more in-depth approach to museum building. It’s apparent too in the new home he is creating for the storied Studio Museum in Harlem, having honed his understanding of the needs of an institution dedicated to Black thinking and experience not least during the 2016 build of his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, dc. Meanwhile, in the uk, Adjaye Associates worked with Theaster Gates to realise the artist’s Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel.
80 SOPHIA AL-MARIA
79 JULIA STOSCHEK Collector German Last Year 43
Artist Qatari-American Last Year 91
It’s been 15 years since Stoschek opened premises in Düsseldorf to show her collection, and by way of a birthday party she invited us around to go gaming. It is a testament to the seriousness of Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age – curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and featuring Stoschek’s formidable holdings of time-based art (not least by Ed Atkins, Meriem Bennani, Harun Farocki, Frances Stark and Sturtevant) – that after it finishes its run next year it will move to the Centre PompidouMetz, in France. (The political nature of the art in the show, though, also catalysed scrutiny of Stoschek’s great-grandfather’s links to the Nazis.) Meanwhile, the collector’s Berlin space (opened in 2016), hosted at dawn, a group show featuring the likes of Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas and Carol Bove alongside a newly commissioned soundwork by Precious Okoyomon. Stoschek sits on the boards of Berlin’s kw Institute and Neue Nationalgalerie (where early ally Klaus Biesenbach has taken up the directorship).
As more money pours into the artworld from the uae, Al-Maria has become an adept chronicler of the region’s aesthetics and libidinal urges. A decade ago she was among a small group who coined the phrase ‘Gulf Futurism’, and her work studies accelerated capitalism with both critique and a sense of sublime intrigue. It is ironic then that it is only this year that she has been handed a substantial institutional exhibition on home territory, at Mathaf in Qatar, featuring a survey of her previous installations and videowork, as well as newly commissioned soundscapes. Now London-based, in Europe the artist showed her 2021 filmic collage Tender Point Ruin at Luma Westbau, Zürich, and presented a solo show, Pidge, at the commercial Project Native Informant in London. (The latter, using the motif of the homing pigeon, whose route-finding abilities are becoming increasingly confused by mobile phone signals, explored ideas of tech alienation.)
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81 OTOBONG NKANGA Artist Nigerian-Belgian new
81 Photo: Wim van Dongen 82 Photos: Noor Photoface 83 Photo: Sunny Shokrae 84 Photo: Mads Selvig
When Nkanga first entered the seventeenth-century Scuola di San Pasquale in Venice, ahead of a two-person exhibition coinciding with the Biennale, she started singing. It was, the exhibition organiser told Ocula, a way of hearing the building before seeing it. Such is the concern of the artist’s practice (involving drawing, textiles, installation, video and performance) with questions of home, place, displacement and the emotional resonance they have to our being. She proves an obvious choice then for the many group exhibitions that take such themes, not least this year’s Busan Biennale, which has the South Korean city in its lens, and When Faith Moves Mountains, the first show staged since the Russian invasion at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv. Her solo at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, which closed in July, was followed by an exhibition at the SintJanshospitaal, Bruges, which used objects from Musea Brugge and the memories inspired by the old hospital as its starting point.
82 NADIA SAMDANI, RAJEEB SAMDANI & DIANA CAMPBELL Collector / Collector / Curator Bangladeshi / Bangladeshi / American Last Year 49 ‘We have failed to tell our story,’ Rajeeb told Forbes. ‘We have failed to tell the story of our genocide. We have failed to tell the story of our long history of art and literature.’ He was speaking about Bangladesh, after the couple coproduced an exhibition of photojournalist Anne de Henning at Paris’s Guimet National Museum of Asian Art. He, wife Nadia and the artistic director of their Samdani Art Foundation, Campbell, are on a mission to change that, not least through the five previous – with the next slated for 2023 – editions of their Dhaka Art Summit. Via this biennial conference of exhibitions, prizes and talks, they have promoted artistic production in the country and wider region, and brought the artworld to Bangladesh. While Srihatta, their planned private art centre, is delayed, they continue to promote local production overseas (this year providing financing for the Britto Arts Trust’s presence at Documenta and artist Munem Wasif at the Lyon Biennale).
