ArtReview April 2025

Consistently dressed to impress since 1949

Yuki Kihara On the Origin of the Species

TOKYO January

NEW YORK January ∙ SEOUL April

SEOUL January ∙ TOKYO March

SEOUL January ∙ TOKYO March

NEW YORK March ∙ BERLIN May

HONG KONG March ∙ NEW YORK May

LOS ANGELES April

NEW YORK May

SEOUL June

TOKYO July

NEW YORK November

Artworks: © 2025 Jim Dine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2025 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), courtesy The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative; © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann / Licensed by ARS / VAGA, New York; © 2025 Joel Shapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © James Turrell; © 2025 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2025 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2025 Estate of Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2025 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; © Agnes Martin Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © The Claes Oldenburg Estate; © 2025 Robert Mangold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

2024

2016

2022

2025

1978

1984

2020

1968

2005

1992

Rose Wylie

David Zwirner

ArtReview vol 77 no 3 April 2025

Well what do you know … so ArtReview said, ‘If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?’ Then it let them sit with that. And so they sat. Thinking about it. Or, more likely, waiting for someone else to think about it for them. Because that’s what people do today, ArtReview understands. In the age of ai and all that. Or probably before the age of ai.

But that’s a story for another place and time. And so we all sat. Until, eventually, that turned out to be a little awkward. So, after a bit, and to break the ice, so to speak (it was a rather warm day), ArtReview had to confess that it was easy.

Because, really, like, in the real world, it was. But then it felt the need to qualify that last statement. Because now it had introduced a contradiction into the scenario. And no one likes a contradiction. It makes you look like a fool. And we’re always told that no one should look like a fool. Apparently. Unless you’re playing one in King Lear or something. Then the fool is a wise person. Speaking the truth when it can’t be spoken. Because everyone else is shitting themselves in terror. Then the fool’s folly is more like a disguise. Although obviously ArtReview has never looked like that. ArtReview likes to think that ArtReview looks busy and important. Always. In fact, it cultivates such a look. Look how it’s breezing along right now. Guiding you towards a killer revelation. That will change your life. Or at least how you think about art. Because right now there seems to be something of a disconnect between art and life. At least in the sense of art being something that happens in galleries and museums.

And life being something that doesn’t. That’s kind of what this issue is all about. That and some people who are trying to bring the two closer together.

Art

11

How they do that is something that will be revealed later in this issue (you need to turn the pages, make an effort). How ArtReview manages, constantly, at all times, and so very, very effortlessly, to look busy and important is its secret.

But, like porn, you’ll know it (the busyness; the importance; the effortlessness) when you see it. You’re a visual person, right? That’s why you’re reading this. It’s important not to make assumptions, ArtReview has learned over the decades. Through a rollercoaster of surprises and disappointments. It tries to protect you from that by telling you what’s good and what’s bad (in terms of art that you might see), which, as its Uber driver is fond of saying, should result in a ‘smooth ride’. For you. ArtReview is the one that takes the pain.

But ArtReview digresses. That ease – the easiness with which ArtReview began this welcome message; when it said that it was in fact easy; having suggested that someone else should do it – was the result of a lot of practice. Decades of it. The point was that the ease has its own price. That it doesn’t come easily.

That it doesn’t mean what you think it means (which is, after all, what most art is all about these days – telling you that you don’t know what you think you know, or that what you think is complete is in fact empty, the difference is the same). Which – that it was all so effortless in the sense of easy, rather than effortless in the sense of carefully rehearsed – is, ArtReview supposes, what they were implying in the first place. ArtReview

Life

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

Sign up to our newsletter at artreview.com/subscribe and be the first to receive details of our upcoming events and the latest art news

12

Art Observed

The Interview Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

by Yuwen Jiang 22

Warsaw’s New Museum

by Phoebe Blatton 36 Vibe Shift

by J.J. Charlesworth 37

Dead and Alive

by Martin Herbert 33 Just Eat It

by Chris Fite-Wassilak 34

The I in ai

by David Salle 38

page 33 Ed Atkins, Children, 2020–ongoing. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

15

Art Featured

Yuki Kihara

by Fi Churchman 42

Gabrielle Goliath

by Stephanie Bailey 58

Like Us, But Not

by Tom Seymour 52

Ideals of the East

by Okakura Tenshin annotated by Yuwen Jiang and Mark Rappolt 65

page 42 Yuki Kihara, Darwin Drag (still), 2025, single-channel video. Courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand

16

SANFORD BIGGERS JOSE DÁVILA AGNES DENES CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER RAPHAEL HEFTI KIMSOOJA

KAPWANI KIWANGA SARAH MEYOHAS RONALD RAEL ALISON SAAR MUHANNAD SHONO

MARCH 8 – MAY 11, 2025 COACHELLA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA Sponsored by

Additional support from Jordan Schnitzer and the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and Amazon.

Media Partners: Artnet, ArtReview, C Magazine, Canvas Magazine, Cultured Magazine, frieze Magazine, Here Media, KGAY Palm Springs, GayDesertGuide and 103.1 MeTV FM, LocaliQ, part of The Desert Sun and Desert Magazine, Palm Springs Life Magazine, Terremoto, and Visit Greater Palm Springs.

desertx.org @_desertx

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 76 Christine Sun Kim, by Maddie Hampton Screen Memories, by Jenny Wu Jim Hodges, by Tom Morton Michael Wilkinson, by Gabriel Levine Brislin La Genevoise: Carte Blanche à Carole Bove, by Martin Herbert Peter Joseph, by Tom Denman Christina Ramberg, by Chris Murtha Wafaa Bilal, by Annette LePique Racheal Crowther, by Gabriela Acha How is Death Written in the South?, by Gaby Cepeda Antonio Obá, by Digby Warde-Aldam Hannah Black, by Taylor LeMelle Drain the Öresund, by Alice Godwin Alice Coltrane, by Nicole Kaack Jakkai Siributr, by Yuwen Jiang Barbara Steveni, by J.J. Charlesworth Bianca Hlywa, by Alexander Leissle aes+f, by Ophelia Lai Jay Bernard, by Ella Nixon Efo Sela, by Kwame Aidoo Stellenbosch Triennale 2025, by Chaze Matakala

Flower, by Ed Atkins, reviewed by Martin Herbert Flowers, by Brian Dillon, Takenori Miyamoto and Teppei Takeda, reviewed by Nirmala Devi After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-Utopia, and Other Science Fictions, by Eva Díaz, reviewed by Jonathan T.D. Neil Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art, edited by Phaidon, reviewed by Mia Stern Citizen by Descent, by Kritika Arya, reviewed by Pramodha Weerasekera The World After Gaza: A History,

by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed by Mark Rappolt

page 76 Christine Sun Kim, Whatcha Doing, Do Do, 2018, charcoal on paper, 51 × 66 cm. © the artist

18

backpage 110

Art Observed

Regarding the time for the kindling 21

Photo: Yonatan Vinitsky

22

ArtReview

The Interview

by Yuwen Jiang

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

“The most intimate aspects of our life continue to be shaped by imperialism, which means that some of the most intimate patterns of experience are shared”

Known as one of today’s key proponents of and thinkers around the reversal of imperial violence, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, in Providence, and has written extensively on photography and political theory. She is also a filmmaker, curator and author, and published her first children’s book, Golden Threads, in February. Azoulay, an Arab Jew of Algerian origins, has focused her recent work on the historic ummah, or Muslim community, that stretched from Central Asia to North Africa, where Jews were once protected under Islamic laws and shared many customs and much heritage with their Muslim neighbours. ‘I am also a Muslim,’ she writes in Jewelers of the Ummah:

A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World, published last year, ‘because my ancestors didn’t know they weren’t.’ The book comprises 16 letters she wrote to her ancestors and chosen kin whose life and work were intertwined in the legacy – or erasure – of precolonial Algeria, the Maghreb and beyond.

I first came to know Azoulay’s work as a student of the history of photography.

Reading her famous thesis The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) allowed me to see a photograph not as a disconnected image for consumption but as a record of actions and relationships – between the photographer, the photographed and us, the future spectators – that made an image possible. It’s a series of

April 2025

conditions that shaped the world, in which we’re always implicated. Today, with ongoing wars and genocides turning human bodies into abstract numbers, pixels and dust – and as our increasingly technocratic world forms a seemingly detached reality of its own – Azoulay’s work continues to shed light on how we understand our digital reality, the politics of looking as well as ways to unlearn the colonial modes of thinking many of us inherit. Ahead of the premiere of her film One Thousand and One Jewels – Unlearning Imperial Plunder III at the Decolonial Film Festival in Paris in May, we sat down to speak about pasts, futures and how we might be able to reclaim a lost world.

23

Don’t Fence Me In artreview You work across genres: academic and children’s books, film and photography. How did you come to work in this way? ariella aïsha azoulay What you list are not simply categories of genre, media or means of expression, so my answer will first have to engage with how such categories have been shaped such that we assume their separateness and that each has its own sui generis history and set of rules. We are talking about imperial technologies in the broader sense – photography, film – but the production of children as a group apart is also an imperial technology; children were invented and used as part of the European imperial enterprise of destruction of life worlds of different groups around the globe.

In all my work I find myself suspending imposed boundaries such as these; I do so not for the purpose of creating an interdisciplinary practice – which reinforces those disciplinary boundaries – but rather in order to shift the centre of gravity away from media-specific narratives and towards shared histories of colonised groups. Dispensing with these imposed categories enables me to attend to their/our needs and to reclaim their/our traditions and memories despite the ways these media were used to dispossess us from our worlds.

In retrospect, I recognise this motivation to think against imperial categories of media

and genre in The Civil Contract of Photography, a book that I wrote against common histories and theories of photography – which focus either on the devices or on the photographers.

The imperial fusion between those histories, the art market and the museum – what later I called ‘the primitive accumulation of visual wealth and capital’ – turned the photographed person into a present absentee. The book’s point of departure is very simple: the photographed person was always there, and yet they were not accounted for – neither when photography was institutionalised nor when their labour and presence were extracted in the production of photographs of this visual wealth.

So, to answer your question, instead of replying in terms of discipline or genre, I’ll invoke Ecclesiastes’s notion of time: ‘A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven: a time for being born and a time for dying’. For me, there is a time to make a film to speak with and alongside other voices, and a time to write a book that addresses children – it all depends on where I am in the world and whom I’d feel motivated to address, with whom I’d like to be in conversation, and how. I made my first film, A Sign from Heaven, which engages with three models of taking life under a settler colonial regime, since simply writing about this topic was totally insufficient. I wrote my first children’s book when I became a grandmother, and telling young descendants of the Maghreb where they belong was urgently pressing, since the West

Illustration by Hagar Ophir, in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Golden Threads, 2025.

Courtesy Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

24

ArtReview

continues to manipulate the history of diverse Jews to justify the genocide in Palestine.

How to Destroy Knowledge ar This idea that categorisation of disciplines – or in your words, media-specific narratives – is an imperial technology is very interesting. It seems like you’re implying that the categorisation of disciplines and that of people are the same process of dispossessing and separating knowledge from the world where they’re produced. aaa It’s not the same process, but a part of the same imperial enterprise of destroying existing types of knowledge.

I could reply to your initial question by accepting the question and speaking about myself as unlike common academics – ‘I am also engaging with cinema or with photography and with children’s books’ etc – but this would say something about how I navigate within the division of knowledge, not so much about the division of knowledge itself.

What I wanted to emphasise is that imperial technologies – those that we associate with ‘progress’ or with ‘modernity’, or let’s say device-based technologies like photography or cinema – those technologies were imposed as a form of generating knowledge that has its own separate history. And in that way we can write the history of photography and the history of cinema separately, without seeing

‘Where are my ancestors? Colonial postcards’, image published in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Jewelers of the Ummah, 2024.

Courtesy Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

April 2025

25

Jean Geiser (attributed), Jewish Woman in Algeria, c. 1875, albumen print from glass negative, 20 × 16 cm. Public domain

26

ArtReview

how they are part of the same imperial enterprise that is based on extraction.

What I meant is that the invention of childhood is also a technology, and it is a technology that engineers the life of humans – similarly to the way other technologies engineer the life of nonhumans. So I wanted to speak about how all those technologies together normalised the idea that different types of knowledge exist separately and we are just transgressing them.

It is necessary to recall that these divisions of age groups or types of knowledge didn’t exist, and are not unavoidable. We have much to learn from – and aspire to – the way visuality, for example, was enmeshed with justice in some precolonial cultures. ar A large part of your recent work revolves around the Jewish Muslim world, which also suffered from a kind of division that turns Jews and Muslims against each other. And you often use the terms ‘Arab Jews’, ‘Muslim Jews’ and ‘Jewish Muslims’. Are these different?

To many this might read almost like an oxymoron, as today Muslim and Jewish identities are understood as religious and racial, even. What’s at stake in these terminologies? aaa Before replying to your question, let me emphasise that it is not that divisions are necessarily violent, and that the opposite is necessarily better. It is the colonial, imperial or capitalist way of imposing divisions with force – or amalgamating divisions, as with the imperial violence against diverse Jews, for example, who were forced to be identified as a singular people.

My new book, The Jewelers of the Ummah, deals with the macro and micro forms of violence that destroyed the presence of diverse Jewish groups in North Africa and the Middle East to such a degree that the idea of their shared existence with Muslims – expressed in the categories ‘Muslim Jews’ or ‘Jewish Muslims’ – can seem to some an oxymoron.

Jews were protected communities under the ummah – the Islamic nation – since its inception.

The destruction of their presence within the ummah is the outcome of several colonial projects but also part of the Euro-American campaign of violence that, in the wake of the Second World War, invented the Judeo-Christian tradition in an effort to absolve Europe of its crimes against Jews and finally ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’ through the sacrifice of Palestine and the conversion of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians into the enemies of the Jews. The challenge and goal of the book, though, is not to come out with the ultimate category to designate an identity but to make the Jewish Muslim world – a world in which the Jews were Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, Amazigh, Andalusian – imaginable again.

Love and Craft ar I remember reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, where he writes, ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’. It feels like a similar dynamic here, where differences are only racialised and reified under an already racist ideology.

In relation to this European project of racialising the world, your recent children’s book, Golden Threads, is built on colonial photographs taken of Algerian women and girls, which to me was very exciting to learn, since in my own research I have attempted to understand a disappeared Manchu community – my own ancestors – via ethnographic photographs taken

by European travellers. It proved to be a very difficult world to rebuild via these Orientalising camera lenses. aaa Criticising the practices of colonial photographers and the industry built around the Orientalist depiction and circulation of colonial images of our ancestors is important, but we cannot stop there, since this visual wealth is ‘ours’ – that is, all those whose colonised ancestors were robbed of their presence in order to enable the accumulation of visual wealth to exist in Western museums and archives, and all those whose ancestors’ modes of life were transformed into specimens of bygone worlds – to be studied through the mediation of the museum. Photographs of colonial officers taken in the Maghreb are still treated as authoritative references for the study of jewellery, often with no questions asked about how these photographs contribute to the destruction of the world they ‘document’.

I wrote Golden Threads against the premises of this kind of colonial photography, which turns girls into hangers for the presentation of those marvellous jewels that their parents made, before colonialism destroyed the infrastructure of their making. The book restages these girls’

Image published in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Jewelers of the Ummah, 2024.

Courtesy Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

April 2025

27

world and depicts them as the daughters of the craftspeople who worked in the mellah (the Jewish quarter) in Fes. They grow up, learn, eat, play and sing in those workshops where their parents work, and they learn how to take care of the shared world through love and craft.

It is also an homage to the old tradition of Jewish guilds and to the Jewish corpuses of laws that protected the rights of artisans, among them the right to go on strike, which is described in the book. The young readers of the book will learn from this group of five girls an important lesson that is not taught in schools: the necessity of going on strike when faced with injustice.

My hope is that after reading the book, when its readers encounter these girls or others like them in colonial photographs, they will remember that they are looking at girls who participated in one of those strikes against brutal colonial industrialisation and that the meaning of industrialisation was the destruction of their modes of life.

Becoming Our Ancestors… ar This dynamic of reading these ‘documents’ and ‘accumulations of visual wealth’ not as some positivist evidence, but as a kind of destruction, a negative process, is really important, and really not acknowledged enough.

Even though Golden Threads is a children’s story, I imagine being able to write a realistic story requires a massive amount of research, especially given the erasure and manufactured amnesia surrounding

Algerian Jewish identity. Is this why you engaged with these archival objects in a more creative way? aaa The majority of my research was done for the writing of the Jewelers of the Ummah, which consists of open letters addressed to my kin and elected kin through which we inhabit the Muslim Jewish world. The idea for the children’s book came while I was writing the letter to my beloved children as part of that project, and I understood that I must resist the unidirectional way we are socialised to think about ancestry and transmission. The coincidence between the death of my parents and the birth of my first grandchild forced me to understand that I too am now an ancestor, and I have the right to choose whether to passively reproduce this colonial disruption of transmission or reverse its curse.

Thus, instead of maintaining that ‘I didn’t inherit much from the Maghreb’ and indirectly accepting that colonialism has the power to end a world life that had endured for thousands of years, I sought ways to renew disrupted paths of transmission that unfolded in multiple directions beyond that of the heteronormative nuclear family, which was engineered by colonialism to sabotage multigenerational transmission.

Reclaiming what was not transmitted to me became, at the same time, inseparable from what I can transmit myself. The letters that open and close The Jewelers of the Ummah – the first to my father and the last to the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani – are written from the point

Great Synagogue of Algiers, 1902, postcard. Public domain

28

ArtReview

of view of daughters who refuse to accept the right nation-states bestowed on fathers to move their daughters away from the world of their ancestors.

… Who Were Not Docile ar You’re very emphatic on the importance of reversing imperial violence, rather than seeing it as unrepairable. Is it really possible to undo imperialism? aaa For 500 years people have struggled to oppose, repair and reverse colonial and imperial wounds and damages. We cannot allow ourselves to disregard this resilience, which today is emblematised in Palestine, or to reproduce the imperial epistemological violence that has always pressured its victims to move on and forget about the crimes waged against them.

Potential History and The Jewelers of the Ummah offer language to account for these continuous efforts to mend and redress imperial wounds, as well as to participate in anticolonial struggle.

Hence, my approach is not concerned with the question of whether it is possible to undo imperialism or not; rather it involves using my different hats including, or maybe first and foremost, that of the political theorist and the native speaker of the languages of images and objects, to provide an anticolonial theoretical framework to amplify those efforts and to help orchestrate them across different places and times.

While I was a bit worried that The Jewelers of the Ummah would mainly interest descendants of this world, I’m deeply moved and excited each day I hear from another person originating from a different world who feels the book is also about them, as you also described when recognising yourself in the questions the book opens. This should not surprise us, since despite the very personal research involved in this book, the most intimate aspects of our life were – and continue to be – shaped by imperialism, which means that some of what seems to us to be the most intimate patterns of experience are shared. On this background, the book looks for those truly rare personal moments that occur when people manage to escape the imperial curse and say ‘no’, not necessarily in heroic acts of refusal but minor ones that track across generations. This is extremely important, especially given how we’ve been taught that our ancestors were docile. ar The idea of potential history is empowering, as it allows us to be inspired and influenced by another moment in time and think outside the present – even though they are always entangled in some way. But it seems like this could also be a tool appropriated by other political ends for perpetuating the Empire. Donald Trump’s election slogan ‘Make America great again’ is, supposedly, another example of evoking the power of a shared past. And potentially the Zionist project could also make a similar argument about its own exiles. Do you think there is a slipperiness or potential for misuse in the theoretical tools you have developed?

aaa These two examples are not ‘evoking shared past’ but on the contrary evoking colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the name of one dominant group that considers itself superior to others. In the case of Trump, these are evoked in the name of a prior moment of white supremacy. In the case of the Zionists, these are evoked in the name of an invented history of Jewish sovereignty over a land that was also inhabited by other people.

Potential history sets as its foundation the recognition of crimes against diverse groups and the need to attend to these crimes by restoring the condition of their livelihood outside of the imperial formations that are predicated on their exploitation. So, the answer is no – there is no slipperiness. ar In The Civil Contract you famously argue that our right to see comes with the responsibility to respond. As photographs don’t have inherent truth, and they’re often weaponised to serve political needs, how do we know what to respond to when we are so inundated with images of suffering? And when the idea of indexical truth has become more and more unstable? aaa In The Civil Contract I try to challenge the liberal fetishisation of the right to see, and understand it as part of the regime that photography created, and speculate the relationship between the different actors – photographers, photographed persons and spectators – as citizenry, where rights, duties and violence are distributed, regulated, challenged and refused. In so doing, I show that

photography puts us into a relation with others with whom we are governed that is not necessarily identical to that imposed by the state.

Thus, despite not sharing the same status and rights in the citizenry of photography, people can rehearse other formations of power, irreducible to the top–down model of imperial formations. In this sense, the responsibility to respond is not only grounded in the fact that a photograph is shown to us but because photographs (the products) and photography (the practice, event and condition) are sites in which those differences between the governed manifest themselves in a way that we can understand how much who we are and the positions we inhabit are not disconnected from what is seen in the images.

Idioms such as ‘being inundated with images’, or the older versions of ‘compassion fatigue’, or ‘images of suffering’, are all used to make people think that what is at stake is the circulation of images and not what these images are. The genocide in Gaza made it clear.

Palestinians risk their lives to broadcast images of the genocide they are enduring, and they do so against a global project of silencing this truth.

It was never about the quantity of the images or on how many images of violence one has to see in order to respond or take action, but about how to respond to images in a way that recognises the truth they bear: that the Palestinians are alone to broadcast a genocide from a zone forbidden to anyone who is not part of the genocidal army.

Pages from Ardashīr nāmah; Ezrā nāmah, c. 1670, a Judeo-Persian version of the Book of Esther compiled by Persian Jewish poet Shahin Shirazi. © and courtesy The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York

April 2025

29

Layered image of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and an unnamed Algerian Jewish money changer in a colonial postcard.

Photo: Yonatan Vinitsky. Courtesy Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

30

ArtReview

ar To me this ‘fetishisation of the right to see’ almost echoes what you called the ‘accumulation of visual wealth’, in a capitalistic way, and takes seeing or imaging as a given, and as unlimited, while the labour or extractions that happen in the process are downplayed. aaa There is something very tempting in photography to think about the individual photograph that is made by this or that photographer or is now in this or that collection; or about an individual encounter between the photographer and the photographed person.

It is very tempting to stay at the level of the single image or event. But when we understand the invention of photography as based on, or informed by, previous imperial technologies like land grabbing and extraction of resources, we see that the West operated photography – not just cameras – to achieve much more than is in discrete photographs.

Western actors – entrepreneurs, inventors, operators, scholars, anthropologists, soldiers and others – accumulated a visual wealth that landed in their museums, archives, libraries and private collections. This ‘primitive accumulation of visual wealth’ is in the hands of the West in the same way that they extracted other forms of resources, which enriched them and empowered them to destroy more. What I’m trying to reckon with is this dimension of photography, and at the same time, to decentralise the authority of those who own this wealth – to resist how they determine what was left to us to aspire to.

So rather than limiting my engagement with this colonial legacy to criticising the photographers and their manipulations of the photographed scenes – by staging these women depicted in colonial postcards with their jewelleries – I engage in a conversation with my ancestors, whose images were literally taken and claimed. It’s a conversation that shows that not only these jewelleries are mine, but also this know-how is still alive despite the museum impulse to kill it.

The question though is how I engage with this visual wealth that is accumulated in the West in a different way. In the ‘Fabrication & Narration’ workshops that I’m doing, we are reclaiming together not only those pieces of jewellery but this knowledge that the museum played an active role in destroying its infrastructure and disrupting its transmission.

Calling All Shahrazads ar Your film One Thousand and One Jewels – Unlearning Imperial Plunder iii will be coming out soon. Relating to The Jewelers of the Ummah, this one seems to be about ‘the jewels of the Ummah’.

