January & February 2019 by ArtReview

Future Greats

Wow! New artists for 2019

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com

James Welling

Transform

James Welling, 159, 2018, 14 × 11 inches ( 35.6 × 27.9 cm)

January 10–February 16, 2019

David Zwirner New York

Richard Avedon, James Baldwin, writer, Harlem, New York, 1945. © The Richard Avedon Foundation

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin Curated by Hilton Als

January 10–February 16, 2019

David Zwirner New York

Sonic Albers

January 8–February 16, 2019

David Zwirner

New York

Josef Albers, Provocative Percussion, 1959. Offset printed record album jacket, 12 × 12 inches (30.5 × 30.5 cm)

NEW YORK

Tatsuo Miyajima Innumerable Life / Buddha

PARIS JAN 19 - MAR 9 MR.

PIETER VERMEERSCH

NEW YORK JANUARY 12 - FEBRUARY 17

Pieter Vermeersch, Untitiled, (detail) 2018. Acrylic on marble. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

PIETER VERMEERSCH

NEW YORK JAN 12 - FEB 17 JENS FÃ&#x201E;NGE JOSH SPERLING

HONG KONG JAN 9 - FEB 23 CLAIRE TABOURET

SEOUL JAN 17 - MAR 9 JR

TOKYO DEC 20 - JAN 23 EDDIE MARTINEZ SHANGHAI NOV 10 - JAN 5 TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Sam McKinniss Neverland

Michael, 2018 Oil over acrylic on canvas 25,4 x 20,3 x 2,5 cm 10 x 8 x 1 in

Bruxelles January 10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; February 28, 2019

Mari Katayama 24 January â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2 March 2019

47 Mortimer Street, London, W1W 8HJ www.white-rainbow.art

Mari Katayama, bystander #014, 2016 (detail), Lambda Print Semi-Gloss, Uniquely Decorated Frame. ÂŠ Mari Katayama. Courtesy of rin art association.

TRACEY EMIN A Fortnight of Tears

6 February – 7 April 2019 White Cube 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3TQ

ArtReview vol 71 no 1 January & February 2019

Tense Predicting the future has become a bit embarrassing. Indeed, the idea of the future feels thoroughly discredited. The future, as a space imagined by the present, isn’t populated by the utopian ideals of political thinkers, radical social movements or the clarion-calling of charismatic leaders (as it perhaps once was), but now comes fully packaged, marketed as Silicon Valley visions, ted talks or, indeed, the smirky shark-jumped tv series Black Mirror. No matter if the replicants of Blade Runner (set in Los Angeles circa 2019) haven’t come to pass, when we have the dystopiain-waiting that is Elon Musk and his ilk instead. When it comes to recommending artists to look out for in its annual Future Greats issue, ArtReview can’t believe there isn’t an algorithm to sort that out, leaving ArtReview free to extend its Christmas holiday. But since Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t bothered to write that one yet and ArtReview is old-fashioned in some ways (it is, after all, nearing the grand old age of seventy, but more about that next month), it still does things the time-honoured way: asking established artists, curators and critics to recommend an artist they believe in and want us to look out for over the coming 12 months. The 13 short recommendations are of course the personal preferences of the selectors (but anyone who thinks data-driven ai isn’t also personal

Present

preference needs to download Meredith Whittaker, Kate Crawford et al’s recent ai Now Report, which details the biases of so-called affectrecognition software, among other warnings), yet they point to some of the preoccupations agitating artists at present. Some of these are broad (and perhaps age-old) themes concerning economic disparity, race politics or state violence; others open up more specific narratives, including sex work in Athens and the ecology of Costa Rica. And yes (don’t worry!), there are others who are concerned with the formalities of painting and sculpture. And what the future might hold for those formal concerns. In a way, then, Future Greats is not about the future at all, but about who might be shaping the present. (As ArtReview’s favourite sci-fi artist, Syd Mead, once put it, science fiction is just ‘reality ahead of schedule’.) It is also a mark of hope in turbulent times – though ArtReview is under no illusion that times haven’t always been turbulent – that things can’t be all bad if there are still artists to write about. Jorge Luis Borges’s prediction that ‘man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left’ has yet to pass. And he wrote that, like, ages ago. ArtReview

Future

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Richard Pousette-Dart, Imploding Black, 1985 -86 © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019

Richard Pousette-Dart Works 1940–1992 January 18 – February 20, 2019

6 Burlington Gardens

LONDON

Sethembile Msezane SPEAKING THROUGH WALLS 25JAN . 13APR

26 BARRETT STREET LONDON W1U 1BG WWW.TYBURNGALLERY.COM

Art Previewed Previews by Martin Herbert 27

Art Featured Kate Newby Interview by Ross Simonini 36

Cady Noland by Martin Herbert 42

Future Greats selected by Rahel Aima, Laura Barlow, Oliver Basciano, Zach Blas, Sebastian Cichocki, Gökcan Demirkazık, Ben Eastham, Federico Herrero, Chris Kraus, Simon Njami, Lucia Pietroiusti, Paul B. Preciado, Mark Rappolt 52

page 36 Kate Newby, Nothing that’s over so soon should give you that much strength, 2018 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen

January & February 2019

Art Reviewed

work-seth/tallentire, by Andrew Hibbard Korakrit Arunanondchai, by J.J. Charlesworth Zarouhie Abdalian, by Wendy Vogel Bangkok Art Biennale 2018, by Mark Rappolt

exhibitions 92 Turner Prize 2018, by J.J. Charlesworth Raoul De Keyser, by Martin Herbert Melanie Manchot, by Jennifer Thatcher Blair Thurman, by John Quin Petrit Halilaj, by Eddy Frankel Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, by Teresa Retzer Fredrik Vaerslev, by Dominic van den Boogerd Boris Lurie, by Eliza Levinson Erkan Özgen, by Louise Darblay Luleå Biennial 2018, by Izabella Scott Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018, by Stefanie Hessler Good Grief, Charlie Brown!, by Gabriel Coxhead Nicholas Pope, by David Terrien Heidi Bucher, by Fi Churchman

books 112 Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–1990s: An iapa Reader, edited by Victor Wang Garage, by Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela The Polish Rider, by Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya Butch Heroes, by Ria Brodell future greats in association with k11 118

page 104 Panel from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, published on 22 September 1963. © Peanuts. Courtesy Somerset House, London

ArtReview

Contemporary Art Evening Auction LONDON 5 MARCH

ALEXANDER CALDER Glassy Insect, 1953 Estimate £2,300,000–2,800,000

EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 2 – 5 MARCH 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5401 ALEX.BRANCZIK@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYART #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY © 2019 CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK/DACS LONDON

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Art Previewed

Make of my body the beam of a lute 25

Previewed It’s axiomatic that the winners get to write history, but the latter manifests and imprints itself diversely outside of textbooks: as archives, 1 treaties, policies. Against this, Barby Asante’s practice has pushed back in a variety of collaborative manners, from The South London Black Music Archive (2012), organised with Peckham Platform and Tate Modern – which invited South London locals to collate memories leading to an informal cultural history – to the multivenue Baldwin’s Nigger r e l o a d e d (2014), in which the confrontational conversation between James Baldwin and Dick Gregory in Horace Ové’s 1969 film Baldwin’s Nigger, relating the black American experience and the Afro-

Caribbean experience in England, was transcribed, rewritten and restaged. Asante’s major project in recent times, unfurling as a sequence of chapters and exploring the social, cultural and political agency of women and nonbinary people of colour, is entitled As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence: For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa (begun circa 2016). The Baltic segment, inspired by conferences and discussion sessions around the subject of negotiating treaties and policies, and considering the deep meanings of legislation, involves the live writing of a new Declaration of Independence, and will bloom into an exhibition incorporating performance elements.

Arguably it’s never an inapt moment 2 to revisit Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, except maybe over Christmas dinner with your grandparents. But now, 30 years on from his untimely death, seems a particularly apropos moment for Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, with multiple examples of censorship of exhibitions raising the spectre of the 1980s culture wars in which the American photographic artist’s work became a cause célèbre. And the Guggenheim is the place for it, given that the institution was gifted some 200 works and objects by the Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1993. The Gugg is celebrating Mapplethorpe’s complex legacy over the course of a year: the first

Barby Asante, performance as part of Declaration of Independence, Diaspora Pavilion, Venice, 2017. Photo: Francesco Allegretto. Courtesy the artist

2 Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print, 39 × 41 cm. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

January & February 2019

six months cherry-picking his career arc – from mixed-media works and Polaroids to his pristine, classically minded, exquisitely lit and posed prints veering between nudes, portraits, still lifes and S&M – and the second half, from July, culling from elsewhere in the museum’s holdings to assess his impact on recent art. Despite the neoclassical poise and intricate lighting of her photographic compositions, 3 Annette Kelm might not be considered a post-Mapplethorpe artist: maybe more a postChristopher Williams one – given the resonant ambiguity of her scenarios and their couching in the pristine language of advertising and editorial photography – though also with a bevy of her own ideas. What the Stuttgart-born artist’s

arrangements of showcased objects, props and occasional architecture, sometimes repeated across multiple photographs as if to reinforce their oblique significance, have in spades is charge: they’re at once cool, elevating documents of worldly things and suggestions of symbolic meaning glimmering outside the frame. (Or, as one of her Berlin gallery’s press releases exactingly puts it, ‘Levelled down onto the plane surface and free of any narrative charge, the compositional factor comes to the fore, endowing the motifs in all their visual density and pithiness with a wellnigh rebus-like significance’.) At Kunsthalle Wien, her expansion of the familiar takes in subjects that appear as both purposeful near-abstractions and ingresses

to complexity, such as the Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau in Berlin, where experiments in fluid mechanics and ship engineering are conducted, reduced here to a structured façade; and punctured shooting targets that high-five the works of Lucio Fontana. 4 If you know Michael Smith, you know Mike. The avuncular Chicagoan video/performance/ installation artist’s alter ego since the 1980s, a kind of self-aware – or at least the artist is aware – holy fool, has appeared in many of his narrative videos. He’s been an ersatz standup comedian, among other guises, and it was likely Mike in the promo video for Smith’s Skulptur Projekte Münster work a couple of years back, in which he presented a working tattoo parlour for the

3 Annette Kelm, Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau, Berlin, 2018, archival pigment print, 100 × 79 cm. Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin & London, and Gió Marconi, Milan

4 Michael Smith, Imagine the view from here!, 2018, production still. Courtesy Museo Jumex, Mexico City

ArtReview

5 Katinka Bock, Kelvin and Clyde, 2018, copper, bronze. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

6 Anna Boghiguian, Une toute petite histoire de Nîmes, 2016, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Renato Ghiazza. Courtesy the artist

getting-on-a-bit. In the video, Mike veered off a coach trip to the city and elected to get his ass tattooed: ageing, and dealing with aspirational mass culture, have become major concerns in his work. At Museo Jumex, in a solo show titled Imagine the view from here!, Mike is back once again, his actions touching on current relations between the us and Mexico – herein he’s considering buying a ‘curated’ timeshare located within the museum itself. Hopefully he can sit down by now. Translating press-release info from the French here, but the (English) title of Jocelyn 5 Wolff’s group exhibition Hot Dilute Soup relates to an analogy for the primordial chemical bouillabaisse from which human life emerged. Into this the nine-artist show folds the eminent

promises as much about metaphorical notions concept of elective affinities, the phrase – going back, rather more recently than the dawn of of creation and new growth as any scientism inherent in the individual practices – though, life, to Goethe – referring to the tendency of chemical species to combine with some species of course, we could be misreading it. rather than others. That doesn’t mean that this is 6 In 2015 Anna Boghiguian won the Golden a medium-specific display, but rather one linked Lion for her contribution to that year’s Venice by a conception of emergence, the inchoate, Biennale, where she presented her work in the the poetically elemental, from Katinka Bock’s Armenian Pavilion – including The Salt Traders bronze fish on a hopscotch pattern of greening (2015), reconstructing ancient trade routes copper plates, to Enrico Ascoli & Hilario Isola’s and x-raying the persistence of slavery today. miked-up vessels of fermenting raisins, to Since then, the seventy-two-year-old EgyptianMiriam Cahn’s embryonic canvases, to a film Canadian artist (of Armenian origin, naturally) programme including Stan Brakhage and Joel has barely let her feet touch the ground, her Haertling’s Song of the Mushroom (2002), involvsprawling installations involving cutout paper ing mushroom spore prints made directly figures appearing in all manner of prestigious onto 16mm film. Such a show, one may guess, venues. (This writer most recently saw them last

January & February 2019

8 Lee Ufan, Relatum – Shadow of Stone, 2010, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. © adagp, Paris. Courtesy Lee Ufan Museum, Naoshima

7 Helen Marten, The Weather, 2018, nylon paint on fabric, airbrush inks on paper, stained ash, powder coated aluminium, 310 × 240 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin & London

summer in the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.) Given Boghiguian’s maritime interests, St Ives seems a natural place for her to land; this show features, alongside her papery figures, paintings, collages and books, parts of her studio relocated to St Ives; and, we’re promised, ‘resonates with the local context of St Ives as an artists’ community, and Cornwall’s industrial history in terms of seafaring and trade’. Side note: apparently – or according to Twitter – the dive-bombing seagulls in St Ives are now swiping Cornish pasties directly out of the public’s mouths; but don’t let that put you off. It’s two years and change since Helen 7 Marten won the Turner Prize, and since then – and the Serpentine Galleries solo show she held concurrently – she… hasn’t held a single

solo exhibition. For the last year she’s been Lee Ufan’s career since the 1960s has been 8 writing a novel, which makes sense: Marten’s a quest for harmonisation. He grew up in Korea art is tipsy on colliding textures and feels like when it was under Japanese rule, such that there was a split between his national identity and language (like sentences, as Brian Dillon has the Confucian education he received; and the pointed out), and her combinatory titles are paintings and sculptures he’d come to make top-tier. (Her last show at König, in 2014, was titled Orchids, or a hemispherical bottom.) But now, would seek to harmonise not only this difference maybe because the writing is done, she’s back on but, in its relation to abstraction, that between the exhibiting horse. Fixed Sky Situation features East and West, and between art and philosophy. Lee’s gorgeously restrained canvases are built on eight new works: the image we’ve seen extends Marten’s deft mode of expanded painting: individual brushstrokes applied while the artist graphic, zippy, discontinuous, rich with artifice, regulates his breathing, painting-as-mediation; while a knotty text by Marten relating to the his intensely still-feeling sculptures feature show speaks of public selves, private selves, movcarved, rocklike forms in dialogue with flat ing fast from one personality to another. As an planes. Of this retrospective, which aims to clarify the various phases of his artistry by using artist turned novelist who remains an artist numerous rarely seen works, the Centre and who was always literary, she should know.

ArtReview

Pompidou-Metz notes that ‘Lee Ufan is always seeking to control the infinite’. Note to young artists: you could maybe be a bit more ambitious. Artists who address the stymieing of the American Dream look to be on the right 9 side of history, Matthew Day Jackson among them. Over the past decade or so, the Californian multimedia adept has diversely poeticised his country’s fall from grace, from aerial views of Hiroshima rendered in scorched wood to multiple befouled evocations of astronauts, to modified covers from life magazine (itself now defunct). Expect plenty such vibes in his show at Hauser

& Wirth’s Somerset outpost, where he’s lately been artist in residence; his stint overlapped with Thanksgiving, and naturally Jackson put his own spin on it: the meal, an ‘immersive evening’, was titled No Thanks / Thanksgiving. Private museums are ten-a-penny now10 adays, but few have the purposefulness that appears to underpin Graz·yna Kulczyk’s Muzeum Susch, which opens in January in Switzerland’s Engadin valley. (We’d add ‘picturesque’, but it’s Switzerland, so why bother.) Besides looking like a fascinating place to visit – it’s sited among the remains of a twelfth-century monastery on the pilgrim route to Santiago

de Compostela – it’s avowedly dedicated to ‘the disruption of power structures, bringing marginalised artists and movements centre stage and giving their voices opportunity to be heard’. That mission begins with the group show A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, externally curated by Tate Liverpool’s Kasia Redzisz, named after Siri Hustvedt’s noted essay and addressing art-historical representations of womanhood via the work of some 30 artists including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Maria Lassnig, Betty Tompkins and Renate Bertlmann. Bonus for spelunking art-types: ‘cavernous underground grottos’. Martin Herbert

10 Kiki Kogelnik, Hanging, 1970, acrylic, sheet vinyl and hangers on canvas, 169 × 138 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Kiki Kogelnik Foundation

9 Matthew Day Jackson, Solipsist ii, 2018, Formica, silkscreen, lead on panel, stainless steel frame, 195 × 130 × 5 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Somerset

Barby Asante Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 23 February – 5 May

Michael Smith Museo Jumex, Mexico City through 10 March

Lee Ufan Centre Pompidou-Metz 27 February – 30 September

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 25 January – 5 January 2020

Hot Dilute Soup Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris through 2 March

Matthew Day Jackson Hauser & Wirth Somerset 19 January – 6 May

Annette Kelm Kunsthalle Wien through 24 March

Anna Boghiguian Tate St Ives 19 January – 6 May

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women Muzeum Susch, Zernez 2 January –

Helen Marten König Galerie, Berlin through 24 February

ArtReview

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ARTHUR JAFA: A SERIES OF UTTERLY IMPROBABLE, YET EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS.

GALERIE RUDOLFINUM UNTIL 31 MARCH 2019 CURATED BY HANS-ULRICH OBRIST AND AMIRA GAD. PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE SERPENTINE GALLERIES. FEATURING MING SMITH, FRIDA ORUPABO AND MISSYLANYUS. ADMISSION FREE THANKS TO J&T BANKA. GALLERY PARTNER: AVAST FOUNDATION, EXHIBITION PARTNER: J&T BANKA, MEDIA PARTNERS: RESPEKT, RADIO 1.