84 DAYANITA SINGH
83 MERIEM BENNANI Artist Moroccan Last Year 96
Artist Indian new
The artist first established a name for herself with caps, an imagined world uncannily close to our own, featuring an Atlantic island internment camp, in which teleporting, body swapping and age reversal are the norm and surveillance culture has been taken to the extreme. For her shows this year at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Nottingham Contemporary and the Power Plant, Toronto, she presented the singlechannel Life on the caps, the sequel to the 2018–19 eight-channel installation Party on the caps, which similarly mixes live action with crocodilefilled cgi. Meanwhile, similarly animated lizards, which featured in 2 Lizards, a series of Instagram shorts that brought her even more fame during the covid-19 lockdowns, went on show at the Whitney in New York, while beyond the museum walls Bennani had a High Line commission to deal with, installing a 2.7m-high motorised foam sculpture of a tornado on the city’s elevated park.
“I realised if I could just say ‘I’m a photographer’, then I could go wherever I liked,” Singh told ArtReview this year. “I could travel with whomever I liked. I didn’t have to be answerable to anyone. I just invented the role of photographer for myself so that I could be free.” That love of freedom pervades the artist’s work in both subject and form too, capturing musicians, the transformation of Indian society, friendships and changing gender roles, and presenting them not just to be framed on the gallery wall, but also via innovative photobooks (this year’s Let’s See she terms a ‘photo novel’) and exhibition formats (‘mobile museums’ and ‘book objects’) that invite viewers to physically engage with her images. Her disruption of the medium has won her prizes – the Hasselblad Award this year – and institutional acclaim, not least the touring show that opened at Gropius Bau, Berlin, in March and Villa Stuck, Munich, in October; and goes on to Mudam Luxembourg and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, next year.
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86 RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
85 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO
Artist Thai reentry (83 in 2017)
The husband-and-wife couple behind Mexico City’s Kurimanzutto expanded their North American presence to a 622 sqm New York gallery. They were helped by their artists: Gabriel Sierra designed the front desk, while Dr. Lakra was behind some of the fittings. There are other subtle traces of their stellar roster too. Textiles by twentieth-century Danish designer Nanna Ditzel, which Danh Vō has frequently referenced in his work, are used; as are lamps by the late Swiss-French designer Janette Laverrière, light fittings that Nairy Baghramian has deployed as found objects in many of her shows. This group effort opened with a group show, featuring the likes of Adrián Villar Rojas, Oscar Murillo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Haegue Yang, as well as gallery newcomer Kosovar conceptualist Petrit Halilaj. Back home in Mexico City, Rirkrit Tiravanija commanded the programme with a new body of work made in collaboration with Cooperativa 1050o, a potters collective from Oaxaca.
87 NICOLAS BERGGRUEN
Tiravanija already has a place in art history for his participatory artworks, often featuring him cooking and serving Thai food to audiences, promoting social interaction as a key element of the artistic process. As well as appearances at the Jeju Biennale, and a show (among many others) devoted to Mexican pottery at Kurimanzutto, this year he had his debut exhibition at Barbara Gladstone’s outpost in Seoul, featuring two robotic arms writing texts in the artist’s handwriting. Like previous works, it dealt with bridging feelings of otherness: ‘For me, it has a deep meaning like looking at otherness, looking at difference and looking at the thing that is not you’, he told The Korea Herald. ‘Empathy is very important because to function in a relationship to otherness, one needs their empathy.’ Empathy and otherness were also at the fore in this year’s edition of Okayama Art Summit, curated by Tiravanija.