There seems to be a relation between objects and people that you’re always thinking about. Could you speak about how you carried out the project? aaa Part of the film was shot around the ‘Fabrication & Narration’ table, where descendants

of the Jewish Muslim world come together to share stories about pieces of jewellery from the Maghreb while fabricating them, and vice versa, fabricating while listening. In the middle of the table is a map of the destroyed Jewish Muslim quarter of craftmaking in Algiers, which I retraced with found and remade pieces of jewellery from the Maghreb. This table and the film are part of my attempt to decentralise the museum as the source of authority for teaching us, descendants of this destroyed world and guardians of these jewels, what their meanings and uses are, as if they belong to the past and as if imperialism truly succeeded in disrupting our ancestral transmission. The premise behind the film is that as long as all these Shahrazads tell the story of the Jewish Muslim world, the verdict of its elimination is suspended. ar Do you feel optimistic about where the world is headed? aaa While it is hard to be optimistic with a genocide that has lasted a year and a half, I believe that we ought to continue the anticolonial struggle. We owe it to the people who already paid an immense price and continue to pay every day. We cannot lose faith in our multigenerational capacity to overthrow this horrible racial, imperial, capitalistic regime.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s film One Thousand and One Jewels – Unlearning Imperial Plunder iii will premiere on 21 May at the Decolonial Film Festival, Paris

‘Fabrication & Narration’ workshop held during the exhibition Revenir, 2025, The Mucem, Marseille.

Courtesy Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

April 2025

31

www.para-site.art Facebook/Instagram @parasite.hk WeChat parasitehongkong 10B, Wing Wah Industrial Building 香港鰂魚涌英皇道677號榮華工業大廈10B室

Within visual art, and not infrequently outside of it too, the human body might currently appear to be in a flop era. Going round the galleries and looking, in particular, at exhibitions of painting – because, well, most exhibitions are of painting – it can often feel like the stylistic pendulum has lately swung decisively towards abstraction, after many revivalist years for figuration.

Pondering that apparent shift, you might easily think of superficial aesthetic reasons – the fundamental that’s-enough-of-that ennui that dates back to when the second generation of cave painters, bored of stick people, insisted on images of buffalo instead – and also point to the conservative backlash against explicitly identity-driven art. Either way, rumour has it, many formerly figurative painters now hire burly assistants to rugby-tackle them as soon as they’ve painted a nice washy or squiggly background and are about to put a person on top of it.

But at the same time, while an absence of human bodies might seem, superficially at least, to be supplanting an obsession with them, in other mediums and artforms the proverbial meat-puppets remain central, and abundant.

Take, for example, Anne Imhof’s doom: House of Hope (2025), her recent fashion-adjacent spectacle at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, which – on its most basic level – asked people to look at live people doing stuff or just standing there.

Of course, those lookers also got irritated by having their views blocked by those trying to film the event on their phones – hell is other people, etc. We want to see bodies, or think we do; and then there they are, lots of them, and we find them annoying and want them to go away.

Furthermore, binary narratives suggesting that the human form is currently important or unimportant in art aren’t accurate; or rather, both things can be true. As soon as you make pronouncements like ‘apparently we’ve had enough bodies for now’, or ‘abstraction is back, figurative painting is done, phew’, you go round the galleries again and lo, there’s still a ton of paintings of people being produced. (Let’s leave out of this, for now, the tastes of dunderhead collectors who can’t handle anything other than pictures of their own species.)

Such, indeed, seems to be the defining, lenticular tenor of the cultural moment:

Dead and Alive

Artists rejoice! says Martin Herbert.

Forget fashionable taste! You no longer have to struggle to be relevant!

top Anne Imhof, doom: House of Hope, 2025.

Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers and Park Avenue Armory above Josh Kline, Productivity Gains (Brandon / Accountant) (detail), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal

April 2025

the body appearing to fade out and, in other quarters, being still really insistently present, partly because there are pressures on it to vanish. (See also human creativity per se, the fact that there’s about to be a premium on ‘humanauthored’ books, the not unrelated fact of tech bosses encouraging their offspring to train in the humanities.) This duality, this simultaneous death and efflorescence of the human, is surely underscored by an uncertainty – fuelled by ai, the possibilities of self-modification, the spectre of the Singularity, etc – about what even constitutes ‘humanness’ anymore: a sense, that is, of incipient loss.

Recent Hollywood films pinned to the nature of the contemporary body and psyche, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (both 2023) to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), anxiously register our moment’s sense of corporeal flux.

A lot of recent art, meanwhile, might be construed as a subconscious response to this existential threat, either making the body insistently present, both as a site of defiance and as a locus of baseline humanity, or, as with abstraction’s return, performing its vanishing.

Some signature artworks of our time, like Josh Kline’s bagged bodies, imply both at once; others, like Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s, urge collaboration with our incoming inhuman overlords; still others, like the ones in Ed Atkins’s Tate Britain retrospective this month, combine undead cgi renderings of people with abundant extremely human chatter and feeling. If bodies and persons are seen as synonymous, meanwhile, note that in legal terms it’s increasingly difficult to define what a ‘person’ is, given that things considered to be a ‘legal person’ can include churches, rivers, companies and animals.

Still, buck up. The result, artists will note with gratitude, is that it’s currently impossible to make irrelevant art, so long as there are either people in it or not. Is your art pointedly full of human bodies?

Congratulations, you’re incisively commenting on our current predicament, our terrifying hinge point as a species. Is your art pointedly bereft of those human bodies?

Same, even if you’re painting rivers and churches. Everything now depends on what it says in the press release.

33

Just Eat It

A bright green foam sits in the bowl; a couple of tanned potato chips are tucked tastefully to the side. Digging beneath the mostly tasteless foam (a bare hint of grassy sweetness suggests it’s made of pea) with a chip, you excavate a mound of salty ground-meat. The cumulative effect is reminiscent of the trashy hardshell tacos I ate in volume as a kid; but this, we’ve been told, is a food portrait of Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore as ‘a shepherd’s pie – but deconstructed’. It is the third course in artist Sandra Knecht’s art-meal-event The Dinner Party (taking its name from Judy Chicago’s 1974–79 installation), staged at the Serpentine Galleries’ Magazine restaurant in London this past March. It’s one of a series of ‘culinary gatherings with a critical edge’ presented by the artist.

Each of the meal’s eight courses presents a synaesthetic conjuring of figures who inspired Knecht, from musician pj Harvey to artists such as Nan Goldin. The extended meal was filled with awkward chat, some tasty mouthfuls and a few delicious but oddly tasteless conceptual culinary choices: Frida Kahlo ‘as’ a chicken taco, Zanele Muholi ‘as’ vanilla ice cream.

Culinary experiences in the artworld are on the rise, observes Chris Fite-Wassilak, but why does food need to be framed as ‘art’ in order to be considered something special?

top and left Sandra Knecht, The Dinner Party, 2025 (performance views, The Magazine, Serpentine Galleries, London).

Photos: Talie Rose Eigeland. Courtesy the artist and Serpentine Galleries, London above Gordon Matta-Clark, Food (still), 1972, 16 mm film transferred to video, 43 min.

Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

34

ArtReview

Though by the time it all ended, what stuck out most was the repeated ‘deconstruction’ of many of the dishes. A nod, presumably, to the El Bulli-style mode of high-end cuisine, which seeks to elevate food by breaking down and altering its constituent parts. And perhaps, given that the event took place under the label of ‘art’, to the philosophical inclinations of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. As if it wasn’t enough that it be a series of food portraits, but needed more. Although all that might have been affected by the slight buzz from the deconstructed Manhattan (Carson McCullers) with which the meal ended.

Food has often been on the table, as it were, at exhibitions recently. In the microcosm that is London alone there have been over half a dozen shows featuring food and art ‘culinary experiences’ in recent months. Ellen Mara De Wachter’s book More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses, released last December, positions food’s use in art as part of a shift away from the primacy of sight. ‘Working with food was, and still is, an unusual approach to making art,’ De Wachter tells us. The book offers a primer, profiling ten artists’ projects with food, from Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) to Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark’s food restaurant (1971–74);

though, given De Wachter’s selection, readers might get the impression that art and food was a combination cooked up only in latetwentieth-century New York City. (Right on cue, food is currently being reprised by artist Lucien Smith in nyc’s Chinatown.)

‘Artistic valorisations of the culinary are best taken with a grain of salt,’ warned writer and curator David Teh in the catalogue for the 2012 survey exhibition Feast, at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago. Part of me wonders if it’s primarily an urban, art-centre fabulation: that food, and such gustatory events, are part of any practice and art scene, and simply aren’t

packaged or marketed so overtly or extravagantly in less stratified, commodified and hierarchic locales. We choose not to see the food already involved with art (stale croissants sold at art-centre cafés; salted almonds furtively munched while wandering around a gallery; the glorifying pint and noodles sought mid-gallery run; the corner-store samosa grabbed before an opening; the flat supermarket sandwiches and crisps rushed mid-install; conspiratorial shared dinners with art friends; inane, unsatisfying openingnight dinners for those tangentially involved in an exhibition; the digestive biscuits eaten while writing this) as art food, in part because such consumptions could be part of anyone’s daily life. And, as such, they are apparently not sufficiently elevated to be placed on art’s table of contents.

But food’s always been a means, fuel or subject for art, at least since someone etched some plants and animals onto a cave wall thousands of years ago. Like sound, food is a slippery ur-media that art can embrace but can’t control: material and utilitarian, multisensory and loaded with histories and ideas, social and immersive, it can slip in and out of any arena and spill all over your shirt. It’s already its own concept and context. Food is art, great.

So why does it need to be constantly reframed as something transgressive or new to art?

Perhaps it’s not a question of medium but of what is lost when food is recontextualised in the art gallery or institution, where it’s then expected to carry the weighty baggage of expectation as a novelty and boundary breaker.

In his speech introducing Knecht’s event,

top Sakiya, foreground, in the Ein Qiniya hills outside Ramallah. Photo: Nida Sinnokrot.

Courtesy Sakiya Photo Archive above Cooking Sections, climavore: On Tidal Zones, 2017–2021 (installation view, Isle of Skye).

Photo: Nick Middleton. Courtesy the artists

April 2025

Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist mentioned the artist’s farm in Switzerland as an example of a ‘durational’ artwork, alongside those farms of other artists, such as Yinka Shonibare and Adrián Villar Rojas. Meanwhile, collectives such as Campo Adentro in Spain, Sakiya in Palestine or Lakshmi Nivas Collective in India are exploring the merging of art practices with agriculture and pastoral practices.

Such endeavours seem geared not towards filling high-end tables, but rearranging systems of production, distribution and living. Growing food and making food are inherently communal ecological acts, political and relational.

Sharing food and eating it is too – but sometimes less so. Perhaps if there’s any use to coopting food into an art context, it’s to foreground these relationships and issues. To be seated at a dinner-as-art, though, one doesn’t always feel so conscious or critical, making small talk while waiting for dessert. At that point, the art-meal’s proximity to high-end cuisine feels a little more uneasy, where we risk becoming not an art lover, just another delighted, lip-smacking gourmand.

The added layer of making exhibitions and installations about these facts is, more often than not, sterile, confusing and misguided, if not exclusionary and creepily insidery. I often think of the widely distributed imagery of Cooking Sections’s ongoing climavore project (2017–) on the Isle of Skye, of a small group of people having a meal on a set of benches and tables made of oyster cages set in a bay’s water at low tide. I’m sure it was a lovely experience for those who were there; but if a meal is the project, exhibiting documentation of the meal is just gloating.

Knecht’s inspirational meal in London was open seating at long tables for dozens of people to mix, and at £24 a head, relatively accessible – but it was also set on a March weekend daytime during Ramadan, the timing swiftly framing who in the city is welcome at the table.

The point isn’t that such events shouldn’t happen, but that they should be more proliferative and less fawned over. It doesn’t need any further deconstructing: food is already art, with or without anyone’s claims on it as such.

The issues raised and at stake aren’t special, but something quotidian instead, issues taking place already, at your table.

35

Since its founding in 2005, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, or msn) has been a hub of ambitious programming, initially operating from a former furniture store before moving to a pavilion on the bank of the capital’s Vistula River. In October 2024 it finally opened a permanent home, for its collection of 4,300 international and regional artworks from the 1950s onwards, on the northeastern corner of Warsaw’s Plac Defilad (Parade Square) – a place of gathering since its creation during the 1950s. The new msn building stood relatively empty until February this year, when the institution unveiled an inaugural exhibition titled The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection, and has drawn the usual conservative scorn about contemporary art and architecture. A three-year strategic partnership with automobile company Audi and the displacement of local traders who formerly occupied the site has also provoked uncomfortable discussions.

Underlying all this is the more fundamental question, why build such a museum today? That its opening weekend saw over 14,000 visitors might speak for itself, but msn proves that this question is not met with easy or universal answers.

The building’s low-slung, minimalist form, which, depending on your perspective, exudes ‘quiet luxury’ or evokes a branch of ikea (whose global domination began with the exploitation of Poland’s forests during the 1960s), seems in keeping with Warsaw’s current mode as a capital of big business and fashionable hospitality. msn has years of experience negotiating and contextualising Poland’s divisions and historical traumas. It feels significant that its new building opened a year after the electorate’s rejection of the long-reigning rightwing government, which had commandeered the cultural sector to an alarming degree. While explicit gestures of ‘decommunisation’ have been made across the political spectrum to populist ends, msn engages in a more nuanced exchange with the square’s soaring Stalinist Palace of Culture, which endures like the architectural equivalent of an ageing diva: awful but iconic.

Meeting visitors on the first floor as they travel around a dizzying, Escher-like central staircase, and positioned towards the Palace of Culture (visible through an expanse of glass), is Friendship (1954), a rare sculpture from the less well known Social Realist output of Alina Szapocznikow, who is generally celebrated for her later experimental works. Imposing in patinated bronze, it depicts a Polish and Soviet worker side by side in an embrace, but their other

36

Tipping the Scale

In Warsaw, Phoebe Blatton wonders what balance of the expected and the unexpected will bring crowds through a museum’s doors

Cajsa von Zeipel, Friends with Grapefruit (detail), 2020, mixed media, 180 × 109 × 109 cm.

Photo: Alicja Szulc

ArtReview

arms, which had extended outwards to hold a banner between them, were lost after the sculpture’s removal from the palace’s entrance hall during the 1990s.

There is an ironic gesture in the sculpture’s placement, which could be waving (with absent arms) to its place of origin.

This came to mind during msn’s opening weekend via an artistic (though not art in any attributable sense) installation of cabbages – not ‘ornamental brassica’ but actual thumping kapusta – along the bar of the museum’s café. Fashionable floristry or a knowing, tender ‘wave’ to Eastern European clichés? Or both?

Hanging above were paintings by Karolina Jabłońska of homemade bottled pickles, evoking the trope of słoiki (also the collective title of the paintings, dated 2024) – meaning ‘jars’ in Polish – the derogatory name used by city folk for migrants from the Polish countryside.

The exhibition catalogue features plenty of academic introspection about museology and politics, but there’s an insouciance at msn, an instinct for drama and challenge that seems tapped into its public; a public that is acutely aware of its precarity at the eastern border of Europe. Crowd-pleasers and disturbers abound, from Canadian artist Tau Lewis’s Angelus Mortem (2021), a monumental ‘big cat’ head made from discarded furs, to the dystopian demigoddess of Swedish sculptor Cajsa von Zeipel’s mixed-media Friends with Grapefruit (2020), her piercing stare fused onto a society still awaiting the reestablishment of reproductive rights. In one of the exhibition’s four ‘takes’, Dark Planet: Art, Spirituality, and Future Coexistence, an untitled, moving vanitas tableau from 2014 by Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes is pertinent to a land also dominated

by Catholicism and home to nearly one million Ukrainian refugees. Szapocznikow’s surreal sculptures of the 1960s/70s, lips and breasts sculpted from industrial waste materials, are expected in the section titled Synthetic Materialities: Body, Commodity and Fetish from the Cold War to the Present. What is not expected is the way in which Szapocznikow – when exhibited alongside other women artists from around the globe via this curatorial lens – takes flight from typically sombre presentations of her work, rooted in Holocaust trauma, in a way that is expansive and comradely, strangely joyful. For the moment, this feels like the point of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, where permanence might finally have a form but is rooted in a spirit far stronger than concrete.

Phoebe Blatton is a writer based in Berlin

In the post-Trump world and the febrile atmosphere of the culture wars, even mild criticisms of the artworld’s cherished orthodoxies and consensus values are met with outrage. In the December 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine, the writer Dean Kissick published ‘The Painted Protest’, a lengthy polemic about the history of the contemporary artworld and its increasingly politicised alignment with identity politics. Charting the shift from the boomtime artworld of the 2000s and early 2010s, Kissick argues that, after 2016, art that ‘had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity’.

The many reactions to the article have tended to coalesce around those insisting, on one hand, that the artworld isn’t as wholly committed to the politics of identity and representation as Kissick pretends, and, on the other, that maybe it is, but that there’s nothing wrong with the wide spread of identity politics anyway. That mix of denial and double-down comes from the insistence that identity politics is necessarily a progressive politics. As Christian ViverosFauné insisted in his Village Voice tirade against Kissick, ‘the coming culture wars will need more and better political art, not less’, while ‘dialing the clock back won’t take the politics out of culture’.

Which politics, though? The defensiveness reveals that many in the artworld are perhaps not so sure that the project of identity politics – institutionalised by museum programmes’ emphasis on the minority identities of artists, and by the critical culture that still holds sway between the academy, the art school and the public galleries and biennials – is doing what it was supposed to. A more analytical Ben Davis, writing for Artnet, conceded that while part of the reaction against ‘woke’ identity politics is undoubtedly agitated by the right, it has resonated with a wider disillusion about the ameliorative claims of an institutional culture that has turned much of its material and critical resources towards the centring of marginalised groups as an end in itself. As Davis notes, the turn of women, Black and Hispanic voters towards Trump in 2024 has triggered ‘paradigm collapse’ among the liberal establishment, which we have been led to assume includes the cultural centre, now attempting to understand why

Working Class

After Trump’s second coming, the artworld will have to work hard to regain its legitimacy, argues J.J. Charlesworth

many people are less inclined to respond to a cultural politics that was supposed to address them according to their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender.

Davis acknowledges what other commentators have tended to avoid – that there might be what he terms a ‘populist left’ critique of identity politics, not issuing from ‘White resentment’ but from an older tradition of class politics.

For Davis it is ‘a particular genre of “identity politics” that is specifically counterposed to “class politics”’. This form of identity politics, he points out, ‘is particularly dominant in art spaces, which prize symbolism and correctness of cultural consumption very highly and cater to high-status educated people’. And as anyone paying attention to the politics of populism will note, in the us and elsewhere, it is often Anne Imhof’s vandalised 2024 ‘Wish You Were Gay’ billboard, Bregenz.

Photo: Instagram @anne_imhof

April 2025

‘low-status’, less-educated people who have moved to the new populist coalitions.

Class is not an easy politics to map onto contemporary art’s institutions, since while, symbolically at least, the output of the artworld is supposed to be for everyone, it remains an elite system, funded by oligarchical interests.

If, between the academy, the philanthropic foundation and the art museum, a certain politics of minoritarian identity has come to dominate the programmes and official discourses of cultural institutions, it is perhaps because marginalised minorities can anyway be ‘safely’ embraced by the benign care of the progressive institution, while leaving class inequalities untouched.

Of course, the contemporary artworld has, since the 1970s, been defined by the shift towards identity politics. Feminist, Black and queer politics were all part of the artworld throughout the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In that, Kissick’s characterisation of the artworld before 2016 as a ‘polyphony’ ignores the roots of the present consensus. What changed, however, was that the politics of identity became the discourse of the establishment, while the rewriting of art’s institutional culture by the demands of equity, diversity and inclusion accelerated after 2016, partly due to the populist shock of Trump’s first election (and, in the uk, Brexit), all the while bolstered by the ‘cancel culture’ that saw those critical or unconvinced of the increasingly militant forms of identitarian activism shut up, shut down or shut out of art’s institutional culture.

Inevitably, an artworld that remains a paragon of exclusivity while symbolically committing to the excluded cannot maintain such a contradiction for long. If only because any broader public – one not defined by easily demarcated identities, but interested a more ‘polyphonic’ view of culture, taste, social and political interests, and, yes, identity – will eventually see the artworld become an enclave catering only to particular groups and priorities, and eventually look elsewhere. At some point, the artworld and its institutions will have to figure out how to readmit ‘polyphony’ into its discourses and practices, since the claim of art’s institutions to legitimacy remains based on its value to a heterogeneous, pluralistic public. The other option might of course be to close it all down, or shut its doors to anyone not aligned to its discourses. And then the question would be – who would notice?

37

Artists have often struggled to go beyond the available permissions of their time and place to transcend the familiar and to free up the imagination. The most common way of going about this is with drugs: opium or alcohol or marijuana or, today, ayahuasca or ketamine.

Other methods involve meditation, fasting, hypnosis or foreign travel. Anything to slip the confines of one’s own consciousness, the contents of one’s own head.

There is also a long history of artists who have embraced technological innovation, adapting new materials or processes to their own working methods. Everything was new once; there was a time when oil paint itself was a new technology; painting on canvas instead of wood panels was also a leap. The camera, which some thought would make painting obsolete, was almost from the beginning embraced by painters who understood its potential for conveying a sense of form. Artists as diverse as Degas, Eakins, Bonnard, Wols, Rauschenberg and Richter all used the camera to varying degrees in their work. Silkscreen, video, neon – all radical departures at one time, now simply part of the artist’s toolbox.

I have long dreamed of a truly malleable, elastic pictorial space, in which distortion comes from within, and is resolved according to some hitherto unknown system. What I longed for in particular was the dynamism of all-over abstraction, the theatrical space of largescale abstract painting – the heft and physical sensation of New York School painting, only fashioned out of figuration, out of images.

38

To the Next Level

David Salle considers the ideal curriculum for training an artistic ai

above David Salle, Suspenders, 2025, oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival uv print on linen, 183 × 274 × 4 cm facing page, top David Salle, Blue Coffee, 2025, oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival uv print on linen, 76 × 102 × 4 cm

ArtReview

The revolution in machine intelligence that we are currently living through, although likely a nightmare in some walks of life, makes possible just this type of composition. When Picasso and Braque introduced a fragmented, multiple-points-of-view version of threedimensional volumes in the first decade of the twentieth century, the idea had been to align pictorial space with recent advances in physics and optics, with what it felt like to be alive in the scientific age. Some years later, when the Surrealists played around with notions of scale, juxtaposition and the suspension, in painting, of the laws of gravity, the impetus was to align the space of painting with the emotional landscape of the unconscious – to make painting consistent with Freudian psychology. The unlikely and uncanny became the new normal.

But that revolution in pictorial space, initiated by those radical pioneers so long ago, continues.

Today, machine learning affords artists the means to reconfigure pictorial space with the malleability and plasticity of pure imagination.

And then it goes further.

I should emphasise that I am not an engineer and have scant understanding of the underlying technology. I have, in fact, very little interest in it. I don’t really care how the thing works.

I’m only interested in what it can do, and care for it only so long as it gives me something I can use. ai is a powerful tool, but it’s still a tool.

It is not, at least for now, an author of anything.

It is essentially an amalgamator. The ‘thinking’ part of the machine, the algorithm, does seem to have some kind of drive to break pictures

apart, and to recombine their component parts, somehow to scramble their original spatial orientation but preserve and even amplify their emotional subtext. What could be more expressive of this moment?

The primary difference between painting and digital images, between things that are made and things that just are, resides in the edge.

In the digital sphere, an edge – the boundary between two or more forms – is just pixels.

Edges do not constitute an event because the whole image is just pixels. Every square inch reads with the same undifferentiated, uninflected detachment, which can sometimes be the source of its charm, but more often makes me want to throw something at it. In painting, the boundary between two forms is fraught with meaning; an edge is the result of a gesture, a decisive action.

The way a painter handles edges plays a large part in defining his or her style. What we call ‘style’ is the sum total of all the decisions taken within a work of art combined with a physical capability, or talent.

Could the machine be taught to think about edges like a painter? The people who developed this technology had no grasp of artistic intentionality, as a matter of form. How could the engineers be expected to understand how an intention translates into a mark, and how that mark sets the condition for the painting’s tone, for a whole worldview; or how the organisation of visual information has a specific inside energy?

above David Salle, N.P. Intrigue, 2025, oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival uv print on linen, 183 × 249 cm

No, the machine would have to be sent to art school, and I set about crafting the curriculum.

I started with the basics: what a brushstroke is, what an edge is, how to use the brush to make an edge. And: this is how you create form using value pattern, the contrast of light and darks, and this is how you organise the visual components into a dynamic composition. I trained the machine, which is to say, fed it a diet of images of form givers, form creators, artists like Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico and Arthur Dove.