Grand Palais www.artparis.com

4th 7th April 2019

A Gaze at Women Artists in France Southern Stars: An Exploration of Latin American Art

Art Featured

of my head the sounding gourd 35

Interview

Kate Newby by Ross Simonini

“My work is about putting myself into situations where anything can happen. I’m not doing a lot, but I am fully immersed in the process” 36

ArtReview

I met Kate Newby in her Brooklyn studio, a simple, clean box of a room she occasionally used for mental wandering, but not for making art. She’d recently returned from installing her show A puzzling light and moving (2018), at the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon, which would be up for a year, at her request. Over the coming months, she planned to revisit it, adding, removing and reconsidering the choices she had made during her original installation. The show includes many of Newby’s characteristic forms – tiles, wind chimes, puddles – all made from earthen materials: clay, cotton, wire, glass. The objects often appear weathered, like artefacts that could’ve been excavated from any global civilisation at any time. Her installations seem to reconstruct nooks from these timeless places and can express urban grandiosity and naturalistic modesty within the same space. For her recent show I can’t nail the days down (2018) she used thousands of clay bricks to lay a floor in the Kunsthalle Wien. Throughout the room, the bricks were speckled with the kind of quiet gestures you might overlook in your local pavement: dimples, embedded coins, errant scratches. A viewer must engage the work with head down and gaze soft. Newby spends much of her research time outside, strolling the streets around her exhibitions, gathering the elements of her art from the ground. Many of these little items could be called ‘junk’ or ‘found’, and yet her sculpture bears little resemblance to the kind of art that is historically associated with those descriptors. She often transforms and merges her findings with her own elegant fabrications to create something almost artless. Her work, both indoors and out, often feels continuous with the world around it, like an intimate encounter with a patch of grass in the centre of a vast metropolis. As we spoke, Newby and I played with a collection of thimble-size sculptures she’s made over the years. Many of these were metal castings of things from ephemeral life – a can tab, a match, a pebble – but she also laid out a collection of shell-like clay forms in a single gestural push. Each one is filled with bits of found glass, and then fired in a kiln to create melted, frozen puddles that fit into your pocket. She’s made hundreds of these – compulsively, it seems – and has included them in many exhibitions as a part of her ever-growing vocabulary of objects. Since moving from her home in New Zealand, Newby has only had a studio for a brief stint, preferring to make everything onsite. A few weeks after our meeting in the autumn, she unburdened herself of her shortlived studio space in New York and decided to work at home, which nicely suits her process. “It actually feels good,” she wrote to me, “like the studio was a stretch and I was trying

something out. But it’s good to consolidate and feel a bit safe as well. I remember we talked about energy and resources and taking care of the artistic self, and this all feels like a move towards that. I liked reading the comments in the interview about why I had a studio and I’m glad you got me in the moment when I was still in one… Maybe I’ll never have one again?” ross simonini We are in here in your studio, but you don’t really use it like a studio. kate newby I don’t make anything here. My work is made in installations. I go somewhere, bust out all this work and then leave. And I’ve been wondering, is that going to become unhealthy after a while? rs Unhealthy how? kn Well, I don’t want to get depleted, and sometimes I feel very sad when I install a show and it opens and I never see that work again. I never get to revisit it, or spend time with it. Because the work can’t come back here to the studio. I mean, my show in Vienna was 6,000 bricks. That shit isn’t ever seen again… can’t be seen again!

the sidewalk into the unfired brick. The bricks then return to the factory line to be fired with all the other bricks. With the clay works I am throwing the clay on the ground, onto objects around the area that I am working, and I’m collecting these marks. Sometimes debris gets burned into the clay too. So I’m not really doing anything. rs It seems like you’re doing something. kn I’m just performing an action. There’s not a lot of craft involved. But I’m completely active. My work is about putting myself into situations where anything can happen. I’m not doing a lot, but I am fully immersed in the process. It’s also active in the sense that, every time I pick up a piece of glass from the sidewalk, it’s me walking, for one. It’s me seeing the glass, for two. And it’s me deciding if I feel safe enough in whatever situation I’m in to pick up the glass. Because it’s actually quite embarrassing. rs Why? kn Because I’m crouched down often around trees, going through the dirt, and people say, “What are you doing, picking up dog shit?” rs How many times have people said that to you?

“Every time I pick up a piece of glass from the sidewalk, it’s me walking, for one. It’s me seeing the glass, for two. And it’s me deciding if I feel safe enough in whatever situation I’m in to pick up the glass. Because it’s actually quite embarrassing” rs What happens to that work after? kn Galleries don’t want to store this stuff. In the case of the Vienna work, some got sent to the Kunsthaus Hamburg. Some of it was recycled. Now it’s being reduced to 1,200 bricks and I’m going to ship that to my mum’s house in New Zealand, because she can store them at the end of her driveway. She doesn’t know this yet. rs These bricks and clay tiles you make often have impressions in them. What’s your process to make those marks? kn Well, the brick works are made at brick factories. I carve into bricks when they have been formed but the clay is still unfired. I make marks by stabbing, scraping, carving; as well I push pieces of broken glass that I have picked up off

facing page Kate Newby. Photo: Steffen Jagenburg. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

kn Quite a few. rs Is the embarrassment part of the work? kn Yeah, it means I’ve become vulnerable. rs Did you collect things as a child? kn I’m actually not a big believer in picking things up. rs Really? kn Someone asked me the other day if I collect rocks, and I said, no! It’s terrible to take rocks. rs But glass is ok? kn Yes. It’s a refused material readily available, it’s almost like cleaning in an insignificant way… Or shells. People give me shells, but I don’t collect things. Sometimes I’ll collect things if I’m sentimental. Like I had a Kombucha on the plane and it was called ‘Clear Mind’, and I liked that, so I kept the bottle cap. rs Are you always looking for things? kn Yes, but there are factors: how’s my mood? Because sometimes I just can’t do it. And: do I have pockets to carry it? rs You’ve made some work to be exhibited in pockets. For months at a time. kn I give work to security guards or attendants. Sometimes I’ve given these works to other artists who are in an exhibition with me. I like the idea that the work is getting shown privately. You

can’t see the work unless whoever has it wants to show you. I like how things come in and out of visibility. They are not presents, though. I ask the work to be sent back to me. rs To see how it transformed? kn The work gets vulnerable really quickly. Pieces get lost. And that’s not uninteresting. Then you have the memory of it. A lot of the work is metal, and I don’t seal them, so they are able to develop a natural patina from the hand touching. It’s minimal. But I want to see the damage. [She takes a jar from a shelf and dumps the contents on the table: dozens of miniature sculptures] These are the ones I never give away. I’ve made several hundred of these.

rs What was the art community like in New Zealand? kn Quite positive. I grew up on a beach on the west coast of Auckland, 40 minutes from downtown. In the bush, really. I was part of an artist-run space called Gambia Castle. Rent’s cheap there, so you can run a space with your friends. And I was working in hospitality and could get by on that. It’s small, too, so it’s an entangled community, and there’s a nice competition. We all made each other better.

rs Would you call these little works ‘charms’? kn No, because ‘charm’ elevates them. I want you to elevate them. What matters is that you find them valuable. [Holding a twig cast in metal] This is from my father’s avocado tree.

rs Are you nostalgic? kn I wish I looked back more. My work requires a lot of first, quick responses. Working with clay is like that. So making this mixtape is a way to balance that out.

rs Do you tell viewers this? kn No. I push back on narrative. It makes it easier for people to have narrative. But I’m stubborn about it. I don’t know why. Most of my work needs special attention. It needs weather, circumstance. The tiles need rain and the wind chimes need wind. They’re always changing. What’s a puddle if it’s not outside in the rain?

rs When you said you wanted to balance out your lifestyle, what do you mean?

rs Which is why you have to work onsite.

kn 2010. My first major exhibition was in Bremen at the gak [Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst]. I was in New Zealand and I got an email out of nowhere. So I arrived in Bremen and made the whole show there, over the course of five weeks, and I just stayed on afterward. It set the precedent for me. Then I moved to New York in 2012.

kn I never left on purpose, but I’m glad I left when I did. I just kind of moved around, and New York was the place I left my stuff. And now I’m thirty-nine and I don’t know if I want to move again. I always thought I’d wind up in Brussels. I love it there.

kn I only got this studio a year and a half ago. It’s my first real studio since art school. It’s a big deal. I just needed my own room, to think about things, to rejuvenate. This morning I just made a playlist of songs I loved from 1994. And it doesn’t feel unhealthy doing that. It feels good. I always listen to songs over and over again, and those are the songs on the list: Mazzy Star, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, songs from the Singles soundtrack [1992], the Empire Records soundtrack [1995]. Music meant and means a lot to me.

kn Oh yes. I’ll give it away without thinking about it. I just got an email, which said that a bird shat on my roofing tiles in Portland, which is great. What a success!

rs When did you start working this way?

rs Why did you leave?

rs Why do you have a studio if you don’t use it?

rs You seem pretty loose with your work.

kn Yeah. It’s exhausting. This recent show [at the Lumber Room], I made it in two and half weeks.

vote. Our female prime minister is unmarried and just gave birth. Stuff like that happens. It makes for interesting artists.

Here, in New York, it’s so vast and everyone is busy. I’m really happy that I’m an artist from New Zealand. I think New Zealand artists are good artists. I believe that. I don’t know why. Maybe because of our remoteness, being at the bottom of the world. Or because we’re both self-deprecating and wildly energetic. It’s a recently colonised place and it was the first country in the world to give women the

A puzzling light and moving, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Worksighted. Courtesy the artist and Lumber Room, Portland

ArtReview

kn I just want to get better at lifestyle. Artists have a lot of agency. I can say what I need. I need time to think. I recently pushed off some shows to help myself, but it’s hard, because if you’re not showing, you’re not making money. It’s emotionally confusing. rs Are you a fully professional artist? kn Yeah. But I was getting my doctorate in art for a while and living off of the scholarship that came with that. I don’t sell a lot of work. But what else am I gonna do? I travel too much to get a job. I have cheap rent. I don’t spend a lot. I’m a taxpayer in the us but [legally] I’m a ‘nonresident’, and I’m also a ‘nonresident’ in New Zealand. So I’m a nonresident everywhere! So I find it hard to get grants. It doesn’t matter, though. I cherish making art. I’m flabbergasted that I get to do what I’m doing. But this doesn’t

top I love you poems, 2018, assorted clay and found glass, dimensions variable. Photo: Worksighted. Courtesy the artist and Lumber Room, Portland

above The more I listen to it the more I love it, 2017, glass, beer bottles. Photo: Johan Wahlgren. Courtesy Index â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Contemporary Swedish Art Foundation, Stockholm

January & February 2019

top Were there no impossibilities, 2018, glass, wire, 210 × 170 × 30 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and The Sunday Painter, London

above I can’t nail the days down, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Jorit Aust. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Wien

ArtReview

mean I’m living it up. I find it tough to pay for yoga classes, but I’m not going hungry. I was swimming all summer because the pool was free. I picked up ten cents on the ground yesterday and that was all I made this month. I mean, when do we get to calm down, relax and pat ourselves on the back? rs Are you suspicious of art at all? kn I’m not sure when art is about thinking and when it’s about feeling. I think through doing things. It’s funny, I like Patti Smith but I don’t want to watch a documentary on her. I’m hesitant to learn more. I’m the same with process. I try to come at materials blindly, like glass and clay. I give myself permission to go into a glass studio and know nothing. I can just play around with glass frit and make choices. rs Artmaking is basically decision-making. kn I really don’t like looking at work when I feel like the artist hasn’t made a decision. I can see when they didn’t know what was going on. They felt overwhelmed making it. I like specific work. Sometimes people can’t make their minds up. They find everything appealing.

in the space of being able to make decisions. I just know when I’m tapped into the thing. But it’s also way more complex than that. It’s like the Patti Smith thing. I don’t want to refine what I know. I don’t want to complicate it. But I’ve never really vocalised this before. None of what I’m saying is very thought out.

“I push back on narrative. I don’t know why. Most of my work needs special attention. It needs weather, circumstance. The tiles need rain and the wind chimes need wind. They’re always changing. What’s a puddle if it’s not outside in the rain?” rs Seems appropriate though, for the subject. kn I think a lot about how I like to see work. I like the feeling of not knowing when a work

rs Does this happen to you? kn Yeah, I can tell when it happens in my own work, too, but it’s usually a few days too late, after the show’s open. Maybe I wasn’t

Not this time, not for me (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy the artist and Sculpture Center, New York

January & February 2019

ends and where it begins. But I think that’s often done with less, not more. For instance, I love the Sun Tunnels [1973–76] by Nancy Holt. It’s committed. I think about commitment all the time – to materials, situations, words. People muck around too much. This is why I give myself a set amount of time to work on projects. I like confidence and face-to-face interaction. I worked on the Biennale of Sydney recently, and it was all on email. How could I tell them what I want when I haven’t even been to the site? I found that very hard. I’m not an artist who sketches up things. But I’m still trying to understand the ways I want to work. For me, assertiveness is the goal. In Vienna for my show at the Kunsthalle Wien I wanted to do something but I was afraid to ask, because it would be so much work for everyone involved. And then I thought: is that really how I’m making decisions? That’s why I have a studio, to think and keep myself from making lame decisions. I was going to make a decision because it was too hard for people I don’t know who are paid to help me. And I almost didn’t catch it. But that’s just the self-limiting aspect of being a woman, a person from New Zealand and a sensitive person. If I’m not careful, these things can go unchecked. I can’t be bossed around by art. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

Yes by Martin Herbert

After spending most of the past two decades saying ‘no’ to almost anything to do with the artworld, American Cady Noland has finally said ‘yes’ to a new show 42

facing page Cady Noland, 2018 (installation view, mmk, Frankfurt)

above My Amusement, 1993–94, aluminium over wood, steel plates, chain and whitewall tyre, 305 × 244 × 76 cm

Cady Noland, 2018 (installation view, mmk, Frankfurt)

Shuttle, 1987, metal cart, car parts, 58 × 340 × 46 cm

this and facing page Cady Noland, 2018 (installation views, mmk, Frankfurt)

Opening the morning mail a few months back, I found myself holding but were blazoned with sardonic slogans like eat yer fuckin face something I never expected to see: an invitation to a ‘comprehensive’ off!!! Goaded, I booked a train to Frankfurt and was confronted with, Cady Noland retrospective, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (mmk) for a Noland fan, the outright ridiculous, the oh-my-stars. Eightyin Frankfurt. I blinked. I inwardly called bullshit. Noland – who, if you three works from 1984 to 2008, three made in collaboration with the don’t know her, is the American artist who most saliently and scath- late Diana Balton, are distributed across three floors of the museum, ingly predicted the mess her country is currently in – has not exhib- at times spaciously positioned so that their kinaesthetic terrors and ited any new work since 2000. After that, and specifically after disman- compositional smarts ring out, at others tucked away Easter-egg-style tling her final artwork (for a group show at New York’s Team Gallery), round corners and in alcoves. (According to the list of works in the destroying its parts and stowing them in bins around Manhattan, she accompanying booklet, a good number of these are owned by a figure effectively quit the artworld in disgust at its hypocrisies and inequali- you’d consider their maker’s antithesis: Larry Gagosian.) ties. She made a couple of pieces in the following decade, but only to Anyway, here are Noland classics like Oozewald (1989), an aluminireplace damaged ones. While a practising artist and after – the ‘after’ um cutout image of Lee Harvey Oswald punctured with seven circubeing mostly spent blocking lar holes, schematic gunshot While a practising artist and after – the ‘after’ being wounds, mouth plugged with exhibitions, denying authorship of works made by her that mostly spent blocking exhibitions, denying author- a bunched-up American flag. had parts missing, refusing to ship of works made by her that had parts missing, Noland, like her painter-father Kenneth, gravitates to targets; have her photograph taken, rerefusing to have her photograph taken, refusing to and this work, sold at auction fusing to be interviewed and being generally obstreperous – be interviewed and being generally obstreperous – in 2011 for $6.6 million, made her the most expensive living she had never sanctioned a retroNoland had never sanctioned a retrospective female artist at the time. Here spective, despite offers from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among others. In a rare conversa- are signature assemblages that either spill their contents onto the tion with Sarah Thornton in 2014, she’d allowed that she might permit floor like updated 1970s scatter works or contain them in consumerist such a thing further down the line. But even if she didn’t love moma frames like shopping trolleys and baskets, incorporating ephemera (she’d called them out for sexism in the past), was it going to happen that seems to indict a whole culture: American celebrity magazines, in Frankfurt? Nah. Someone there was cobbling together a few loans weaponry, Budweiser cans, buckles, ammo, sunglasses, cameras, car polish. Here too, interspersed, are a choice handful of works by and calling it a survey. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The show opened – it runs until the end of March – and images other artists, including fellow traveller Steven Parrino – whose crumstarted turning up on Twitter and Instagram: signal examples, pled canvases sync perfectly with Noland’s own sense of cultural ruinfreshly exhumed and darkly sparkling, of Noland’s astringent, ation; Charlotte Posenenske; Joseph Beuys; and Andy Warhol, from American-nightmare sculptural style: from menacing aluminium whose Death and Disaster paintings much of Noland’s bleak, silvery stocks waiting for victims to shopping baskets filled with hubcaps mien clearly descends, as she herself cops to here. In her 1989 essay and firearms, to obscure 2d works that looked like restaurant logos ‘Towards a Metalanguage of Evil’, she compares entrepreneurial males

Celebrity Trash Spill, 1989, newspapers, magazines, cameras with equipment, lenses, camera tripods, microphone, shirt, five sunglasses, doormat, rubber mats and pack of cigarettes, dimensions variable

ArtReview

and psychopaths, and analyses America as a land of barely suppressed decision to make this show, by current events – certainly the curator violence, blunted by beer and voyeurism and racial and sexual enmity; had – and whether the Frankfurt location, with Germany currently the exhibition testifies to this. It looks shockingly contemporary. presenting some kind of relatively stable counterweight to America’s I wandered around half-stunned – and, in a very Noland moment, spiralling, had some deliberateness about it. While acknowledging, was temporarily turfed out when some kind of alarm sent the museum as if it needs saying, that “Noland’s work has always been highly politinto a state of emergency – and then I came back, buzzed the muse- ical”, Pfeffer says she doesn’t know about that. The artist, apparently, um’s director and the show’s curator, Susanne Pfeffer, from the desk is giving a lot to this show, but she’s not particularly speaking for it. and we sat down for a quick coffee. (And later conversed by email.) Once again, she’s not doing interviews, or it seems so unlikely that she This was her first show since taking the post at the museum. How would that I didn’t even ask. on earth had she managed this curatorial coup? Why was it here? There are currently no plans for this show – which to me, if it’s not The mmk, Pfeffer notes, had a good many works by Noland in their already obvious, was easily the best I saw last year, outpacing even the collection, thanks to a substantial gift from a collector. That and Bruce Nauman retrospective – to tour. If that’s the case, it’ll dismay her understanding of Noland’s transatlantic Noland-watchers works as “extremely relevant to In her 1989 essay ‘Towards a Metalanguage of Evil’, but has her characteristic bloody-mindedness written all she compares entrepreneurial males and psychothe present time” was the starting point, she said. “I thought paths, and analyses America as a land of barely sup- over it. There is no catalogue either, just the aforementioned now or never. Then I got hold pressed violence, blunted by beer and voyeurism modest booklet with an essay of her telephone number” – by heavyweight German theoa statement that elides this proand racial and sexual enmity; the exhibition cess taking a while, aided by a testifies to this. It looks shockingly contemporary rist Diedrich Diederichsen. The aforementioned D’Angelo collector, a contact in New York and a building of trust – “I again studied her work intensively, and hasn’t released another record since his brief return; Noland may, asked for a meeting. We met and she said yes.” More than just saying after this outing, go back into seclusion, her overarching statement yes, Noland has been extremely hands-on with the show, from tink- perfectly made, her position in art history that bit more assured. (For ering with elements of the display after the opening to personally Pfeffer, it’s a landmark in her own profession; a friend of hers joked selecting images for press coverage. “It was and still is a very intense that, after this, ‘every artist will trust you’, and they should.) But if we don’t hear from Noland again for the foreseeable, we can feel lucky to and close collaboration,” says Pfeffer. My mind made an odd connection. In 2014 the American R&B have had this – a toxic cornucopia of chromed steel, bullets, barbeques, auteur D’Angelo released his first album since 2000, Black Messiah, saddles, whitewall tyres and abundant ambient fear: the twenty-first evidently galvanised by Black Lives Matter. (On Twitter, I floated the century already known, and given form, in the twentieth. ar wacky idea that this show was Noland’s equivalent: an art historian wrote back, ‘I have no idea what you mean, but I completely agree’.) To Cady Noland is on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (mmk), Pfeffer I wondered aloud if Noland had been similarly affected, in the Frankfurt, through 31 March

above Basket of Action, 1988, metal basket, jumper cable, metal link chain, dimensions variable all images Photos: Axel Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Museum für Moderne Kunst (mmk), Frankfurt