88 KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI
Collector German-American Last Year 47
Artist Thai
The property billionaire (and son of the late, legendary collector Heinz Berggruen) has continued to evolve the thinktank activities of his Berggruen Institute, which supports cutting-edge thinking and research into the interconnected worlds of global politics, science, technology and philosophy. Art isn’t always far from these, though with the conclusion of its ‘Transformations of the Human’ programme last year (which supported artist fellows such as Ian Cheng and Anicka Yi), the art-focus has taken a step back (that programme has been spun off into an independent organisation). Though Berggruen’s huge Herzog & de Meurondesigned ‘scholar’s campus’ project in the Santa Monica Mountains has yet to break ground, the institute’s Venice satellite space is now up and running, and in March Berggruen acquired a second palazzo, the future base for Berggruen Arts & Culture, scheduled to open in 2024, with Sterling Ruby currently artist-in-residence.
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The artist’s list of solo exhibitions, showcasing his multimedia meditations on animism, lost histories and obscured memories, might be dizzying – the National Gallery Prague; inaugurating nonprofit Canal Projects in New York; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Singapore Art Museum; and, given that workload, the perhaps aptly titled From dying to living, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm – but Arunanondchai has never just been a solo player. ‘The thing I always wanted to share in my work is this sense of a shared place,’ he told Art News. ‘You can’t do it through an individual voice or in an individual.’ The solution was to cofound his own festival: Ghost debuted in 2018 with Arunanondchai as curator, and returned in October as Ghost 2565 (the date in the Buddhist calendar), in which he’s more organiser and fundraiser, leaving Christina Li to invite artists including Meriem Bennani, Wu Tsang and Tulapop Saenjaroen to show at venues across Bangkok.
ArtReview
85 Photo: P.J. Rountree 86 Photo: Anette Aurell 87 Photo: Spencer Lowell. Courtesy Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles 88 Photo: Harit Srikao
Gallerists Mexican reentry (57 in 2020)
89 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI Artist Indian reentry (85 in 2020)
90 LUCIA PIETROIUSTI Curator Italian Last Year 13
90 Photo: Thaddäus Salcher 91 Photo: Joseph Pascual. Courtesy Silverlens, Manila 92 Photo: Paul Odigie
Though today he’s best-known as the cofounder and director of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which takes place in Kerala and has become something of a role-model event for largescale exhibitions in the Global South, Krishnamachari started out as a painter and continues to exhibit as such. Scheduled to open this December, the current edition (delayed by the pandemic) is titled In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, framed as a ‘bulwark against despair’ and curated by an artist (as all the previous editions were), Singaporean Shubigi Rao (who represented Singapore at this year’s Venice Biennale). Yet through each reinvention of Kochi, which incorporates talks and education programmes, a Student Biennale and architectural programmes, it’s Krishnamachari who remains constant. Beyond steering Kochi though pandemic-enforced delays, constant fundraising and the biennale’s prospective acquisition of a key site, Aspinwall House, as its first permanent venue, Krishnamachari also remains extremely active as a curator: this year’s efforts included programming Extremely South, a showcase for underrepresented artists from Southern India.
91 ISA LORENZO & RACHEL RILLO
As the blurb for the 8th Biennale Gherdeïna (which Pietroiusti curated this year with Filipa Ramos) states, she is committed to ‘celebrating the multitude of living forms – human, animal, vegetal, mineral, mycological persons’, in whichever way she can. Another way is through her new independent Radical Ecology outfit, formed with filmmaker and activist Ashish Ghadiali and patron Nicoletta Fiorucci’s money, which brings together artists and creatives with thinkers, scientists, activists and intergovernmental agencies to tackle issues around ecological justice. The organisation launched in July with the symposium ‘Equilibrium’ – organised around the London stop of Sun & Sea (Marina), the ‘climatechange opera’ that Pietroiusti curated for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale – and a film programme (featuring works by Carolina Caycedo and Sky Hopinka) addressing ecocide, air pollution and climate displacement. Meanwhile, Pietroiusti’s General Ecology project for the Serpentine Galleries produced Back to Earth, an exhibition that tackled the climate emergency, to mixed reviews.