Not the whole corpus of their work by any means, but a handful of paintings that illustrated the formal ideas. Once the machine had acquired some reference points, I trained it on a tightly edited selection of my own work.

I remembered a series of paintings I’d made nearly 25 years earlier that were based on a nineteenth-century opera backdrop, a romantic pastoral scene of a couple sitting on some rocks that bordered a lake, with leafy green trees in the foreground and a view of mountains in the distance. I converted the muted greens and browns and blues of the original scenic painting into interlocking hard-edged shapes, like crystals, or puzzle pieces that snapped into place. I painted these faceted rocks and trees using two or three different palettes, arresting colour harmonies that are high-key, counterintuitive and artificial.

I had an instinct that the pastoral image would be the right starting point for the machine, something that would allow it to build the new kind of spaces that I had been yearning to see for years.

And so it began.

all images Photo: John Behrens. © David Salle / ars New York, 2025.

Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London

David Salle is a painter. His new work is on show at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, 10 April – 8 June

April 2025

39

Art Featured

Of the sacred fire 41

42

ArtReview

Specimens A trip into the expansive world of artist Yuki Kihara, where a reconsideration of what it means to be human requires a reevaluation of the origin of the species

by Fi Churchman

Charles Darwin sighs. “I kept a secret about the queer animal queendom,” he confesses. He looks a little off: his face is doughy and pallid; he seems forlorn as he rocks back and forth in an armchair. “Because I was afraid of being cancelled by the Victorian establishment.”

Moments later, he is instantly transported from his chair and what appears to be a private members’ club, to a brightly coloured coral reef. And outfitted in a glorious clownfish-inspired gown.

This is the beginning of Japanese-Sāmoan artist Yuki Kihara’s most recent video, Darwin Drag (2025). For more than two decades, her multidisciplinary output of photography, performance, moving image, sculpture and archival research has sought to interrogate colonial visualculture and dismantle the historical Western gaze cast on the bodies and sexuality of Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific. Recently, she has also looked to the intersection of gender-based and racial prejudices, resource extraction and the human impact on the environment around the South Seas and, more broadly, the Pacific Ocean.

In Darwin Drag, the eponymous British biologist (played by Kihara, who wears extensive prosthetics for the role) is given the opportunity to reflect on omissions regarding the variety of sex traits catalogued in On the Origin of Species (1859), a piece of scientific literature that is considered foundational to the field of evolutionary biology.

In the video, drag queen-cum-fairy fishmother buckwheat (aka Lealailepule Edward Cowley, a collaborator and professional drag queen working in Aotearoa New Zealand) takes Darwin under her fin, and together they travel a coral reef, exploring several fish species that exhibit sequential hermaphroditism (ie they can change sex).

It’s a biological trait that was observed (recorded in Darwin’s notebooks) but downplayed, along with any sexual display that deviated from the binary female-male reproductive model, by Darwin and his

peers. (Darwin refers to ‘vitiated’ – impaired – instincts in Origin when observing nonhuman animals and plants whose reproductive natures are highly sensitive to changes in environmental or social conditions.)

All clownfish (known in Sāmoa as tu’u’u-lumane, buckwheat tells us) are born male. In a group of clownfish the dominant male will turn into a female fish. She’ll lay eggs and her mate will fertilise those. When the female dies, her mate or the next largest male will take her place. This change is called protandrous hermaphroditism, we learn from the six-minute video. Some female globehead parrotfish (fuga), which are less vivid in colour, will change into vibrant blue-green male fish when they reach sexual maturity (protogynous hermaphroditism), while the coral goby (mano’o) can change back and forth between sexes (bidirectional hermaphroditism). “The mano’o are introverts and hardly move around, so their chances of looking for a new mate is pretty slim,” explains Darwin in Kihara’s videowork.

“Hence, when two mano’o meet, any possibility of a sex change would surely come in handy!” chimes in buckwheat, now dressed as a parrotfish. Rita Menu (Shayden Taylor) and Tess Tickle (Mizac Hotere) are dressed in peach- and gold-ruffled goby-inspired dresses, shimmying up against one another and applying makeup; Rita applies highlighter to her own cheekbones, while Tess, with a suggestive smile, begins to paint on a goatee. Darwin proceeds to tell us that another kind of hermaphroditism is called ‘synchronous’, meaning both male and female reproductive organs are present at the same time: “That reminds me of the pusi!” smiles buckwheat, referring to the fimbriated moray eel. There’s a good dose of cheeky subversiveness in Darwin Drag, which upends the conventionally serious, observational approach of the television nature-documentaries that we are accustomed to with a disco-soundtracked drag aesthetic.

April 2025

43

The same is true of Paradise Camp, an ongoing project begun in Darwin’s face to be shaped by a person that he and the establishment 2020 (of which Darwin Drag is a part) and that has formed the back- to which he belonged – put simply, one that privileged white heterobone of Kihara’s work since touring from the New Zealand Pavilion sexual Christian men – would have deemed ‘vitiated’ or ‘unnatural’. at the 59th Venice Biennale to the Powerhouse Museum in Gadigal And covered up. land, Sydney, and Saletoga Sands Resort & Spa in Sāmoa. Kihara has Kihara is Fa’afafine and Paradise Camp is conceived of as a just opened her latest instalment, titled Darwin in Paradise Camp, at Fa’afafine utopia. Fa’afafine (meaning ‘in the manner of a woman’) is the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. Each iteration of Paradise Camp has a term that refers to third gender people in Sāmoa who are born male, featured photographs, moving image, sculptures, textiles, performance and raised and identify with female gender traits. (For those who and an archive that includes museum documentation, newspaper are assigned female at birth and embody masculine gender traits, articles, photographs, illustrations Fa’atane means ‘in the manner of a and more, all of which are installed man’.) Third genders are not based There’s a good dose of cheeky in the fashion of a natural-historyon sexual identity, but on gender subversiveness in Darwin Drag, museum exhibition. At Darwin in and spirituality, and exist across which upends the conventionally serious, the world, each an accepted group Paradise Camp, for example, opposite of people within their cultures: a display of preserved fish speciobservational approach of television in North America, there are twomens, one vitrine displays the prosnature-documentaries with a discospirit people; in India, the hijra; thetic of Darwin’s face and hair that soundtracked drag aesthetic Kihara wore for the video. Propped in Balkan cultures there are sworn up on a mount, the mask looks virgins; in Thailand, the kathoey. like a flap of shed skin or the surface of a head waiting to be taxider- “Paradise Camp is a place where no one is discriminated for their mied; in the same vitrine are the moulds used to cast the contours gender or their sexuality,” explains Kihara. “It’s a place where we of Kihara’s head. There’s a sharp but playful irony to the way Kihara live in harmony with nature. That’s always been the ethos of Paradise subverts the traditional Western model of museum display and its Camp: to look at the natural environment from an Indigenous epistemic violences – that is, the ways in which museums are respon- queer perspective.” sible for recording and shaping its society’s knowledge, a system that What makes Kihara’s work so compelling is the way in which has both historically ignored or overlooked Indigenous sexuality and she creates points of access for different audiences. The series After at the same time othered and fetishised Indigenous bodies. Here, Gauguin (2020) recreates the French artist’s paintings of Tahitian Kihara uses the vitrine not only to display the biologist as a specimen women via photographs that depict members from the Fa’afafine and but also as a kind of double portrait, one that reveals the inside of Fa’atane community, to which Kihara belongs, reprising the poses.

above Darwin Drag (still), 2025, single-channel video preceding pages Yuki Kihara. Photo: Ralph Brown

44

ArtReview

Darwin Drag (still), 2025, single-channel video

April 2025

45

Two Fa‘afafine (After Gauguin), 2020, part of Paradise Camp, 2020/22, for the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022

46

ArtReview

Finding, in her research, that several of Gauguin’s paintings likely thrift shops – that were modelled after “racial archetypes of Pacific lifted Sāmoan figures and landscapes from photographs taken by Islanders” and upcycled by Kihara to chronicle all the outfits that New Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew at the turn of the twen- Bertha wore during significant moments in her life: when she tieth century, Kihara subverts the exoticising and fetishising Western was marching for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in New gaze upon Pacific Islanders’ bodies by repicturing these paintings Zealand (Law Reform Girl 1986), her work promoting awareness of with Fa’afafine collaborators and centring the idea of self-represen- hiv/aids among Pasifika peoples (Queens of the Pacific 1994), the first tation. The models, far from the passive subjects of Gauguin’s paint- time Fa’afafine appeared on the runway in Aotearoa New Zealand at ings, gaze coyly, smoulder, stare knowingly, glare or look at viewers a major fashion event (Madame Butterfly 1995) and so on. The last doll in the series, Over the Rainbow 2023, with a softened, compassionate “When I created Paradise Camp… wears the same outfit that Bertha expression. After all, ‘The title of my wore during her performance at the exhibition is intended to “camp” the I wanted the exhibition to be an notion of “paradise”,’ Kihara told opening of Paradise Camp. opportunity for the community to come Natalie King, who curated the exhiIn Sāmoa, “The Fa’afafine comtogether, to feel safe and to celebrate bition’s presentation at the Venice munity not only managed the openBiennale. This quality is evident in ing of the exhibition, but they also the fuck out, you know?”

Darwin Drag, too, which sits someperformed in front of the deputy where between a drag performance, a nature documentary, an envi- prime minister and the leader of the opposition,” Kihara tells me. ronmental campaign advert, a kids’ programme. But Kihara under- “It’s important for us to be visible in front of government officials and cuts her sense of humour by consistently pointing to the subjects to hold them accountable, and for us to make sure that when they’re of colonialism, the violences of heteronormativity and the human planning policies around climate change and sustainability, that they always have us in their hearts and minds.” impact on the environment.

Kihara says that she could have “cut and paste” Paradise Camp from “Every time it moves to different places, Paradise Camp evolves to engage with the local community. When it toured to the Powerhouse one location to another. But the artist is sensitive to how different Museum, I invited a Sāmoan diasporic drag queen, who I admired audiences and communities can be engaged and made to feel welcome for a very long time, to participate: her name is Bertha,” says Kihara. at her exhibitions – even down to making sure that institutions either have or are willing to install genderTo commemorate Bertha (aka Harold Samu) Spirit of the ancestors watching (After Gauguin), 2020, neutral toilets. “Whenever I make a project and her legacy as an activist, Kihara presented part of Paradise Camp, 2020/22, or body of work, I ask myself: who is it that a new series titled bertha (2023). It’s made for the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion I want to empower with what I do?” she says. up of a collection of vintage dolls – found in at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022

April 2025

47

48

49

above Three Tahiti(Sāmo)ans [After Gauguin], 2017, archival digital print preceding pages Vārchive (detail), featuring Fa’afafine Aquarium (far left), part of Paradise Camp, 2020/22, for the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Photo: Luke Walker

50

ArtReview

“When I created Paradise Camp, the people that I wanted to empower were people like me: Fa’afafine, but also trans, nonbinary, intersex people, people who didn’t fit into the binary. I wanted the exhibition to be an opportunity for the community to come together, to feel safe and to celebrate the fuck out, you know?”

The issue of empowerment partly boils down to visibility, in the sense of representation and recognition. Included in Kihara’s evergrowing archive project, usually presented across the walls of Paradise Camp with a kind of scrapbook aesthetic, is a series of the artist’s own passports, which show her sex listed as ‘M’, ‘X’ and then ‘F’ (‘By the way,’ she writes in the description alongside the passports, ‘F stands for Fa’afafine!’). Keeping a record of Fa’afafine culture and using this to platform significant figures in the community, Kihara calls this body of research a Vārchive – introducing the concept of Vā, which was described in 1996 by Sāmoan writer Albert Wendt as ‘the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together’. While the concept was originally in reference to the way Sāmoans relate to and connect with one another, Kihara extends this to nonhuman entities that share diverse sex and gender traits too. Including fish. Part of the archive, first presented at the Venice Biennale, includes a panel that Kihara calls Fa’afafine Aquarium (2022), which depicts images of the sex-changing fish that, in part, inspired Darwin Drag.

“Everybody knows who Charles Darwin is in the uk context,” says Kihara. “So I thought this is how I could engage with the British audience. Part of the research involved a site visit to the Natural History Museum in London, where I came across some of the fish specimens that Darwin collected in Tahiti in 1835. One of the fish he’d collected

was a parrot fish, and that specimen will be presented alongside my work.” That parrot fish, roughly 13cm in length, is contained in a jar of preservative, its skin long leached of colour.

When I ask Kihara why, in Darwin Drag, buckwheat welcomes Darwin into the coral reef with open arms, instead of, say, taking a more obviously critical position against the biologist, she tells me, “Cisgender and straight people also suffer from heteronormativity, and these gender norms were secured by colonialism, imperialism, religion and the patriarchy.” It’s also, let’s face it, fun to see buckwheat “liberate” Darwin from such ideological constructions by allowing room for the hoary-haired biologist to wiggle around in a dazzling sequined dress while batting his eyelashes at his fish friends. What’s more, in transforming human-Darwin into fishDarwin, Kihara makes reference to the dominant narrative of human hegemony over the animal world.

She tells me a story: Tagaloa, the supreme god, pulled the Pacific Islands up out of the ocean using a giant fishhook. Sāmoa was first inhabited by two males, who Tagaloa formed out of a pair of grubs.

One day, while fishing, one of the men was bitten by a fish called a lō and died. His partner, devastated, begged Tagaloa to bring him back to life. The supreme god agreed, but instead brought the man’s partner back as a woman. Together the man and woman created the rest of humankind. “Heteronormative evolution is a colonial construct.

My ancestors were ahead of their time – they already knew that all life was created from the ocean,” says Kihara. “What I’m trying to say is that we’re all part of one ecosystem.” ar Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara is on view at Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, through 3 August

above Talanoa Between Yuki Kihara and Paul Gauguin (still), 2022, digital video all images Courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand

April 2025

51

Like Us, But Not

by Tom Seymour

Body horror’s recent revival in film and art suggests that the human isn’t what it used to be 52

ArtReview

“You are everything they want me to be,” says Elisabeth as she point of destruction by the television signals he consumes. In his final confronts her younger self, Sue, in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance moments, he embraces his metamorphosis with the phrase: “Long (2024), one of the most discussed and divisive Hollywood movies of live the new flesh”. This prophecy encapsulates the genre’s trajectory the past year. The film sees Elisabeth, played by Demi Moore, strike towards a future where identity is unfixed, bodies are mutable and a Faustian pact with a shadowy corporation to create Sue, a youthful the self is controlled by external forces.

Over the last year, the genre has explored the porous boundaries of and ‘more perfect’ doppelgänger that pushes its way out of her body. the human form through reproductive ethics, biotechnology, animal As Sue misbehaves, Elisabeth’s body is punished. The film’s politics are literal – Moore’s ageing Hollywood actress must answer to a hybridity and virtual avatars. Recent films like Max Minghella’s Shell and Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (both 2024) depict bodily repulsive film executive called… Harvey.

Yet the film also stands as a hypercontemporary reflection of body transformation as a symptom of a world in which a person is no horror, the eternally multivalent popular genre that has the uncanny longer anchored to an organic, warm-blooded form.

But the new flesh is not confined to film. Contemporary visual knack of serving as a barometer for society’s disparate, unspoken artists are increasingly engaged with anxieties. The significance of Elisabeth’s Today our anxieties are embodied themes of bodily disintegration, transplight extends beyond the politics of formation and commodification. Mire beauty and ageing by exploring the in the convergence of flesh and Lee’s Open Wound (2024) saw fleshy, lubridissolution of the human body as we once machine, in genetic manipulation cated silicone sculptures hang from knew it. Visualised onscreen by indeand, postpandemic, in the liminality the ceiling of Tate Modern’s Turbine pendent auteurs like David Cronenberg Hall. Amid the vogue for gut health, and Andrzej Zuławski, body horror has of human-animal hybridity these seemingly still-digesting inteshistorically externalised cultural fears tines evoked anxieties around medical interventions, biotech and through grotesque transformations of the human form. Cronenberg’s films, like Rabid (1977), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), dissect the the vulnerability of the body to microscopic entities. Lee works fusion of flesh and machinery, often reflecting anxieties about media, within the legacy of Korean sculptors like Lee Bul, whose art envisurveillance and the female body. Zuławski, through Possession (1981), sions cybernetic augmentation; yet Mire Lee’s work also owes much portrays the monstrous feminine as both terrifying and liberating in to Cronenberg in the suggestion that bodily manipulation is often its depiction of a servile housewife in West Berlin during the height violent, invasive and inescapable.

Fans of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) would not anticipate a kinship of the Cold War, embarking on an inner journey of sexual transgression. Fears change for each generation: where once the genre focused with the work of Tracey Emin, yet the once Young British Artist’s on disease, parasites and governmental and technological control, it exhibition I Followed You to the End, on show last autumn at White now speaks to an age shaped by virtual experience, digital dysmor- Cube Bermondsey, visually interpreted cancer as a bodily invasion by phia and a growing detachment between the physical and virtual self. a terrifying alien presence. Emin openly documented her battle with Today our anxieties are embodied in the convergence of flesh and a malignant growth in her bladder, placing films of her stoma bag at machine, in genetic manipulation and, postpandemic, in the limi- the centre of the show. Her raw documentation of her suffering body fighting an internal mutation chimed with a nality of human-animal hybridity. above Videodrome, dir David Cronenberg, 1983. world increasingly fixated by the fragility of Cronenberg’s seminal Videodrome directly Courtesy The Criterion Collection the human experience. anticipated such anxieties. The film’s protagfacing page Mire Lee, Open Wound, 2024 Similar themes have also been explored onist, Max Renn, descends into a hallucina(installation view). Photo: Lucy Green. more subtly in contemporary photography. tory nightmare as his body is reshaped to the © Tate Modern, London

April 2025

53

Tarrah Krajnak, Self-Portrait as Weston/as Bertha Wardell, 1927/2020, 2020, gelatin silver print. © the artist.

Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery, London

54

ArtReview

Tarrah Krajnak, For Ana ( from Ayni, Offerings for my Sister), 2020–22, cyanotype. © the artist.

Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery, London

April 2025

55

LuYang, LuYang Delusional Mandala (stills), 2015, single-channel video, colour, sound, 16 min 27 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

56

ArtReview

The self-portraits of Peruvian-born American artist Tarrah Krajnak Russell calls on women to reclaim bodily errors – glitches – (currently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Founda- against patriarchal and capitalist structures. ‘Within glitch feminism, tion Prize) use deft and sharp collage to interpret identity as a frac- a glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformtured, unstable construct, one vulnerable to outside control. Krajnak’s ance,’ she writes. ‘This glitch aims to make abstract again that which often irreverent work might not so obviously align with the body has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material; the horror tradition. Yet rather than externalising fear in grotesque body.’ Today, horror is found in our struggle to do as Russell instructs physical mutations, she uses the momentary nature of photography to reclaim one’s glitches, and not to succumb to society’s thirst for an to explore how our sense of uniqueness is increasingly blurred and increasingly unreal standard of beauty; what Jia Tolentino, writing shaped by forces beyond our autonomous control. Her work suggests in The New Yorker, has coined ‘Instagram face’. that horror does not solely emerge from bodily corruption, but from Long before Hollywood’s rediscovery of body horror, Chinese the collapse of self in the face of external pressure. artists like LuYang and Cao Fei were articulating these concerns in the This thematic expansion is not limited to the organic body. The digital realm. LuYang’s LuYang Delusional Mandala (2015) and doku senew flesh in an era of ai-generated aesthetics means the human form ries (2020–) depict ai-generated avatars undergoing grotesque mutacan be endlessly morphed, erased or enhanced, and art has the capac- tions, bodies warping and melting in a virtual landscape. These digital ity to capture the increasingly accepted works extend horror into the realm of the Art has the capacity to capture fact that digital dysmorphia isn’t merely cybernetic, where the body is no longer a a passing psychological concern but a funphysical construct but a mutable, disposthe increasingly accepted damental and permanent transformation. fact that digital dysmorphia isn’t able entity. Similarly, Cao Fei’s rmb City French body artist orlan has long explored (2007–11) constructs a dystopian virtuality merely a passing psychological the fragility of the human form through in which human forms are mere disposperformance, digital art, photography and able commodities. These works matericoncern but a fundamental film, with recent work that incorporates alise Cronenberg’s vision of technology reand permanent transformation ai-generated imagery and 3d modelling shaping the body. Here, selfhood bows to the onto her own body to critique beauty standards and bodily commod- might of algorithms. Our dna is now reconfigured as digital detritus. ification. Andrew Thomas Huang’s ai-generated animations depict In today’s body horror renaissance, gore is a metaphor for a the human body in constant metamorphosis. Such works illustrate larger existential crisis. We’re entering an era in which human existthe dawning realisation that the grotesque mutations once confined ence will be defined by the interplay between biology, technology to the realm of film are now an everyday reality on social media. Here, and digital representation, no longer reliant on soft flesh and brittle behind our screens, the collapsing boundaries between real and artifi- bones. Yet, by the same token, the body is no longer the sole propcial bodies – once imagined in Videodrome – are becoming normalised. erty of the self. It is a battleground, contested by medical advanceInstead of the cinema screen or radical gallery space, the locale ments, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and the relentless of bodily horror is now Instagram and TikTok: infinite virtual land- aesthetic pressures of visual culture. The horror lies not in the loss of scapes in which the self is endlessly malleable, subject to constant bodily control, but in the realisation that selfhood no longer need be revision, external modification and rampant sexualisation. In her embodied. “You can have everything you want, but you’ll never be 2020 book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, American writer and curator her,” says Sue, the younger doppelgänger of Elisabeth. The new flesh Legacy Russell writes: ‘A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to func- is here, and we all fear falling apart. ar tion. Within technoculture, a glitch is a part of machinic anxiety, an indicator of something having gone wrong.’

Tom Seymour is a writer based in London

The Substance, 2024, dir Coralie Fargeat.

Courtesy Mubi, Metropolitan Filmexport

April 2025

57

Working in Trauma’s Wake Gabrielle Goliath’s artworks seek to reframe acts of mourning and of remembrance

by Stephanie Bailey

58

ArtReview

Ovaherero and Nama Genocide, In 2010, South African artist Gabrithe artist turned ten documented elle Goliath created the photoElegy performances, each a tribute graphic portrait series Berenice 10–28 to a murdered woman, into a ten(2010), inviting 19 women to stand in for the artist’s childhood friend, channel video installation, creating something of a chorus whose who had been killed in an act of dorhythms are defined by the point mestic violence on Christmas Eve, in each video at which singers 1991, in Kimberly, where Goliath switch places. That choral form was born. Each portrait represented one year since Berenice’s death, with Goliath later inviting another was previously crystallised in the video installation Chorus, which group of women to produce Berenice 29–39,in 2022. The project forms an Goliath created in 2021 in response to the rape and murder of Uyinene anchor point in Goliath’s expansive, multimedia practice: a sustained Mrwetyana, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Cape and careful exploration of what she has described as “the problematic Town, whose killer took advantage of his job at the local post office of the representation of violence in art”, and the question of how to to lure her back to the precinct – ostensibly to collect a parcel – after speak against racialised, sexualised and gendered violence without hours. The incident stirred the ongoing struggle against gender-based retraumatising, fetishising or objectifying survivors. violence and femicide in South Africa, prompting the government to Works like Roulette (2014) followed, in which the recording of a initiate a ‘National Strategic Plan’ for the crisis; only for Goliath to revolver being shot once every three hours cuts through the static witness a return to the ‘incremental and terrifying reality of this crisis playing on a pair of headphones: a frequency that was updated from as norm, as an everyday of permissible violence’. the original six hours in keeping with 2017–18 data released by the Through their compositions and dedications, Chorus and Elegy South African Police service showing how often, statistically, a woman both preserve and sustain this ongoing call for collective justice in South Africa is murdered. And Elegy, a long-term commemorative in South Africa and beyond, by refusing to let Mrwetyana’s name, performance-project in which seven opera singers collaborate on and that of so many others, fade. In the case of Chorus, two videos maintaining a single tone over the course of an hour, by lining up are projected onto standing walls that face each other. One shows behind a podium on which each participant, in turn, sings until they a performance of a polyphonic hum by the University of Cape Town can no more. Defined by an act of collective, ritual mourning, Elegy Choir, many of whom were Mrwetyana’s classmates; the other shows was initiated in 2015 to honour Ipeleng Christine Moholane – a nine- an empty stage, whose back wall features a list naming the women, teen-year-old journalism student who was raped and murdered in children and lgbtq+ victims of femicide in South Africa starting Tembisa – after Goliath heard the student’s father speak about her from August 2019, when Mrwetyana was killed, to October 2022. Also death on the radio. ‘At this lowest moment, it must have taken so among the names are those of the men who died trying to protect much courage for him to make himself publicly heard and to converse the victims, an important feature in Goliath’s interrogation. ‘For me, with others about this tragedy in an effort to say, “This has to come to this circles back to the question of men and how to reckon with this an end”,’ Goliath told artist Amadour in an interview for The Brooklyn violence,’ she told Amadour. ‘It’s about the order of modernity, the Rail in 2022. ‘I began envisioning an artwork to counteract this abhor- modern subject, the historical beneficiary of social life as we know it, rent but normative brutality. How could I create something to refuse and how it orders the world.’ this order of violence – a space for others to participate and mourn?’