January & February 2019

Future Greats in association with

of my nerves strings 51

Introduction At a time when things seem to be ‘out of control’, it’s easy to succumb to the pessimistic view that people have little power to influence events and how the future – or the course of history – takes shape. We’re told that social media are busy influencing our every choice, from the things we buy (seriously, ArtReview’s Internet browsing is currently plagued by ads for a pair of designer trainers ArtReview is convinced it only mentioned in an email that it sent to itself) to the way we cast our votes. We’re told that the environment is fast approaching a critical point, and that we’re mostly to blame. What can we do? The problem with narratives of powerlessness is that they tend to reinforce themselves, making us more cautious about trying something new. And yet, even if it seems that things are ‘out of control’, it might be that this also makes it a more critical and exciting moment for people to take risks and try new ways of doing things. That goes for the 13 artists featured in ArtReview’s annual Future Greats issue, in which (in case you didn’t know) ArtReview ask critics, curators and artists to present an artist they think is doing something notable, new, possibly even game-changing, but who hasn’t yet been given the recognition they deserve. Because although the world might be in every kind of flux, it hasn’t stopped artists responding to that moment. So here are artists intersecting with the chaotic experience of being a migrant in a fractured Europe. Here are artists charting the ways in which the human body has become fractured and mobile through global economies and technologies; and artists working out how to fuse artmaking and activism to intervene in the charged politics and economies of sex, race and gender. Others still map the interconnections that allow the social world to work (democracy, free speech) within its bigger context – global environmental systems and the planet’s resources. And among these are artists who test how the institutions and the spaces of art might be reinvented as something other than the artworld status quo of money, patronage and spectacle. These issues are some of the fault lines that define the current moment. The way these artists engage with those questions might influence the way we think about them, or about how art can be made – or they might not. Presenting a group of artists to look out for isn’t a guarantee of surefire success. Rather, giving artists a platform, for the space of an issue, offers an opportunity to consider the value of their new attempts at making art and being an artist in the fast-evolving circumstances of the present moment. This year marks the third of ArtReview’s partnership with K11 Art Foundation, an organisation that nurtures artistic talent within the Greater China region, promotes it to the world in general and exposes new audiences to art via its galleries throughout the region and, more particularly, its ‘art mall’ concept. The latter allows for exhibitions to take place in a retail environment. Not in the sense of the exhibition taking place in a commercial gallery; rather in the sense of the exhibition being staged within an environment other than the conventional white cube or museum. An environment that people who don’t visit museums on a regular basis find more comfortable to inhabit.

ArtReview

Aykan Safoğlu

selected by Gökcan Demirkazık

In her collection of essays Touching Feeling (2002), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick embraces the preposition ‘beside’ as a salient mode of critical theory addressing its subjects (instead of the exposure that ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ implies). Berlin-based artist Aykan Safoğlu’s practice is perhaps one that corresponds to this approach: built on and through proximities and intimacies, his works simultaneously exude a certain rawness and auteurist refinement as they touch upon queer bodies, migration and, most recently, death. The video essay Off-White Tulips (2013), for instance, a tender letter to James Baldwin about his exile in Istanbul during the 1960s, serves as a platform to consider the transformation of the city and Safoğlu’s own coming-of-age via a collection of vintage photographs and images. In another work, the

Aykan Safoğlu is a filmmaker based in Berlin. He was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen for his short film Kırık Beyaz Laleler (Off-White Tulips) in 2013, and received a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, in 2014. Safoğlu is a member of the curatorial collective ‘ğ’. His exhibitions include a solo show, Off-White Tulips at Ystads Konstmuseum, Ystad (2016), and group exhibitions The Bill: For Collective Unconscious at Artspace, Auckland (2016); Father Figures are Hard to Find at nGbK, Berlin (2016); Home Works 7 at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2015) and Sight and Sounds: Turkey at the Jewish Museum, New York (2014).

Gökcan Demirkazık is based two-channel installation Untitled (Gülşen & in Istanbul. He is a freeHüseyin) (2015), the artist reaches for the story lance art critic and research/ of his uncle Hüseyin, who went to Germany as editorial assistant at salt. a Gastarbeiter and committed suicide in 1978, by asking his friend Gülşen – a Kurdish activist who came to Germany as a student a year earlier and did not know Hüseyin – to take on his uncle’s pose and character based on an old photograph. Their unrehearsed interactions on camera, especially Gülşen’s embodiment of Hüseyin in her replies to the artist’s questions, constitute a delicately negotiated recollection of the troubling conditions of migrants in Germany. The vanishing of their memory is further accentuated when she poses next as the figure in the recently destroyed monument to migrant workers in Tophane, Istanbul – broken, just like Safoğlu’s uncle. And so, for the duration of the Festival of Future Nows in 2017, the artist added a ‘ğ’ (replacing an ‘h’) to the name of the festival’s venue, Berlin’s Hamburger ‘Bağnhof’ – a contemporary art museum and, as a former train station, a place with resonance for all those who arrived in Berlin in search of a better life. Like the ‘h’ in German, this queer letter does not have a sound of its own, but amplifies that of adjacent letters, gesturing at some boundedness in fate.

above Untitled (Gülşen & Hüseyin) (still), 2015, two-channel video installation, 13 min. Courtesy the artist following pages Off-White Tulips (stills), 2013, video, colour, sound, 24 min. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

ArtReview

January & February 2019

Mélodie Mousset I met Mélodie Mousset socially before I was aware of her work. I extended the most casual invitation for her to come down and visit while I was writing in Baja. To my enormous surprise, she and a Mexican friend actually came, more or less unannounced. Somehow they found this nondescript place in a Mexican campo five hours south of la. We hung out and had drinks by the bay. Later, I read my friend Noura Wedell’s inspired, unpublished essay about Mousset’s Organic Voyage project (2012–). In it, Mousset has her own internal organs virtually rendered by a forensic imaging company and then casts them in resin. She travels from Le Havre to Veracruz on a container ship and then on to Mexico City, where she has them recast as wax candles, in keeping with local customs. From there, she travels to the Sierra Madre mountains and spends four months living in the jungle with local healers, the curanderos. Eventually she burns her organs inside a cave. Mélodie Mousset lives and works in Zürich. She was the winner of the 2015 Swiss Art Awards, and her latest vr installation, HanaHana, presented this autumn at the Zabludowicz Collection in London, received multiple accolades, including ‘Best Artistic vr Experience’ at the Beijing vr Festival and a Golden Halo award for ‘best artistic achievement’. Other recent solo exhibitions include Intra-Aura at Last Tango, Zürich, and A Fresh Burn Like a Double Tree at salts, Basel. Her work will be on view at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, 18–22 March, and in Masks, a group show at Aargauer Kunsthaus opening in September.

The project was actively pursued for two or three years, and it’s not finished yet. The hard drive containing the film was lost; everything fell apart. Mousset’s associative process is so rich. She fully believes in her own imagination, and the logical or alogical digressions that shape an inner life. What struck me most about Organic Voyage is the way that the artist’s quasi-spiritual search is continually interrupted by material circumstances. She encounters a caste system on the container ship; a bunch of North American stoners and hippies have New Age-colonised the jungle, and the curanderos are all corrupt. Mousset’s Voyage kind of mirrors Antonin Artaud’s famous journey to Ireland with St Patrick’s staff, but in reverse. He was seeking a body without organs; she was trying to externalise her own organs without a body to contain them. I don’t think of Mousset as part of a lineage, unless it’s one of exceptionally original, anomalous artists who have the courage to pursue an idea as far as it will go. So, maybe Carolee Schneemann, Werner Herzog, Béla Tarr, Paul Thek, Bas Jan Ader, Jay DeFeo. Mousset has moved on to making virtual-reality experiments and projects. She is discovering the pleasure of the surface, after plumbing the depths. I think her mental agility, and ability to morph into various settings in an almost anthropological way make her work especially important now, and for years to come.

ArtReview

selected by Chris Kraus Chris Kraus is a writer and art critic based in Los Angeles. Her novels include I Love Dick (1997), Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Torpor (2006) and Summer of Hate (2012). Kraus has also published a collection of essays and two books on art and cultural criticism. She recently wrote a biography of the American novelist and poet Kathy Acker.

this and facing page Organic Voyage (details), 2012â&#x20AC;&#x201C;, mixed media. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

HanaHana (still), 2017, virtual reality. Courtesy the artist

Sol Calero and MĂŠlodie Mousset, HanaHana, 2018, virtual reality and mixed-media installation. Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist and salts, Basel

ArtReview

A Fresh Burn Like a Double Tree, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Gunnar Meier Photography & Gina Folly.Courtesy the artist and salts, Basel

January & February 2019

MarĂa Galindo MarĂa Galindo is a Bolivian anarcha-feminist based in La Paz. In 1992 she cofounded the collective and social movement Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) to challenge issues of sexism, structural discrimination against the lgbt community and Western hegemonies, while engaging in antipoverty work through propaganda, street performances and civil resistance.

this page Pasarsela Feminista, 2013, performance views in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Photos: Idoia Romano. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

selected by Paul B. Preciado ‘I am a whore, I am a lesbian, I am Bolivian. I can only exist by constructing prohibited alliances between these discursive and political positions that are supposed to contradict each other. I speak up from the site of torture and of violence, but not to give testimony; rather to imagine happiness from a position of disobedience.’ This, roughly, is how María Galindo would introduce herself. Over the past 15 years, Galindo has created a radical artistic practice: an artist, performer, activist, writer and cofounder of the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando, she brings the subaltern practices and knowledge of indigenous women into dialogue with the political and literary traditions of anarchism, punk and nonwhite feminism. But what can art do in the face of an authoritarian neocolonialism in which the logics of feminism and indigenous identity politics have been absorbed within humanist, religious and neoliberal discourse as new strategies of control? Galindo answers by dislocating art from the spaces of the market and the gallery and bringing it right back to the place where it was born: the public square, the social ritual. Mujeres Creando’s public actions such as Pasarela Feminista (Feminist Catwalk), staged in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in 2014, sought to confront the white and heterosexual idealised feminine body, an image

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, curator and perpetuated by mainstream media, philosopher on the study of gender and via a 13-hour ‘rebellion’ by women in sexual politics based between Paris, the city’s streets during which they Barcelona and Athens. He is a writer-inresidence at the luma Foundation gave speeches while walking a makein Arles. Preciado’s most recently shift catwalk in outfits that they published book is Pornotopia (2014). felt both reclaimed and represented their own bodies and experiences as indigenous women. Against the racial and sexual purification of the body, Galindo’s work exorcises the terror of colonial history by means of a bastard and iconoclastic theatricalisation of Catholic and patriarchal symbols. Against the capitalist economy of exploitation and ecological destruction, Galindo’s artistic animism uses ‘cheap and broken’ objects and bodies, investing them with new life as totems of a poetic revolution to come that aims to challenge our conventional modes of perception and our desiring economies. Her more-than-art practice belongs to a lineage of art-shamans in which we might also locate the works of Pedro Lemebel and las Yegüas del Apocalipsis, Ocaña, Miguel Benlloch, Sergio Zevallos, Beau Dick, Lygia Clark, Michel Journiac, Ulrike Ottinger, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Vala Tanz and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Graffiti by Mujeres Creando. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

American Artist In 2018 American Artist premiered Black Gooey Universe in Brooklyn, a viscerally heady and moving exhibition that reveals historical erasures and future potentialities of blackness in computation and digital cultures. Take Mother of All Demos (2018), one of the works on display, in which Artist stages a seemingly nonfunctional computer workstation partially covered in viscous bitumen. It is as if the keyboard has been tarred, or an opaque black ectoplasm is seeping out. The installation addresses a 1968 computer demonstration of a graphical user interface (gui, pronounced ‘gooey’) that inaugurated a transition from the black command-line computer screen to the now dominant white screen of folders and documents. For New York-based Artist, this technical transition indexes vast dynamics of antiblackness in the us, bound to America’s history of slavery, which runs like goo through Silicon Valley products. At the same time, Mother of All Demos speculates a renewed functionality of blackness on the computer

American Artist lives and works in New York. They are currently a resident artist at Abrons Art Center and a 2018–19 recipient of the Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Fellowship. American Artist recently completed a residency at Pioneer Works and last year held their first solo exhibition at Housing (all in New York).

screen, as an operating system outside the logics of white supremacy and racial capitalism. How to use Artist’s black ‘gooey’ is challenging to discern, as the work is not interested in pragmatic solutions. Instead, blackness is encountered as something broken that demands the epistemologies of the interface be rewritten. Across installation, sculpture, net art, publishing and organising, Artist brings radical black politics and thought, along with a sharp yet playful conceptualism, to bear on technology and power structures. Their approach is often materially minimal, philosophically rich and strikingly emotive, with a formal attentiveness and discursive nuance that is most impressive. This is concisely evident in their decision to legally change their name to American Artist. Such an act is at once a demand to access a category often reserved for straight white cis men but also a claiming of anonymity. Their deft reconfigurations of technical, national, racial and personal protocols offer glimmers of political autonomy, what Artist has also described as ‘dignity’. In short, American Artist’s practice is committed to liberation, be it political, conceptual or aesthetic. I can’t think of anything more necessary in American life today.

this and facing page Mother of All Demos, 2018. Courtesy Housing, Brooklyn

ArtReview

selected by Zach Blas Zach Blas is an artist and writer based in London. In 2018 he presented work at the Gwangju Biennale; the 68th Berlin International Film Festival; Abierto x Obras, Matadero, Madrid; maxxi, Rome; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and participated at Creative Time Summit in Miami. Blas is also a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

January & February 2019

this page What is the Being of a Problem? (details), 2018. Courtesy Housing, Brooklyn

ArtReview

No State (detail), 2018. Courtesy Housing, Brooklyn

January & February 2019

Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca The 2016 São Paulo Bienal, curated by Charles Esche, was a densely political affair, provocative and pertinent, but certainly hard going at times. With that in mind, it is perhaps understandable that a slick and seductive 15-minute videowork – with a banging soundtrack – by Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca stood out. Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things, 2016) is a music video/musical/abstract documentary about the popular brega music scene in the Brazilian city of Recife. Told through the characters of Porck, a hairdresser and aspiring mc – all facial tattoos and intricately shaved hair – and Dayana, a firefighter and twerk-loving singer in tiny shorts, the story, despite the simplicity of its presentation, delivers astute observations on class and money, capitalism and culture. To the kind of hi-nrg beat that makes me gag in recollection of nights filled with too much cheap cachaça, Porck rhymes in Portuguese that “The girls go crazy when they smell my scent / Covered in tattoos Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca are based in Recife. In 2018 they had solo exhibitions at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo; Residency Unlimited, New York; eav Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, and The Box, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Columbus. They featured in Skulptur Projekte, Münster, in 2017 and the São Paulo Bienal in 2016. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

I’m here to make trouble / They may badmouth me but I’m moving on up”. The machismo of the lyrics is undercut by the fluorescent pink of his vest, while the humour in the artists’ portrait is balanced with a fierce affection for their subjects. The latest work by Wagner, who is Brazilian, and de Burca, her Dutch husband (who as ArtReview went to press were announced as Brazil’s representatives to this year’s Venice Biennale) continues to defy easy categorisation. Set on the empty, supernaturally pristine Toronto subway system, rise (2018), which I saw last year at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, cuts or tracks between the few passengers that are present as they communicate with each other through poetry, either verbally or via voiceover (therefore seemingly telepathically). There is the same sense of dislocation at play here as in the earlier work. The subjects, who are all Canadians of African or Caribbean descent, explore personal regrets and hopes in rhymes that echo up escalators and through the desolate platforms and ticket halls. For all the cinematic allure of their art, Wagner & de Burca are musicologists of a sort, the anthropological nature of the work posing questions of performed identity and how subcultures give ballast to an alienating world.

this page Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) (stills), 2016, 4k video, hd, colour, 5.1 sound, 16 min

ArtReview

selected by Oliver Basciano Oliver Basciano is Editor (International) at ArtReview

this page rise (still), 2018, 2k video, colour, sound, 20 min all images © the artists. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo

January & February 2019

Vivian Caccuri Vivian Caccuri lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her recent solo exhibitions were Condominium at Galeria Leme, São Paulo (2015), and It’s in the Mind at Progetti Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (2013). Group exhibitions include Future Generation Art Prize at Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice; The Atlantic Triangle at Rele Gallery, Lagos, and Sugar and Speed at mamam, Recife (all 2017). She presented work at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial and won the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize in 2017.

Study for Mosquitos Also Cry, 2018 (‘Mosquito Headnet with armholes covering upper body, modelled by a sleeping man, 1902–18’). Courtesy Wellcome Library

Mosquitos Also Cry, 2018, performance at Frieze London. Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze

ArtReview

selected by Lucia Pietroiusti I first heard of Vivian Caccuri’s work while working on General Ecology, an ongoing project that explores complexity, interspecies questions and the environment through ecological worldviews and systems, at the Serpentine Galleries in London. With sound experimentation at its core, Caccuri’s art investigates the bodily, affective and sociopolitical dimensions of the medium, looking at how the history of specific sounds is packed into a dense tangle of hegemonic signifiers. In many of her works, these histories – banned music, forbidden bodies, the intimate connection of dance and revolt – are transformed into embodied experience, within which sound becomes material, palpable. Caccuri’s performance-lecture Mosquitos Also Cry (2018) reflects on the sound of a mosquito’s flight, and how its characterisation as bothersome or threatening belongs to a wider colonial narrative around hygiene and population control. This research, currently ongoing, also manifests in the installation Água Parada (Still Water, 2018). Its title is a reference to the role of the mosquito (which breeds in still water) in the spread of dengue fever, and the work comprises a

Lucia Pietroiusti is Curator of General mosquito net, a series of mosquitoEcology at the Serpentine Galleries, London. attracting lights and a composition Currently she is producing and co-curating in which the sound and wingbeat (with Filipa Ramos) a durational symposium titled ‘The Shape of a Circle in the frequencies of different species of Mind of a Fish’, which explores interspecies mosquitoes have been mixed into consciousness. In 2019 Pietroiusti will an appropriately infectious dance curate the Lithuanian Pavilion at the track. Far from following a single Venice Biennale, featuring a new perfor˙ ˙ mance work by Rugile Barzdžiukaite , art-historical lineage, Caccuri’s ˙ Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte. work hovers on that compelling edge between visual art, experimental music and anthropology, which I believe to be the key place from which to consider together extremely complex and entangled systems and conditions – namely ecology, interspecies relationships and the legacies of globalisation and colonial violence. Anthropologist Anna Tsing refers to ‘feral proliferations’ as those unintended and unstoppable consequences of the settler-capitalist project’s structures of order and control. In Caccuri’s work, these consequences are brought right back into your senses, under your skin.