92 AZU NWAGBOGU Curator Nigerian Last Year 92
Gallerists Filipino reentry (92 in 2020) After establishing Silverlens as one of the leading galleries in the Philippines, the Manila-based gallerists felt it was the right time to fulfil a longtime ambition, launching a New York outpost (which opened with two solo exhibitions, by Martha Atienza and Yee I-Lann). ‘We didn’t feel so invisible anymore,’ they stated earlier this year, aiming to bring their roster of Filipino and Asian diaspora artists to a wider audience while also bringing attention to Asian-American representation. At a point when larger Western galleries have rushed to open outposts in Asia in recent years, Lorenzo and Rillo are reversing that flow and creating a different network, with several of their artists present at this year’s Aichi, Bangkok and Istanbul triennials and biennials, as well as the Carnegie International, in Pittsburgh, alongside their Manila programme of exhibitions, which this year included a protest-inspired collaborative exhibition by Pio Abad and Stephanie Syjuco, and the bright figurative canvases of Düsseldorf-based Nicholas Grafia.
The Nigerian curator continues to work apace, helping to create an international stage for African contemporary artists. The African Artists’ Foundation, which Nwagbogu founded in 2007 in Lagos, hosts a rolling series of exhibitions and residencies for emerging artists. He is also director of Lagos Photo festival, which just ran its 13th edition, as well as presenting a selection from its previous editions at the first Ozangé Biennale of African Photography, in Málaga. Nwagbogu continues to explore the potential of the digital market, speaking at Milan’s Photo Vogue Festival in October on the importance of nfts for African photographers, and to curate Magnum Photos’ releases of nft collections. All the while, he curated the exhibition Dig Where You Stand, with work by Zanele Muholi, Yinka Shonibare and Ibrahim Mahama, which began at the Alliance Française in Lagos earlier this year and then toured to Mahama’s scca Tamale in Ghana, and will continue to venues across the African continent over the coming year.
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93 ATSUKO NINAGAWA
94 BARBARA GLADSTONE Gallerist American reentry (94 in 2020)
Gallerist Japanese new
The merger with Gavin Brown in 2020, and the consequent addition to the stable of critical darlings ranging from Arthur Jafa to Rirkrit Tiravanija, has proved a shot in the arm for Gladstone’s storied gallery. As locations in New York and Brussels mixed exhibitions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jannis Kounellis with new work by Shahryar Nashat and Anicka Yi, so the gallery’s new outpost in Seoul this year – inaugurated by Philippe Parreno – signalled its expanding ambitions. With a list of artists that increasingly combines commercial heft with cultish appeal, Gladstone Gallery looks well placed to consolidate its position. The sky is not entirely unblotted – a lawsuit filed in New York in February accused Gladstone of mistreating an employee – but for one of the stalwart galleries of the New York scene, the future looks remarkably bright.
95 MASSIMILIANO GIONI
96 CASEY REAS
Curator Italian reentry (44 in 2019)
Artist American reentry (96 in 2008)
Working on home turf, the artistic director of New York’s New Museum is cocurator of Theaster Gates’s current survey show Young Lords and Their Traces, as well as surveys earlier this year by Faith Ringgold and by Paris-based Kapwani Kiwanga, the latter of which used only natural lighting (darkness was apparently an issue only during the last 45 minutes of the museum’s opening hours). A serial biennial curator, who also hops nimbly between the worlds of public institutions and private foundations, Gioni is artistic director of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation in his native Italy and the curator of Dark Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truth at the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, which featured over 200 works from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé and focused on the changing meanings of figuration in contemporary art. Proving he can also nip between the worlds of fashion and art, in Doha he is the cocurator of the current Valentino show, Forever Valentino, and, earlier this year, the Jeff Koons survey Lost in America.