Goliath confronts that question of responsibility – in which Iterations of Elegy have followed, including one for Noluvo everyone is implicated in gender-based violence whether they have Swelindawo in 2017. Swelindawo was killed in 2016 by Sigcine Mdani, directly experienced it or not – by conjuring potent and insistent whose sentencing acknowledged the systemic misogyny, femicide sites of collective reckoning that are grounded in embodied transmisand queerphobia that drove his actions – sion; something that the chorus as a structural above Berenice 29–39 (detail), 2022, Swelindawo was in an openly lesbian relationform embraces as a collective act. It was ‘a crit11 photographic portraits, pigment ink ical conceptual and poetic decision… to make ship, and her partner had to go into hiding on cotton Baryta, 90 × 90 cm (each) this work collective,’ Goliath tells Amadour. shortly after her murder. In 2024, the year facing page Berenice 10–28 (detail), 2010, ‘When one choir member runs out of breath Goliath staged an Elegy performance as part of 19 photographic portraits, pigment ink and cannot sing anymore, there are other the Venice Biennale to honour victims of the on cotton Baryta, 108 × 75 cm (each)

April 2025

59

Personal Accounts – Deinde Falase, 2024 (installation view, Jaou Tunis, 2024). Photo: Mehdi Ben Temessek

60

Personal Accounts – There’s a river of birds in migration (still), 2024, four-channel video and sound installation

61

Elegy – for two ancestors, 2024 (performance view, Foreigners Everywhere, Venice Biennale, 2024).

Photo: James Macdonald

62

ArtReview

voices to carry on the lament. In this way, it’s not only about song, shown across a constellation of six screens, some paired and others solo. In some cases, the women are filmed in a documentary-interas such, but breath – a collective offering and holding of breath.’

The idea of the breath, or many different breaths, connected across view style, sitting alone; in other cases the camera zooms in on details time and space, is amplified in Personal Accounts (2013–), an ongoing like their hair, avoiding faces to preserve anonymity. Each testimony transnational multicycle video- and sound-installation project whose – a composition of sounds, gestures and subtle twitches – is disarmfirst iteration was included in a 2014 exhibition at Goodman Gallery in ingly direct. The sucking in and expulsion of breath; eyes flushing Johannesburg. That five-channel video installation presented moving red; a wry smile; then, tears.

Completing the trio in Venice was the four-channel There’s a river of portraits of five women that were edited to show them expressing only the nonverbal utterances and expressions between their testimo- birds in migration, whose title draws from a liturgy scripted, composed nies of domestic violence. Against a white background, their faces fill and performed by South African artist and activist Treyvone Moo, the screen as they look into the camera; their images visibly splicing the matriarch of House of Diamonds, a safe house addressing lgbtq homelessness in South Africa. Four in rhythm with where the film was cut and stitched according to where vertical video screens leaning against Goliath confronts that question of words begin and end. a wall each show a figure against a responsibility – in which everyone is Goliath premiered a new cycle of marine blue background – Treyvone, implicated in gender-based violence Personal Accounts at the 60th Venice draped in a blue patterned fabric, Biennale in 2024, with three iterations Maneo, whose head is crowned whether they have directly experienced adopting the same format – frontwith a spray of flora, Sapphire and it or not – by conjuring potent and facing video portraits edited to cut Hopewell, their names appearing insistent sites of collective reckoning out spoken words. Deinde Falase is a both in the work’s introduction and three-channel video and sound instalin a dedicated Personal Accounts online lation featuring the titular news presenter who announced the portal, where their stories and reflections on trans survival in signing into law of the 2014 Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill in Johannesburg are held in community with contributions by indiNigeria and who became an asylum seeker in South Africa soon after. viduals who participated in different cycles from around the world.

Composed as a triptych, Deinde sits against a blue background and As the only one who barely receives a vocal cut due to the rolling hum angles his body to face inwards on the screens bordering the central of their song, Treyvone’s voice acts like a sonic thread connecting with ‘panel’, where he faces the camera, addressing – per the work’s intro- every breath in the room, wherever the work is shown: a metonymic duction – a different person in each frame: his late mother, who never constant that tells a deeply collective story – a fact that becomes more learned of his sexuality; his elder brother, who lives in America and apparent as the project grows, and Goliath creates context-specific supports him; and his younger brother in Nigeria who does not. Lago cycles for the places where Personal Accounts travels. di Como is a 16-channel installation anchored to the Como branch For the 2024 biennial Jaou Tunis, for example, where Goliath of Telefona Donna, a support centre offering community and legal presented Personal Accounts at the b7l9 Art Station, the artist created counsel to more than 250 cases of gendered violence and sexual a new work, Salle d’écoute (2024). The three-channel installation assault daily. Against a blue backdrop, nine women from around the was filmed in a listening room in downtown Tunis, founded by world and from different walks of life living in and around Como are L’Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates in 1993 to support

Personal Accounts, 2024 (installation view, Foreigners Everywhere, Venice Biennale, 2024).

Photo: Luc Meneghel

April 2025

63

women facing gendered violence. Shown in a closed-off space, screens display a video of that listening room’s curtain, which stands in for footage of the participants, honouring their wish to remain anonymous and rerouting attention to the sounds reverberating around the room: breathing, weeping, sometimes chuckling. For an exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh that followed, Goliath produced the 22-channel Mango Blossoms (2024), based on stories of survival and repair from women and gender-diverse individuals in and around Edinburgh. Portraits ripple with splices across four screens positioned around a room, two of which reach the width and height of the walls. Loops show faces alone or figures sitting on their chair, coupled with cuts that zoom into hair, clothes, sometimes hands and nothing else. In both cases, Treyvone Moo’s song, emanating from There’s a river of birds in migration close by, is ever present, its resonance stitching together a tapestry of entangled bodily and vocal utterances where meaning builds through scales of relation.

What emerges is a project composed as an epic and ongoing transnational discussion expressed in nonverbal vocalisations rather than language, which so often fails to capture the traumatic weight that racial, sexual and gender-based violence can heave onto those who have been subjected to it, or to confront a painfully common struggle that transcends borders and stretches well beyond the history of the nation-state and Western imperialism – even if the present day’s violence is intrinsically tied to that legacy. This, in a nutshell, defines mourning as a living practice, or as Goliath puts it, the lifework of mourning – that is, to hold what comes in the wake, which for Goliath involves reaching for ‘a different kind of work’ that goes ‘against what violence does’. As described in the Talbot Rice exhibition text, ‘Goliath is calling for a different kind of relation – a politics of love and avowal that doesn’t disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.’

This song is for… (2019) is one such call: a sound, video and text installation created with rape survivors who each shared a personally

significant song, written reflection and colour, resulting in videos of women- and gender-queer-led musical ensembles performing those songs in films tinted with monochromatic hues, alongside an accompanying album. Embedded into each song’s arrangement is a purposeful glitch reminiscent of the sound a scratched lp record makes when it’s played: a sonic interpretation of traumatic recall, where a thought or feeling becomes stuck. In 2023 Goliath returned to the form of the acoustic spiral with These three remain, a monumental 12-channel sound installation commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 15.

Twelve speakers installed in an open space enclosed by stone walls on the grounds of the Sharjah Art Foundation emitted the sounds of more than 7,000 samples of the word ‘love’ drawn from playlists compiled by the artist and her brothers, as lights transformed the enclosure into a monochrome of rotating pastel hues: a meditation on an enduring and undeniably universal emotion, even if some only experience its shadow opposite. Love, after all, can be a haunting, as the poem that accompanies the work’s documentation on Goliath’s website suggests: something left behind, something to be recovered.

Goliath’s practice is grounded in that recovery, with works that test how art can create space for trauma to unfold and unfurl – to be worked through relationally, laterally, personally – in the name of restoration through recognition. That is, to hold space for witnessing as much as to bear witness; not through language nor the intellectualisation of the horrors of systemic violence, but through the complex web of emotions and states that define its ever-shifting and far-reaching textures, both within the body and without. The point, as Goliath has suggested, is about acknowledging the contexts and histories that have conditioned humans into systems that have structured our most intimate relations. “Racialised, gendered and sexualised violence is transnational, is global, is deeply entangled with histories of colonial modernity, is terrifyingly normative, and enmeshed within ordinary life,” Goliath has pointed out. “This is not about a distant suffering.”

To coax out that proximity, to close the distance, is the work. ar Stephanie Bailey is a writer from Hong Kong

Roulette, 2014 (installation view, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2021).

Courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris all images but one Courtesy the artist

64

ArtReview

Eternal Returns 4 Ideals of the East

Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was a Japanese scholar and art critic operating during the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, a time when large parts of Asia struggled under various manifestations of Western imperialism, while Japan was starting to export a brand of its own.

Okakura is primarily known today for the three books he wrote in English: Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904) and The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (1906). The first two of these publications promoted early expressions of Pan-Asianism, albeit with Japan as the Asian nation par excellence (to the point that you might question whether or not Okakura really considered Japan a part of Asia at all, according to critics like Indian writer and theatre director Rustom Bharucha) and the defender of Asian culture (whether out of solidarity or a sense of ownership). Particularly after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), fought over the race to occupy Korea and northeastern China, which allowed Japan to promote itself as the only Asian nation to have defeated a Western colonial power and laid both China and Korea open to Japan’s imperial expansion. Okakura’s mission was, on the one hand, to defend traditional Japanese culture from encroaching Westernisation and, on the other (perhaps in support of the first), to promote Japanese and, more broadly speaking, Asian culture to aficionados in the West. As part of the last, he became Curator of the Department of Japanese and Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (which had been Okakura’s primary

home since 1904), in 1910. So that he could literally sell Asian art to the West, or at least buy it for Westerners.

Okakura had studied in Europe and the us as part of an early placement with the Imperial Art Commission. On his return he founded and directed the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he intended to breathe fresh life into traditional forms while resisting the slavish copying of Western aesthetics. The last was a battle he swiftly lost, so he resigned and founded the Nihon Bijutsuin (Japan Visual Arts Academy), where he adopted a more pragmatic approach to Western aesthetics and their ability to enhance traditional artforms. Okakura died of a heart attack in 1913, shortly after writing in a letter that ‘I have eaten things in various parts of the globe – too varied for the hereditary notions of my stomach and kidneys’ as a means of rationalising the ill health that dogged him in his final years. And as a way of blaming his Japanese body for letting down the internationalism of his mind.

While his own nationalist and imperialist beliefs remain intensely problematic (well, unless you agree with them), Okakura’s early attempts to insist on the value of Asian aesthetics and philosophy in the face of a Western narrative that presented its own values as more advanced, more contemporary and more powerful than anything else that might have been going on make him an intriguing thinker whose influence persists to this day. Moreover he was part of a diverse intellectual circle in which he counted everyone from Rabindranath Tagore to Isabella Stewart Gardner among his friends. The text that follows is the opening gambit in his best-known work on art, Ideals of the East.

April 2025

65

The Range of Ideals

by Okakura Tenshin Annotated by Yuwen Jiang and Mark Rappolt

Okakura Kakuzō (front left) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (front centre) with their friends on the Terrace at Red Roof, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1910, gelatin silver print. Photo: Thomas E. Marr and Son. Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston / cc by-nc-nd 4.0

66

ArtReview

Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.

It’s interesting that Okakura’s Pan-Asianist argument starts with the introduction of a divide and that the divide is the Himalayas. The publication of the first edition of Ideals of the East, in 1903, took place just prior to the British expedition to Tibet (the Younghusband expedition, 1903–04), and at a time when archaeological expeditions into western China (by German, French, British, Russian and Japanese teams) were undertaken, resulting in a massive amount of knowledge being produced on Buddhist cave paintings (a lot of them subsequently cut out and removed). Okakura’s concern with Tibet seems to reflect an interest in keeping up to date with the state of expeditions. Which would prove useful later, when Okakura was engaged to collect Asian art for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Of course, Okakura’s idea of a united Asia serves only to promote Japan, the one place where, to his understanding, Asia appears united and the ‘thought inheritance’, whatever that is, takes on a material manifestation – he will argue that Japan took its religion from India and its language from China, thus uniting the South and the East. West Asia is less relevant to him generally. A mode of thought that persists to this day. Although the riches generated by oils and gas might be rapidly changing that perspective.

Dunhuang cave mural of Avalokiteshvara, worshipping bodhisattvas and mendicants, early Tang Dynasty (618–907 ce).

Public domain

Down to the days of the Mohammedan conquest went, by the ancient highways of the sea, the intrepid mariners of the Bengal coast, founding their colonies in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra, leaving Aryan blood to mingle with that of the sea-board races of Burmah and Siam, and binding Cathay and India fast in mutual intercourse.

Cultural exchange is, for Okakura, inextricably connected to conquest and power. So in some ways it’s not really exchange at all: just taking, or imposing.

The long systolic centuries – in which India, crippled in her power to give, shrank back upon herself, and China, self-absorbed in recovery from the shock of Mongol tyranny, lost her intellectual hospitality – succeeded the epoch of Mahmoud of Ghazni, in the eleventh century. But the old energy of communication lived yet in the great moving sea of the Tartar hordes, whose waves recoiled from the long walls of the North, to break upon and overrun the Punjab. The Hunas, the Sakas, and the Gettaes, grim ancestors of the Rajputs, had been the forerunners of that great Mongol outburst which, under Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, spread over the Celestial soil, to deluge it with Bengali Tantrikism1, and flooded the Indian peninsula, to tinge its Mussulmân Imperialism with Mongolian polity and art.

Here history for Okakura is a bit like the monsoon. Or, to get culturally specific (and not do what Okakura so often does), like Hokusai’s celebrated representation of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831).

April 2025

67

For if Asia be one, it is also true that the Asiatic races form a single mighty web.

Even if he managed to separate out the strands of that web in the previous paragraph.

‘Tartar Prince’, published in Joachim Bouvet, L’estat présent de la Chine, 1697. Here ‘Tartar’ refers to the northeastAsian Manchus who ruled China’s last dynasty.

Public domain

We forget, in an age of classification, that types are after all but shining points of distinctness in an ocean of approximations, false gods deliberately set up to be worshipped, for the sake of mental convenience, but having no more ultimate or mutually exclusive validity than the separate existence of two interchangeable sciences. If the history of Delhi represents the Tartar’s imposition of himself upon a Mohammedan world, it must also be remembered that the story of Baghdad and her great Saracenic culture is equally significant of the power of Semitic peoples to demonstrate Chinese, as well as Persian, civilisation and art, in face of the Frankish nations of the Mediterranean coast. Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing-line. Islam itself may be described as Confucianism on horseback, sword in hand. For it is quite possible to distinguish, in the hoary communism of the Yellow Valley, traces of a purely pastoral element, such as we see abstracted and self-realised in the Mussulmân races.

In this paragraph, Okakura appears to be arguing for Asia’s cause (against the Frankish nations), but here using a colonial language (and after all, he wrote this text in English, for people who spoke that language, rather than for members of any of the Asian nations he is writing about). Tartar in European languages, for example, may refer to any culture ranging from Turkey to northern Asia; Islam at this point has also spread from northern Africa to Southeast Asia. Other than a Japanese Orientalism at play, it’s also worth thinking about how Okakura can appear to be saying something about solidarity while actually pushing an imperialist agenda.

Or, to turn again to Eastern Asia from the West, Buddhism – that great ocean of idealism, in which merge all the river-systems of Eastern Asiatic thought – is not coloured only with the pure water of the Ganges, for the Tartaric nations that joined it made their genius also tributary, bringing new symbolism, new organisation, new powers of devotion, to add to the treasures of the Faith.

It has been, however, the great privilege of Japan to realise this unity-incomplexity with a special clearness. The Indo-Tartaric blood of this race was in itself a heritage which qualified it to imbibe from the two sources, and so mirror the whole of Asiatic consciousness. The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion, made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture.

Again it comes down to power and strength. And Japan, at that time, sees itself as the only country in Asia untouched by colonialism – which is debatable, since the Meiji Restoration that allowed it to quickly Westernise was spurred on by an unequal treaty signed with the us.

Dynastic upheavals, the inroads of Tartar horsemen, the carnage and devastation of infuriated mobs – all these things, sweeping over her again and again, have left to China no landmarks, save her literature and her ruins, to recall the glory of the Tâng emperors or the refinement of Sung society.

68

ArtReview

Amida Buddha at Byōdō-in, Kyoto, woodcarving by Jōchō, 1053. Published in Japanese Temples and their Treasures, 1910.

Public domain

The grandeur of Asoka – ideal type of Asiatic monarchs, whose edicts dictated terms to the sovereigns of Antioch and Alexandria – is almost forgotten among the crumbling stones of Bharhut and Buddha Gaya.

In fact, it took a colonial power (that of Britain) to ‘rediscover’ them, after they were (presumably) erased by more traditionally Hindu regimes. But the grandeur of Ashoka would be something on which an independent India would eventually be founded, with the wheel of dharma, which draws directly from one of the capitals of a pillar erected by the Buddhist Mauryan emperor, becoming an essential component of the national flag. Given India’s current Hindu nationalist turn, you might take that as an example of how the Okakura ‘way’ continues to flourish today.

Yōshū Chikanobu, A Contest of Elegant Ladies among the Cherry Blossoms, 1887, triptych of woodblock prints, 37 × 74 cm.

Public domain

The jewelled court of Vikramaditya is but a lost dream, which even the poetry of Kalidasa fails to evoke. The sublime attainments of Indian art, almost effaced as they have been by the rough-handedness of the Hunas, the fanatical iconoclasm of the Mussulmân, and the unconscious vandalism of mercenary Europe, leave us to seek only a past glory in the mouldy walls of Ajanta, the tortured sculptures of Ellora, the silent protests of rock-cut Orissa, and finally in the domestic utensils of the present day, where beauty clings sadly to religion in the midst of an exquisite home-life.

It is in Japan alone that the historic wealth of Asiatic culture can be consecutively studied through its treasured specimens. The Imperial collection, the Shinto temples, and the opened dolmens, reveal the subtle curves of Hâng workmanship 2.

The temples of Nara are rich in representations of Tâng culture, and of that Indian art, then in its splendour, which so much influenced the creations of this classic period – natural heirlooms of a nation which has preserved the music, pronunciation, ceremony, and costumes, not to speak of the religious rites and philosophy, of so remarkable an age, intact.

April 2025

69

The treasure-stores of the daimyos, again, abound in works of art and manuscripts belonging to the Sung and Mongol dynasties, and as in China itself the former were lost during the Mongol conquest, and the latter in the age of the reactionary Ming, this fact animates some Chinese scholars of the present day to seek in Japan the fountain-head of their own ancient knowledge.

Just as Buddhist monks from outside India once had to restore the religion and its teachings to India. But this is also reminiscent of how Renaissance-era Europeans retrieved knowledge of Graeco-Roman culture preserved in the Islamic world. But instead of celebrating a world in which culture is constantly exchanged and remade, Okakura again seems to insist that there is such a thing as an originary national knowledge.

Thus Japan is a museum of Asiatic civilisation; and yet more than a museum, because the singular genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new without losing the old.

Okakura, of course, is about to go and work in a museum. So here he seems to be saying that he’s qualified for the job because he has always lived in one, and that all Japanese are essentially curators. It’s also interesting that Okakura frames authority/superiority as something founded on eclecticism rather than authenticity, valuing diversity over originality. Reading between the lines of his agenda, one can also see how such a value can be weaponised to serve imperial needs – not just Japan’s at that time, but think about the usa today. Advaitism is a reference to the oneness of existence, but it is evidence of Okakura’s habit of dressing his ideas in the clothing of Asian mysticism (he also wandered around Boston in traditional Japanese dress). Which may relate to the fashions of the times (the dressing up of ideas, not the dressing up of Okakura’s person).

Ogata Gekkō, In the Noh theatre, from the series The manners and customs of women, 1891, woodblock print on paper, 33 × 22 cm. Public domain

The Shinto still adheres to his pre-Buddhistic rites of ancestor-worship; and the Buddhists themselves cling to each various school of religious development which has come in its natural order to enrich the soil.

The Yamato poetry 3, and Bugaku music 4, which reflect the Tâng ideal under the régime of the Fujiwara aristocracy, are a source of inspiration and delight to the present day, like the sombre Zennism and No-dances, which were the product of Sung illumination. It is this tenacity that keeps Japan true to the Asiatic soul even while it raises her to the rank of a modern power: The history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals – the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness. Yet I linger with dismay on the threshold of an attempt to make an intelligible summary of those art-ideals. For art, like the diamond net of Indra, reflects the whole chain in every link.

Again, Okakura attempts to mellow his imperialist train of thought by chucking in a Pan-Asian reference. It’s amazing that people fell for this. Or perhaps not. His audiences in London and New York were a bunch of fellow imperialists, after all.

It exists at no period in any final mould. It is always a growth, defying the dissecting knife of the chronologist. To discourse on a particular phase of its development means to deal with infinite causes and effects throughout its past and

70

ArtReview

Japanese Tantric Mandala, showing text in Chinese and Sanskrit with Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Eight Patriarchs of the Shingon Sect, c.1200–1399.

Public domain

present. Art with us, as elsewhere, is the expression of the highest and noblest of our national culture, so that, in order to understand it, we must pass in review the various phases of Confucian philosophy; the different ideals which the Buddhist mind has from time to time revealed; those mighty political cycles which have one after another unfurled the banner of nationality; the reflection in patriotic thought of the lights of poetry and the shadows of heroic characters; and the echoes, alike of the wailing of a multitude, and of the mad-seeming merriment of the laughter of a race.

Any history of Japanese art-ideals is, then, almost an impossibility, as long as the western world remains so unaware of the varied environment and interrelated social phenomena into which that art is set, as it were a jewel. Definition is limitation.

Here perhaps Okakura finally makes an important point.

The beauty of a cloud or a flower lies in its unconscious unfolding of itself, and the silent eloquence of the masterpieces of each epoch must tell their story better than any epitome of necessary half-truths. My poor attempts are merely an indication, not a narrative.

Notes [Okakura’s]

1

2

Bengali Tantrikism. The Tantras are works written for the most part in Northern Bengal after the thirteenth century. Their subjects consist, very largely, of psychic phenomena and kindred matters, but they include some of the noblest flights of pure Hinduism. Their chief purpose seems to have been the formulation of a religion which could reach and redeem the lowest of the low.

Hâng Workmanship / Tâng Culture / Sung and Mongol Dynasties. A brief abstract of the periods of Chinese history might run as follows: The Shu Dynasty (1122 to 221 bc).

This was the culmination of the process of early Chinese consolidation preceded by the dynasties of Kha and In. The capitals of these powers, though already situated in the valley of the Yellow River, were not yet advanced so far east as the present centre. They were placed westward of the Dokwan Pass, where the river makes a right angle in striking the plains, at that point where it was later to be touched by the Great Wall.

The Shin Dynasty (221 to 202 bc).

The tendency of this power to suppress communism brought about its downfall.

The brevity of its duration, coupled with its importance, is only paralleled in modern times by the Empire of the first Napoleon.

The Hàng Dynasty (202 bc to 220 ad).

This empire was created by a popular rising.

The headman of a village became Emperor of China. But the whole trend and development of the Hângs grew to be imperialistic.

The Three Kingdoms (220 to 268 ad).

A territorial division.

The Six Dynasties (268 to 618 ad).