Água Parada, 2018 (installation view, mac Niterói, Rio de Janeiro). Photo: Juliana DiLello. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Leme, São Paulo

above TabomBass, 2016, wood, loudspeakers, amplifiers, candles, timed playlist, stereo audio, dimensions variable. Photo: Luiza Sigulem. Courtesy 32nd Bienal de São Paulo following pages Água Parada, 2018 (installation view, mac Niterói, Rio de Janeiro). Photo: Juliana DiLello. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Leme, São Paulo

January & February 2019

ArtReview

January & February 2019

Mariana Silva The work of Mariana Silva explores the circulation and crisis of the neoliberal model in relation to collectives such as crowds, publics and the history of museums, as well as the more general social and economic systems within which we are forced to live. I first connected with Silva’s work in New York (where the Portuguese artist is based), while working on the 2013 exhibition Environments at the e-flux space, which featured videoworks she created in collaboration with Pedro Neves Marques. The videos looked at a host of issues – our use of the planet’s resources, the constitution of a ‘public’, the control of free speech, the impartiality of media images and the intrusion of governments and other national and supranational organisations into daily life – but it was as much the research, the manner in which they conducted it and the discussions it provoked (a talks series they programmed was incorporated into the exhibition) that attracted my curiosity. The double-channel projection Explore, Experience, Enjoy (2013– 14) is one foundational work. Based on a virtual revisualisation of Information, Kynaston McShine’s 1970 exhibition of conceptual art at moma, it explores the ephemera of exhibitions as well as the relation between objects, spectators and the museum structures that facilitate and govern the encounter between the two. This in turn

Mariana Silva lives and works in New York. Previous exhibitions include Audience Response Systems at Parkour, Lisbon (2014); Environments at e-flux, New York; and P/p at Mews Project Space, London (both 2013). In 2016 Silva participated in both the Gwangju Biennale and the Moscow Biennale.Her solo exhibition, Social Forms Pavilion, is on view at Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon, through 27 January.

led to the ideas embedded in two works shown at the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, where this thinking was combined with notions about relations between the collective and the individual, and the binaries that govern how we look at a work of art. Such thoughts continue to underpin Silva’s exhibitions: each work explores the limitation of the medium and display. Medium, viewer and space are all in sync. The ongoing Friends of Interpretable Objects (2013–), which refers to Miguel Tamen’s book of the same title, sees Silva thinking about the modern museum defined by three objects: the specimen in the natural history museum; the artefact of anthropology; and the art object in the museum. In it she considers how objects and our understanding of them are animated, framed and reframed by the structures of an institution. More recent work, such as Swarms/Throngs (After ‘Networks, Swarms, and Multitudes’) (2018), explores how insects – and concepts such as hives, flocking and swarming – have become a reference for complex organisational systems and the encroachments of a digital, networked society. In The Zoomorphic Eye (2017) – also shot in the circular format that moves away from the traditional rectangular frame of painting and photography – computerised representations of animal species and the way they organise are interspersed with characters who tell a fictional narrative about the visual representations of the planetary processes of extinction, progress and change. Silva’s work offers a means by which to interrogate autocratic processes and, simultaneously, a way to understand how we perceive the structures of our own lives.

Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva, Environments, 2013 (installation view, e-flux, New York). Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

selected by Laura Barlow Laura Barlow is a curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. She recently cocurated an exhibition of works there by Mounira Al Solh, on through 16 February.

Friends of Interpretable Objects, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Antรณnio Jorge Silva. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon

Social Forms Pavilion, 2018 (installation view, Pavilhรฃo Branco, Lisbon). Photo: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino, Lisbon

January & February 2019

Raja’a Khalid Raja’a Khalid is an artist based in Dubai. Recent solo exhibitions include fastest with the mostest at Tashkeel and Change Your Life at Alserkal Avenue (both in Dubai, 2017). In 2018 her work was shown as part of anti, the 6th Athens Biennale, while at Grey Noise, in Dubai, she presented Palace gossip (2018), a performed reading that included a hooded gyrfalcon.

will travel, 2017 (detail), business cards (set of 1,000), powder-coated aluminium

High Noon, 2016, automotive chameleon paint, steel, mdf, rubber, five panels, 182 × 121 cm (each)

uberneon, 2017, silkscreen on Dri-fit tech fabric custom car cover for Lexus es350, bicycle hooks

ArtReview

selected by Rahel Aima I often think that F.T. Marinetti and Raja’a Khalid would have gotten along. I first met Khalid while editing the state, a Dubai-based journal of postcolonial futurities; she wrote a cogent essay about the enduring conflict between Hindi and Urdu. I remember thinking her outfit was so acutely precise, a scalpellike quality that I would later discover underwrites her multivalent practice. Marinetti died in 1944 but I feel like I – we both – know him intimately, having grown up in a city that embodies the Italian Futurist dream of speed, hypermasculinity and progress with a touch of fash. The Arabian Gulf on the extreme, ultraluxurious promontory of the centuries? It’s all terribly seductive. Most Gulf artists are content to work as sentient entrepôts – if Geneva pioneered the city-as-freeport, Dubai perfected it – repackaging the region to take it to market, often with a kitschy, self-orientalising wink. Khalid jettisons this state-approved vaporware to instead consider Gulfi material culture via its packaging. Threads and treads register temperature, from the red-wefted technical fabric of Solaro (2016), invented to protect white British soldiers in the hotter reaches of the empire, and flame-airbrushed protein powder; to

Rahel Aima is a writer and editor from the iridescent car paint-coated panels of Dubai, currently based in Brooklyn. High Noon and Santa Barbara (both 2016), and the car covers of uberblue, uberneon and uberneon ii (all 2017), made from high-performance fabrics like dri-fit and cool mesh. Plasticised palms, silky Salukis, convalescing falcons and oud-scented olfactory marketing sprinkle on local flavour – Khalid seems to work much like a molecular gastronomist – as if cut with maltodextrin. And Khalid is not concerned with the future so much as the accelerated timbre of the Gulf contemporary, and the carefully constructed scaffolding that holds it up. Conspicuous consumption, athleisure, crypto-religiosity and weaponised heritage are unpicked with particular attention to post-Western class and gender construction, as in the remarkable Change Your Life (2017), which feature swole, neonclad men training in a Mecca-green gym where masculinity meets soft power in a perfect ouroboros. This isn’t b2b so much as e2e or expat-2-expat, a world built for the mercenary neoliberal jetsam of a dying West. You’ll know them by their calling cards: have brain, will travel (will travel, 2017).

this and facing page Plantas de Paseo, 2017, performance, San Jose. Courtesy the artist

Change Your Life, 2017, gym equipment, adjustable benches, rubber flooring, punching bag, mirror panels, led filters, intermittent live performance all images Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

Navine G. Khan-Dossos When I visited Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s studio in Athens last year she showed me a suite of paintings in which brightly coloured geometric forms are arranged against a hot pink wash. The flesh tone, she told me, is that which signifies that sex is for sale in the city, while the symbols were abstracted from the bodies on shooting targets. The combination drew attention to the forced arrest and hiv-testing of female sex workers by the Greek authorities in 2012, and the imprisonment – on charges of grievous bodily harm – of those who returned positive results. The work changed the way I read a foreign city – suddenly full of pink doorways and saturated by state violence – while at the same time reminding me how ignorant I was of its codes. Like much of Khan-Dossos’s work, these paintings also portrayed individuals denied a voice without presuming the right to tell their story directly. To do so she draws on the nonfigurative traditions of Islamic art – which represents the unrepresentable through analogy with geometry – and the visual display of that digital information which underpins new modes of communication.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos is a visual artist working between London and Athens. She has exhibited and worked with institutions including salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul; Istanbul Design Biennial; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah; the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Delfina Foundation, London; and the State of Concept, Athens. Shoot the Women First opens on 9 February at Z33, Hasselt.

Those new modes of communication – in the form of social media and unregulated journalism – promulgate the stereotypes that her work challenges. Take for example Echo Chamber (2017), painted by the artist onto a long concave wall at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum. Resembling an abstract Islamic design, the mural functions as a portrait of Samantha or Sherafiyah Lewthwaite, dubbed ‘the White Widow’ after her husband’s participation in the 2005 attacks in London and her later conviction on terror offences. The work encodes its subject in a visual language, the hybrid complexity of which contradicts this woman’s crude representation by the mass media. It’s less troubling, the work suggests, unambiguously to ‘other’ those whose actions we don’t understand. That works such as Scenes from a Pre-Crime (Performance for Security Guards) (2018) are not easily decoded strikes me as the source of their power. This resistance to the urge to simplify, transcribe or make straightforwardly legible the experience of others is particularly important when artists are torn between the urge to offer a voice to those denied one and knowing that to do so could be read as exploitative. That it’s a risky strategy is acknowledged by the decision of this white British artist to change her name to an undecipherable amalgam of names suggesting different geographies, and her work is a reminder that any sincere expression of solidarity across borders, of whatever kind, is precarious and laborious. That Khan-Dossos is willing to take those risks is admirable.

Echo Chamber, 2017, site-specific installation. Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy the artist and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

ArtReview

selected by Ben Eastham Ben Eastham is Associate Editor at ArtReview

this page Scenes from a Pre-Crime (Performance for Security Guards), 2018, site-specific murals at salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul. Photos: Yiannis Hadjiaslanis. Courtesy the artist following pages Pink Discretionary Command Series v–xii, 2017, gouache on gesso panels, 80 × 60 cm (each). Photo: Athanasios Gatos. Courtesy The Breeder, Athens

January & February 2019

ArtReview

January & February 2019

Sergio Rojas Chaves Sergio Rojas Chaves lives and works in San José, Costa Rica. In 2018 his work was shown at Museum Tinguely, Basel, Die Diele, Zürich, and Kunstverein Langenhagen. In 2017 he participated in Alter Academia Residency in teor/ética and Karaoke Todos Los Días Residency in Despacio, both in San José. His work was on show at the X Central American Biennale in Limón, Costa Rica, and the 1st Performance Festival in Reunión, Honduras. Chaves is the director of independent art space Nos Vemos and cocurator of Reunión, San José.

ArtReview

selected by Federico Herrero Sergio Rojas Chaves works on affective approaches to biology ranging from examining the role of houseplants in our lives to looking at birdwatching communities and aquarium decoration, in the process offering the opportunity to see species in a new light, as living beings both in kinship with and alien to ourselves. Through this work he offers alternative views on human nature. For Despacio, the project space I founded in San José, Costa Rica, Chaves staged a performance, Plantas de Paseo (2017), in which he invited participants to take a plant from their home on a walk through the city. Throughout the event, participants discussed and reflected upon their relationship to their plant and to the flora they saw in public spaces. The work was typical of his approach to artmaking as an ethnobiological practice; here he was interested in the way plant and animal species are seen, used and represented by contemporary culture.

Federico Herrero is a For another work he has led participants Costa Rica-based artist. through guided meditation, asking them to immerse themselves in the personality of a houseplant they are familiar with. Blindfolded with ‘houseplant-masks’, we began a walk through the forest, imagining ourselves as houseplants that, for the first time, are experiencing the possibility of moving and living outdoors. The study of dynamic relationships between people, biota and environments is the starting point for Chaves’s work, yet for me his is also a search for a specific frequency, a vibration among people that is so distant as to be unheard behind the high sound volume of today’s society. In doing so he offers something of a resistance through tropical intelligence. This plays out not only through his artistic practice but also through the work of Nos Vemos, an artist-run space he coordinates in San José that serves as a platform for contemporary art and provides opportunities for younger artists to show their work, something much needed in a city like this one.

this and facing page Plantas de Paseo, 2017, performance, San José. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2019

Ja’Tovia Gary ‘The past is a foreign country,’ the British novelist L.P. Hartley famously wrote, ‘they do things differently there.’ Brooklyn-based Ja’Tovia Gary’s six-minute film An Ecstatic Experience (2015) fuses an account of nineteenth-century slavery in the us South as recalled by a former slave in 1937, reenacted in 1965 and reedited for the twenty-first century. Black-and-white tv footage shows the American actress, poet and civil-rights activist Ruby Dee channelling Fannie Moore (a former enslaved woman) describing the revelatory moment at which her mother declared that their enslavement was over: “It troubled her in her heart, to know the way we was treated”. Dee’s emotive performance is accompanied by other found footage of church services (and later a choir performing The Battle Hymn of the Republic from that same tv show), colour footage of the 2014 riots in Ferguson and the 2015 riots in Baltimore (both following episodes of police brutality or discrimination of a racially charged nature). Through the course of the film, ecstasy is framed as being both liberating and violent; history as cyclical; the past as a foundation of the present and anything other than a foreign country. Ja’Tovia Gary, a founding member of the New Negress Film Society, is currently working on a new film, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Her work is included in God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at David Zwirner, New York, through 16 February. She will have a solo show at Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, 2 February – 20 April.

Gary, whose work appears as much in the context of film festivals as it does art exhibitions, takes things a step further, integrating the medium with the message. The footage in An Ecstatic Experience is intercut or interrupted by a series of animations scratched into the celluloid by the artist. At times the scratches seem microbial, at other times like halos (suggestive, for example, of a tribute to Dee), still others like prison bars, and elsewhere like the traces of psychic emissions. The film is literally scarred, yet beautiful, and more importantly perhaps, personal: executed in a medium that’s touched, in that increasingly old-fashioned way, by the hand of the artist. Evidently this is her work. This heady mix is further explored in the film Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017), which mixes footage of a black female body (the artist’s) posing in Claude Monet’s garden with archive footage of the Frenchman painting en plein air, and found footage of a black female responding to the shooting of her boyfriend by police, all accompanied by a soundtrack of Louis Armstrong singing La Vie en Rose and Gary’s signature animations. The end result is something that flickers between drawing, collage and filmmaking, a portrait of a black female body inserting itself into an artificial landscape composed around and framed by expressions of (largely white) male power. Forces made visible as a first step towards resistance.

Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (still), 2017, film, colour & sound, 6 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

ArtReview

selected by Mark Rappolt Mark Rappolt is Editorin-Chief of ArtReview

this page An Ecstatic Experience (stills), 2015, film, colour & sound, 6 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

January & February 2019

Bili Bidjocka Bili Bidjocka lives and works in Paris. His recent solo shows include #Fiction 4 _ Where is Bili? at Fondation Donwahi, Abidjan and P.I.E.T.Ă&#x20AC;. Le Plan prend forme at Galerie mam, Douala (both 2016). In 2017, Bidjocka participated in Documenta 14 at both the Athens and Kassel sites.

ArtReview

selected by Simon Njami The artworld is getting noisier every day. So loud that one can hardly hear what is said. Everybody has embarked on the crazy race called market, fame, auctions, fairs. The reality is that some of those playing the game – namely the artists – are the victims of a global collateral damage. I call them the survivors; those who have managed to carve their own way and who, therefore, deserve my unlimited admiration. Bili Bidjocka is one of those mavericks who manage to build a world apart and to enjoy it fully, for the better and the worse. His work is never a repetition, but an eternal and obsessive quest to answer a question that cannot be expressed in words: where is the space of painting? When Bidjocka says painting, he does not mean the canvas or the old techniques. Because for him painting is the very meaning of art. It may take different shapes, different representations, but at the end the day it is what he is striving for. His favourite question is: what is a painter who doesn’t paint? Two examples: The Chess Society (2017), a utopian chess game (both physical and online) opposing Kassel to Athens, which he presented at the most recent Documenta, and The Jet-lag Experiment at the

Simon Njami is an indeKunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1999. He had the pendent lecturer, curator and idea for the latter in Madrid, while queuing at art critic based in Paris. the Prado. Some older visitors in front of him started to share their excitement about the Diego Velázquez that they were going to discover. Bili entered the conversation and understood that they had flown all the way from Australia to live this moment. The concept of Bidjocka’s show, which the artist named the most expansive and unsuccessful exhibition of his life, was simple: if some people could spend days travelling just to see a painting, the only way to return art to the centre of life would be to test peoples’ will to sacrifice their time for the art they pretended to love so dearly. Within the museum, Bidjocka recreated an apartment. Food was provided daily and, in this totally sealed space, time was reversed: when it was noon outside, it was midnight inside. He invited a couple of his fellow artists to present some of their works in the space, and the only condition for anyone, the press included, to attend the show was to accept to spend 24 hours within the exhibition. Twelve people agreed.

this and facing page The Chess Society, 2017 (installation views, Documenta 14, Athens). Courtesy the artist and L’Agence à Paris

January & February 2019

Henrike Naumann Henrike Naumann, born in the German Democratic Republic, is an artist whose immersive installations combine videos, sound and scenographic spaces as a way to explore the roots of the rise of the German ultraright over the last two decades. She lives in Berlin.

this page ddr noir: Schichtwechsel, 2018, mixed-media installation (furniture, props and paintings by Karl Heinz Jakob). Photos: Eric Tschernow. Courtesy Galerie im Turm, Berlin

ArtReview

selected by Sebastian Cichocki In 1944 George Orwell wrote in Tribune, the leftwing British newspaper: ‘Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: “What is Fascism?”’ Seventy-five years later, the question remains unanswered. Were the riots in Chemnitz, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville or the National Radical Camp’s handin-hand march with Forza Nuova through Warsaw on Independence Day fascism? There is one thing of which we can be sure: once we do know, it will already be too late. ‘Resistance Against Fascism is the Best Art’ read a banner hung by Occupy Museums in New York’s Whitney Museum on the occasion of the #J20 Art Strike back in 2017. The slogan hasn’t really caught on, which makes the art of Henrike Naumann all the more urgent. Naumann comes from Zwickau in the German Democratic Republic (she foregrounds the fact that she was born in a country that no longer exists), which was a bastion of the National Socialist Underground. Her art places the viewer in an uncomfortable situation. Instead of giving openly antifascist declarations sprinkled with art-gallery confetti, she offers an unpleasant insight into the mundane, unleavened, small-town roots of fascism. Her installation 14 Words (2018) – a sterile, empty shop space – at mmk Frankfurt is an investigation into the Order, a white supremacist neo-Nazi group active in the us during the 1980s (the title of the work

Sebastian Cichocki works derives from the 14 slogans from Hitler’s 1925 as the deputy director at manifesto Mein Kampf adopted by the Order’s the Museum of Modern Art leader, David Lane). Her 2017 exhibition Das in Warsaw. Between 2005 and 2008, he worked as director of Reich at the Kronprinzenpalais, meanwhile, the Centre for Contemporary was devoted to the Reichsbürger movement, Art Kronika in Bytom. comprising the self-appointed ‘heirs’ of the German Empire who question the legitimacy of the federal government and see themselves as ‘indigenous people’ under occupation. In a room filled with items of modernist design, in a predominantly black-and-white palette, was a cushion bearing the Parteiadler eagle, the emblem of Nazi-era Germany. The artist began her career with scenography and later moved through film to visual art. Most of her installations resemble furnished stage sets, through which Naumann deals with our everyday and homely fascism, assessing the conditions in which the historical monster is being resurrected. Looming in the background of her work, however, are questions concerning the role of realism, the political engagement of artists under Communism – her splendid exhibition at the Galerie im Turm, Berlin, included paintings by Karl Heinz Jakob, a member of the Guild of Artists of the gdr and Naumann’s grandfather, amidst her own installation – and the neglected consequences of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Das Reich, 2017 (installation view, Kronprinzenpalais, Berlin). Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy kow, Berlin

January & February 2019

Eurotique (detail), 2018, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art

14 Words, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy the artist and mmk Tower Frankfurt

ArtReview

Palexpo / 31.01 - 03.02.2019

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Art Reviewed

of my fingers the plucking rods 91

Turner Prize 2018 Tate Britain, London 26 September – 6 January In recent years the Turner Prize has struggled against the nagging criticism that it has lost its relevance and that its selections have been too ‘insiderish’. But following last year’s shortlist, when the prize abolished its fifty-year age limit while emphasising a greater ethnic diversity (including Hurvin Anderson and prizewinner Lubaina Himid), this year’s selectors have made an unabashed turn to artists who, as the Tate’s blurb puts it, are ‘tackling pressing issues in society today’. And so prizewinner Charlotte Prodger’s video-essay is about queer identity and its fluidity. Luke Willis Thompson’s film portraits are about police violence and the politics of race. Forensic Architecture’s digital reconstruction of the violent eviction of a Bedouin settlement by Israeli forces is about activism speaking truth to power. Naeem Mohaiemen’s two feature-length videos are about remembering the receding political histories of the Middle East and the Global South. And this is a turn that reflects the broader shift of an artworld increasingly concerned with art’s capacity to intervene in culture and society. There are risks in curating a (prize) exhibition that is more intent on making a point about itself, or about art’s role, than it is about identifying the best examples of the art that’s being made at the moment. There are other artists working on other subjects, which, though not the ‘pressing issues’ that motivate the prize’s selectors, may still generate great work. So while it feels like good pr, the question of a wider idea of artistic value is sidelined in favour of pushing an agenda. Putting the issues tackled ahead of how artists tackle them also risks overlooking how their work operates on its own terms: how an artwork excites or engages its audience, how it handles the conventions of its genre, how it conceives itself as an object in the institutional and cultural space of the gallery. Because whatever is said about the issues they tackle, these are often uneven, unresolved works that do both more and less than the focus on issues supposes them to have done.