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The last time Reas was on the Power 100 list, there was no such thing as bitcoin, blockchain or nft. There was however a burgeoning digital art scene making sense of the internet explosion and increasingly accessible computing power. Reas, a student of digital art pioneer John Maeda while he was at mit, now professor at ucla, has for two decades explored the juncture of visual art and technology, cofounding the open-source visual design software Processing in 2001. But with the advent of blockchain databases and the nft explosion, Reas saw the need for a critical and informed platform for the most interesting digital art being made for nft, which could also support artists financially. The website Feral File, launched in 2020, has become an important showcase for the broad church of net and digital art, with curated exhibitions of work by artists including Zach Blas, Orlan, LaTurbo Avedon and the ai entity Botto – all for sale as nfts, of course.
ArtReview
93 Photo: Katsuhiro Saiki 94 Photo: Sharon Lockhart. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York 95 Courtesy New Museum, New York 96 Courtesy Casey Reas
Founded in 2008, Take Ninagawa Gallery has promoted Japanese heavyweights – such as Shinro Ohtake, Taro Izumi and Aki Sasamoto – to international audiences, and international artists such as Danh Vō and Charlotte Posenenske to audiences in Japan. In addition, Ninagawa, formerly a New York-based curator, is the founding director of Art Week Tokyo, which was established to revitalise the city’s art scene during the pandemic and had its second edition this November. The art week is supported by Art Basel (on whose Hong Kong selection committee Ninagawa also sits), the event providing, in her words, ‘a communallydriven and inclusive platform for collaboration between artists, galleries, museums, and other contributors’, spread across 50 galleries and museums around the Japanese capital, this year incorporating a social space created by architect Motosuke Mandai and a video programme curated by Adam Szymczyk.
97 EDGAR CALEL
98 BLAXTARLINES
97 Photo: Marcus Tragesser. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City 99 Photo: Rainer Hosch 100 Photo: Bo Wong
Artist Maya Kaqchikel / Guatemalan new
Artist Collective Ghanaian new
Calel has gradually been making a name for himself: in the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh; at the Paiz Art Biennale, Guatemala City, last year; and in the Berlin Biennale the year prior. But he is by no means established. He might, however, have changed how artworks are traded and collected. When Tate asked to buy The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el) (2021) from Proyectos Ultravioleta’s booth at last year’s Frieze London, the gallery didn’t know what to do: the work, a series of rocks with fruit offerings on top, had involved a Mayan ritual in its installation, something that was not theirs to sell. Instead the artist brokered a deal between the museum, his gallery and the Kaqchikel people, in which Tate becomes only a temporary custodian of the work. The gallery told Artnet: ‘They’ve come over to the Mayan way of thinking… they’ve conducted this exchange on those terms’.
99 JASON BAILEY
A sprawling, decentralised platform of artists, artist-curators and teachers, blaxtarlines has developed as an organisational network and incubator for art in Ghana, and as a template for independent art scenes around the world. The collective was founded almost a decade ago, in part as a response to a need to reform the art department of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi; professor ka˛rî’kȧchä seid’ou developed an ‘Emancipatory Art Teaching Project’, which eventually led to a series of collectively curated multigenerational exhibitions that prioritised a dynamic, democratic approach over any specific media. This has helped form an ongoing, shifting group of collaborators, and to inspire a web of affiliated projects and collectives throughout Ghana. While its impact is starting to be felt internationally – the group was part of this year’s Documenta, with members exhibiting in Germany, Mali and, in the case of Ibrahim Mahama, its most well known alumnus, in Holland – the focus is on developing a sustainable, critical and tenacious post-Western local art scene.
100 CLOTHILDE BULLEN
Artist American new
Curator Wardandi / Badimaya / Australian new
‘Don’t buy nfts as a financial investment… Buy them because you love the art and you want to support the artists,’ tweeted the artist, digital art enthusiast and nft proselytiser in March. An early convert to the possibilities of blockchain technology for changing the way digital artists sell their work and preserve it for posterity, Bailey has made it his business throughout the hype of the crypto-nft boom to keep the focus on the art, not the money. As the artworld went nft-crazy in 2021, Bailey (who tweets and blogs as artnome) set up Club nft, to develop solutions to the problems of secure nft ownership. And to counter what he saw as the traditional artworld’s tendency to ‘treat nft artists and nft collectors as if they’re not really artists and collectors’, Bailey launched the online magazine Right Click Save in January, publishing intelligent critical writing on artistic developments in the rapidly evolving blockchain space.