The Three Kingdoms were now consolidated under a single native dynasty, which had lasted about two centuries, when an influx of Hunnish and Mongolian tribes of the northern border drove them to take refuge in the valley of the Yang-tse. The scene of Chinese succession and culture is thus shifted at this period to the South, while the North becomes the means of the introduction of Buddhism and the establishment of Taoism.

The Tâng Dynasty (618 to 907 ad).

This dynasty was the result of the reconsolidation of China under the great genius of Taiso.

The capital of the Tângs was on the HoangHo, where the northern and the southern sovereignties were amalgamated. This combination was finally broken up by the feudalistic kingdoms, known as the Five Dynasties, which lasted, however, only half a century.

The Sung Dynasty (960 to 1280 ad).

The centre of rule was now again transferred to the Yang-tse. In this era, under the name of Soju or Sung scholasticism, is developed the movement which we have designated in the text as Neo-Confucianism.

The Gen or Mongol Dynasty (1280 to 1368 ad).

This was a Mongolian tribe which, under Kublai Khan, overpowered the Chinese dynasty and established itself near Pekin. The Gen introduced Llamaism or Thibetan Tantrikism.

The Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1662 ad).

This was due to a popular uprising against the Mongol tyranny. It had its centre of power at Nankin, on the Yangtse-Kiang: but it maintained a second capital, from the time of its third emperor, at Pekin.

The Manchu Dynasty (1662 to the present day).

This was another Tartar tribe who took advantage of the division of power between the emperor and the army to establish themselves at Pekin. Having put down the rebellion of the generals, they could not again be dislodged. Their lack of complete identification with the nation has been the weakness of this house, and rebellions against their power have arisen always on the Yang-tse.

3 Yamato Poetry. The word Yamato is used here as a synonym for Ama, the primitive stock of the Japanese. It is also the name of a province in Japan.

4 Bugaku Music. This means dance music – from bu, to dance, and gaku, music, or to play.

This bugaku music in Japan was developed in the Nara-Heian period, under the influence of the Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties.

It was formed of combined elements of Indian and old Hâng music. It is played by a hereditary caste of musicians called Reijiu, who are attached to the Imperial court, and to grand monasteries and Shinto temples, like Kusaga, Kamo, and Tennoji. It is to be heard on great occasions of festivity and ceremonial.

Okakura Tenshin, ‘The Range of Ideals’, the first chapter of the second edition of Ideals of the East, published in 1904 by E.P. Dutton & Co, New York

April 2025

71

You don’t have to think for yourself

sign up now artreview.com/newsletters

Art Reviewed

Refers exclusively to the case of vâgdâna (betrothal) 75

Christine Sun Kim All Day All Night Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 8 February – 6 July At first blush, Christine Sun Kim’s fascination with language centres less on its poetics than on its conventions. Across the videos, site-specific murals and the myriad series of charcoal line drawings that make up her retrospective at the Whitney, Kim charts an erudite understanding of language-as-system – an interlocking set of symbols, signs and echoed meanings best made visible through the economical lines and blunt phrasing of her works on paper. Taken in concert, the totality of Kim’s work – and the overall effect of the exhibition – offers a recalibration of our relationship with sound and language.

Arranged loosely chronologically, the exhibition starts with Kim’s early experiments recasting sound as visuals: in pieces like Selby Circle and Selby Square (both 2011), she used vibration to splatter blue ink across wooden boards, effectively ‘mapping’ the noise, illustrating it as something to be witnessed as much as heard. Born deaf, Kim’s fascination with sound blossomed after recognising that despite not hearing, she moved through the world with a conscious deference to it. Cataloguing its impact visually, she grew fluent in its obvious effects on others. Situated in glass vitrines, the two ink-splattered, Jackson Pollock-like boards are surrounded by a series of drawings riffing on the conventions of musical notation, and specifically the sign ‘p’, which is used to signal softening in a score. Kim takes the concept and expands it into patterns: grids and triangles

formed by the symbol ‘p’ are paired with musings about how one might illustrate and capture quietness, and further still, how silence can become idiomatic (as in ‘the silent treatment’), a saying that holds no meaning if the words are not spoken to begin with.

As Kim incorporates ever more text into her charcoal drawings, her fascination with sound yields to questions around language itself. Here, there is a clear and welcome activist edge to Kim’s practice. Determined that social currency find other, soundless vectors to travel across, Kim sketches out angles and pie charts, captioning each geometric sliver with a different feeling, diagramming her experiences.

Evocative of infographics, the series Degrees of My Deaf Rage (2018) details her repeated frustrations with the assumed neutrality of spoken language, charting her anger with everything from the Guggenheim accessibility manager (acute rage, illustrated with a charcoal-smudged corresponding angle) to ‘curators who think it’s fair to split my salary fee with interpreters’, which sparks a reflex rage, the angle of which is coloured in a solid, inky black.

Given Kim’s attention to language’s role in constructing our understanding of the world, it’s no surprise that the theme of translation surfaces continually across her work. From her early performance piece Face Opera ii (2013), captured on video and on view in the first gallery, to her later series of drawings ‘ Terp Voices’ (2015),

All Day All Night, 2025 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist

76

ArtReview

Kim often references the pains of working with an interpreter, and the ultimate resignation of having her language – and by extension, herself – mediated through others. Her series ‘English vs Deaf English’ offers an explicit visualisation of just how clumsy one-to-one translations between the signed and the spoken can be: the pages are divided into two columns with phrases scratched out in all-caps showing how ‘ate’, becomes ‘eat finish’, or ‘can’t see a thing’, gets signed as ‘see zero’. The drawings remind viewers of language’s structural edge: that the conventions of American Sign Language (asl), its very syntax and grammar, avail it of a multitude of meaning that cannot be reduced to fit spoken words.

Kim’s work proposes we might instead expand on the authority given to languages beyond spoken English; that in translating an idea that operates spatially into sound and vice versa, there is an opportunity to broaden the bounds of meaning itself. There is an enormity of expression available exclusively in asl, a language in which time is marked by distance, grammar is marked by motion and concepts are distilled not into letters but physical space.

So long as both languages are given equal respect, the rub of mistranslation, propelled by the necessity of communication, offers a chance to pressure-test any given thought. And it is here that Kim’s practice starts to generate its own poetry. Maddie Hampton

Degrees of Deaf Rage While Traveling, 2018, charcoal and oil pastel on paper, 125 × 125 cm. Courtesy the artist

April 2025

77

screen memories Abrons Arts Center and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York 14 February – 14 April During the early 2000s, news networks began covering wars and conflicts at an unprecedented scale, with many airing graphic images from combat zones around the clock. screen memories explores the psychological impact this media environment had on those growing up in the Middle East during that decade. Across two venues, works by Huda Takriti, Yara Asmar and Mona Benyamin – who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, respectively – reinterpret the artists’ early encounters with televised geopolitical crises. Reconstituting the intricate point of view of the child spectator, several works address the complex interplay between experience and witness, while others tackle the

quandary of what it means to author a personal narrative that also involves the lives of others.

At Abrons Arts Center, Takriti’s silent twochannel video Starry Nights / Or, of that night when stars disappeared (2025) recreates the impressions of a perceptive and rightfully disoriented child.

Displayed on adjacent monitors, the work investigates the artist’s memory of the live broadcast of the 2003 ‘shock and awe’ operation in Baghdad. Most of the video consists of lines of text in Arabic and English flashing on black screens. The language feels intentionally naive: ‘The sky became an unlimited canvas of black…’, writes Takriti, ‘green terror / orange terror / red terror / yellow terror / white terror…

And my father says at half past six in the

morning, I am there’. The video ends with a montage of scenes embodying what must be ‘green terror’ – soldiers carrying out a ground operation, their actions recorded on a nightvision camera – without any accompanying descriptive text. Takriti’s memory, this suggests, is fragmented: visuals have been severed from language, sounds erased or lost.

‘Screens’ here allude to the technology used to disseminate news and visual culture, as well as, according to the exhibition text, the false images that a young mind – as per Sigmund Freud – uses to mask memories of traumatic experiences. Nearby, four monitors display Asmar’s video series Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults (2024). The videos

Yara Asmar, Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults (detail), 2024, single-channel video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist

78

ArtReview

take place in a surreal, quasi-domestic setting where numbered foam tiles – pieces from a child’s playmat – scatter and spiral on the floor and ceiling. The episodes are hosted by a woman wearing a large costume head shaped like a clock and an elderly man in evening dress, who banter, sing and answer letters.

Each episode ends on a disquieting lullaby, with refrains like “Home is nowhere” and “A funeral’s a party”. Something is amiss: “The sunlight is different here”, the hosts sing.

“The sky is a little too clear.” But the source of the strangeness goes unstated.

Likewise, in Benyamin’s works, overtly theatrical performances mask what is implied to be real distress. In Tomorrow, again (2023), a single-channel video framed as a news broadcast from Palestine, anchors played by Benyamin’s parents deliver purposely exaggerated displays of emotion in lieu of reportage.

The artist’s mother weeps as security footage

flashes onscreen, showing a man activating a smoke bomb on a coach bus. The artist’s father laughs while standing before recorded scenes of largescale destruction and dispossession.

Benyamin’s dark humour is reiterated in her single-channel video Trouble in Paradise (2018) and her film installation Moonscape (2020).

In the former, her parents play a comedic duo, delivering deadpan jokes, mostly in English, about marriage, death and the Israeli occupation. In the latter, presented at partner venue Cuchifritos, they dance and sing in a dimly-lit lounge bar, while Benyamin, separately, initiates a Kafkaesque email chain to replace her restrictive Israeli passport with one that would allow her to move freely (between the earth and the moon).

The least resolved and most interesting aspect of screen memories is this complicated intergenerational collaboration. Towards the end of Moonscape, we see Benyamin’s mother

singing at a mic, her lips moving out of sync with the song we hear. ‘Separation was destined upon us’, the translated subtitles read. ‘My Israeli passport stands between us my dears.’

She seems to be ventriloquising Benyamin’s own anxieties and frustrations; she speaks for her child and, simultaneously, her child speaks for her. The didactics inform us that Benyamin’s parents also ‘do not speak English and were fed their lines [in Trouble in Paradise] through transliterated cue cards’, and that they survived the Nakba in 1948 and the Naksa in 1967 but ‘never shared their memories from these major events’. Considering this, Benyamin’s parents seem to participate in what art historian Claire Bishop terms ‘delegated performance’ – enacting their real identities as displaced Palestinians as part of the work of art. It is their theatricality that provides them a measure of opacity, even as they become characters in the next generation’s story. Jenny Wu

Mona Benyamin, Moonscape (still), 2020, single-channel video, 17 min. Courtesy the artist

April 2025

79

Jim Hodges It only takes a minute Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 24 January – 1 March Two summers ago, Jim Hodges installed his sculpture Craig’s closet (2023) in St. Vincent’s Triangle, a small park in Greenwich Village.

There it remained for a year, sharing space with the angular steel canopy of the New York City aids Memorial, which honours the more than 100,000 residents of the city who died of the disease. Fashioned from black granite, its finer details picked out in inky bronze, Hodge’s work was based on a 3d scan of the undisturbed contents of a wardrobe belonging to his late partner, the musician Craig Ducote, who died in 2016. The lifesize objects on the sculpture’s open rails and shelves – generic hoodies, a couple of softballs, old notebooks, a walking stick – might have belonged to almost anybody. And yet the way they were arranged – by turns neatly and haphazardly, according to one man’s personal logic – spoke of a specific life, and a specific loss.

For this solo show, Hodges has replicated this mournful, unusually intimate public sculpture in pristine white marble. Standing not in the politically resonant environment of St. Vincent’s Triangle, but in an otherwise empty gallery, Craig’s closet (2024) is a more abstract proposition than its black granite twin. The

milky monochrome stone makes the different objects it depicts difficult to tell apart from one another, or even from the walls. Incredibly heavy as it must be, it seems to aspire to total dematerialisation. In the next gallery the audiowork Angel Angel (2025) features a spectral recording of Ducote’s voice, made during what might have been his final months. Listening to him relate how he’s “taken for granted how beautiful life is”, we notice a twinkling, butterfly-shaped kids’ nightlight, sighting wonder (2025), plugged into the gallery wall. We might imagine this kitsch found object providing him with comfort – or maybe guidance – as the dark gathers in, and his soul prepares to break free from its corporeal chrysalis.

Childhood appurtenances also feature in awaiting, (a study of time) (2025), a work in the third gallery consisting of a vitrine containing three stacked clear plastic tubs filled with bags of candy. Has some prepper parent laid these down for Halloween, or a coming apocalypse?

Nearby hangs a glazed painting in the gloomy, heavily impastoed manner of Walter Sickert, depicting a Victorian mantelpiece topped with a translucent amber-toned urn, which appears to glow from within. As we draw closer, the

Craig’s closet (detail), 2024, marble and bronze, 275 × 149 × 70 cm.

Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London & New York

80

ArtReview

picture glass catches our phantom reflections.

The work’s title, Medium (2024), gestures towards the thick pigments with which Hodges has conjured his vision, while also summoning thoughts of a living person (the artist?) who speaks with the vanished dead.

The fourth gallery features one final found object, double portrait: father and son (2025) – a huge dilapidated wooden garage, which an accompanying text states was ‘rescued from the Louisiana bayou’. Peering through its slats, we see a single bare bulb illuminate the interior gloom, and are reminded, perhaps, of Marcel Duchamp’s installation Étant donnés (1966).

Unlike that work, which invites us to gawk at the prone and faceless form of a naked young woman, there’s little to see here: broken bricks, a child’s rusty bmx, a bladeless hacksaw hanging from a hook. From these few objects, we might infer a history of innocent play, or of devastating trauma. The atmosphere is at once creepy and strangely sacral, and I’m left wondering if I should interpret the titular ‘father and son’ in terms of the Christian godhead. After all, Hodges’s show is much concerned with the possibility of resurrection, and the holiness of ghosts. Tom Morton

Michael Wilkinson Still Life with Blank Canvas The Modern Institute, Glasgow 24 January – 5 March In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno proposed a low-key manifesto for a new kind of environmental music. The primary maxim of ambient music, as outlined in this inaugural proclamation, was that ‘it must be as ignorable as it is interesting’ – a tricky tightrope to tread, but one that aptly captures the carefully balanced blandness of Michael Wilkinson’s latest exhibition.

Eerily sparse, Still Life with Blank Canvas consists of four photorealistic paintings, each depicting a vase of flowers set on a slightly reflective counter before a blank linen canvas couched in a thin aluminium frame. Carried out on canvases identical to those contained within the compositions, Wilkinson has left patches of untouched linen where the real material would overlap with its painted representation.

This claustrophobic mise en abyme short-circuits any sense of depth, giving off the effect that the flowers are pressed in place between the pictorial plane and its material base.

Wilkinson’s handling of light is exquisite and mechanically precise. Painted in fluorescent

pigments, the flowers radiate against the dull tones of the backdrop, even as the vivid acrylics sink into the thick weave of unprimed linen.

In Dahlia (2024) a green and purple stem rises from a bud vase, exploding in a fiery sunburst at the centre of the canvas. A subtle dusting of orange suggests at the colour bouncing off the petals onto the shaded surface behind. The vaporous light refracting through the turquoise glass vase in Lisianthus (2025) twists and curls like coloured smoke.

Although clearly in conversation with the mischievous traditions of seventeenth-century Flemish trompe l’oeil, these recursive works are emptied of any sense of play, lacking even the melancholic lusciousness of much still life from the same period. Nominally domestic, intimacy is conspicuously absent, as is any inkling of the heady sensuousness we might expect from the genre. Instead we are met with the antiseptic emptiness of the hotel lobby, the luxury showroom, the curated austerity of agency-managed Airbnbs. The visual trickery accounts for a large part of their uncanny energy, but the frictionless,

aspirational minimalism of the interiors is what makes the compositions truly unheimlich: unhomely. By excavating their own hollowness, these paintings pull no punches about their status as objects of commerce, redoubling their function as innocuous decor to the point of collapse.

In previous shows, Wilkinson has often made overt references to politics, popular uprisings and alternative music, none of which are gestured towards here. I found myself thinking back to his 2018 series of found photographs of political graffiti from May 1968, carefully edited with gouache and pencil to erase any trace of the painted slogans. Embracing a similar impulse to return to the blank surface, cleared of content but ready to be defaced again, these altered images were carefully poised between potential and forgetting. The blankness in these new paintings, which is concretised in the raw linen and bolstered by the allusions to inane contemporary design, suggests a stagnant placidity: an illusion of idyllic domesticity that is predestined to be refused. Gabriel Levine Brislin

Lisianthus, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 74 × 3 cm.

Photo: Patrick Jameson. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

April 2025

81

Carol Bove La Genevoise: Carte Blanche à Carol Bove Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva 31 January – 22 June Although Carol Bove grew up in Berkeley and is considered an American artist, she was born in Geneva. She’s a particularly appropriate invitee, then, to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire’s ongoing ‘carte blanche’ programme, which asks international artists to creatively rearrange its collection. In the final room of La Genevoise (meaning, literally, a female native of the city), a framed, black-and-white photo, dated 1971, depicts a stack of circular weights on a scale: a representation, photographed by a creative parent shortly after Bove was born, of her birthweight, and a portrait of the future sculptor as sculpture, as near-abstraction. Indeed, by this point, traversing the show’s numerous big, high-ceilinged rooms, a viewer has seen many things from the museum’s holdings that are not ‘art’ – from Genevan archaeological finds such as Neolithic bear teeth to coins, Roman-era masks, figurines, tiles, prison doors and examples of the city’s fabled watchmaking tradition – surprisingly reframed as such.

Bove organises her many chosen artefacts chronologically – as if daring she could make such a stiff, traditionalist organisational principle creative and strange – into a 15,000-year timeline of the city’s history, arranging her selections on long, low-slung white plinths in periodised rooms, eg ‘13400 – 11470 av. j.–c.’ (or 13–11,000 years bce). The layout, nevertheless, feels modernly minimalist for much of the show, since the objects and images are spaced according to some equivalencing of physical distance and time – which means, initially, yawning gaps between things such as Palaeolithic finds from digs and pierced sticks

decorated with animal motifs. Notably, though, running continually alongside the plinths are pointers to another time and place, Bove’s own: a linear metal girder-like construction (the girders apparently referencing specific historical ones used to build skyscrapers in New York) on which sit black 3d-printed copies of each artefact on display. These, unlike the fragile originals, you can touch. In rooms where there are no ancient objects, because nothing was excavated, as in ‘10834 – 8337 av. j.–c.’, there’s just a low girder. As you fondle things that resemble the past and move through gaps in the material history, something of Bove’s apparent mission here comes through. As opposed to the usual dutiful, distanced tour through a history museum, she wants to make a viewer feel (sometimes literally) the great expanse of historical time, and to recognise not only how it can be known but the extent to which it can’t.

If the story is incomplete and not objectively ‘true’ in the first place, this show suggests, meaning rests in the hands of the teller.

Sometimes the rationale for that seems to be that historical evidence itself is shaky and slanted. One annexlike ‘research room’ features materials (from books to historical paintings to a po-faced clay sculpture, Pfahlbauer, 1980–81,

by Fischli/Weiss) that reflect (according to the press notes) nineteenth-century Swiss beliefs in a race of ‘egalitarian, hygienic and industrious’ people who lived in wooden huts on Lake Geneva itself. At other times, Bove points up gendered bias. La Genevoise, from its title down, wants in part to feminise history. Coming up against a permanently installed display devoted

La Genevoise, 2025 (installation view).

Photo: S. Altenburger. © Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

82

ArtReview

to weaponry and armour and the masculine impulse for conflict, the artist hangs nineteenthcentury life-drawings of vulnerable male nudes over cabinets of impregnable armour, and she digs out a version of ‘The Oath of the Three Swiss’, a foundational image in the country’s mythology, where the three men – wielding swords in most iterations of the subject matter – are unarmed. (In the museum’s atrium, meanwhile, Bove presents fellow Genevan Sylvie Fleury’s Skin Crime 2, 1997, a squashedflat convertible painted nail-varnish-pink which shows that a man, John Chamberlain, wasn’t the only influence on Bove’s own crushed-metal sculptures.)

In the final room, which compresses 200 ce to 2025, time speeds up in a way that feels kinaesthetic, not to mention sculpturally wild, as you pass a welter of discontinuous things crammed onto a plinth: a wooden crossbow aimed at a shield, sixteenth-century horological mechanisms, the scarred door of an eighteenth-century club for revolutionists, printing-press implements, a nineteenthcentury oil painting of Genevan philosopher Madame de Staël. On the other side of the room, meanwhile, are all the tactile, 3d-printed black versions of these things, looking for all the world like a hectic if funereal assemblage

by American modernist Louise Nevelson.

Suddenly, it’s like we’ve left Geneva for midcentury, skyscraping New York – or are in both places at once – time and space and history made simultaneously linear and nonlinear and, for the moment, alive with possibility.

Martin Herbert

Sylvie Fleury, Skin Crime 2, 1997 (installation view, La Genevoise, 2025). Photo: S. Altenburger. © Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

April 2025

83

Peter Joseph The Early Works Lisson Gallery, London 7 February – 15 March I could talk about the triangular tension and flat serenity, the weird green and downward jut, but what primarily got to me when I saw Peter Joseph’s Green Painting (1969) was the anamorphism. As I moved about the room, it became a different painting for every degree of rotation – like the skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), abstracted beyond recognition. All objects change depending on where you’re standing, but the extreme angularity of a sideways-stretched, upside-down, wall-mounted triangle accentuates this change. This is the opposite of one-point perspective, which would normally dictate where you stand; it reminds us that vision is fluid and subjective. The apparent absence of ‘content’ in Joseph’s work offers a welcome alternative to today’s glut of it – whether it’s the images that constantly assail our retinas, or the mania of press releases, wall texts and blurbs that brandmanage art while discouraging any possibility of a personal, unscripted response to it.

Joseph was among the first artists to show at Lisson Gallery when it opened in 1967, and this exhibition begins with his works from around that time. The 1960s was also when us abstraction was leaving its mark on British art

– The New American Painting was held at the Tate Gallery in 1959 – and Joseph’s use of blocks of rudimentary colours and nonrectangular canvases at the end of the decade remind us of experiments the American painter Ellsworth Kelly had begun during the 1950s. Yet – apart from in his chromatically intense Green Painting – Joseph seeks, it seems, a quieter emotional register. The vertical bars of beachside colour in Striped Rectangle, Yellows, Violet, Orange, Light Blue, Green and Oranges (1966), for example, are less muscular, less authoritative than Kelly’s vivid planes. Progressively in this show, Joseph moves from primary hues to ever-subtler tonal shifts, drawing us close. We notice his manual, imperfect edges; we feel the difference between one yellow and another.

The show then turns to Joseph’s Damascene moment of 1970 when, sitting in a cinema, the projector packed up and he found himself mesmerised by the glowing empty screen and its silhouetted frame. This revelation prompted a decade of experimenting with the same twotone form: a rectangle – most often horizontal – within a narrow, darker border. Cream with Black (1970) is the earliest example here, its

Cream with Black, 1970, acrylic on cotton duck, 147 × 300 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist

84

ArtReview

pelmetted border loosely mimetic of what he saw. Later Joseph experimented with earthier, more muted colours. In Pink with Orange / Ochre (1977) and Brown with Black (1978), some are so ambiguous I can barely find names for them.

They are colours sooner felt than named, enveloping us in a murky base tone of emotion.

Comparison could be made with Rothko’s throbbing rectangles (1970 was also when the American artist’s ‘Seagram Murals’ came to Tate), but Joseph isn’t so overbearing. His restraint allows me to relate to this chromatic interplay on my own terms, as if I could imprint some of myself onto the void or observe my own immersion from the outside.

There is something intimately human, and even moral (without being moralising), in this type of absorption, which isn’t only due to the welcoming warmth and emotional depth of Joseph’s colours – which are like variations on enduring love, its phases, its times of day. Maybe it’s also because we’re never totally drawn out of our own accountable selves. The screen has gone blank and this gives us time to attend to how we feel about it and what it’s doing to us.

Tom Denman

Christina Ramberg A Retrospective Philadelphia Museum of Art 8 February – 1 June About but not always of the body, Christina Ramberg’s paintings hold in tension its visceral realities and reductive representations, its strengths and vulnerabilities, its allure and repulsiveness. The earliest paintings in this retrospective are small square panels depicting fragmented body parts; mostly heads of hair seen from behind, as in the 16-part Hair (1968).