Prodger’s bridgit (2016) is a voiced-over video-diary of sorts in which her narrator twines the mutable names of pagan goddesses, Scotland’s Neolithic stone circles, shots of the country’s landscape and seascape, into the narrator’s diaristic experience of coming out, of being misrecognised as a man, discussing theories of lesbian separatism, while an account of the oblivion and reawakening from a hospital general anaesthetic threads through it all. It’s the most immersive, subtle and suggestive work here, yet there’s a ‘message’, about the fluidity of selfhood, and it’s as if Prodger’s rhetorical impulse to assert this is frequently at odds with her lyricism. After 33 minutes, it ends strangely abruptly, as if satisfied with the point it has made. If Prodger is the subject of bridgit’s introspection, introspection of another sort defines Thompson’s silent, monumental, blackand-white cine-portraits of subjects whose private tragedies are also the public outrages of race politics: Diamond Reynolds (who witnessed her boyfriend shot dead in their car by Minnesota police) is the subject of autoportrait (2017). Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016) depicts Brandon Groce (grandson of Cherry Groce, whose shooting by police in 1985 sparked the Brixton riots) and Graeme Burke (son of Joy Gardner, who died of injuries sustained as uk immigration officers bound and gagged her to deport her to Jamaica, in 1993). Groce and Burke stare impassively to camera, Reynolds looks out of frame stoically, or at one point is singing, though we cannot know her words. Without these backstories they could be anybody, but Thompson’s films depend on that priming, which presents us with a kind of trap; framing our response to them in political terms encourages us to think of them as memorials, or denunciations. This sets up Reynolds, Burke and Groce as stand-ins for a bigger issue. Yet, ironically, it is their right to retain their own image – to be seen as oneself rather than one’s public tragedy – that unbalances these films. The insistent attempt

facing page, top Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, 2017, 35 mm film, 4 min. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy Tate Photography, London

to make a point is a problem that haunts Thompson’s other film, _Human (2018), composed of closeups of a model of a little house made by artist Donald Rodney (founding member of the blk Art Group) from the artist’s own dead skin (Rodney died of sickle-cell anaemia in 1998). Again, the monumentalising of this fragile object, already photographed by Rodney, seems freighted with good intentions. The problem is not, as some identitarian critics have pretended, that Willis’s collaborators are black and he is not. It is that ventriloquising the histories of others to make a political statement grates against the agency of those for whom one attempts to speak. Still, if Prodger’s and Willis’s works don’t align fully with the claims made for them, it’s maybe because there’s a sense that, in their attention to form, they’re not simply vehicles for position-taking, and that their aesthetics might produce something more than their rhetoric. It’s harder to say the same of the other shortlisted artists. Why is Forensic Architecture’s sophisticated investigative activism, succinctly represented by the projection and documentary installation The Long Duration of a Split Second (2018), presented here rather than, say, located in the battles for human rights being fought in the media and through the courts? As for Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a threescreen essay on the history of the Non-Aligned Movement, it might be a valuable contribution to the subject, but it’s not clear why any similar docu-essay, by a ‘non-artist’, could not equally be presented here. If this at first sounds like outmoded gatekeeping, it in fact reveals that, in their preoccupation with appearing politically and socially engaged, art’s curatorial agendas are often more concerned with reductively celebrating hot-topic content than with celebrating the varied complexities of artworks and artists. That itself is a form of gatekeeping. And that might also be a pressing issue in society today. J.J. Charlesworth

facing page, bottom Charlotte Prodger, bridgit, 2016 (still), single-channel video with sound, 32 min. Courtesy the artist, Koppe Astner, Glasgow, and Hollybush Gardens, London

ArtReview

January & February 2019

Raoul De Keyser ouevre smak, Ghent 22 September – 27 January The grandest collating thus far of works by this painter’s painter par excellence – some 100 paintings, watercolours and works on paper from the 1960s to his death in 2012 – oeuvre isn’t a typically straightforward and chronological retrospective. Appropriately, given the urbane twistiness of Raoul De Keyser’s paintings, which hover soulfully between representation and psychic landscape, it’s more elliptical than that, its centrepiece being a constructed, oddly angled room-within-a-room that shows how the Deinze, Belgium-born artist returned to and reworked motifs over the years: a monkey puzzle tree, for example, or an uneasy pair of rectangles. Yet despite its cyclical approach to time, the exhibition does open with a reconstruction of De Keyser’s eureka moment at the tail-end of the 1960s. Up to that point – as a prefatory roomful of works demonstrates – he’d spent half a decade exploring a post-Matissean intimist realm, making small, loosely brushed, strongly structural studies of window frames and greenery beyond, fragments of campsites, schematic dogs, etc, the outlines steadily thickening until they bordered on Pop and turned into freestanding shallow boxes. Around 1968, though, De Keyser started paying attention to a football field near his house, taking photographs as sources and composing tightly in the frame, then painting goalposts and chalk lines

in closeup until they bordered on abstraction while still being clearly, drolly, the worldly things they were, the chalk marks on grass situated as sporty parallels to the painter’s process of decorating a square. Bathetic cues like football socks hung around awhile, but within a few years De Keyser was deep into an economical language of simple lines on plain grounds whose charm, intelligence and oblique emotional pull are easy to see but hard to describe, except to say that he was able to invest gnomic brushmarks with a mixture of frayed casualness and consistent right placement that feels both very human and reflects a man playing a difficult game at a very high level. De Zandvio (Sand Flea) (1976) radiates white curves across a dark grey ground like tightly nested giant commas; it has something in common with Frank Stella’s early work, but quivers equivocally in a way alien to the American. The four-part Tegendraads (Against the Grain) (1978) barely catches little yellow, blue and red marks, like sticking plasters, as they float towards the edge of the canvas and, in the fourth, disappear, replaced by some stripy underpainting. What’s going on here feels like an event, a process, plaintive and somehow funny, but beyond that it’s up to you. Just as this work is in conversation with Minimalism, during the 1980s De Keyser clearly noted what was going on: some of his

canvases from this era are close to Richter, especially in polychrome palette, though the latter wouldn’t make a painting with the tug of P.R. (Obstakel) (P.R. Obstacle) (1990), where horizontal brushing on a mustardy ground seems to push even further apart the green and red blocks veering into or out of the frame. During the 1990s De Keyser grew looser, more prone to blats and smudges, though his touch – at least in this sizeable cherry-picking – is remarkably consistent. In Untitled (Speed) (1995), four overlapping olive rectangles enter an off-white arena stage left, then are fuzzed by a bit of bravura overbrushing in a lighter, related shade. Things are often going somewhere in these paintings, you notice: they’re only here for the moment. In 1984, the artist’s wife died; he continued painting and the loss shades the ensuing works once you hear of it. Yet an air of mortality hangs around many of his compositions, feinting when you try to grasp it; the paintings turn consolingly playful. At the end, neatly, in a wall of small paintings incorporating collage, De Keyser returns to the football pitch: in one image, a player lies on the pitch, his head on a white line, exhausted, asleep, maybe dead. Someone once said – I paraphrase – that art should feel like the logical endpoint of a thinking process, but you don’t know what that process was. In oeuvre, you see that demonstrated a hundred times over. Martin Herbert

Green, Green, Green, 2012, oil on canvas mounted on wood panel, 30 × 22 cm. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © Family Raoul De Keyser / sabam Belgium 2018. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong; and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

ArtReview

Melanie Manchot Open Ended Now mac val, Vitry-sur-Seine 20 October – 24 February “I haven’t seen swingers like this in a long time!” gushes a teacher in the documentary of Melanie Manchot’s live danceathon, Dance (All Night, London) (2017). The camera pans around enthusiastic professional and amateur dancers who are laughing freely on a temporary stage above London’s Liverpool Street station. Who said Londoners were arrogant and insular? Manchot throws a good party: Dance (All Night, Paris) (2011), a precursor to the London version, and Celebration (Cyprus Street) (2010), a nostalgiatinged East London street party, are among this captivating selection of her event-based, collaborative works from the past two decades. Indeed, the London-based German artist intended the open-plan gallery space to resemble a nightclub: dark but for the illuminated video and spotlit photographic works dotted around, vying for the viewer’s attention. The club ambience invites visitors to lose their inhibitions; Manchot frequently offers the same invitation to the subjects of her work. Manchot constructs situations that initiate a bond of intimacy with or between her subjects – mostly strangers. While the situations are artificial, reactions to them are not predetermined. There is a sense of urgency in the exhibition title, Open Ended Now – a plea, perhaps, to remain open to others at a time when Brexit and populism are exacerbating intolerance and

discrimination towards immigrants and those of a different political opinion. In an early work, For a Moment Between Strangers (2001), a hidden camera captures Manchot’s seemingly innocent request for a kiss from passersby on the streets of cities including London, Los Angeles and New York, inciting reactions of outrage, embarrassment and polite acquiescence that make the viewer consider cultural, generational and gendered differences in definitions of personal space. With Security (2005), in which a succession of Ibizan nightclub bouncers stand in front of the closed doors of their places of employment before stripping awkwardly, but completely, to camera in broad daylight, Manchot ups the voyeuristic unease of the viewer – for whose benefit are these men stripping? Does a female gaze make the viewer more selfconscious about the politics of voyeurism? Manchot makes unhurried work: recording encounters that unfold in real time, or across an extended time-period, such as 11/18 (2015), for which she filmed her daughter for one minute each month for seven years before adulthood. Casting (2018) uses the exhibition’s duration as a timeframe for writing a new film: weekly auditions allow visitors to cast themselves in a role of their choosing, with a scriptwriter poised to respond to their proposals. Manchot thus encourages us to appreciate

process over grand finales in her films. In The Dream Collector (2008) she lies in wait – for up to two hours – for sleepers in a Mexico City park to awake, prompting them to recount their dreams, in vivid and often moving detail. The most surreal of her works here, Corned Star (2018), itself plays out like a dream, juxtaposing a thoroughbred horse against an apocalyptic setting of modernist ruins. Dreams, night-time, childhood: Manchot is attracted to the liminal spaces and transitional moments in which people are less guarded. She supports those, like the parkour runners in Tracer (2013), who defy conventional codes for occupying public space, and she emboldens others to take risks. This is especially poignant in The Ladies (2017), in which Manchot photographed a group of Bangladeshi women in Cambridge in spaces around the university and city that they had previously avoided because they considered them the reserve of a white male elite. Since Manchot began working 20 years ago, our social behaviour has shifted towards online encounters. Can we trust strangers in real life? Are we capable of making long-term commitments, of taking leaps of faith? Manchot’s work, right up to the latest danceathon, makes a persuasive case that we can. The question is whether we need a catalyst, like Manchot, to compel us to make the jump. Jennifer Thatcher

Dance (All Night, London), 2017, three-channel video installation, 33 min 15 sec. Phot0: Martin Argyroglo. © adagp, Paris. Courtesy the artist and mac val, Vitry-sur-Seine

January & February 2019

Blair Thurman Exquisite Course Peres Projects, Berlin 16 November – 21 December Curves, bends, flyovers and chicanes: Blair Thurman’s constructions immediately conjure up the zip and vim of Formula One racetracks. Many of the Louisiana-born, fiftysomething artist’s works are hybrids that see him applying acrylic paint to canvas on carved wood; they look like wall-mounted sculptures. Some of these are pulled into groovy shapes that hint at 1960s (P)optimism: stretched ovals, beanlike, as with Bacardi Circuit (2018), whose central bat logo refers to the critter on the label of the famous Cuban rum bottle. The twists of Crazy 8 (2018) summon aerial images of the great circuits – Monza, Spa, Silverstone. The shape of the black painted numeral here equally recalls the plastic Scalextric sets of childhood, while the Lotus green and white Thurman deploys makes one nostalgic for the deadly daring of a Jim Clark and the iconic colours of his racer. The blue-and-yellow serpentine turns and knots evident in Mr. Salty (2018) reference a prerace nibble – a packet of pretzel twists made by Nabisco – that Thurman, with infallible logic, imagines as the shape of a fictional circuit. The work his show is named after, Exquisite Course (2018), is another track outline, this one on a background of reflecting Plexiglas coloured a lurid urine-yellow. The title, clearly,

plays on the Surrealist game of ‘exquisite corpse’, in which the collective assembly of words or images takes place without participants knowing what has gone before, the result an anarchic type of collage. Thurman’s methods are more controlled. He suggestively uses the word ‘course’ here with all its multiple understandings: the route followed by a road or racetrack, but also as a verb, ‘to course’ like a river or, in its other meaning, to chase. The glamour of fast vehicles and motion is made explicit in The Speedway Painting (1992), a 19-part curve of canvases in rectangles of different colours that nod to Ellsworth Kelly’s geometries. If anything, though, Thurman’s palette is more dream-bright, redolent of the extremes of advertising or food colouring, as with his use of Pop tones like the acid-green of candied angelica and the Penelope Pitstoppink seen in Fuel Cell (2018). He’s fond too of silver spraypaint-jobs that call to mind petrolheads tinkering in their garages, as with the circular Norway or the Highway (2017), which may well reference the country’s upcoming £37-billion high-speed motorway and looks like a spiky customised hubcap. Tight spirals feature in the black, grey and white curves of another oval, The Man

The Speedway Painting, 1992, acrylic on canvas in 19 parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin

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Who Fell to Earth (2018), complete with central void, its swerves like the flow of water swirling around a plughole. Here too are examples of Thurman’s neon works, such as Gallery Go Round 2 (2018): another course, this time of thin glass tubing in the shape of a fence or the gate to a paddock, its tangerine glow resembling the initial shimmer of street lighting at dusk and its watery reflection on the gallery floor like that cast on wet asphalt at night. More specifically, the colouring Thurman uses here has a similar nectarine tinge to the bendy strips of plastic track still favoured by the ‘Hot Wheels’ enthusiasts, of which he’s apparently one. Invented by industrial designer Elliot Handler, Hot Wheels also utilised the skills of Harry Bentley Bradley from General Motors, who created the initial set of brilliantly customised model cars. This pairing might be the biggest influence on Thurman’s work. His own constructions echo the exhilaration you felt on first seeing those speeding coupes looping the loop. The dizzying, swooping forms here seem inspired by the adrenaline rush of skids and stunt jumps, a happier time when humankind thrilled to the innocent joys of defying gravity. John Quin

Petrit Halilaj Shkrepëtima Fondazione Merz, Turin 29 October – 3 February In a small town in the depths of the Kosovan countryside lies the dilapidated shell of a former cultural centre. Many of its walls have crumbled, its roof has collapsed, its floor is ankle deep with rubbish. It’s not that remarkable a place, and Runik isn’t that remarkable a town, but it’s where Petrit Halilaj grew up. The cultural centre once thrummed with life, but all that’s left is the crap that remains when things have been forgotten, when the world around you has moved on. And now, chunks of it are in an art gallery in Turin. The big metaphor at the heart of Halilaj’s work at the Fondazione Merz – the final part in a trilogy of shows that started with a performance in Runik’s dilapidated cultural centre, became an exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee and is now an installation – isn’t subtle. It’s a lobbed breezeblock of a message: his childhood cultural centre in his rural hometown is in ruins, so his culture itself is in ruins. That culture embodies a sense of self, identity and purpose: and it’s all been left bereft and derelict. Now Halilaj is trying to spark, or ‘shkrepëtima’, it back to life.