Bullen took up the role of senior curator and head of Indigenous Programs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (agwa) in Perth last year – it was a return to an institution where she had worked for a decade, after four years as a curator of First Nations art at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Bullen’s work provides a leading example of how art institutions might create, as she has put it, ‘sustainable pathways’ for Indigenous artists. This spring Bullen organised an expansive set of six exhibitions under the title of BlakLight, giving over agwa’s entire programme and building to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists – remarkably the first time this has happened in an Australian public gallery. It might be seen as a visible culmination of Bullen’s long-term work supporting both Indigenous artists and art critics, ‘to ensure authentic representation and interpretation of ourselves across all forms of our cultural material’.
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THE 2022 POWER 100 1 ruangrupa
34 Hans Ulrich Obrist
68 Vincent Worms
2 Cecilia Alemani
35 Koyo Kouoh
69 Mami Kataoka
3 Unions
36 Marc Spiegler & Florian Faber
70 Michael Armitage
4 Hito Steyerl
37 Judith Butler
71 Sara Ahmed
5 Fred Moten
38 Saidiya Hartman
72 Kader Attia
6 Wolfgang Tillmans
39 Achille Mbembe
73 Maria Balshaw
7 Simone Leigh
40 Eugene Tan
74 Martine Syms
8 Nan Goldin
41 Brook Andrew
75 Hyun-Sook Lee
9 David Zwirner
42 Maja Hoffmann
76 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
10 Darren Walker
43 Adrian Cheng
77 Guillaume Désanges
11 Anne Imhof
44 Amy Sillman
78 David Adjaye
12 Cao Fei
45 Miuccia Prada
79 Julia Stoschek
13 Anna L. Tsing
46 Emmanuel Perrotin
80 Sophia Al-Maria
14 Wu Tsang
47 Ibrahim Mahama
81 Otobong Nkanga
15 Olafur Eliasson
48 Byung-Chul Han
16 Donna Haraway
49 Barbara Kruger
82 Nadia Samdani, Rajeeb Samdani & Diana Campbell
17 Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth & Marc Payot
50 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
18 Theaster Gates 19 Kara Walker 20 Larry Gagosian 21 Karrabing Film Collective 22 Carrie Mae Weems 23 Marc Glimcher 24 Chris Ho & John Tain 25 Forensic Architecture 26 Arthur Jafa 27 Steve McQueen 28 Zanele Muholi 29 Cecilia Vicuña 30 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 31 Paul B. Preciado 32 Apichatpong Weerasethakul 33 Sonia Boyce
51 Ai Weiwei 52 Isaac Julien 53 Ari Emanuel & Simon Fox 54 Glenn D. Lowry 55 Candice Hopkins 56 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong 57 Anicka Yi 58 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye 59 Adriano Pedrosa 60 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 61 Elvira Dyangani Ose 62 Mariane Ibrahim 63 Aaron Cezar 64 Liza Essers 65 Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja 66 Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst 67 San Isidro Movement / 27n
83 Meriem Bennani 84 Dayanita Singh 85 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto 86 Rirkrit Tiravanija 87 Nicolas Berggruen 88 Korakrit Arunanondchai 89 Bose Krishnamachari 90 Lucia Pietroiusti 91 Isa Lorenzo & Rachel Rillo 92 Azu Nwagbogu 93 Atsuko Ninagawa 94 Barbara Gladstone 95 Massimiliano Gioni 96 Casey Reas 97 Edgar Calel 98 blaxtarlines 99 Jason Bailey 100 Clothilde Bullen
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December 1 – 3, 2022 Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company
Power in Numbers
which, anyhow, is unascertainable 99
38 21 14 10 10 9 4 4 2 1 100
ARTISTS GALLERISTS CURATORS MUSEUM DIRECTORS COLLECTORS THINKERS ART FAIR DIRECTORS ARTIST COLLECTIVES ACTIVIST MOVEMENTS ARCHITECT
37 EUROPE 34 NORTH AMERICA 29 ASIA 8 AFRICA 3 SOUTH AMERICA 2 MULTIPLE 16 NEW 18 REENTRY
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ARTIST PROJECT CAROLINA CAYCEDO A water bond is not, as you might immediately think (or Google), an expression of the special relationship between hydrogen and oxygen. In a way, it has nothing to do with water at all. At least not the stuff that makes up around 60 percent of the human body or roughly 71 percent of the surface of the Earth. Rather it’s a mechanism by which municipalities (or similar administrative institutions) raise funds for the construction of water infrastructure by leveraging debt against future water-bill revenues. In short, it’s a mechanism by which most of the planet gets commodified. Or a mechanism by which simply living creates debt. These last two themes are among the subjects of Carolina Caycedo’s 2020 series Distressed Debt. For the