Though some are slotted into tabletop mirror stands, there are no faces to be found here or elsewhere in Ramberg’s imagery. That her typically female subjects – often shown bound, cloaked or in compromising positions – do not look back at us implicates our gaze in the power dynamics of her pictures. Part of Ramberg’s self-described strategy of ‘withholding information’, the absence of faces also produces an objectifying anonymity that became literalised as her increasingly abstract figures merged with their adornments.

Ramberg studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked among artists who became, like her, associated with Imagism, an informal movement advancing a graphic figuration that fused Pop and Surrealism. From the beginning she painted almost exclusively with acrylics on Masonite panels, meticulously sanding the surface to remove evidence of brushstrokes and achieve the airbrushed mattness of commercially printed

material. The squeaky-clean fetishism of Ramberg’s process undercuts the sexual fetishism of her imagery, which she derived, in part, from comic books, lingerie advertisements and erotica. If, for example, there is any eroticism in Black Widow (1971), a painting of a woman undressing to reveal a lustrous corset, Ramberg undercuts it with her wan palette, mannequinlike rendering and a detached profile view.

These early paintings of idealised women in constraining lingerie suggest Ramberg’s ambivalence towards such imagery. Seemingly uncertain whether they should appeal or critique, and probably wanting them to do both, she put the images in conflict with themselves.

The eight-panel acrylic painting Corset / Urns (1970) opens the artist’s extended consideration of the torso, as woven and braided hair morphs between vessel and body-shaping undergarment.

Ramberg also conflated human midsections with armour, chairbacks and origami, a process she referred to, in the margins of a nearby drawing, as ‘a cross breeding’. Through the 1970s her figures become increasingly abstract, challenging and deforming the archetype of her earlier subjects. Hair develops a mind of its own: rogue locks snake and coil like tails, burrowing into and sprouting from unexpected places on the body. Sinewy bands of hair have fully replaced apparel in Wired (1974–75) and Broken (1975),

wrapping the gangly arms and cinched waists of headless humanoids. Later in the decade, while Ramberg was raising her young son, the ‘bodies’ she envisions are hollow and fractured, like the disintegrating armature of Schizophrenic Discovery (1977), and then, as with Hearing (1981), heterogeneous assemblages of spare parts – containers or wombs nesting smaller figures within. Ramberg had effectively taken objectification to its end point: only a cursory human resemblance remained.

The exhibition closes with two lesser-known aspects of the artist’s practice. Made throughout the 1980s and exhibited as art during her lifetime, Ramberg’s quilts reinforce her interest in pattern and serial repetition. A final series of abstract black-and-white paintings from 1986 evoke the skeletal scaffolding of satellites and radio towers, both communication technologies; sketchy, diagrammatic canvases that have a searching, indeterminate quality more akin to Hilma af Klint’s mystical abstractions. If Ramberg’s later works seem like dramatic departures, it’s mostly because her development had previously been so linear. It’s as if the artist – in the period just before she was diagnosed with a debilitating neurodegenerative disease that would force her to stop making art – was finally relieved of the body’s burden.

Chris Murtha

Untitled (Hair), 1968, acrylic on Masonite in artist’s handpainted wood frame, 18 × 52 cm.

Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Christina Ramberg

April 2025

85

Wafaa Bilal Indulge Me Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 1 February – 19 October Wafaa Bilal’s Indulge Me is the first retrospective of an artist whose work has long held up a mirror on empathy and its limits. Indulge Me surveys two decades of disarmingly intimate and unexpectedly dreamlike confrontations engineered by Bilal, an interdisciplinary artist who lived in Iraq when the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and began his art career in the us around the time American President George W. Bush launched the ‘War on Terror’ in 2001.

In the first gallery, viewers are confronted by a facsimile of the set for the artist’s 2007 project Domestic Tension, a paint-splattered cell equipped with a bed, a chair, a computer and an automated paintball gun that appears to have been fired thousands of times. For the original 2007 project, Bilal lived in the makeshift cell – a converted room in Chicago’s former Flatfile Gallery – for 30 days, livestreaming his time there as he allowed viewers to shoot him with a similar internet-controlled gun. Consequently, Bilal was shot hundreds of times by online viewers from over 130 countries.

Domestic Tension reads as a work of unbearable intimacy, a claustrophobic and masochistic expression of grief in response to the death of the artist’s brother as the result of an American

drone strike. The facsimile, however, is empty, and though footage of the 2007 project plays on the walls at the mca, Bilal’s absence changes our relationship to the work. After all, as he was livestreaming in 2007, Bilal continually spoke with and developed relationships with audience members, spectators and shooters alike. The footage seems to memorialise these interactions, which occurred at a time when many Westerners, especially Americans, still shared an almost utopian vision of the Internet as a ‘global village’.

Since then, netizens have become atomised, mutually distrustful and hyperaware of their relationships to suffering inflicted by proxy – and consequently more risk-averse, closed off to mess and culpability – a transformation that has rendered us more like the dissociated drone operators of modern warfare than we’d like to admit.

Such a queasy realisation begets an uneasy intimacy. There’s a friction inherent to the act of watching Bilal’s work, which asks us to confront how we look and what we see when we see the artist. This is evident in the largescale screening of footage from 3rdi (2010–11), a performance in which a camera was surgically grafted to the back of the artist’s head for a year, and Bilal’s

Virtual Jihadi (still), 2008, videogame. © and courtesy the artist

86

ArtReview

computer game Virtual Jihadi (2008), displayed under the flickering lights of an installation recalling an early 2000s Baghdadi internet café.

3rdi shows the eyes of others following Bilal’s movements, literalising the surreal experience of everyday Islamophobia. Although we are also spectators, we can distance ourselves from – and even judge – those caught on Bilal’s camera.

In Virtual Jihadi, we play as shooters tasked with killing American soldiers. Like drone operators, we sit alone, frantically pressing the space bar and enter button. Blood is rendered in 8-bit animation, and though soldiers can return fire, ‘death’ is only an end screen. The effect is disquieting, even if in the eighteen years since Bilal created the work the rise in live-streamed violence and mass killings in schools or other public places has only further desensitised us.

There’s a dreamlike – or nightmarish – quality to Bilal’s work, born of these intimacies that seem impossible and circular, of memories that resist linear designs but exist as imperfect, changing and elastic collections of starts, stops and loops. Bilal takes us on a journey formed by crossings and in-between spaces where he reveals something about the volatility and fragility of empathy. Annette LePique

Rachel Crowther Gebrauchsmusik Noah Klink, Berlin 24 January – 1 March In a contemporary reality dominated by surveillance, our virtual shopping arcades and social platforms – Amazon, X, Meta – appear in disguise as environments of freedom, perpetuating the illusion of choice by (and for) consumerism. Contrastingly, institutions such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes still adhere to hierarchical notions of discipline, rendering bodies docile through physical control. Racheal Crowther’s exhibition Gebrauchsmusik (or ‘Utility Music’) uses minimal means to capture the paradoxical duality of these spaces. It does so by confronting branded imagery with traces of unnoticed labour, acoustically captured and broadcast through a set of vintage tech gear. Under this guise, the fetishistic aesthetics of the techno-corporate world underscore an ambiguous divide between the controllers and the controlled.

In one room, the Dublin-born artist places Close Call Only (10783, de) (all works 2025). Here, a screen and a Whistler trx-2 radio scanner are encased, respectively, in a security vitrine and a metal cage. The scanner broadcasts the live voices of security guards, taxi drivers, couriers and construction workers captured

by an antenna on the gallery’s rooftop. Two cctv cameras, in turn, monitor the antenna.

The intercepted sounds, silences and stillness, as well as its monitored imagery, are changing and unpredictable. Crowther, pointedly, relinquishes control, in the process pulling reality outside into the white cube and its very particular audience.

On the wall in a second room, Pipedream® is a large laser-cut metal logo of a medical cross, within which is the titular ‘Pipedream’ – its scrolled, brand name-like typography appropriated from a sex-shop nurse’s costume.

Crowther’s formal gesture points towards the hollowness of nurse-fetish fantasies, contrasting them with the harsh circumstances that real nurses might face. The sleek appearance of the corporate often hides how their profitable economies are based on systematic neglect of human beings, without whom these systems would not function.

The sound of these ignored activities and obscured sectors of the working world is, to turn to the exhibition title, an accidental form of gebrauchsmusik – both metaphorical and literal. Written about critically by Theodor Adorno, gebrauchsmusik came to be viewed

as a term of insult to describe utilitarian, soundtracklike music – composition as commodity rather than art. Musicologist Heinrich Besseler, though, acknowledged the value of the genre for human experience by bringing people together. The background rumble of our fractious present moment, certainly in a city like Berlin, might be, first, that of strikes due to unfair labour conditions, and secondly, more loudly, racist slogans at rising volume. Crowther’s show suggests the dissonance between dependence and neglect in the ‘gebrauchskakofonie’ of our times.

Yet, whether the nurses and clerks that the display calls to mind are surveillers or surveilled remains unclear. Furthermore, are artists – seemingly her main audience – included in this group of neglected practitioners? The exploitative, though romanticised, structures of the artworld doom most of its makers to engage with day jobs in various sectors including healthcare, seemingly merging these two worlds. As a former care worker herself, Crowther makes these realities visible in this show, wherein everything – even labour – exists as a fetishised, commodified entity.

Gabriela Acha

Close Call Only (10783, de), 2025, tv screen (broadcasting live feed of the antenna on the roof), antiligature tv cabinet, Whistler trx-2 radio scanner, security cage, Diamond d-777 antenna, radio frequencies, military spec coax cable, cctv camera (facing antenna), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

April 2025

87

Carolina Fusilier & Paloma Contreras Lomas How is Death Written in the South?

Museo Anahuacalli, Mexico City 4 February – 8 June ‘El Anahuacalli’, as locals know it, is a heavy lump of a building. All volcanic rock smushed together into clean geometrical lines, it’s as close to the glories of pre-Hispanic architecture as it is to the splendours of modernism. More importantly, it is heavy with history: Diego Rivera, the grandest ghost in the Mexican art pantheon, lovingly had it built, opening in 1964, to house his pre-Columbian art collection – ‘his idols’, as Frida Kahlo called them. He also wanted to be buried in this place: a fitting mausoleum for his outsize talent and legend.

Carlina Fusilier and Paloma Contreras Lomas, the two young Mexico City-based artists sharing the space in How is Death Written in the South?, work with the idea of the tomb, a space made to be inhabited by the dead. A highlight sits right at the entrance: Contreras Lomas’s Maqueta (Maquette, all works 2025) is an intricate altar with ceramic statuettes of anthropomorphic animals – a dog and a cyborg monkey – sitting atop handpainted tiles decorated in loud, beautiful colours. It tells the tale of a sacrificial dance club, where Xipe Totec, the flayed Aztec deity, meets Dante’s Virgil.

It’s an afterlife voyage that displays Contreras Lomas’s predilection for mixing the iconic and the prosaic. Also wonderful are Fusilier’s Pasajes i y ii (Passages i & ii), twin paintings installed at opposite ends of a hallway. Shaped and sized in imitation of the corbel arch

repeated throughout the building, they offer a representation of technological-looking portals: one framing a rectangular pool bathed in pale yellow light and surrounded by mysterious doors; the other a circular, vaporous puddle showered by fiery fragments falling from a mysterious above. According to the curatorial text, Fusilier’s father recently passed away, and her pictorial efforts throughout the show address the body’s transition from the material world to the spiritual beyond – and how to attempt communication between the two through technology.

Las Inmortalistas i–viii (The Immortalists i–viii) is a series of bright, similarly dreamlike paintings framed in rough, foillike frames standing on aluminium structures connected to retrofuturistic-looking equipment that translates the ‘electromagnetic currents’ of the building into a creepy buzzing sound.

Nearby, the area known as ‘the studio’ – which contains Rivera’s largescale sketches for Man at the Crossroads (1932), his ill-fated Rockefeller Center fresco – feels crammed and clunky. Fusilier’s delicate Biocosmic garden, a mechanical ballet of dead plants and flowers reanimated by tiny electronic motors, occupies the middle of the space, while Contreras Lomas’s ‘murals’, two enormously tall graphite drawings splayed on raw canvases, hang on opposite walls. One, Southern funeral, paranormal archive, is a crowded and detailed image of a crucified

Carolina Fusilier, Pasajes i y ii (detail), 2025, two oil on canvas works, 240 × 215 cm (each).

88

ArtReview

creature with a snake’s head and a body made of dollars who stands atop a pink car covered in bones, which in turn is driving over the mangled corpses of humanlike dogs. Below it all a caption expounds on the incongruence of an artistic representation of a cemetery in a country scattered with clandestine burial plots.

It ends with ‘¡Viva Palestina Libre!’ Whereas Contreras Lomas’s lines were once thick and murky, here they are precise, as economic as her baroque imagination allowed.

Here the artists’ efforts seem at odds with each other: a darkly humorous allegory of the necropolitical order that currently consumes us, sharing space with a twee, poetic observation on the resuscitating power of science. In her huge drawings, Contreras Lomas deals with the well-chewed symbols of neoliberalism gone wrong, the belligerent rebirth of history and the bodies it leaves behind; while Fusilier’s ‘garden’ continues her subtle allusions to Cosmism, the Soviet ideology that called for a technological landscape that would enable the mass resurrection of all previously dead humans in order to colonise the entire universe. Of course, in today’s world, this ancestor of transhumanism evokes its own kind of rationalist, long-termist misanthropy, its own spectre of violence. The misaligned perspectives, however, work in the end, and they feel as radical as they need to be to match the energy of Rivera’s castle. Gaby Cepeda

above Paloma Contreras Lomas, Maqueta, 2005, Doglike Xipe Totec (flayed guardian), Cyborg Xipe Totec (flayed guardian), Cementerio Club (wolf cub host), sacrificed frog god, Disco Club Frog (Anahuacalli), Rat magician king, Changuifer vase, stairs, staff of the communist underworld, devils with foxlike features as witnesses, tiles on the dance floor, all glazed ceramic, dimensions variable both images Photos: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archive; Trustees of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums; Bank of Mexico; tono Festival, Mexico City & Puebla

April 2025

89

Antonio Obá Festim da alma Mendes Wood dm, Paris 6 February – 27 March Antonio Obá has an axe to grind, and quite understandably so. His chief concern is the marginalisation of Black culture in his native Brazil – and the fact that the country has all but buried its considerable debt to Africa in the creation of a national identity. His work is heavy on symbolism, mysticism and allusions to cultural syntheses between Catholicism and Candomblé spiritual traditions. This exhibition of recent paintings and drawings follows much the same formula, while also – as its title, ‘Feast of the Soul’ in English, hints – proposing to chart the progression of a life cycle. The first image we see, Alegoria para uma nascida (Allegory for a Newborn, all works 2024) is a trompe-l’oeil conundrum in which Obá displays a virtuosic defiance of pictorial confines: a young girl gazes out defiantly from an arched false frame, her foot stamping on a sinister white snake; the last, Autorretrato enquanto máscara (Self-portrait as a Mask), features what looks a lot like a death mask based on the artist’s own likeness.

Unignorable suggestions of the historical and cultural processes that characterise so much of Obá’s work come with Contenda – 2: A Dança (Contention – 2: The Dance). The painting’s composition sees two men – both Black, both clad in identical, quasi-ceremonial white pyjamas – locked in a dancefloor embrace,

surrounded by manicured, soft-focus vegetation. Two sets of decorative railings, capped with distinctive spearlike tips, form a partial enclosure around the figures, the former rendered in an irradiated red at odds with the otherwise gentle palette and brushwork: they make sense within the representational logic of the composition, but are somehow not quite of it. This semiabstract physical barrier could be read as a representation of constraint, even its ornamental flourishes projecting a sense of menace.

And yet: the tranquil scene playing out within its confines hints it might be less a carceral structure than a means to keep the rest of the world out. ‘Contenda’, as referenced in the work’s title, is a particularly complicated subdiscipline of the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira, a practice commonly understood as a form of resistance to slavery and a neat metaphor for Obá’s own relationship to painting. Paris gallerygoers may read the scenario as an illicit homosexual tryst; otherwise, an ‘othering’ of Black custom. Yet what if it really is just a straightforward depiction of a tradition few outside Obá’s own self-identified community can be expected to understand?

Obá, whose adopted surname means ‘king’ in Yoruba, thrives on such contextual

Memento Mori – Baile de debutantes, 2024, oil on canvas, 140 × 180 cm. Photo: Estúdio Em Obra.

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood dm

90

ArtReview

ambiguities. For Criança de coral (Choir Child), 14 bloodred plinths arranged in a wide curve support portraits of children participating in a Catholic choir, apparently based on photographs. When they’re viewed individually, any unity of purpose is lost, and to the uninformed eye they look as though they’re yelling in anger or, more likely, agony – the illusion of organised joy, as any lapsed Christian will attest, is hard-won. For all the formal novelty of the display, however, it lacks the nuance we see in Contenda.

Similarly, though rather more subtly, the moths that invade the dancefloor depicted in Memento Mori – Baile de debutantes (Memento Mori: Debutante Ball) (a scene referencing the first debutante ball open to Black Brazilians, in Belo Horizonte in 1963) may not represent the pestilence we might assume. These insects, one indigenous species of which feeds on the tears of animals, are a recurring motif in Obá’s paintings: the gallery literature describes these creatures as observers to the scene, but might they actually be lapping up the weight of historical prejudice? You’re left wondering: might a reading based on historical, culturally specific symbolism be simplistic in this instance?

Obá leaves us hanging, as well he might.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Hannah Black The Directions Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg 26 January – 13 April When a show is called ‘literal’, to hear and to use that term can be a criticism of the work.

The disparagement comes from a notion that the literal work behaves something like a dead end, leaving no space for viewers to make their own interpretation. But The Directions is a show that embodies the sense of having no way forward, so that to describe it as literal is to propose that the show could be thought of as a map of a familiar anxious feeling: when it becomes clear that sustaining life in a given structure is no longer feasible.

Inside Vleeshal, a maze of corridors is constructed from metal beams and plasterboard.

But some walls are missing, and parts of the structure’s floors are absent, revealing the gallery’s floor below. Where the pathways come to dead ends are three videos of starry nights and voiceover reflections, recorded in places that Hannah Black has lived – New York, London, Marseille/Montfort (all works 2024–25). At other points inside the maze hang a collage, a drawing and two paintings from the bkr Municipal Collection Middelburg, a sort of early artists’ basic income scheme that ran in the Netherlands

from 1949 to 1987, along with photographs of the destruction of Middelburg during the Second World War. In this unfinished structure’s courtyard is a potted cypress (Bright Cypress), a tree that symbolises the transition between life and death, between living and the underworld. The pot is marked ‘wrong world’ in bright red paint.

And above the structure are the celestial bodies: modelled replicas of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Black has arranged these into the constellation of where they were in the sky on 7 October 2023. The artist provides alongside the printed chart a text of her own that connects the Palestinian struggle for liberation to the ‘historical ironies’ that beleaguer the psycho-cognitive inner world of an individual self living inside ‘the gigantically dying colony’ that is modern Europe, which for example built its postwar identity on championing human rights and condemning genocide, while now funding several genocides across the world.

In astrology, planetary alignment can be used to connect individual realities to the broader experiences of generations. The Directions functions much like an astrological

reading, of how it feels to be in the creative class in this contemporary moment, in Europe, experiencing the financial precarity of militarised late capitalism (albeit from a position of privilege), watching multiple genocides through a computer screen and wondering, ‘How are any of us going to survive this?’ Black poses this malaise, in a text included in the exhibition, as ‘not only a spiritual question, but also an economic one’. Through inclusion of the works from the Middelburg collection, she draws on an example of an earlier, abandoned economic support infrastructure for artists and attempts to find a way through a period of existential and economic crisis in Europe. The Directions functions as a constellation of the gaps that exist between what Marxist, anti-colonial and psychoanalytic theories each suggest for resolving the ongoing crisis that the creative class is experiencing today, as we gain awareness of what has lain beneath our economic survival: colonial order, in place in Europe since the Second World War, which is now being exposed for its dead ends.

Taylor LeMelle

Bright Cypress, 2024–25 (installation view).

Photo: Gunnar Meier.

Courtesy Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg

April 2025

91

Drain the Öresund Malmö Konsthall 8 February – 4 May In 1953 the Swedish industrialist Ruben Rausing had a grand idea – drain the Öresund Strait (otherwise known as the Sound) and create a land border between Malmö in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark. In an opinion piece for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the milk carton tycoon argued the new territory would mean more space and more profits for the Danes and Swedes (as well as being no bad thing for his own company, Tetra Pak). But the opinion was met with scorn. Today, it’s the extraordinary cable-stayed Öresund Bridge that connects the two cities.

Taking Rausing’s madcap plan as the starting point, the Poland-based, us-born curator Post Brothers offers a snapshot of the region’s contemporary art scene, gathering 14 artists,

both emerging and established, from both sides of the bridge. But the project is conceptually weighty too, covering all manner of issues – historical, social, environmental, political.

Industrial materials and infrastructures that have plundered resources from the Öresund Region and fashioned Swedish and Danish economies are the thematic anchors. There are several references to the human cultivation of the Sound, such as Ina Nian’s glass cases of seawater, filled with corrodible iron chains and tools (Black Noise #4, 2021–). Nian juxtaposes these objects with the sounds of ore production, sailing ships and fighter planes, interweaving iron’s historic role in colonialism and slavery, as well as modern warfare. Close by, Nian has placed the number ‘408,573’ on the wall in

Silas Inoue, Bond, 2023, aluminium, stainless steel. Photo: Helene Toresdotter.

Courtesy Malmö Konsthall

92

ArtReview

a confronting reference to the number of tons of iron apparently exported from Sweden to Britain between 1600 and 1815.

The exhibition excavates other uncomfortable moments of culpability, as with Kalle Brolin’s video installation I am Come Again (2022).

Here, archival and contemporary imagery highlights a complex relationship with immigration, addressing who, historically, has been permitted to work in Sweden’s agriculture.

Notably, among those welcomed as seasonal labourers after the Second World War were able-bodied survivors of concentration camps, at a time when some Nazis criminals were conversely being sheltered in Scanian castles.

Hanni Kamaly’s three arachnoid steel sculptures, towering nearly three metres high,

give voice to a silenced community of migrants.

They are titled after individuals deported from Sweden during the early 1900s, whose photographs Kamaly discovered in the book Swedish Racial Types by eugenicist Herman Lundborg: george camerbach (2022–25), juan salazar (2022–25) and ali ben mohammed (2024–25).

Even without knowing these names, though, Kamaly’s sculptures exude bodily presence.

Andreas Rønholt Schmidt and Sebastian Hedevang’s geometric frames, which reimagine the historic moulds used to make ‘sludge cakes’ from human waste before the modern sewer system arrived during the 1850s, are another marvellously corporeal addition. Added items of modernist kitchenware, like a gleaming coffee pot, transform these frames into slightly farcical pieces of new cool Scandinavian design. Once the tools of the lowly ‘kjeltringer’ (nightmen), these frames are now symbols of contemporary coffee culture and the middle classes.

There are several blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments, like Henriette Heise’s delicate geometric line drawings, discreetly positioned on the walls (Day Sky, 2017–25). Flares of colour painted by Hannibal Andersen over particular walls and columns, meanwhile, familiar but not immediately identifiable, turn out to be the coopted palettes of big Scandi business like Ikea, Husqvarna and Mærsk, speaking to the quiet influence of capitalist forces (The Abstract Expression of Privatization [Six Colour Mark], 2022–25). (Arguably, though, the strength of this idea is diluted by the inclusion of non-Scandi business like Red Bull, Duracell and bp.) In keeping with a currently popular curatorial trend, the nonhuman population of the Öresund Region has a voice here too. Silas Inoue’s enormous stainless steel and aluminium coin, Bond (2023), features a part-animal, part-plant, part-human creature on one side and a moth on the other. The title suggests the underlying ties between

human and nonhuman beings as well as financial debt and the price paid by nature for human expansion.

The most visually striking work, physically dominating the gallery, is Jessica Olausson’s A Room Used to Gather (2025), although on encountering it one may wonder what a cabinet, flood defence barriers, an electronic votive candle stand, lumps of ash and the coordinates to an aeroplane graveyard (provided on the wall label) have in common.