Scattered around the space of the Fondazione Merz are the remnants of that cultural centre: chunks of timber, masonry and bricks hang suspended from the ceiling, draping towards a bed covered in wood and clay recreations of Neolithic objects, copies of artefacts found in and around Runik. It’s as if Halilaj has frozen time just as a tornado ripped the building from its foundations, dragging the debris up into the sky in a sort of arte povera cyclone. High platforms, wooden structures like guard towers, line the rest of the space. Toy rifles and blackboards hang from red curtains suspended from the platforms. These are the objects of the town’s demise, and the symbols of what was lost. Education and tradition blighted by neglect. But angelic winged creatures, floating up by the ceiling, hint that these objects could also be the symbols of rebirth. The problem is, it’s pretty obvious that you’re surrounded by props from a performance rather than finished pieces. It ends up feeling like the detritus of

art rather than the work itself, objects that once meant something but now just represent those ideas. It even looks like a stage set, begging dramatically to be brought alive by actual action. Drawings in the adjoining room feel like an afterthought, and, down in the basement, a film documents the performance at the heart of all this, but that also doesn’t feel that fulfilling, because it’s not the performance, it’s not the art, it’s a document of it. And that’s only half of a story. Despite those shortcomings, in this messy builders’ yard of an exhibition, Halilaj is trying to cobble together a sense of identity out of the ashes of a cultural bonfire, trying to make something new out of the ruins. It’s reconstruction out of literal destruction, or at the very least dereliction. This is bigger than the objects in front of you, this is Halilaj dragging eyes and attention back to his hometown, and his hometown’s cultural corpse back to life through his art, and there might just be a pulse there. Eddy Frankel

Shkrepëtima, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Renato Ghiazza. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Merz, Turin

January & February 2019

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller The Instrument of Troubled Dreams Oude Kerk, Amsterdam 24 November – 29 April A dog barks somewhere, horse hooves trot past, a cello plays two chords. The sound of a medieval chorus accompanies the church organ filling the hallowed space of Amsterdam’s oldest building, transfiguring its ceilings, seeming to raise the soaring roof even higher. Hidden behind wooden screens, where the high altar used to be, in the middle of the Oude Kerk’s choir, stands Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Instrument of Troubled Dreams (2018) – a black Mellotron. The orientation of three rows of chairs beckons you to sit down and play. Short descriptions of themes have been tagged above the Mellotron’s 72 keys, divided into three categories: sound, music and voice. We have experienced most of the sounds – the weather, animal noises, etc – of the ‘sound’ keys before. Other sounds visitors will only know in their mediated forms, like machine guns firing and the roar of airplane bombers. For the instrumental recordings the artists worked together with film music composers, the choral and organ portions recorded in the church itself. The 11 narratives triggered by the ‘voice’ keys (and spoken in Cardiff’s wellmodulated voice) structure the Mellotron’s sounds and guide your imagination through stories from the past, present and future.

“Too many people crowded together, the boat’s toilet was filled by the second day, water was running short,” begins one of the narratives. From this story fragment the Mellotron player can layer in the sound of a person breathing heavily. The voice continues: “She thought there must be a murder onboard as the people grew fewer every day and their faces more terrified.” The tragic scene can be underscored with a sound effect like ‘windgusts’, or one can give it the uncanny atmosphere of a 1960s horror movie by accompanying it with the ‘carnival organ’. While the narrator’s story seems to have taken place outside of any particular time, it is impossible not to imagine a contemporary refugee crossing the treacherous Mediterranean waters. The experience of the narrations recalls consuming fiction, which works – as in the reception of movies, as Stanley Cavell has noted – ‘not as if I am present at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory)’. Cavell also succinctly argued that sound in film creates space, which is seemingly shared by characters and viewers. While the space of a filmic world is visibly present but not physically accessible, The Instrument of Troubled Dreams builds

The Instrument of Troubled Dreams, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Maarten Nauw. Courtesy Oude Kerk, Amsterdam

ArtReview

up a merely audible space that we can enter like a sound sculpture. As the acousmatic sounds in the church provide no imagery, we automatically activate our own visual recall to fill the space. The combination of narratives, environmental sounds and emotionally charged music viscerally evokes the experience of a dream, or possibly a dystopian nightmare, one conjured by collective traumas and, more than that, tons of mediated realities stored in our minds. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s collaborative works play with our perception, attention and consciousness. Not everyone is a fan of this kind of art; the pair’s ‘video walks’ in particular, where viewers ‘follow’ a prerecorded walk on a video camera while wearing headphones, have been criticised for their engrossing but obtrusive quality. Their critics’ argument seems to derive from a rather outdated theoretical idea relating to the power of manipulative media and the vulnerability of the masses, which is dismissive of the audience’s ability to engage intellectually with the medium. The Instrument of Troubled Dreams, conversely, manipulates the visitor’s perception of both mediated and unmediated realities, and rather than exploiting the senses, actively sharpens them. Teresa Retzer

Fredrik Værslev Fredrik Værslev As I Imagine Him Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 29 September – 6 January Fredrik Værslev works in series, each of which is founded on an unusual concept for the production of paintings – as is amply clarified by this midcareer retrospective, which brings together nine painting series and one photo series from the last decade. In the central hall, the Canopy Paintings (2012–18) hang high on the wall – as canopies are supposed to – though sitting flush to it. The striped canvases, reminiscent of 1950s abstraction, are based on awnings in the artist’s childhood home. And just like real canopies, these works have been exposed to ever-changing weather conditions; they owe their natural patina to snow, sunshine and rain. Opposite the Canopy Paintings are the Terrazzo Paintings (2010), painted after the imitation-marble floors found in many Norwegian housing blocks. Although the dots and specks are rendered meticulously and the picture surface is, appropriately, ground smooth, one can’t help thinking of Jackson Pollock’s drippings. Small preliminary studies for the Terrazzo Paintings are placed in several models of simple suburban houses, the Dollhouse Series (2016). Together, these three series testify to Værslev’s main preoccupations: how does abstract painting fit within our everyday

environment? And how to employ abstraction to convey personal memories? Each of the works looks good on its own, but they’re better when seen in a row. The museum’s galleries, with their triangular walls and curved ceilings, are not exactly tailor-made for the display of paintings, but Værslev did not interfere with Renzo Piano’s obtrusive museum architecture. His spatial layout is a grand and elegant gesture that adds surplus value to some of the works. The smallest room contains the largest pieces, the Sail Paintings (2016), loosely based on the sails in the harbour of Værslev’s hometown, Drøbak. Because one of them didn’t fit on the wall, it is hung from the ceiling, floating in space, so one can see the verso of the work as well: it’s as if the painting is mimicking a sail. Displayed on the first floor are paintings produced with unorthodox techniques. The stains and patches in the Mildew Paintings (2013), for example, are the result of mildew that grew on the primed canvases when they were rolled up and stored outdoors for a period of 12 months: rather than the outcome of artistic control, these blurry monochromes are products of nature. The Trolley Paintings (2012) result

from mechanised labour: their straight lines are painted with a device commonly used to mark lines on sport fields. Værslev’s Shelf Paintings (2009), which spun off from the artist’s mother’s desire to have a painting with a shelf for displaying knickknacks, are partly produced by friends and family. The most impressive room combines the Pyramid Paintings (2015) with colour prints from the photo series My Architecture (2008). The paintings are made of leftover canvases, stitched and stretched on an aluminium frame with a distinct pyramidal form. The shape was inspired by a construction used in the Scandinavian building industry to cover windows when a facade is being renovated. The photos tabulate facades of different office blocks, cannily shot from such an angle that they seem to be part of one and the same building. The combination of these two series articulates Værslev’s ambition to connect painting to architecture, or more precisely, to the urban environment of the Norwegian welfare state in which he grew up. Abstract painting, no longer at the service of modernist progression, is here coming home. Dominic van den Boogerd

Untitled (Canopy Painting), 2012–18, spraypaint, primer and white spirit on cotton canvas, 230 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Standard, Oslo

January & February 2019

Boris Lurie Pop-Art After the Holocaust Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków 26 October – 3 February Theodor Adorno famously wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’. The failure of attempts to reconcile art and trauma in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust similarly guides multimedia artist Boris Lurie, as this new retrospective of his work demonstrates. Lurie, who died in 2008, was a Holocaust survivor: in 1941 he was deported from Riga, aged sixteen, and subsequently imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps (Stutthof, then Buchenwald) until 1945. Lurie used a number of symbols, including the pinup girl, the yellow star, the swastika, women’s undergarments, sharp knives, archival photographs from concentration camps and, most famously, the word ‘no’ – part of an anti-Pop, antiartworld movement spearheaded by himself, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. The show is a single packed room: in one instance, no less than 51 multimedia works either featuring the word ‘no’ in print, cursive or scrawl, or painted a bright, angry red, are hung in tight columns of seven or more. Installed on a large yellow-star counter display at the centre of the gallery floor, a number of long serrated knives are forced violently into blocks of cracked cement (Knife in Cement series, 1972–74). The next wall is more serene: seven untitled mixed-media canvases from 1962, three large-

scale, four medium-size. Each work shares the same colour scheme, at least from a distance – a bluish-greyish-greenish saturated cutout collage transferred to canvas, washed over lightly with white, then spatter-smacked at random with neon orange, red, yellow and pink paint. The whitewashing of the crisp collage leaves the impression of something faded and timeworn – warping picture-perfect smiling children, proud husbands and women as both pinup mistress and doting mother from 1960s advertisements into dredged-up slurry from a murky past. In one work, a naked woman cut from newsprint kneels in the lower-left corner, posed suggestively. But she’s been decapitated by Lurie’s collaging: a yellow cube of cartoon butter tilts, poised to slide down her body, in a garish union of the salacious and the saccharine. What’s more, the process of making these works – the agent used to transfer photograph to canvas, perhaps, or the white paint layer above – has worn down not just the colour but the print of the multimedia collage, decomposing the images in webs of holes and exposing the stitched white cloth of canvas underneath. In this way, the pristine images one could find in any magazine are inverted: they become precious, delicate,

fragile. By memorialising the mundane as it crumbles before the viewer’s eyes, Lurie calls the viewer to see the everyday as both sacred and slipping away, in so doing evoking powerful sensations of memory and loss. In this way, Lurie uses a visual language of iconography popularised by Pop artists and Abstract Expressionists to render legible his trauma, his grief and at times his fury. The exhibition’s curators vacillate between giving no details and, perhaps, saying too much – the works presented come with no individualised wall text or descriptions, save for a series of short paragraphs at the exhibition’s entrance: a limited biography of the artist that includes, almost at random, the fact that the pinups are intended to represent the bodies of female Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Save for this ‘clue’, the viewer is given all of Lurie’s jumbled, manipulated and sometimes mauled hieroglyphs and none of his ciphers, and is thus left with few words, only feelings. Perhaps this reflects the fact that the crux of Lurie’s work defies any single solution; rather, it reflects the chaos of emotions that comes with trying to codify atrocity between the symbolic explanation and the messy truth. Eliza Levinson

no on Reversed Pinups, from the series Hard Writings, 1972, mixed media, 48 × 57 cm. Courtesy Boris Lurie Art Foundation, New York

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ArtReview

Erkan Özgen Giving Voices Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 13 November – 24 February In 2009, during a residency in Barcelona, Erkan Özgen met Antoni Tàpies. As they declared their admiration for each other’s work, Tàpies suggested they should, one day, exhibit together. And though it would not happen during the older man’s lifetime (he died in 2012), it seems fitting that when the Kurdish artist’s works eventually found their way to the Tàpies foundation, the exhibition should coincide with a rehanging of the Catalan artist’s most political output, made under Franco’s dictatorship. While the two bodies of work couldn’t be more distinct formally – Tàpies’s raw, abstract ‘matter paintings’ and assemblages against Özgen’s short, incisive documentarylike videos – they share the urge to give shape and voice to the violence its makers witnessed. The focal point of Giving Voices, Özgen’s first solo show in Spain, is Purple Muslin (2018), a 16-minute documentation of a refugee camp for Yazidis, a religious-minority population forced to flee northern Iraq to escape persecution by isis.

The act of giving voice is nowhere as resonant as in these interviews with Yazidi women, so eager are they to vocalise their situation – the atrocities of their persecution, but mostly the sense of displacement and purposelessness they feel, often resulting in depression. Here, talking is a way to stay sane, or at least alive. Özgen’s use of video becomes a mode of empowerment for his subjects and a lens for the artist to reflect on the psychological impact of conflict. In the next room a four-minute video, Wonderland (2016), includes another poignant interview. A deaf child, sitting on the floor of an apartment in his pyjamas, mimes the atrocities he saw before escaping Syria – an emotive and potent account that hints at the limits of spoken language and the potential of other forms of communication to express the traumas experienced by survivors. Projected on the other side of the room, as an almost perverse counterpart, a new work,

Aesthetics of Weapons (2018), portrays an anonymous Turkish policeman and his disturbing relationship with his firearm. While the man’s face remains mostly out of frame, the camera offers closeups of his hands as he manipulates his gun, at times caressing and kissing it; he goes on to describe his affection for it, personifying and eroticising it. When Özgen turns the camera on statesanctioned violence, he gives space and visibility to another perspective, which, though it appears initially psychopathic, turns out to be more equivocal: for in sharing such feelings (it’s surprising to see how eager he is to communicate this unsettling intimacy), the policeman displays a form of vulnerability. And it’s this tentative approach to the complex psychological roots and legacies of violence, leaving viewers uncertain about where to position themselves, that makes Özgen’s work so cutting. Louise Darblay

Wonderland, 2016, single-channel hd video, colour, sound, 3 min 54 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Han Nefkens Foundation

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Luleå Biennial Various venues, Norrbotten 17 November – 17 February As I fly out of Norrbotten, Sweden’s arctic region, I sit amid rows of soldiers. Luleå, the port city from which we departed, is located 900km north of Stockholm and provides access to a military site known as the Vidsel Test Range. Once iron and timber, this region’s natural resource is now its emptiness: its nature reserve is rented out for bomb testing. I’m the odd one out, having been here for the Luleå Biennial, which was set up in 1991 by a local art collective, the Kilen Art Group, and has now been taken over by three young curators, Emily Fahlén, Asrin Haidari and Thomas Hämén. The set of exhibitions, showing work by 37 artists, begins in Luleå, occupying unlikely venues – from a Cold War bunker to a crane at the old harbour – and expands into the regional towns of Jokkmokk, Boden and Kiruna, the last a five-hour bus ride north into the Arctic Circle. Titled Tidal Ground, the biennale is themed around darkness. At the beginning of the winter season, when the days are less than six hours long, a golden sun streaks along the horizon, seeming continually to be setting. At the Luleå Konsthall, a cultural centre on the seafront, familiar works such as Francis Alÿs’s film Paradox of Praxis 5 (2013), which documents a burning soccer ball as it is kicked through the streets of Ciudad Juárez by night, are placed alongside regional art. Sami artist Britta Marakatt-Labba has embroidered a flour sack left in the Arctic by German soldiers during the Second World War, which is displayed framed

beside a Sami wartime passport. MarakattLabba’s father was a reindeer herder and Sami – one of the indigenous people of the northerly region of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia – who witnessed the Nazi occupation of Norway during the 1940s. The sack is embroidered with a reindeer, a postage stamp and a gun. As these artefacts attest, the militarisation of the northern borders prevented nomadic herders from travelling through their lands, a cultural region known as Sápmi. Punctuating the exhibition, meanwhile, are sculptures by Norwegian artist Hanni Kamaly, anthropomorphic assemblages of steel rods that droop and dangle like limbs. In Freddie Gray (2016), named after the AfricanAmerican man who died in Baltimore police custody in 2015, five steel legs are held in a metal harness, a trapped figure that resembles both the architecture of confinement and the incarcerated body. Kamaly’s sculptures illustrate degradation, turning humans into things – a ‘thingification’ that softens the ground for transgression, be it of indigenous or civil rights. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a chain of fortresses and defence facilities were built across the Norrbotten borderland, preparations for a war that never came. One example is Mjölkuddsberget, a hill on the outskirts of Luleå tunnelled out during the Cold War. Decommissioned in 2000, Milk Point Mountain is now privately owned, its dank bunkers deployed as a mushroom farm and

Luleå Biennial, 2018 (installation view, Luleå Konsthall). Courtesy Luleå Biennial

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bitcoin mine. Raqs Media Collective’s The Blood of Stars (2017) takes over freezing shafts and caverns, which I roam with a handheld torch. Telephones ring in cold, empty rooms while spotlights range over the ghostly concrete chambers. Across town, in a small group show at the artist-run Galleri Syster, most compelling are the pearly sculptures by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri that make up Spectrum I (2016). Displayed along a wall and shellacked glossy, glittery pinks, the cone-shaped objects look like futuristic telephones, or perhaps sex toys. I soon learn they are 3d models of drill heads – tools of extreme destruction, used to bore holes into the earth’s crust. A two-hour bus ride north is the town of Jokkmokk, home to the Ájtte Museum, established in 1989 by the Sami community to tell the story of their people. Here, works by seven artists have been integrated among the exhibits of Sami furs and shamanic drums. In one room, Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (2017) plays on a television set, following the artist as he retraces his 1996 journey from Kurdistan to Europe, balancing a dizzying sculpture made of mirrors on his nose; in another room, a mirror work by Swedish artist Lap-See Lam reflects back Sami artefacts. It’s a subtle intervention – like the biennale itself – one that draws attention to what is here already, reminding viewers that this landscape is anything but empty. Izabella Scott

Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement The Sound of Screens Imploding Various venues, Geneva 8 November – 3 February This year’s Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement is curated by Andrea Bellini and Andrea Lissoni under the title The Sound of Screens Imploding, invoking cataclysmic change. In their text in the exhibition booklet, the curators conjure a ‘fundamental principle’ around which the show revolves: ‘that moving images now live outside the screen, lingering on in a fascinating kaleidoscope where vision can be shaped even by sound’. In today’s digital sphere, the argument goes, (moving) images have left the fixed screen. At the Biennale, then, 20 newly commissioned works have exploded, perhaps more than imploded, into the main venue at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Cinema Spoutnik, arts centre Le Grütli and online spaces. Kahlil Joseph’s blknws (all works 2018) is seen first by viewers entering the Centre. The two-channel video is a take on news broadcasts, focusing mostly on influential black people in the us, such as a Emma González and pianist Cecil Taylor, presenting a nonlinear alternative to the established journalism format whose fallibility has become painfully obvious in recent years. Andreas Angelidakis’s Demos Bar, consisting of seating blocks covered with gold foil, which also clads the walls and handrails in the staircases, comments on the capitalist spectre haunting post-economic crisis Greece,

the artist’s home country. On the second floor, Meriem Bennani’s immersive, smart and humorous multichannel video installation Party on the caps imagines an island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean where refugees denied access to the us are held. Set in a not-so-distant future, these would-be immigrants have developed a bustling multiethnic megalopolis, all guided by its mascot, the animated green crocodile Fiona. Ian Cheng’s text on cognitive evolution, Emissaries Guide to Worlding, is available as an e-book on an iPad and for download in Geneva, while Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic’s No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 has a physically palpable effect. The multiple video projections, featuring Boychild and found footage of the 12 Thai boys who were trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave for 18 days in June and July 2018, are surrounded by a thick and smelly earthy substance covering the floor and walls. Tamara Henderson’s Womb Life on the top floor is a surrealist installation including a film of animate objects, a clunky shelf with artist books and a Tinguely/Paiklike array of fragmented sculptural bodies that could also be (re)production machines. Of the screenings at the Cinema Spoutnik, meanwhile, Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity stands out, a sci-fi essay investigating Soviet cybernetics,

highlighting the contradictions between socialist bureaucracy’s slowness and current digital speed. Imagery distorted by Google-tracking tools and bold graphic design letters appearing and disappearing on the screen are accompanied by a screeching soundtrack. The work that still resonates most with me is Elysia Crampton’s sound environment Orcorara (tres estrellas todos yguales). The Amerindian Aymara musician and composer’s original score is inspired by the writer Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, who lived in the seventeenth century between Lake Titicaca and Cuzco. While attempting to explain Quechua cosmogony to the Spanish colonisers through language, he realised its limitations and resorted to images. In Crampton’s talk during the opening night, she showed Quechua chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s drawings on an overhead projector, pointing to the opening of a third space in indigenous cosmogony. This third space can be the place of Aymara and lgbtq resistance, a place beyond binaries, or a place where antimatter disappeared after the implosion. And it can possibly be a place to be created once we leave the confines of the screen. The Biennale poignantly raises the question of what kind of a space that may be, and what we may want it to be. Stefanie Hessler