London-born, la-based Colombian artist, the water bond is just one example of a capitalist mechanism that is ‘commercializing a human right as a commodity’. Indeed, Distressed Debt is an expansive project that looks to the way in which bonds of various types – from historical slave bonds to public and private corporate bonds, to those underwriting contemporary infrastructure, spanning roughly from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century – are used to govern and dictate the ways in which we live; or define human rights. The project presents the evidence and then asks us to question it. Bonds (and the bond market) are also a vehicle through which governments and companies can be pressured to raise the funds required to service their debt. When the pressure becomes too much (when a government or company is in danger of defaulting or entering bankruptcy protection), the debt becomes ‘distressed’ and is sold on at a significantly discounted price. Because the chances of payback are reduced. And payback (with more or less unreasonable interest), along with a certain type of servitude or indenturedness, is what bonds are all about. All in the name of progress, modernity and general ‘advancement’. The work itself takes the form of large fabric banners that assemble a collection of historic bonds from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico, and a series of paper collages. Their surfaces in turn depict the distress of transfers, rewritings that are a part of the transfers of bonds, the change of company names and their passing from one hand to another. What’s curious about the resultant display of bondage is, in part, the language of bonds. It’s an inescapable fact that their talk of redemption, security, deliverance and the word ‘bond’ itself is also
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the language of liberty, solidarity and socially responsible living. Twisted here to mean something else. Something opposite to all that. In a way the bonds that are assembled and collaged, in parts and in whole, represent a kind of aesthetics of perversion. An aesthetics that’s not without a seductive allure of beauty despite their proclamations of community, territory and property. And their easy facade of officialdom. An aesthetics that shows signs of continuity from bonds relating to enslaved Black bodies to those relating to bodies of water and their management, dispersal and displacement. Inescapably, these documents also bear a similarity to printed money. In that these bonds demonstrate one of the best-known passages of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848): ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’ But we just need to look around us with open eyes to know that that’s happening. Everywhere. With the resultant dynamics of power and inequality that accompany it. With respect to both the human and nonhuman worlds. ArtReview
p 50 Be Covered in Any Way, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 48 × 48 cm p 57 To Be Employed on the Virginia Central Railroad, and To Be Returned Well Clothed, 2020, digital print on cotton, 160 × 300 cm pp 62–63 No Tax of Any Kind, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 58 × 89 cm p 68 Dollars Dollars (detail), 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 55 × 58 cm pp 72–73 Freight Charge, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 74 × 100 cm p 76 usa, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 66 × 58 cm p 81 Guarranty, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 100 × 75 cm
ArtReview
pp 84–85 Commonwealth (detail), 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 75 × 100 cm p 88 Charm Bonds, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 60 × 62 cm pp 92–93 The People of Puerto Rico, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 74 × 96 cm p 96 And Took the Oath, 2021, inkjet print on Epson Hot Press, 43 × 50 cm p 103 Let Us Tell You About the Bonds of Puerto Rico (detail), 2020, digital print on silk, 135 × 250 cm all images Carolina Caycedo, Distressed Debt, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
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Art credits on the cover Carolina Caycedo, Vulture Fund, 2021, original utility, private company and city bonds on paper, 62 × 48 cm (framed) ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by The Logical Choice. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, issn No: 1745-9303, (usps No: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne pe10 9ph, United Kingdom.