Apparently they all relate to damage control.

The imposing presence of the flood barriers, in particular, conjures what might have happened if Rausing had had his megalo0maniacal way and the waters of the Sound had been drained. This work might stand, in a way, for the whole show’s reckoning with the Öresund Region and its tale of two cities – a little obscure at times, unless you’re prepared to do some conceptual digging, but undeniably ambitious. Alice Godwin

Drain the Öresund, 2025 (installation view).

Photo: Helene Toresdotter. Courtesy Malmö Konsthall

April 2025

93

Alice Coltrane Monument Eternal Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 9 February – 4 May A failure of ‘branding’ is often invoked in relation to the late Alice Coltrane. Descriptions of the instrumentalist and composer tend to fall elliptically into the gravitational force of her husband, jazz saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane.

But Coltrane’s life before and after John was equally rich. In the years following her husband’s premature death, Coltrane emphasised her role as musician and mother, and later as a vessel through which the light of a Supreme One flowed as sound; Turiyasangitananda, as she named herself – ‘the Lord’s highest song of bliss’.

Monument Eternal captures Coltrane’s irreducible life in archival materials, photographs, film documentation and audio recordings. There are many visions of Coltrane mirrored across the exhibition’s sections, each with its kernel of truth: ‘Sonic Innovation’ describes her early years performing bebop and jazz in Detroit, Paris and New York; ‘Spiritual Transcendence’ charts her turn towards Vedic faith; ‘Architectural Intimacy’ bridges these periods, honouring her ability to create radical communities. Importantly, the exhibition considers her through the eyes of a younger generation, presenting homages, many newly commissioned, by 19 contemporary artists, including Martine Syms, Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) and Jamal Cyrus.

Of these, works by Ephraim Asili, GeoVanna Gonzalez and Jasper Marsalis betray tensions that underwrite the exhibition’s commemorative intentions. Reenacting Coltrane’s early harp experiments, Asili’s film Isis & Osiris (2024) is a dialogue and performance session with harpist Brandee Younger, who describes Coltrane’s influence on her between shots of musical improvisation. In the recording studio, Younger’s fingers pluck out a meditative cycle of notes, filmed by fixed and moving cameras as a third eye, a giant mirror, moves along an additional track. In side-by-side 16mm shots, Younger doubles and occasionally quadruples, much like Coltrane, whose image punctuates the exhibition in wall-scale photographs and endless contact sheets. Watching Asili’s film, the viewer struggles to parse the reflected image from its source, prompting questions about cultural inheritance as Younger sits at Coltrane’s gilded Lyon & Healy harp.

If, in Asili’s film, reinventions of Coltrane proliferate, in Gonzalez’s and Marsalis’s works she is starkly absent. Gonzalez’s sculpture-cumperformance platform Beneath the Sun, Lies the Wisdom Eye (2024) gleams a vibrant orange, a colour that in Vedic tradition represents purity and was worn by Coltrane from 1976 onwards.

Stairs ascend to the dais on four sides, evoking

Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal, 2025 (installation view).

Photo: Sarah Golonka. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

94

ArtReview

Coltrane’s mantra ‘Roads are many, the destination one’. As with Gonzalez’s sculpture, Marsalis’s Performer (2025) weaves a relationship with Coltrane’s body, draping an orange sari over a mic stand such that the fabric suggests a human shape. The show splits itself along the lines defined by these three works: on one hand taking Coltrane’s life and work as raw material; on the other, emphasising absence.

The Hammer’s portrait of Coltrane highlights the elusive nature of memorial. In Monument Eternal, Coltrane is a divine icon, subsumed by a sea of other voices. The show does not deepen our understanding of Coltrane.

Rather, the commissioned artists engage her memory in deeply personal encounters. In Shala Miller’s Heavenly Father series (2024), black-andwhite photographs of prismatic mirrors and nighttime shadows, the photographer blurs their own relationship with their father’s spirit and Coltrane’s visitations by her deceased husband. Nonetheless, these subjective reflections reveal what Coltrane symbolises to artists working today – vanguardism, mythic tragedy and Black struggle for utopia. In some sense, this polyphonic treatment of Coltrane is apropos.

In music, as in life, her goal was to become part of a larger consciousness, to dissipate selflessly into a universal unknown. Nicole Kaack

Jakkai Siributr There’s no Place Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 15 November – 16 March Three large tapestries open the exhibition. Each hanging on a horizontal pole like torn, despondent flags, these are made from joined uniforms worn by former Thai public service workers, we’re informed by the wall text. In one (Airborne [Klongtoey], 2022), bright orange vests worn by motorcycle taxi riders are reshaped into facemasks and stitched together, while uniforms of street sweepers are embellished with coin-shaped amulets in another (ld20, 2023). Figurines of bodhisattvas, ascetic monks, amulet lizards and other such touristic spiritual trinkets dangle from each, like loose threads hanging from a piece of worn-out cloth. Thai artist Jakkai Siributr bought these uniforms from workers who had lost their jobs during the covid pandemic, during which time Thailand’s bustling tourism industry virtually came to a stop. (Prior to the pandemic, tourism made up a fifth of the country’s gdp.) These brightly coloured jackets, designed for visibility, were rendered as invisible as the workers themselves.

Siributr’s textile works often emerge from times of conflict and violence. His exhibition at the Whitworth, his first institutional solo in the uk, consists of a single room of works as well as a large installation, There’s no Place (2019–),

in a corridor adjacent to the institution’s own fabric collection. The latest iteration of this ongoing project, which he initiated while working with Shan refugees at the Koung Jor Camp in northwestern Thailand, close to the border it shares with Myanmar, comprises rectangular pieces of cloth hanging from the ceiling, filled with words and faces. Embroidered by the young residents of the camp, the naive imagery ranges from Shan alphabets to family portraits, evoking memories of home as well as the yearning to belong.

Back in the gallery room, displayed next to the tapestries, Siributr’s Changing Room (2017) points to the violent reality of Thailand’s deep south, where clashes between the region’s Malay-Muslim separatists and the Thai military are frequent. Arranged around a full-length mirror, Changing Room consists of embroidered military uniforms and white songkok caps worn

by Muslim men. The work invites members of the audience to try them on, but once you do, you discover that the caps’ inner linings are made of military fabric, on which horrific images of beheaded orange-robed monks or soldiers with machine guns are embroidered in a childlike style. Putting one on provokes the

uncomfortable feeling of being in contact with these violent realities – a gesture that forces you to bear them in mind, and let the horror settle in.

The forms of absent bodies are hauntingly present in the gallery’s intimately sized room.

In Broadlands (2023), made with the clothes of Siributr’s late mother, shawls and blouses in various shades of pink and beige are suspended midair, twisted and sewn together as if caught in a restless and drawn-out embrace. Jewels and pearl necklaces hang down from the fabrics like tears, mirroring the hanging figurines cascading from the service-uniform tapestries.

Surrounded by the more politically informed works, Broadlands feels like an altar and evokes a sense of movement, of his mother’s figure as well as his own sewing, grieving hands.

Behind it, a series of thangka-like fabric collages picture his female family members, overlaid with appliqués of drones and planes. Matrilineal (2023) depicts his family amidst the same visual vocabularies that constitute scenes of aggression in his other works. Taken together, the works give us a sense that the political and the personal are tragically intertwined. To survive loss and bereavement – and to live with trauma – is a struggle that implicates everyone. Yuwen Jiang

Matrilineal (detail), 2023, five fabric collages, dimensions variable.

Photo: Michael Pollard. © the artist; Flowers Gallery, London; 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok. Courtesy the artist

April 2025

95

Barbara Steveni I Find Myself Modern Art Oxford 1 March – 8 June At first glance, the life and career of Barbara Steveni, who died in 2020, fits well within the artworld’s current attention to overlookedin-their-lifetimes women artists. Born in Persia (now Iran) in 1928, Steveni had, by the 1950s, gone to art school, married the eccentric proto-conceptualist artist John Latham and was turning in the circles of London’s radical art scene. In 1965 Steveni had the idea for what would become the Artist Placement Group (apg), an organisation with the goal of relocating the artist from the seclusion of the gallery into the social world, bringing the artist’s particular insights into the workings of big corporations, national industries and government departments. It became a model, in concept and method, for a form of practice that now seems unremarkable: the artist’s residency within nonart host venues or organisations. But Steveni, charismatic and articulate, while fronting the group as its spokeswoman (Latham was a cofounder and closely involved), communicating its vision and negotiating the placement agreements, ended up being seen as the ‘secretary’ or ‘administrator’, partly because of the sexism of the time, and partly, perhaps, because in staging the idea of the special identity of artists who took on the placements, Steveni ended up appearing as facilitator rather than initiator.

I Find Myself, then, retrieves Steveni’s career from the shadow of apg; its activities are confined to Modern Art Oxford’s smaller middle spaces, squeezed between the larger galleries, where Steveni’s earlier and later work is the focus. This is a complicated goal, since I Find Myself is partly an act of reconstitution of a life’s activity that did not always leave behind ‘finished works’, or even works of ‘art’, given Steveni’s ambiguous attitude to her own role as an individual artist. In the last gallery one finds recognisable ‘artworks’ made at art school – an untitled painting conjuring

a vaguely female figure composed of wonky colourful geometrics (untitled, c. 1949–52), and a deft charcoal drawing of a London public garden (Cheyne Walk, c. 1940s–50s).

But it’s the group of object-tableaux from the late 1950s that open the show which indicate Steveni’s turn to an interest in a more expansive, unmediated connection to reality.

The Untitled Assemblage works (all c. 1958–62) are found objects painted and glued onto baseboards that are hung like paintings: a roll of firehose unfurling across a bright yellow rectangle; scissors nestling inside moccasin slippers, the whole fixed onto a field of brown linen. Postwar and post-Duchamp, artists were turning objects back into art – Latham was affixing cut and burnt books to canvases, and according to one of the catalogue texts, the couple were hosting the Swiss ‘new realist’ sculptor Daniel Spoerri. These few works are bolstered by vitrines presenting found-object works that Steveni assembled later, testament to a habit of collecting and hoarding objects while deferring what should be done with them. The centrepiece of the first section, Laure Prouvost’s installation Dancing thought leftovers with Barbara (2025), is itself a sort of portrait of Steveni: Prouvost, who worked as Latham’s assistant and was close to Steveni, has hung a host of worn and disintegrated objects accumulated by Steveni, over which plays a floor-to-ceiling multichannel video projection of Prouvost’s camera exploring these objects in huge closeup shots. If there’s any connection between this section and what would drive Steveni’s later work, it might be to do with the intimation that society itself, rather than discrete matter, could be a material to be shaped by an artist.

The highlighting of what an artist didn’t quite make, or returned to make later, full of deferment and putting off, nevertheless sets up a more complicated story than that of the female artist diverted from realising her

facing page, bottom Artist Placement Group, The Sculpture – Active State (installation view, Between 6, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1971).

Courtesy Estate of Barbara Steveni

facing page, top i am an archive (still), 2008–15, digital video, 1 hr 6 min 5 sec.

Courtesy Barbara Steveni Estate and Family Members

96

individual ambitions by everyday sexism, the responsibilities of having children and raising a family. Certainly Steveni was profoundly aware of these obstacles, but once the show moves to the more familiar activities of the apg during the 1970s – stuttering, faded monochrome videos of Steveni handling press conferences or negotiating a placement with an executive from a British electronics company; letters and correspondence between apg and the Arts Council, in which its director of art sourly justifies cutting its funding because ‘apg is more concerned with social engineering than straight art’ – it becomes clearer that what is at stake is the perhaps unresolvable tension between the identity of the ‘straight artist’ and that of the ‘straight’ organiser. Steveni would continue the principles of apg with her later organisation o+i, represented here by video and photographic documents of a long-running project in schools in London’s Southwark borough during the 1990s. By the final gallery, the focus shifts to Steveni’s later ongoing project i am an archive (2002–15), where, through video interviews with collaborators, walking video conversations with friends while visiting sites in London and elsewhere, and conferences, Steveni sought to retell her own history as the history of the ideas and projects she was instrumental in making happen.

What I Find Myself subtly traces is how Steveni battled with the entrenched cultural status of ‘the artist’ – individual, specially talented, too often male – while attempting to retain a more holistic vision of how an artist’s unattached creativity could operate productively within society. It was perhaps always a utopian project, since it required profoundly reconfiguring – or abolishing – the distinction between the artist and forms of organisation that make art happen. And it’s perhaps why Steveni, in the end, could never settle on being an artist, or organiser, or both. J.J. Charlesworth

ArtReview

April 2025

97

Bianca Hlywa Mute Track St. Chads, London 16 February – 12 April A person’s sense of smell, dictated by olfactory receptors, is 10,000 times more sensitive than taste.

I remembered that factoid when entering Mute Track. In the centre of the space hangs a scoby (a ‘Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast’, apparently), like a disco ball of horrors. Bianca Hlywa has attached chunks of brown and vomit-green blubbery culture to a lattice of polypropylene strapping – the kind used for cargo tie-downs or marine equipment – and holstered it up from a scaffold in the centre of the rectangular space.

Then it starts to spin. The motor – connected to a control box on the gallery wall, fitting in seamlessly beside an original power box for the building – will speed up, slow down, stop, in alternating patterns looped on a six-minute schedule, the heavy sheet pirouetting like a rotting ballroom dress. And yes, the stench is formidable: acidic, vinegary, thin enough to slip between pores and clothing fibres. It clung to my clothes for the rest of the day.

According to the notes, Hlywa fermented the culture in her studio for five months, then two more in the space. Each evening the artist takes

the sheet down and lays it, spreadeagle, in a flat chemical bath in the corner of the gallery; each morning, its cultures nourished and rested, the 110kg Thing must be hoisted up again. (That St. Chads constitutes two units of a former ‘ear, nose and throat hospital’ storage unit near King’s Cross, makes you wonder if this is the worst this space has seen.) So Mute Track is a laborious exhibition for the artist but perhaps especially for the artwork, a living, dripping Thing, rolled out and made to dance for its dinner. Do we not see something of ourselves in this yeast-lined duvet, carted out each day to perform a life?

This grim muckiness is once again finding favour in the artworld. You’d have to have your eyes closed to have missed messes like Mire Lee’s Open Wound (2024) at London’s Tate Modern this winter; or your nose blocked to escape Dan Lie’s The Reek (2024), a paganlike construction of mud, straw and fungi that then inhabited and germinated in the gallery space at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. But there’s something particularly – grimly – absurd about Mute Track, a sense of humiliation inflicted on

Mute Track, 2025 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and St. Chads, London

98

ArtReview

this Thing, strung up and swung around for our gawping, nostril-clasping entertainment, painting its dripping life-sauce in patterned circles onto the floor. Its muteness is of course part of this: the room is almost silent bar the mechanism’s high-pitch whirr – like a factory conveyor belt, or the original Thing’s thin, pained wail – and the quiet slaps and squelches of chemical brushed across the black sticky floor.

Grotesque; mesmeric.

Of course, the grotesque has long been recognised as the underbelly of beauty, its dark unconscious. The lengths of absurdist care Hlywa takes, assuming for herself a simultaneous role of the work’s creator and tormentor, feel like the beginnings of a lesson: about what we do with the Things we loose on the world.

Art – like its all-seeing parent, culture – has perennially been vulnerable to beautification, or sanitisation: a general smoothening and polishing whose motivators range from the regulation of commerce to, at its worst, a fascistic impulse.

Mute Track sounds more like a rallying cry: roll up your sleeves. Alexander Leissle

aes+f Inverso Mundus: City of Chimeras Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong 20 February – 20 March The film Inverso Mundus (2015), by the Berlinbased Russian collective aes+f, follows a long tradition of artworks depicting the world upside down. Etchings from as early as the sixteenth century show fish flying in the sky, horses riding humans and men nursing babies, among other role reversals that have offered sly challenges to existing norms. Likewise, aes+f’s 39-minute film animates highly stylised photographs and 3d renderings of absurd scenarios populated by unusual characters.

Intriguing in concept but less so in execution, the film is the centrepiece of the collective’s bloodless solo show Inverso Mundus: City of Chimeras, which demonstrates the limits of social critique couched simplistically in the act of inversion.

Inverso Mundus consists of a series of unconnected vignettes set incongruously to music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and other composers.

The intricate melody of Bellini’s Casta Diva (1831) soundtracks scenes of impassive men being placed in metal stocks or strapped to giant hamster wheels by women in eveningwear who preside menacingly over them. In other sequences, old people spar with children in boxing matches and women fawn over mutant

hybrids of domesticated and wild animals, including a tentacled ‘pugtopus’ and a hairless cat with batwings. A particularly tone-deaf scene has police officers engaging in a love-in with Black and Brown civilians. A bolder work could have taken this further to explore dynamics of power, race and desire, but Inverso Mundus never looks beyond the surface of its absurdities.

The characters have no agency or purpose; they are simply moved around like so many Sims.

Inverso Mundus seems calculated to shock and disgust, but it delivers an empty performance of edginess. Inversion is not inherently subversive; it is weaponised by the powerful in false narratives of war that swap victim and aggressor, or in economic myths that cast billionaire tax-avoiders as heroes and workers as parasites. aes+f has described its practice as a form of ‘social psychoanalysis’, yet Inverso Mundus doesn’t have anything else to add to the conversations around violence, power, technology or the values of today; it merely presents a glossy unreality that borrows from the ‘uncanny valley’ aesthetics of videogames and ai-generated animation.

The strength of Inverso Mundus lies in the sheer weirdness of its ‘chimeras’, which drift

aimlessly across simulated skies. These creatures are also portrayed in a series of new oil paintings such as the 5m-wide Inverso Mundus, Celestial Cities of Chimeras (2024), in which two-headed ‘sealdogs’ and ‘brainfish’ with boars’ bodies soar past heavenly bone-white citadels. There is a freewheeling irreverence to how aes+F takes elements of kitsch – baby seals, puppies, candycoloured clouds – and transforms them into something monstrous; Inverso Mundus as an ongoing project is not without moments of fun and humour. The collective’s social observations are sharpest in a selection of portraits depicting smartly dressed women and children posing with various chimeras as though they are prized pets. Aping Baroque portraits of nobility, these works allude to the grotesque parading of wealth by elites as well as the commodification and corruption of nature to satisfy human vanity.

Yet there is little sense of evolution across this body of work in the decade since the film debuted. The new paintings replicate the same motifs, creating the impression that Inverso Mundus is not a reflection of the world we inhabit, but instead an ossified relic of another world altogether. Ophelia Lai

Inverso Mundus, Girl with Brainfish, 2024, study for a painting, 120 cm (diameter). Courtesy the artist and Tang Contemporary, Hong Kong

April 2025

99

Jay Bernard The Last X Years Artangel, www.tlxy.io from 9 February Darkness characterises the landing page of The Last X Years. Grey-on-black, the screen is dominated by a viruslike orb consisting of swarming blobs. Crinkled marks mar the black, as if the webpages have been scrunched up, then flattened out again. The styling of The Last X Years – an Artangel-commissioned online project by London-born writer and artist Jay Bernard – has an investigative tone, with its three landing pages titled ‘Voice’, ‘Mirror’ and ‘Memory’.

In the ‘Voice’ section, headlines from the Daily Mail and The Guardian establish Brexit (the uk’s 2016 referendum decision to leave the eu) as the subject. Clips of anonymous voices spark to life, many of them offering personal stories of life since the vote. As we listen, synchronised transcripts of the audio scuttle across the page against the scratched black background, as if typed out for a confidential report: ‘28 September 2018 Food supplier proposes vegetarian dishes in case of no-deal Brexit’, one headline reads, though accompanied by text that mentions neither food supply nor vegetarianism. Brexit is the only clear unifying theme for the text and headline, as the speaker reflects upon what has changed since the referendum.

If on the ‘Voice’ page the user has to discover connections, wondering how relevant a displayed

headline might be to the accompanying text, the dynamic changes on the ‘Mirror’ page. Here the technological processes that underlie the pairings – apparently strung together by an ai software, TensorFlow – are made more visible.

The amorphous orb is animated and enlarged, and hovering the cursor transforms each blob from grey to blue and triggers pop-up text: a newspaper headline reappears accompanied by another interview excerpt and the word ‘connection’, followed by either ‘weak’, ‘medium’ or ‘strong’. On the final page, ‘Memory’, the full list of interview excerpts and headlines is available to browse. Information pushes itself on the user on a scale that only technology could process in a single visit, suggesting a sense of human limitation faced with ai’s analytical capacity.

It is difficult to deduce the systems that orchestrate the site, raising questions, perhaps, about how technology might direct the political landscape. Less opaque, however, is the artist’s hand in the curating of text and graphics. One speaker exclaims, “I was just like, why would they want to leave? No, it just didn’t make sense to me.” The ‘why’ is italicised, sitting on its own line, while ‘no’ and ‘it’ are spaced apart from neighbouring words. Gaps sit like concrete

The Last X Years (still), 2025, online project.

Courtesy Artangel, London

100

ArtReview

spacers, obstructing the flow of thought. Despite the narrow majority vote in favour of Brexit, the subjects to which The Last X Years gives a voice seem disproportionately depressed: closest to the ‘Leave’ side among the web of Northern Irish, German and Australian voices, is a receivedpronunciation speaker who is critical of the eu, which he blames for economic fallout postreferendum. When some interviewees express past sympathies – ones that have since been revised – Bernard asks, “And you weren’t disturbed by the xenophobic nature of the campaign?” If The Last X Years is a work of social history, it certainly isn’t an objective one.

Interviewees navigate complex political issues, such as Palestine, antisemitism, covid, Scottish independence, the Russo-Ukrainian War, Nigel Farage, the Northern Ireland Protocol and Trump, grouped together in an amorphous blob under the scapegoat of Brexit. Faced by the insistent stream of information – a continuous loop of text and audio – it is no surprise that the website glitches, mirroring miscommunication in another form. ‘X’ years could be nearly ten years ago or tomorrow. Time collapses in the evergreen and information-saturated digital landscape, where correlation is substitute for cause. Ella Nixon

Efo Sela Children of the Universe Nubuke Foundation, Accra 28 November – 29 March In Efo Sela’s painting Speak Your Truth Quietly (2021), two figures are seated with their backs against each other. The one to the left is unveiled and holds a pot of red liquid, presumably blood.

In contrast, the figure to the right is masked, with the mouth agape exposing canine teeth as sharp as its horn or the used knife by its feet, while a golden egg glows in the left hand.

On the ground, a crow mourns a dying rooster, its feet separated from the body. A line of ants animates the mystery by parading fallen feathers like coffins. As the main figures sit fixated as if possessed, the Adinkra symbol Owuo Atwedee, represented by a red ladder on a side of their seat, summarises the moment by denoting the certainty and universality of death. The white background with blots, splashes, scrawls and drips of black paint augments the sense of unease.

Within the brutalist interior of Nubuke Foundation, Sela’s solo exhibition brings together paintings and drawings that make use of reworked symbolism and striking colours – often gold, white and black – while combining

free-flowing forms and cosmic features that seem to grow naturally from the artist’s subjects and materials. The painting Escapism: In the House of New Moon (2020) evokes a mystifying atmosphere with a bird perching on an ouroboros surrounding a foetus embossed in gold.

Connected by the umbilical cord at the centre, the foetal form hangs away from vèvè cosmograms equidistantly placed at the four corners of the otherwise black canvas. Spiritual tools for making offerings to the deities of Vodu religion in exchange for blessings, protection or interventions, vèvè are characterised by intricate intersections of hooks, circles, flags, crosses, hearts, triangles, stars, quadrilaterals and serpents. Sela takes the potency of such traditional symbols and gives them contemporary form, while exploring the original intent and functionality of African art; for healing, reinvigoration of consciousness and the mutual thriving and interconnectedness of humans and the natural world.

Sela’s works blend abstract and representational styles with textural effects, as in the

painting Resignation (2024), in which a figure faces east as the other, back to back, faces the west. With the lefthand figure, the use of an Akrafena (a ceremonial Akan sword) signifies leadership status. The figure on the right facing the East, wearing a gilded traditional headwrap, crosses its arms in reluctance. With reference to the title, this signals a withdrawal from confrontations, while the figure on the left appears to be celebrating triumph.