Meriem Bennani, Party on the caps, 2018, five-channel projection, mapped digital video installation. Photo: Mathilda Olmi. Courtesy the artist and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève

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Good Grief, Charlie Brown! Somerset House, London 25 October – 3 March Only a handful of newspaper comic strips have transcended their status as ‘funnies’ and come to be regarded as significant works of art. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–44) and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–26) are probably held in highest esteem; but up there too is Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000). Of course, compared to anything else in the canon, the reach of Schulz’s creation is unsurpassed – both in terms of the strip itself (the complete Peanuts consists of a staggering 17,897 episodes, and at its peak was syndicated across over 2,600 newspapers worldwide) and its broader cultural presence, from being developed into numerous tv series and movies, to the seemingly endless opportunities for mass merchandising. Good Grief, Charlie Brown! contains various teeming displays that show off the vast range of licensed products – toys, lunchboxes, stationery, clothing – most inevitably featuring the strip’s breakout star, Snoopy. More interesting, though, are the unofficial appropriations, the patches for example that us servicemen in Vietnam wore combining Peanuts imagery with drugs and sex references, which give a better sense of the characters’ ubiquity, along with the many admiring letters written to Schulz by figures ranging from Timothy Leary to Ronald Reagan. As for the strips themselves, there are scores of originals throughout the exhibition,

usually demonstrating the social relevance of Peanuts – the irascible, independent character of Lucy, for instance, linking to debates around feminism, as well as to Schulz’s suspicion of psychiatry (one of the strip’s best recurring gags was that Lucy, the loudmouthed manipulator, also dispensed psychiatric advice). Not that Schulz’s characters were mere ciphers. What’s remarkable about Peanuts is how it managed to depict a viable, functioning world, one shot through with a distinctly downbeat, melancholy tone, even as its only visible actors happened to be children – or, as Umberto Eco, one of the first cultural commentators to seriously consider Peanuts, called them, ‘monstrous, infantile reductions of all the neuroses of the modern citizen of industrial civilisation’. All of this, which might be called the content and context of Peanuts, the exhibition is excellent on. It’s less good on the strip’s form, its visual properties. Sure, a couple of sections focus on Schulz’s drawing technique, and there’s a fun film portrait of him deftly sketching. But in a show predicated upon the idea that comics are worthy of artistic consideration, some deeper analysis – how Schulz’s style progressively became starker and shakier, say – would have been welcome. After all, it wasn’t just mainstream culture where Peanuts’ influence was felt, via fads such as the jocular ‘Snoopy for President’

David Musgrave, Animal, 1998, resin and enamel paint, 22 × 14 × 3 cm. Courtesy Greengrassi, London

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campaigns, but within comics themselves as a medium. Peanuts’ impact on later works, whether newspaper strips like Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95) or underground titles like Love and Rockets (1982–), was immense. Yet the exhibition is completely silent on this. Instead, it turns to contemporary art to make the case for Schulz’s legacy. There are some good pieces: Mel Brimfield’s cartoon, Nuts: Episode 23: Remembrance of Things Past (2018), from her ongoing Peanuts homage series where a Schulz-styled version of the artist pours forth anxieties and vulnerabilities; or David Musgrave’s Animal (1998), an anatomical sculptural model of a bisected Snoopy – works that are effective precisely because they engage with Schulz’s creation on a formal, albeit ironic, level. Too many other pieces, though, give the impression merely of riffing on Peanuts, plundering it for whimsical subject matter – Marcus Coates’s lifesize version of Lucy’s psychiatric booth, Who Knows? (2018), in which visitors can submit ‘life questions’, is the most insipid example. But beyond any individual shortcomings, it’s the reliance on non-comics art as a whole, in order to justify the continued relevance and bolster the intellectual credentials of Peanuts, that feels deeply flawed, and that ultimately undermines the very argument the show sets out to make. Gabriel Coxhead

Nicholas Pope Sins and Virtues The Sunday Painter, London 15 September – 24 November The 15 mixed-media-on-paper works lining the left and right walls of The Sunday Painter’s narrow groundfloor gallery present a variety of scenarios: a blue amoeba with three nuclei shedding electric-orange bolts; a multichambered structure crouched over a roadway; large, labia-shaped vessels being urinated into. Further down, the images begin to resolve into a coherent set: the view out a car window at a line of towering, fanciful roadside lanterns, labelled on the drawing itself as ‘Seven Lanterns of Sin Southbo’. Another view from a car (the interior of the automobile visible around the edges of the drawing), this one of colourful misshapen fingers that become identifiable in subsequent drawings as architectonic structures with eyelike windows, labelled ‘Seven Towers of Virtue Northbo’. In a work titled The Seven Lanterns of Sin and The Seven Towers of Virtue in the rear view mirror (1998) we see that these two structural agglomerations face each other across a motorway. A map of Great Britain with a fluorescent-orange ring road around London and key routes to the regions, the word ‘Virtue’ overlaid on the Irish Sea and ‘Sins’ on the North Sea, drives home, so to speak, the notion of

motorway network as organising principle for life, with service stations offering guidance, indulgence and a place to relieve oneself along the way. In entering this confined space, gallery visitors, looking left and right at these roadside scenes, are reminded that we too are on this motorway. Nicholas Pope, nearing seventy, and showing at The Sunday Painter for the first time, found early success as a sculptor (he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1980) and then withdrew, following a period of illness. He returned during the 1990s with a series of works that circled around, without settling on, matters of faith, including the installation The Apostles Speaking in Tongues Lit by Their Own Lamps (1993–96), whose three-metre-tall terracotta figures were shown at Tate Britain in 1996–97, and The Ten Commandments in Flowing Light (1996–97), a profusion of pastel-coloured stuffed-cloth shapes erupting from a six-metrediameter foil crater. Sins and Virtues is thematically and materially of a piece with those works as the exhibition expands into the gallery’s lower-ground space with a more recent body of work. Here a series of 14 largescale, brightly

coloured oil bar works crowd the walls, as 14 coloured-glass vessels perch delicately on a clear shelf running overhead, each representing one of the vices or virtues (The Conundrum of the Chalices of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues, 2014). There is an approximate correlation between drawing and chalice, and one can puzzle out, from scrambled letters included in the pieces, which represents Lust, which Prudence, Gluttony and so on. But it’s a reminder that the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues do not themselves directly correlate, and that although virtues are perhaps intended to serve in an advisory role while we negotiate the sins, one does not cancel out the other. This is the middle space the artist seems to be working with as the exhibition builds towards its culmination: a profusion of cloth and ceramic exploding from a sculptural foil crater (Sofa of the Deadly Sins and Coffee Table of Virtue, 1998–2018). Flesh-coloured tentacles and tubes, sea worms and further organlike shapes and creatures present a close-to-horrifying dredging up of the elemental and primordial. It’s a reminder that, regardless of direction of travel, this all ends in oblivion. David Terrien

Sins and Virtues, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and The Sunday Painter, London

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Heidi Bucher Parasol Unit, London 19 September – 9 December Heidi Bucher flays a building. In a short filmwork near the entrance to this retrospective she pulls and tugs at the skin of dried latex – previously applied, dripping wet, by her own hands – that has formed over the walls, windows and doors of a Swiss psychiatric hospital. The layer of material she peels away reveals one side of Kleines Glasportal, Bellevue Kreuzlingen (1988), stuck with the dust and dirt of the surfaces that shaped the latex mould. Imprinted with the outline of an ornate glass doorframe, the sheet, hung from the ceiling in the middle of the gallery by nine thin wires, is surrounded by other Häutungen, or skinnings, as the late Swiss artist liked to call them. There is Borg (1976), the epidermis of a doorway propped up by bamboo sticks and covered with the sheen of mother-of-pearl powder (a material that recurs in Bucher’s work), and the latex and gauze shedding of shutters and shingles of Fenster mit Läden und Schindeln (1988).

Bucher’s Häutungen are a disruption of architectural space, a manifestation of the liminal – that which is caught in between, neither herenow nor there-then. ‘The door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open’, wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in the penultimate chapter of The Poetics of Space (1958), and this idea of the half-open, or the half-visible, the inside and outside, works in equilibrium with the material appeal of the works on show. To be offered the traces of things, rather than the objects themselves, as in Bucher’s 1979 Frottage series, in which she creates graphite rubbings on paper of various garments, is to deny their definition, or function, and instead allow room for what Bachelard calls the ‘escapades of imagination’. As much is demonstrated by another film, Hautraum (1981), in which a flimsy cubic structure of latex walls – a ‘skinroom’ – is dangled from a swinging crane and flown through the air, flapping around unsteadily like half a box kite. The fragility of the Hautraum echoes in the

Heidi Bucher, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Benjamin Westoby. Courtesy Parasol Unit, London

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four Weissleimhaus (1976–83) – small ‘glue houses’ made with foam, textile and gauze – each placed on its own pedestal and protected by an acrylic display case: they are ghostly objects, the thickness of glue lending to the houses both opaque and semitransparent qualities, each with four walls, one door, no roof (can something be a house when it cannot provide shelter?). Bucher’s works play in the spaces between what is geometrically considered the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, which is to say that while they prevent viewers from positioning themselves in relation to the work and its subject, they also invite familiarity through the imprint of everyday objects and architectural elements, and the tactile qualities of these. As Bucher pulls free the membranes of buildings, she both exposes and preserves the memories of her subjects while exfoliating them of time, place and thinghood. Here, the skin is the half-open, the portal through which we feel ourselves in the world. Fi Churchman

work-seth/tallentire Trailer: itinerary, 1998–2018 Hollybush Gardens, London 23 November – 21 December In 1998, Anne Tallentire and John Seth made Trailer, a series of videos comprising footage of Dublin, each shot and screened within a single day at different locations around the city. The product of a collaboration that began in 1993 and which eventually fell under the moniker work-seth/tallentire, Trailer muddied the boundaries of performance, screening and documentation to inquire about modes of perception and urban spaces. Twenty years after the original presentation was commissioned by Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, workseth/tallentire have restaged the project (renamed Trailer: itinerary, 1998 – 2018) as an exhibition at Hollybush Gardens. Simultaneously looped on projectors and monitors around the gallery, the ten short videos that comprise Trailer are set in unremarkable spaces of Dublin such as housing estates and grassy expanses that lack, to use the language of urban development, placemaking qualities. Each video shifts between documentation

of these spaces and simple actions: unravelling a roll of plastic wrap on the ground, walking through a revolving metal gate, hitting the ground with sticks. Perhaps the most striking image is a shot of a woman placing her ear against a wall, suggesting an observational mode that is critical to Trailer. Although it may seem that little is happening or that there is nothing to take note of, there is also a suggestion that we are not paying close enough attention to the everyday. To see Trailer in its original incarnation – I did not – you had to call a number to find out the location of that night’s screening, meaning that the viewer had to move around the city as Seth and Tallentire did in making the videos. As an exhibition in a gallery, Trailer has a harder time accounting for this way of navigating the urban space, but it nevertheless remains attuned to the mechanisms that condition experiences. Among the most impactful shifts in Trailer is the addition of the word ‘itinerary’ and dates

to its title. This expansive dating convention reframes the work as a shifting 20-year project, inclusive of its other iterations: the 1999 group exhibition 0044 that toured Ireland and New York State and a two-night presentation at Hollybush Gardens in 2016. The evocation of provenance and dislocation in Trailer: itinerary points towards the losses and creations of meaning inherent to restaging an artwork in a different time and place, across a border and sea. To look back from London to Dublin 20 years ago – when the Good Friday Agreement was being implemented – is to revisit another moment of negotiation and settlement over issues of borders and sovereignty. Although Trailer avoids such explicit politics, its acts of observation and engagement reveal how important it is to attend to the built environment – its concrete and invisible infrastructures, its residues of political life – to understand how we move through, and perceive, everyday spaces. Andrew Hibbard

Trailer: itinerary, 1998–2018, 2018 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and Hollybush Gardens, London

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Korakrit Arunanondchai No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 Carlos / Ishikawa, London 23 November – 22 December History against myth, politics against lived experience, state power against the openness of the future – Korakrit Arunanondchai’s dazzling three-screen video installation No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 dramatises the sense of living in a pivotal moment, a time of spiritual and maybe even civilisational crisis. Three screens are positioned on adjacent walls of the gallery. The middle screen opens on a forest full of green laser beams and a gathering of ecstatic, white-clothed, ghostlike figures who, among the foliage, caress these unearthly, dancing beams of light. On the left, a sequence focuses on the artist’s frail, elderly grandparents, his grandmother’s stare vacant with dementia, his grandfather leafing through photographs of them growing older over the years, while the opposite screen is largely dedicated to the image of Arunanondchai’s friend and collaborator, the performance artist boychild; androgynous, bare-breasted, bodypainted, sparkling with glitter and with her mouth glowing from within, she’s the avatar of an unknowable future.

No history’s narrative is about narrative and its opposite – the ordering power of words, or ordering myths, and an opposing, unutterable materiality, found in the tactility of the performers’ bodies in the more sciencefictional sequences in the forest and in boychild’s agonistic gestures. “Reality is made up of words / And words make worlds / But worlds fall apart”, whispers the opening voiceover, prophetically, and as the central sequence winds around the news story of the 12 children rescued from the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, the work plays with the ambiguities of how official narrative usurps the intimacy of human bonds; in the huge operation to rescue the trapped children, the military and the state are seen, recast in official propaganda, not as the ruling dictatorship that it is but as benevolent saviours. Caregiving and care-receiving is a recurring motif, ironically manifest in the object of the cuddly-toy bunny rabbit, cuddled by a Thai soldier, the white-clad acolytes and Arunanondchai’s grandmother alike. No history’s often trancelike atmosphere buzzes with the currency of posthuman ethics

and politics; in the darkness of the gallery a green-coloured human head lies in a thicket of foliage, its eyes closed, asleep or dead, green lasers firing from an emitter nestling there, across the gallery ceiling. This figure appears in the central video too, as the narrator muses on how “our story disintegrates”, while the ‘ghosts’ of authority seek to make us “believe in the order of things”, to hold out for a “future narrative that includes us”. What No History is wary of is mythopoeic, human story-making in any form, except, perhaps, when it comes to care, which might be a transcendental expression of togetherness, not only between humans but between humans and everything else. There is something millennial and apocalyptic to this. As the humanness of human history is shown to come to an end, in the failing stories of Arunanondchai’s pointedly gender-binary grandparents, the opposite screen is occupied by the monadic, androgyne boychild, writhing, gesticulating, mouth flickering with digital light that indicates that, whatever she is saying, it isn’t language but utterance of a more primordial, or future, kind. J.J. Charlesworth

No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5, 2018 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Carlos / Ishikawa, London

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Zarouhie Abdalian Production Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans 3 November – 10 February In Production, New Orleans-native Zarouhie Abdalian links the abstract concept of work to the often-overlooked materials of labour – ballast stones, motors, construction tools, the ambient sounds of the workday. Using a spare, poetic aesthetic, Abdalian monumentalises these objects and calls attention to the hidden histories of sidelined and mistreated labouring bodies. These histories, of course, are especially poignant in the local context of the port city of New Orleans and the greater Mississippi. The conceptual artist has long favoured a site-specific method, and most of the works on view are made or adapted for the exhibition. But as she brings her work home, Abdalian lends it an intimate touch. A dramatic swathe of red cotton, dominating a long wall, draws viewers into cac’s groundfloor converted-industrial space. The museum occupies two levels of a former warehouse for the shuttered pharmacy chain Katz & Besthoff, with a newly opened creative coworking space on top. From afar, the creased Banner (2018) resembles one of Tauba Auerbach’s large Fold paintings of the early 2010s. Closer up, one can see words stitched in crimson across its rumpled surface: let living labor live, let dead labor die. A distillation of Karl Marx’s ghoulish quote about exploitation – ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ – the motto brings a punk twist to a piece that could other-

wise rehearse well-worn arguments about women’s work. Painted up to the edges of Banner, in a neat line across the length of the expansive galleries, is a personalised example of the artist’s handicraft. In loopy cursive without discernible breaks, Abdalian has hand-lettered the names of tools without apparent regard for specialisation or function. One excerpt reads: ‘whipsawaxemortiserouterbobbinnailsethacksawpushbroomswitchbladeironcottongin’. The project, titled Chanson du ricochet, originated during Prospect.3 in 2014, when the names of tools were read out loud at the New Orleans African American Museum in the Tremé neighbourhood. The artist has explained that the tools referenced labour on the site ‘that was historically forced or coerced or overlooked in some way’. Here, the artist has reconfigured this script around her own durational labour. If these works bear the traces of Abdalian’s own hands at work, other pieces deploy recording or casting to pay homage to other workers’ efforts. Transport Empty (2017), a sound piece made in collaboration with Joseph Rosenzweig, brings together field recordings from many labour sites – including the gallery itself – each followed by a silence of the same duration. The piercing waves of sound make the gallery feel claustrophobic; as the noise ebbs, the space starts to feel larger again. The stone shall cry out (2018) is an upright, lifesize resin cast of a New Orleans street paved with ballast stones. These large rocks balanced the weight on outgoing

ships, later tossed overboard to allow room for the ships to return with cargo. Abdalian underscores the latent association with the slave trade by her choice of location. The piece was cast from a stretch of Montegut Street near nineteenth-century rice mills and cotton presses, where raw materials, historically harvested by slaves, were processed into saleable goods. Hull (2018) seductively mimics the look of a ballast stone hitting the water, as the rock rests atop a sheet of dented gold-plated metal. Working furthest from New Orleans, Abdalian has cast small fragments, with Hydrocal, from a Tripoli chalk mine in Iuka, Mississippi, in from chalk mine hollow (i–xii) (2017). Now abandoned, the mine was worked by labourers who died of a lung condition called silicosis. The casts, each enclosed within a 13 × 15 cm frame, register the marks of their pickaxes, as well as evocative traces of red and blue from the graffiti that now covers the cave. Within the exhibition, Abdalian has also curated a film programme with six documentaries by artists including Allan Sekula, Kevin Jerome Everson and Flora M’mbugu-Schelling. She writes that these films ‘endeavour to ascribe meaning to work’. Rather than a didactic supplement to her exhibition, however, the programme may be considered a material extension of it. In her insistence on activating the materials of labour, and letting them be read as such, the artist also makes work of meaning and meaning of work. Wendy Vogel