on pp 50, 57, 62–63, 68, 72–73, 76, 81, 84–85, 88, 92–93, 96, 103 Carolina Caycedo, Distressed Debt, 2020. See page 102 for full captions all images Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
December 2022
Text credits Words on the spine and on pages 47 and 99 are by Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1954
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takeaway The food artist
“So, it’d be, like, really great if you could design a menu that’s completely carbon neutral?” This is what the foundation’s art director said to me, a couple months back. Now I’m in Sharm el-Sheik. For Cop27. For the opening of the ReGreta! You Betta: The Power of Climate Change exhibition. Why did I say yes? It’s so fucking hot here. The director is standing in front of me, still talking: “… or even better – because we’ve had to ship in three tons of peat for this fabulous Indigenous Peruvian artist we’re flying in – seriously, his practice is just so evocative, I can’t even – you’ll just have to experience it – anyway, do you think you might be able to cancel that carbon cost too? That would be incredible, don’t you think? For the delegates?” The peat has just arrived, dumped in a pile in the middle of the convention centre’s huge air-conditioned gallery. Through the windows, outside on the terrace, I can see queues of delegates forming at the snack kiosks. Inside, the Peruvian artist doesn’t look happy. Apparently the foundation director has told him his performance has to happen between the main course and the dessert. At this point, I am not sure what dessert will be. Maybe it will be a culinary pun on the ‘desert’. But that’s an old joke. Or ‘desertification’, which is more environment-y… The Peruvian artist starts to tell me about the tinned desserts their nanny used to make them growing up in Manhattan. “I thought you were Peruvian?” “My great-great-grandmother’s second husband was, but the connection is there. I found my cultural heritage while studying at Bard.” Twenty-four hours later, I am surveying the lines of lovely smiling immigrant labourers provided by the hotel standing at their kitchen workstations. Each has dozens of cucumbers in front of them: given the carbon footprint, I thought it best to grow the food in-house. So I had my gardener source some seeds of Barretiere cucumbers from Brindisi
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and some Nishiki cucumbers from just outside Kyoto, and send them on to the hotel’s kitchen porter to grow on his windowsill before I arrived. The staff have been tasked with carrying out a different set of cucumber carvings, each evocative of a different artist with whom I feel affinity: I have half a dozen Bangladeshi gentlemen carving beautiful reenactments of Cao Fei videos, while the Sudanese porters I’ve enlisted from the housekeeping department are faithfully recreating Forensic Architecture investigations in watery salad form, while, easiest of all, I have a nice Colombian lady guarding half a dozen cucumbers laid out in the basement laundry room to speedily rot, which, once sufficiently mouldy, will be named ‘homage to Anicka Yi’. I had been told I had to include a cucumber Jeff Koons to placate the Hollywood actor who will be in attendance, and who is apparently in a complex legal fight over the ownership of a work he commissioned, but I explained that was gauche. Of course, I do feel sorry for the staff in the kitchen – it’s hard to handle their knives in the dark, but the lights must be turned off to adhere to the strict carbon expenditure limit I’ve now been contractually obliged to observe. My Egyptian £1.25m contract rests on it. Forty-eight nonstop hours later, and the cucumbers are ready, laid out on hundreds of compostable plastic trays or, in the case of the Anicka Yi dishes, served up oozing over old j-cloths that one wrings out straight into one’s mouth. The Peruvian artist appears to be shovelling the peat from one pile into another, but no one is paying him much attention, because right on cue the serving staff march in a line into the exhibition opening, the assembled curators, critics, collectors and sponsors (my dear thanks for their support) cheering my great artistry. “This is so powerful!” the foundation director shrieks, chomping down on a cucumber Anne Imhof drenched in the blood of one of the kitchen workers.
26–29.01.2023
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