The Last Poets series (2024) is a group of charcoal drawings on paper. While the title might recall the band that came out of the American civil rights movement of the late 1960s, the series depicts conjoined abstracted figures made of intertwined lines and curves that lead the viewer’s eye to see landscapes as much as human bodies. Reimagining African traditional aesthetics, Sela’s work aims to open space for engagement with history and spirituality, while probing ideas of community, global interconnectedness; a meaningful contribution to contemporary conversations in Ghana and beyond. Kwame Aidoo

Speak Your Truth Quietly, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 153 × 196 cm. Photo: Isaac Gyamfi.

Courtesy the artist and Nubuke Foundation, Accra

April 2025

101

Stellenbosch Triennale 2025 ba’ zinzile: A Rehearsal for Breathing Various venues, Stellenbosch 19 February – 30 April Gathered together by Khanyisile Mbongwa, the 28 practitioners in this multisite exhibition, 26 from across the Global South as well as two from the United States, are attuned to breathe in the tempo of African conceptions of nonlinear time. ba’zinzile: A Rehearsal for Breathing takes breathing as a metaphor for the historical and personal dimensions of living – breathing as fundamental to life and as a sign of endurance and survival – while the three main exhibitions look to past, present and future. At the main Oude Libertas venue, On the Cusp and In the Current present explorations of breath, memory and cultural resistance. The triennial also unsettles the Stellenbosch University Museum and the Rupert Museum, which together present From the Vault, an exhibition concerned with unearthing institutional and individual collections, pushing the limits of the archive to critically engage with society and culture.

At the Rupert Museum, From the Vault returns to the effects of South Africa’s 1913 Natives’ Land Act that restricted land ownership for Black citizens. Landscape paintings from the museum’s collection vividly depict the parched earth scenery of Southern Africa and are placed alongside Kemang Wa Lehulere’s frenetic and phantasmic abstract oil paintings, such as the lush green mystical ideation of the earth below The odds must be crazy (2023–24). The soothing overtures of savant jazz trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni resonate in the museum space, as the soundtrack for Wa Lehulere’s film Mhlekazi (After Bird Song) (2025). A sense of displacement is produced by Anton van Wouw’s bronze sculptures, presented in a central line across the exhibition space. Two figures in the series stand out: Shangaan (1907) is a gilded bronze

bust of a Black man with a vexed gaze and arms folded beneath his chest, while his wretched counterpart, Accused (1907), has a contrastingly defeated look. The aesthetics of the two balances somewhere between anthropological artefacts that represent the ‘Other’, while at the same time immortalising a people torn from their geographic inheritance. The sprawling landscape oil paintings dating back to the apartheid era become inhabited by these resuscitated bronze subjects, with Wa Lehulere’s contemporary works operating as a critical mirror to such colonial-era archives.

This call-and-response between past and present extends to Oude Libertas, one of the oldest wineries in South Africa, whose grounds are transformed by 18 artists and seven filmmakers. Here, Helen Zeru’s work Institutionalisation of the informal, an installation subtitled Between Worlds: Art, Memories and Informal Community Ties (2025), invokes an excavation, this time in the form of a dug-up grave with mirrors at the bottom, recalling the memory of her mother’s remains being displaced in Ethiopia. Traversing generations and cultural geographies, the work’s intimation of healing as a creative process is a sentiment that is present throughout the triennial. Beyond vineyards that whisper histories of labourers being paid in the wine they harvested, in a room in the basements of the Oude Libertas building, Thierry Oussou’s work Politics of the Seed (2025) cultivates the sensorial experience of the winemaking process with an immersive installation of mirrors and disintegrating grapevines. The afterlives of slavery are articulated by Torkwase Dyson’s outdoor sound installation Letters from the madhouse (2025),

an intimate headphone-listening experience that creates a sonic history of the Middle Passage, interspersed with the sounds of water and echoes of Billie Holiday’s hauntingly beautiful melody Strange Fruit (1939).

For their sharp ability draw on dreams and memories for inspiration, the most compelling installations are situated outdoors. Up the hill from Dyson’s work, Manyaku Mashilo’s Towards our ancestors who lean towards us, with bent spines, trying to tell us where we are from, where we are going. (2025) is a rounded structure with a painted mural depicting female ancestral figures dressed in white, surrounded by ripples that look like map contours. The space feels sacred as you enter, stepping onto charcoal: after the fire comes new growth, a collective memory bank of cosmically chartered narratives populated by matriarchal wisdom.

If Mashilo uses natural materials like sticks and clay from the surrounding environment, so Simphiwe Buthelezi uses ocean sand for her enchanting installation in the Oude Libertas. With To read a book backwards (2025), Buthelezi has arranged dynamic interactions between broken mirrors and ocean sand on reed mats, reminiscent of a landscape seen from high above. Mirrors are rife throughout the triennial, a visual commentary on time passing and a familiar surface for rehearsing our appearance in the outside world. For its transdisciplinary and intercultural offerings that urge us to reflect on cartographies, archives and site-specific installations, this triennial on the southernmost edge of the African continent breathes new life into notions of healing and the infinite time continuum of culture.

Chaze Matakala

Manyaku Mashilo, Towards our ancestors who lean towards us, with bent spines, trying to tell us where we are from, where we are going., 2025 (installation view). © and courtesy Stellenbosch Academy

102

ArtReview

Simphiwe Buthelezi, To Read a book backwards, 2025 (installation view). © and courtesy Jumping the Gun

April 2025

103

Books Flower

by Ed Atkins Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) Language is at the heart of Ed Atkins’s cgipowered videos, performances and occasional plays, so it’s not surprising that he’s also produced three books of his writing in the last nine years, switching format each time. Following A Primer for Cadavers (2016), which collected various writings from 2010 onwards, and Old Food (2019), a hypertactile fictional grande bouffe centred on grotesque bodily gratifications, Flower is billed by its publisher as ‘his first work of non-fiction’. The same blurb, though, also describes the 96-page book as ‘treating personal truth as unavailable’, and ‘taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter’s improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty ai’. Its innards are subject to corruption, which seems appropriate given that this is how Atkins, at length here, purports to describe his own.

Like his films’ garrulous digital avatars, the Ed Atkins we meet in Flower is ready to turn himself inside out: to parade his appetites, innermost thoughts, unchecked unhealthy tendencies. The book begins, as if following on from Old Food, with a connoisseurly paean to substandard wraps sold in pharmacies, which ‘look like these spent prophylactic alien larvae props… the damp folded ends are hidden in the cardboard bottom like its genitals’. With the insalubrious tone set, Atkins (or ‘Atkins’)

decants other downmarket likes: premixed cans of hooch, relentless vaping or else smoking Silk Cuts, ultra-processed meats (‘indexed human technology’), certain painkiller brands.

He gives in to his corporeal wants, rationalising that ‘I’m trapped in my body’, and his impulses rush him past self-control and punctuation: ‘I caught myself at the fridge with a mouthful of bright yellow leftover curry, fake beer and vape at 11am I’m a maniac [sic].’ He has twitches and (self-diagnosed) adhd, which he combats by using several screens at once while drinking and vaping. He has a skin condition, says he’s fat, cultivates his cough; healthwise, he crosses his fingers, avoiding doctors or dentists. ‘I hope I look unwell and sound unwell but am not unwell… I don’t want to die but I won’t do anything ordinary about slowing it.’

Elsewhere, Atkins checks off other character flaws: his manipulativeness, wonky charisma and inability to finish sentences, his refusal to help himself or answer his phone, his scattershot reading and petty thieving from supermarkets.

If you’re familiar with Atkins’s art practice, you might be at least halfway persuaded of the narrator’s sincerity by how he talks about, say, wearing motion-capture apparatus, and by more confessional-feeling declarations: ‘Most of the time I hide how important the things I make are to me’; ‘I don’t like collaborations between

science and art though I have benefited from the sham of it’. He writes persuasively about how making ‘dead men’ – nonliving, computergenerated figures – might allow for a proxied confrontation with death. That’s using technology against itself, since the great foil of Atkins’s art is digitality and its remove from the texture of real life; this book, dankly glorying in the inescapable bodies we steer roughly around while not being in control of our consciousnesses either, is another reaffirmation of physicality, however terrorising, in a long line of them.

At the same time, Flower, whose unparagraphed outpouring makes one, after a point, begin to read the title as ‘Flow-er’, is punctuated by moments of its narrator tabulating quiet domestic details with his partner and children, and continually suggests a life actually lived rather than numbly drifted through, with an albeit perilous acceptance of one’s many blemishes. ‘I am often full of joy,’ the author writes on the last page, before returning to the body one more time, trying to remember the cause of a scar and remembering his mother (presumably accidentally) stabbing him with a garden fork. ‘It was hard’, he concludes – as if already beyond the veil, beyond mind and body – ‘but I had an amazing time.’ Whoever said that, you’re briefly happy for him. Martin Herbert

Flowers

by Brian Dillon, Takenori Miyamoto and Teppei Takeda United Vagabonds, ¥5,000 (hardcover)

The short review of this book would say that it does what it says on the cover, which is emblazoned with the words ‘Teppei Takeda Flowers’: it presents 34 paintings of flowers

by Japanese artist Teppei Takeda. It’s a beautiful book (designed by Naoto Fukasawa), a little under a4-size. Each painting is fullpage and features a single flower made up of a minimal series of brushstrokes that swirl partially mixed swathes of paint into a cluster of petals, the whole attached to a green stalk that looks like a supportive calligraphic gesture (if the paintings were sentences and the

104

brushstrokes words, the stalks would be punctuation marks). The paint gives off the vibe of cake icing, causing a reaction not unlike the drooling triggered by one of American painter Wayne Thiebaud’s celebrated renderings of baked goods. Looking at the paintings, you can read the strokes and see the paint mixing, along with all other traces of their manufacture. Perhaps that’s why each work is titled Painting of Painting.

But, of course, they look like particular flowers too. In a short text, Takeda states that the works are answers to the question of why he paints, which, in its circularity, appears to say something

ArtReview

while actually saying nothing. For Takenori Miyamoto (all texts here are printed in English and Japanese), the paintings are a reflection of the artist’s personal life: being the primary carer for a young daughter. For Brian Dillon, they are a reminder of a Balzac short story and the disjuncture between abstraction and figuration (with segues to the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock). But perhaps what this book really demonstrates is how much can be loaded into a single stroke of a brush. And in that sense it’s a reminder of why people fall in love with art. Nirmala Devi

April 2025

105

After Spaceship Earth: Art, Technology, and Other Science Fictions

by Eva Díaz Yale University Press, £45 (hardcover) Jumping off from The Experimenters (2015), her wonderfully readable history of Black Mountain College and its remarkable aggregation of some of the twentieth century’s major artistic and design talents, historian and critic Eva Díaz, in her new book, focuses on one of those talents: R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller taught at Black Mountain from 1948 to 1949, and is styled as the trunk of a family tree whose blooms Díaz sniffs out in all sorts of contemporary art practices of the past decade.

Fuller is a fascinating figure, and for Díaz he embodies both the good and the bad of American techno-utopianism. For Fuller, technology was an unalloyed good, as was the imperative to use it more efficiently and equally distribute resources around the globe. But Fuller was also a us military contractor (an unalloyed bad for Díaz’s wing of the progressive art-and-design caucus).

Various of his dome designs were bought by the us military for easily transportable and constructable housing, both for people and for surveillance equipment, as with the Defense Early Warning (dew) installations that pepper 4,800 kilometres of the Arctic. In After Spaceship Earth, Díaz sets for herself the task of showing how contemporary artists have been exploring both the promises and compromises of Fuller’s legacy, which she nicely dubs the ‘Fuller Effect’.

Much of that exploration comes down to how, when and why contemporary artists have presented, or represented, domes in their work.

And indeed, domes abound: Díaz narrates how Fuller’s famous geodesic domes figure as dystopian escape pods in works by Mary Mattingly and Oscar Tuazon; as sites for critiquing what Díaz calls ‘modern adaptive information flows’ in works by Ben Coonley and Jacolby Satterwhite; as channelling a communitarian imagination, from their centrality for Drop City, a 1960s Colorado hippy commune, to moma ps1’s corporate-sponsored vw Dome event space, which was in service from 2012 to 2020; and as portents of a totalitarian information space (from the dew to Starlink) that is revealed and critiqued by artists such as Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen.

For all of the excellent snippets on Fuller and his effects on both art and pop culture – particularly noteworthy here is Díaz’s linking of the dissociative experiences of domed cinema spaces, such as the 1963 Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles, to Douglas Trumbull’s revolutionary fx work for the ‘stargate’ sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – they remain just that, snippets, with in some cases only the most tenuous connections to the more contemporary artists and debates that hold Díaz’s interests.

One has to ask, for example, why nothing is written about Ruth Asawa, one of Fuller’s students at Black Mountain College during the 1940s. Or what about Norman Foster, who met Fuller in 1971? He comes in for only a single

mention, and only as an avatar of the excesses of space privatisation, though Foster is arguably the figure today who is manifesting the full scope, both good and bad, of Fuller’s technoutopian visions.

Another way to put this is that After Spaceship Earth would be a very interesting exhibition, but it is not entirely convincing as either history or criticism. When in the second half of the book Díaz exchanges Fuller for legendary funk musician and Afrofuturist Sun Ra as a touchstone for contemporary art practices, what were once ‘effects’ traceable through a loose but tangible genealogy become mere thematics. Any work of the past decade that invokes space or time travel as an allegory for racial, feminist or decolonial politics might be included, and the writing suffers. For example, two paragraphs on Neïl Beloufa’s 2007 videowork Kempinski – the only two this otherwise exceptional artist gets in the book – read like an overindulgent wall text.

In these latter sections, description comes to trump analysis, as works of art become illustrative rather than illuminating, artists are ‘profiled’ and chapters close with shopworn progressive mantras about ‘injustices’ being met with ‘new speculative imagination’ and ‘radical forms of invention in performance and art production’. These themes are more redolent of establishment exhibition culture, here captured between the covers of a book, which doesn’t feel very new or radical at all. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art Edited by Phaidon with an introduction by Erika Balsom Phaidon, £49.95 (hardcover)

If you try to read this book cover to cover, you might experience a dizzying thrill. First you’ll find time compressed in the introduction by academic Erika Balsom, who impressively covers the history of moving image in just eight pages. Then you’ll find it stretched out over the remaining 265 pages, which introduce the work of more than 100 contemporary artists from around the globe in alphabetical order, most of whom – even relative ‘veterans’ such as John Akomfrah, William Kentridge or Lynn Hershman Leeson – have been active during the past year.

However, the best way to read it (and not experience dizziness) is like a dictionary, with entries vetted (or nominated) by high-profile

106

curators, writers and institutional directors like moma’s Stuart Comer or the Rockbund’s X Zhu-Nowell. Each spread comes with a short artist statement and a couple of artwork descriptions, followed by artwork stills and installation shots that do their best to illustrate despite the obvious shortcomings of the static page when it comes to capturing animated form.

Overall, you’ll get a piecemeal understanding of the different ways in which moving image is made and used today – navigating high-res, low-res, found-footage, staged or ai-generated images, speculative futures or critical investigations of the past. It’s an overwhelmingly large and diverse medium

ArtReview

to tackle, and this book, with its formulaic descriptions, is best taken as something to whet your appetite. Ever present is the vague sense you’re reading 100-plus exhibition texts threaded together with no exhibition attached.

A reminder perhaps that there is only so much we can expect a book to do as a stand-in for art.

Among the artists who made it on the taster menu are the 2025 lg Guggenheim Award recipient Ayoung Kim and a healthy crop of participants in last year’s Venice Biennale, including Gabrielle Goliath, Bouchra Khalili, Zineb Sedira and Wael Shawky. Though it may not offer many new insights, Vitamin V is a nicely packaged snapshot of the trending artists in the field right now. Mia Stern

Citizen by Descent

by Kritika Arya Self-published, £22 (hardcover) Kritika Arya’s book of ten illustrated autobiographical essays was self-published in India in 2023 and is now available internationally via Amazon. It begins with a chapter that explains her ‘puzzle strategy’: a way of understanding life as a young woman in her early thirties. It will be familiar to those who have assembled jigsaws: start with the edges; work your way towards the centre. Arya has now, in her thirties, realised that certain of the puzzle pieces that make up her life have been lost, discoloured or discarded, likely never to be found again. It is these empty spaces that are the subject of this memoir. And the biggest empty space surrounds the idea of home.

Born in Dubai to Indian parents from Rajasthan, Arya has her Indian citizenship by descent rather than by birth. After studying in the uk and being forced to leave because of visa issues, she has now lived in India for more than ten years. But isn’t quite sure if that’s ‘home’.

During the course of the essays – which are presented in formats that span journal entries, lengthy sms conversations with her sister and manuals for surviving the anxiety of facing uninvited, overinquisitive guests, and cover her childhood home, romantic relationships, education and career – it becomes clear that her ultimate goal is to find an emotional or intellectual rooting, in the absence of one that

is spatial or geographical. And, as a reader, you are conditioned to help her, to look for the clues that could indicate where this might be: in sixyear-old Arya’s toy detective kit, which she used to ‘investigate’ her siblings, friends and extended family; or in the corridor of her Dubai home, which held a makeshift wicket for playing cricket as well as a prayer room, mimicking most Indian households with a Rajasthani background.

As Arya matures and moves from one place to another, she convinces the reader that there is no state of permanence in the world, whether you try to locate that via a place, person, job, emotion or sensation caused by an illness.

Anecdotes refer to Arya’s family’s struggle to remain rooted in her Rajasthani culture while living in Dubai. Arya feels the pressure to communicate well in Hindi, a language she acquired merely ‘by descent’ – while living in Dubai, her family spoke Hindi only at home. English was what she learned to speak, read and write at school. As she grows older, Arya notices that she becomes increasingly separated from home, via the memories of what it once seemed to be versus the way in which she perceives it now.

She wants not to worry about that, as her father advises her, but she can’t.

For her, this search remains ongoing, as it does for many of her generation of millennials

(including myself) who are descendants of generations for whom ‘home’ was equally in flux.

As Arya seeks to construct a ‘home’ in her mind, she is led to confront issues relating to her mental health. As a result, Citizen by Descent is an honest and vivid account of young life among many self-help books too many millennials resort to for inspiration, tips or tricks that might help one to become the best version of oneself. While it might be considered a coming-of-age story, this is a collective one – narrated not just through Arya’s words, but through the works created by the artists who respond to her stories.

For example, her flat in London is depicted

by Sri Lankan-British artist Annette Fernando (with whom Arya worked while studying at Central Saint Martins) in a pen-on-paper drawing that highlights Arya’s longing to remain in the city that she eventually left because she could not obtain the necessary visas. In the drawing, Arya lies with her laptop and indoor plants in a warehouselike setting full of construction tools.

She is under constant threat of eviction because the apartment doesn’t meet building regulations.

Emotions that accompany such threats, like fear and anxiety, are captured with rawness in the memoir, all of which make those emotions palpable to all readers who have lived in flux. And to those who have not. Pramodha Weerasekera

The World After Gaza

by Pankaj Mishra

Over the past two decades, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra has positioned himself as one of the key thinkers in reimagining our world through the lens of decolonisation. While his latest book omits that world from its title, it nevertheless remains at its centre, as Mishra struggles to think his way through the ‘moral calamity’ that characterises Israel’s actions in Gaza after 7 October 2023, and the West’s general acceptance and endorsement of them.

For Mishra, decolonisation is the creation of a ‘past, present and future’ in which the global majority can recognise themselves, as opposed to a history in which they were constantly rendered impotent. And what’s happened in Gaza, with its attendant reversion to a mightis-right morality and an ethnonationalist conception of the nation-state, has swept all that aside.

Fern Press, £2o (hardcover)

The first part of his book concerns how the Holocaust (or Shoah, to use, as Mishra does, the Hebrew term) gradually became the raisond’être of Zionism and the Jewish State. Not that this is about Israel alone. Along the way he observes that the Holocaust also highlights a ‘deficit of compassion in the West’, whose states were often resistant to taking in Jewish refugees, preferring instead various forms of ‘bystanderism’. (Albeit his discussion of the Hamas attacks themselves is brief to the point that opponents might accuse Mishra of indulging in a little bystanderism of his own.) A mixture of fear about the Holocaust happening again and guilt about it happening in the first place has shaped the politics and morality of most Western nations, and those they touched.

In the second part of the book, Mishra weaves the Shoah, the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of

April 2025

Arabs from Palestine in 1948) and the partition of India together, as the parallel products of ‘imperialist skullduggery, nationalist opportunism, clumsy partition, war and ethnic cleansing’. And then looks at how the nationalists in charge of India and those in charge of Israel have used these events as an excuse to launch violence ‘without constraints’. He moves on to align the Arab cause with a historic pattern of wider racist oppression, arguing that they are being dealt with in the same way as all people of darker skin have been. And perhaps it’s in his insistence that what’s happening in the Middle East is not remote and not something about which we can figure out the whys and wherefores at a later date that Mishra makes his most powerful arguments. While not without its flaws, this is brave writing that demands to be read. Mark Rappolt

107

Artist Mario Ramesh Nithiyendran, photographed by Bowen Aricò, October 2023

Your fashion bible

shop.artreview.com

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising & Partnerships

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Publisher Carsten Recksik carstenrecksik@artreview.com

Amy Morell amymorell@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Editors David Terrien J.J. Charlesworth Fi Churchman

Yusi Xiong yusixiong@artreview.com

Finance

Editor-at-Large Oliver Basciano

Financial Controller Sheila Dong sheiladong@artreview.com

Associate Editors Martin Herbert Chris Fite-Wassilak Jenny Wu

Accountant Ning Cao ningcao@artreview.com

Nai-Tien Gene Hsu naitienhsu@artreview.com

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam@icanps.co.uk Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit shop.artreview.com

Managing Editor Yuwen Jiang

ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications t 44 (0)1778 392038 e art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk

Editorial Assistant Mia Stern Editorial Allie Biswas Louise Darblay

ArtReview Ltd ArtReview is published

by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y 0th t 44 (0)20 7490 8138 e office@artreview.com

Digital Director of Digital Louise Benson Digital Editor Alexander Leissle Design Designers Pedro Cid Proença Michael Wallace Original design concept John Morgan studio

ArtReview is printed in the United Kingdom. Reprographics by The Logical Choice. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, issn No: 1745-9303, (usps No: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom.

Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne pe10 9ph, United Kingdom.

The paper used within this publication is sourced from chain-of-custody certified manufacturers, operating within international environmental standards.

This ensures sustainable sourcing of the raw materials and sustainable production.

Art credit

Text credit

On the cover Yuki Kihara, Darwin Drag (still), 2025, single-channel video.

Courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 41 and 75 are from The Grihya-Sûtras: Rules of Vedic Domestic Ceremonies, Part 1 (The Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Müller, vol 29), translated by Hermann Oldenberg (1893)

April 2025

109

disrupt /dis r pt/

verb

To break apart; to throw into disorder; to interrupt the normal course or unity of; to dam; to pull the plug; to change up; to ‘change the game’ What the soixante-huitards did to France in the glorious May of 1968, when civil government (very, very) briefly came to a halt. A moment celebrated by leftwingers around the world and remembered (even by those who weren’t there and had nothing to do with it) with teary eyes and a soundtrack of Tom Jones’s Delilah. Since taken up by Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and others in actions that would generally be described as more of a nuisance than anything else (and pale in comparison to the sacred days of May 68). Like flooding on a railway line. Or Samson after his haircut.

As language evolves and meaning segues into meaninglessness, the term has been most frequently deployed by proponents of the political right as a cover for breaking up civil society. And as a reason for ‘encouraging’ obedience rather than disobedience. What Silicon Valley types think they do.

A disruption is normally the reason for an uncle’s colonic irrigation.

When deployed to describe the effect of works in an art gallery, to disrupt is to give people something to think about. For as long as it takes them to exit the gallery. When they no longer need to think for themselves.

While some trade contemporary art as a physical commodity, it really exists only in the world of ideas. That’s what makes it eternally contemporary.

To pretend to subvert expectations or offer a new vision; to react to perceived structures or hierarchies, however illusory, and seek to replace them with your own structures; a euphemism for being contrarian; to react with spite, ignore what’s in front of you and suggest your own ill-informed idea.

Requires bravery (in the artworld, rare).

Often accompanied by the catchphrase ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’.

See also: divert, replace, piss off

110

Drink champagne responsibly