Hull, 2018, ballast stone, gold plate, 61 × 61 × 61 cm. Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans

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Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 Beyond Bliss Various venues, Bangkok 18 October – 3 February Shortly before touchdown on home soil, Thai Airways screens a video about the kinds of blissful tourism the nation attracts: under a golden sun, Western men, neatly coiffured, skip along beaches, tour temples and meditate; jump to nighttime and the same individuals are transformed into dishevelled, Gollum-like creatures on the prowl for young (and very young) girls and boys to satisfy other appetites. One of these forms of tourism is good and one of them bad, the video informs us, in a way that says as much about commonly held perceptions of the country as it does about the dubious morality of some of its visitors and those who welcome them. The inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale (bab) occupies 20 locations across the city, including the luxury hotels, temples, historic buildings and shopping malls that are the face of the good type of tourism. Its primary goal is to identify the Thai capital as an ‘art destination’ and hub for cultural tourism within Southeast Asia. Almost every one of Thailand’s neighbours is doing the same. Even discounting them, over the past six months alone the kingdom has hosted the inaugural editions of two other art biennials (one in Bangkok, one in Krabi) and a triennial video-art festival (also in Bangkok). It’s a congested marketplace. Perhaps that’s why this biennial is hyperbolically titled Beyond Bliss. And so, on a superficial level, bab has littered the city (or at least the ‘approved’-touristy bits of it) with suitably hi-vis, easy-on-the-eye works by artists such as Choi Jeong Hwa (towers of Day-Glo plastic baskets, inflatable flowers, fruit, veg and flying pigs), Yayoi Kusama (suspended toadstool-liveried pumpkins) and Yoshitomo Nara (cutesy, giant-dog sculptures). When he was building Disneyland, Walt called this type of intervention a ‘weenie’, comparing the scripting of space for tourists in his themepark to the dangling of frankfurters off-camera to make on-camera dogs jump on cue in movies. ‘There’s got to be a weenie at the end of every street,’ he is supposed to have insisted to designers. It’s easy to imagine someone repeatedly whispering the same into the collective ear of bab’s five-person curatorial team, led by artistic director Apinan Poshyananda (also

the biennial’s cofounder and chief executive). In place of Sleeping Beauty Castle, bab has Elmgreen & Dragset’s Zero (2018), a zero-shaped wheel of swimming-pool coping, complete with diving board and steps, tilted 90 degrees so that it frames a view of the Peninsula Hotel on the other side of the Chao Phraya River. The symbolism of leisure, luxury, Buddhism, placemaking and picture-taking mixed in one eight-metre-high oval that represents everything and nothing at one and the same time. Yet, to its credit, bab is not only a nirvana for selfie fanatics but also finds places for some of the more purgatorial spaces of contemporary life. Not least at the biennial’s main venue, the Bangkok Art & Cultural Centre (bacc) – a tired monument to the city’s official art scene now overgrown with the souvenir and knickknack shops that populate its ground floor. When bacc was founded by Apinan in 2005, it arrived packaged with the same ideals as bab: to make Bangkok a ‘cultural capital’. Thirteen years later, bab’s launch was accompanied by the centre’s current director, Pawit Mahasarinand, pleading for support in the face of drastic funding cuts by the knickknack-shop-loving city authorities (bab is largely privately funded). Inside, Chumpon Apisuk’s videowork I Have Dreams (2018) features interviews with a group of Thai and migrant sex workers (bab’s catalogue describes them as a ‘taboo subject’) recounting their support of families and property purchases through their labours and their hopes of lives to come once those needs have been fulfilled. Opposite is an equally bittersweet earlier work, Mida Tapestry (2011), embroidered by arrested sex workers and documenting a police raid on Mida Karaoke in Chiang Mai. Around the corner, Imhathai Suwatthanaslip’s No More Sewing Machines (2018) features sewing-machine parts embellished (to the extent that some look like kitchen implements) with the knitted hair of another set of sex workers from Chiang Mai, a reference to the multiple high-minded aid projects that have sought to teach sex workers in Thailand sewing as a way of getting them out of one type of slavery and into what is frequently no more than a less obvious other. ‘Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere’ (an

facing page, top Chumpon Apisuk, I Have Dreams (still), 2018, video installation. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

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adaptation of the Jim Steinman song popularised by Meatloaf) is the slogan on the lightbox (also by Imhathai) nearby. Elsewhere at bacc, patterns of forced and voluntary migration across the seas of Southeast Asia are further explored in the latest incarnation of Malaccaborn Sherman Ong’s ongoing videowork nusantara: the seas will sing and the wind will carry us (2011–), which features a series of fictionalised monologues based on firsthand accounts of the troubled (and sometimes horrific) lives of Afghan migrants to Malaysia. Perhaps it should be no surprise (although it is) that in the middle of all these works sits the kind of weenie Walt would have loved: a work by Croatian collective Numen For Use Design, a giant weblike cocoon of transparent tape, prosaically titled Tape Bangkok (2018), stretched across the walls and ceiling of the gallery and in which visitors can crawl or walk and, presumably, feel like Frodo Baggins trapped in Shelob’s giant spiderweb on the way to Mordor. The next floor up is occupied by the Marina Abramović Institute and a group of artists practising ‘the grandmother’ (as the catalogue describes her) of performance art’s ‘Method’. Visitors are invited to join too, but as you watch the trained performers stitch wedding dresses and the amateurs separate rice, it’s only weenies and unwanted sewing lessons that come to mind. The most consistent part of the biennial is housed at O.P. Place, a heritage building and deserted antiques mall that feels like a ghost of tourism past. Curated by Manila-based Patrick Flores, it features a tightly woven group of works – notable among them Eisa Jocson’s Becoming White (2018) and Samak Kosem’s Nonhuman Ethnography (2017–18) – produced in the main by artists from Southeast Asia, that pursue the themes of identity, displacement and belonging that surface intermittently elsewhere. The abiding impression is of a biennial with schizoid tendencies: unsure as to whether it is trying to build up a complex cumulative effect or to offer a series of discrete spectacles, it consistently disrupts the one with the other. Although today this seems to be the general condition for biennial makers and city marketeers alike. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom Eisa Jocson, Becoming White (detail), 2018, mixed-media installation and performance. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale 2018

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Books The Polish Rider by Anna Ostoya and Ben Lerner Mack, €35 / £30 / $40 (hardcover) A story told by a painter to a writer is the starting point for this playful back-and-forth between art and literature. On hearing that his friend Anna Ostoya had left two canvases in the back of a New York taxi on the eve of an opening, the novelist Ben Lerner was inspired to write a short fiction, or so the reader is led to believe. That short story is complemented here by a critical (but not necessarily reliable) essay by Lerner, given the punning title of ‘Late Art’, as well as reproductions of Ostoya’s work. These include a painting made by the artist in response to Lerner’s writing, completing the feedback loop between image and text, real and imagined, idea and expression. The publication of the fictionalised with the ‘true’ account of the lost paintings offers an instructive record of how the writer adapts found material – works of art – to the demands of a different form. First published in The New Yorker in 2016, ‘The Polish Rider’ imagines a scenario in which the narrator (who closely resembles Lerner) accompanies the artist (recast as ‘Sonia’) in her quest to recuperate the lost artworks. As well as reflections on the sinister bureaucracy of companies like Uber, this picaresque detective

story finds room for digressions on the politics of ekphrasis and much postmodern shadow play. In the course of their search, for example, the pair discover a dog-eared anthology of art criticism (also titled Late Art) featuring a text by the narrator, presenting the opportunity to expound on how value attaches to art objects and texts. The pleasure of disentangling the threads entwining different narratives – the reader’s own detective work – is counterpointed by a suspicion that nothing will be left when they are finally unravelled. The significance of the reference to Rembrandt’s celebrated The Polish Rider (c. 1650) would remain obscure, for instance, were the Internet not on hand to relay that in 1993 The New Yorker reproduced a painting purporting to show the artist in the act of completing it, thus settling a dispute over its attribution. Accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek text by the Dutch artist’s student, that New Yorker piece read unambiguously as a spoof. In its light the weakness of Lerner’s wordplay – a Polish artist’s ‘ride’ in a taxi cab as catalyst for this experiment in writing an artwork into existence – might hint that nothing in this collaboration should be taken as read.

Either way, the self-deprecating wit and natural intelligence of Lerner’s prose elevate the project above a mere exercise in the interplay of signs. It’s nevertheless true that some of the critical insights – that contemporary art is often dependent on language to be legible as art, that art and literature occupy different economies, that the status of a work of art is predicated on the stories told about it – hardly qualify as news. More interesting are the anxieties over whether ekphrastic writing is in all cases an assertion of superiority by the author over the artist (a thought to give the art critic pause) and how it might be possible to establish a more productive relationship between writing and art than that which presumes that the former must respond to, and in doing so authenticate, the latter. Most compelling is the proposition that fiction might offer the best means of ‘staging encounters’ with other media, and that literary prose is by extension uniquely well suited to describing the new modes of communication – and overlapping systems of power, value and technology – shaping contemporary life. Ben Eastham

Butch Heroes by Ria Brodell The mit Press, $24.95 / £20 (hardcover) In 1477 Katherina Hetzeldorfer was roped to a boulder and drowned in the Rhine. Her crime was to have lived with a woman in a relationship ‘like that of husband and wife’. Reminiscent in style and format of a prayer card, Ria Brodell’s gouache-on-paper portrait renders Hetzeldorfer, stout with short hair, in red trousers and white tunic, stoically resigned to her fate as she hugs the rock that will drag her to a watery grave. In a final indignity, it would seem that Hetzeldorfer’s executioners have also thrown into the river the ‘instrument’ – a stick wrapped in red leather – that the accused was supposed to have used to penetrate her partner. Hetzeldorfer’s biography and the circumstances of her death are detailed in a short written account running alongside the artwork; a template repeated over 28 further spreads in this slim volume. Each introduces a ‘butch hero’

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– a historical figure with whom most readers are unlikely to be familiar – spanning cultures and centuries, united only in the fluidity of their gender or sexuality. There are questions to be asked as to the wisdom of using Christian symbolism to talk of subjects that lived outside such a culture (Asian and Indigenous subjects among them), and a sense of presentism in Brodell’s reliance on the language of us gender theory (the projection of guessed pronouns is problematic). Yet the fact that Hetzeldorfer’s fate is not the norm in the stories told here reveals something about the purpose of Brodell’s project. There are plenty of sad tales, each assiduously researched: Sakuma Hideka and Chiyoka were a Japanese couple who attempted suicide after their polyamorous relationship with a third woman came to light, and Catharina Linck aka Anastasius was beheaded after his

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mother-in-law shopped him for having female body parts. However, what is striking is how many of those profiled enjoyed happy lives – some keeping their birth sex secret, others living openly as lesbian or trans. A relative of Naa Jian, who lived in a rural community in early-twentieth-century Thailand, described the agricultural labourer as ‘like a man’, who did ‘men’s work’ and had a girlfriend because that was ‘just the way she was’; Pope Urban viii gave his blessing for Catalina ‘Antonio’ de Erauso to dress in men’s clothing in recognition of Antonio’s service in the Spanish army’s conquests of the New World. Gender fluidity, it would seem then, is not the radical battleground that both contemporary social conservatives and today’s high-on-their-own-wokeness pundits want it to be, but as Brodell demonstrates, age-old and culturally universal. Oliver Basciano

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Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–1990s: An iapa Reader Edited by Victor Wang draf Curators’ Series, free (softcover) In this reader accompanying the latest exhibition in the David Roberts Art Foundation’s Curators’ Series, Institution of Asian Performance Art (iapa), editor Victor Wang puts forward a narrative for the development of performance art in Asia as distinct from the history of its Western equivalent. Each of the four chapters (organised geographically, and presenting photographic documentation of the works alongside one or two previously published essays) makes clear that artists working within the sociopolitical contexts of their own countries engaged in performance for different reasons. In Japan, the Expo ’70 Destruction Joint-Struggle Group (made up of artist collectives including Zero Jigen and Kokuin) took to the streets in protest at the Westernisation of the country’s artistic culture; in China, Ma Liuming presented a body that transgressed Chinese society’s strict gender binaries; in Korea, artists recognised their bodies as sites of political conflict under the oppressive regime of Park Chung-hee; in Taiwan, performance was used as a means of expressing and exploring a national identity. There are, however, aspects of performance history in East Asia that are shared across the countries. The reader brings to attention the importance of documenting performances

(particularly in Reiko Tomii’s essay on Japanese photographer Hirata Minoru, and Joan Kee on performance in South Korea), and the ways in which we might consider this to be as important as the performance itself. While the act, in front of an audience, conveys a sense of urgency because it happens in a specific moment (and cannot be reenacted in the same context), it’s the recording of the performance, through photography, that brings it to a wider audience. This is explored in Tomii’s text, which presents the performances (by groups like Hi-Red Center, or individuals such as Yoko Ono and Ushio Shinohara) and Minoru’s photo-documentation as existing symbiotically. The performances allowed Minoru to make ‘Photo Art’ that was then published in the Japanese mass-media, which led to a greater awareness of performance art. There are also other key insights into the specific political tensions surrounding performance in East Asia. In South Korea, under the rule of Park Chung-hee following his military coup in 1961, state-sanctioned art extended to media such as ink painting or sculpture and forms such as minjung (‘people’s art’), all produced within government-approved institutions. That artists working outside of these were subject to surveillance or imprisonment is fairly well known, but Joan Kee

illustrates a much more complex environment. In her 2015 essay ‘Why Performance in Authoritarian Korea?’, she writes that Park’s government was also keen to ‘improve its international standing’, and thus allowed those ‘transgressive’ artists to exhibit work abroad at biennials, creating a situation that was ‘confusing and often dangerous’. While he rightly justifies the importance of research into the form from a non-Western perspective, Wang’s introductory essay would benefit from providing a little more explanation of, and context to, his references. For example, he mentions influences from Buddhism, Taoism and the I Ching, but doesn’t go on to set out examples of how their concepts of ‘ephemerality, emptiness, chance, rituals…’ inform performance history in East Asia. In this sense, the introduction to Performance Histories glosses over cultural influences, and this is compounded by his vague references to historical events, dictatorships and authoritarian governments, all of which would profit from a simple timeline, if only to locate these in time and place. Nevertheless, the collection of texts presented here offer interesting snapshots into various stages of the development of East Asian performance art, and benefits from a thematic rather than chronological approach to its history. Fi Churchman

Garage by Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela The mit Press, £16.99 / $21.95 (hardcover)

This cultural history of the garage, the space next to ‘your home’ where you ‘keep your car’ so that you can ‘drive’ to ‘work’ (seemingly fixed terms become mutable as Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela develop their thesis that this humble structure is the most important architectural form of the last century), draws a line from Jesus Christ to Frank Lloyd Wright to Steve Jobs to, implicitly, the current us president, who, though unmentioned, must be casting some of the shadow in the authors’ downbeat assessment of our contemporary condition: minds suburbanised, lives garage-ified and the dominant power structure defending its privileges as fiercely and effectively as ever. The writers approach this tale from the directions of art (Erlanger) and architecture (Ortega Govela) in a sometimes awkward, high-energy blending of feminist and queer-Marxist readings;

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both also contribute artworks, photocollages, renderings, film stills and other illustrations. It goes like this: the manger-stable was brought into the home at about the time the Ford Model T entered production, when Wright’s radical and determinedly patriarchal design for the Robie House (1908–10), informed by his experience of growing up fatherless, had the knock-on effect of producing an attached garage (and subsequently Mrs Robie’s departure). This was not a masculine space per se but one that, because it lay empty much of each day, was ripe for reprogramming by those wishing to escape from family and neighbours – for weightlifting, home-brewing, drumming, etc – or, more consequentially, from the past, the status quo and other strictures. It’s this second path that fires up Erlanger and Ortega Govela. While elaborating, almost in the background, connections between the automo-

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bile, suburbia, white flight, the financialisation of the American home, the iPhone and the collapse of divisions between (as well as definitions of) labour and leisure, the authors build towards a hectic crescendo in which the garage, incubator of myths surrounding the solitary radical (usually male, from Wright himself to the pioneers of Silicon Valley, though Gwen Stefani also gets a mention) whose creations are appropriated by the very systems they sought to disrupt, remains, as ‘a space of fluid otherness’, the best paradigm for hacking the ‘smooth bubbles’ and algorithmically fed-back loops of our corrosively suburban online existences. Only this time around, they write, we must seek to nurture the collective over the individual (more multistorey car park than garage, then). It’s an abrupt and weak ending to a provocative and exuberantly presented thesis. David Terrien

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on the cover design and colouration by Isabel Duarte and John Morgan studio, photo from Bettmann Archive via Getty Images

Words on the spine and on pages 25, 35, 51 and 91 come from lines in praise of Shiva by the twelfth-century poet Basavanna, from vacana no 500, trans A. K. Ramanujan, in Speaking of Siva (Penguin, 1973)

on pages 113 and 116 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

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Future Greats in association with K11 Art Foundation ArtReview January & February 2017 Zachary Cahill by Dieter Roelstraete June Crespo by Catalina Lozano Adelita Husni-Bey by Mike Watson Kang Jungsuck by Sunjung Kim Hayoun Kwon by Victor Burgin Alexandra Laudo by Joanna Warsza Sandra Mujinga by Kiki Mazzucchelli Cameron Rowland by Natasha Hoare Katie Schwab by Ben Street Iza Tarasewicz by Oliver Basciano Raphaela Vogel by Philippe Pirotte

ArtReview January & February 2018 biriken by Nil Yalter Dineo Seshee Bopape by Osei Bonsu Giulia Bruno by Mark Rappolt Chen Zhou by Venus Lau Khalil El Ghrib by Reem Fadda Matthew Angelo Harrison by Cécile B. Evans Turiya Magadlela by Sue Williamson Protesters by Jeremy Deller Amitai Romm by Chris Fite-Wassilak Terreyro Coreográfico by Bernardo Mosqueira

ArtReview Asia Summer 2017 Orawan Arunrak by Arin Rungjang Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian by Esther Lu Hao Jingban by Aimee Lin Ho Rui An by Anselm Franke Hsu Chia-Wei by Ho Tzu Nyen Li Jingxiong by Li Qi Stefanus Endry Pragusta by Eko Nugroho Thakol Khao Sa-ad by David The T. Shanaathanan by Mark Rappolt shimurabros by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Evelyn Taocheng Wang by Christina Li Zhao Yang by Jilly Ding Kit

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ArtReview January & February 2019 American Artist by Zach Blas Bili Bidjocka by Simon Njami Vivian Caccuri by Lucia Pietroiusti María Galindo by Paul B. Preciado Ja’Tovia Gary by Mark Rappolt Raja’a Khalid by Rahel Aima Navine G. Khan-Dossos by Ben Eastham Mélodie Mousset by Chris Kraus Henrike Naumann by Sebastian Cichocki Sergio Rojas Chaves by Federico Herrero Aykan Safoğlu by Gökcan Demirkazık Mariana Silva by Laura Barlow Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca by Oliver Basciano

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