ArtReview Asia Summer 2022 by ArtReview

Lawrence Lek

Futurism, collectivism and the lingering stench of the past

Japanese animé’s unhinged avant-garde

Summer 2022 Karin Sander “What you see is not what you get” (22 Exhibitions) June 10 – July 16, 2022 Nathan Carter Silky-way Sylvan Slip-throughs Serrated Sub-space Side-winders and Countess Von Venomous’ Private Pearl Position June 10 – July 16, 2022 Summer ’22 July 21 – August 27, 2022

Art Basel June 16 – 19, 2022 artmonte-carlo – salon d’art July 14 – 16, 2022

Potsdamer Straße 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

Raoul De Keyser, Closerie I (BerlinerEnsemble),1998 © Raoul De Keyser / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Belgium

Raoul De Keyser

拉烏爾·德·凱澤

July 5—August 6 7月5日—8月6日

Replay Again

David Zwirner

卓納畫廊

重新再來

ArtReview Asia vol 10 no 2 Summer 2022

All Over the Place Oh, hello. General inflation, fuel and food shortages in Sri Lanka, the children of dictators back in power in the Philippines, endless lockdowns in China, crackdowns in Hong Kong, cryptocurrency meltdowns, religious killings in India, Canadians supporting religious killings in India, Israeli jets terrorising Lebanon’s skies, the us taking a medieval approach to women’s rights... You’d be forgiven if you’re thinking it’s all gone to shit. Oh yeah, and ArtReview Asia hasn’t even mentioned the war in Ukraine. Given the problematics of coming to terms with our messy, fucked-up present, this issue of ArtReview Asia looks at art as a means of exploring both the past and the future in order, hopefully, to get a firmer grasp on the bit in between, the jam in the sandwich – the now. It does that not because it’s entirely escapist or because it’s shitting its pants, but because looking at, say, the development of collective practices in Indonesia, or readings of and responses to Partition in India, or speculating about the evolution of ai in Singapore are all ways of looking at our present from a different angle, or with a sideways glance. Along the way, traditions and cultures are used, exploited, adapted and rediscovered. And sometimes even respected and honoured. In a way this issue – which also looks to diasporic culture, the use and abuse of tradition in Japanese animé and how to live with others – is precisely about how you assemble things that are fragmented, contradictory and paradoxical into something meaningful, useful and purposeful. While being conscious of its evident flaws. ArtReview Asia

You have aged well

Moon Kyungwon ムン・キョンウォン＆チョン・ジュンホ & Jeon Joonho News どこにもない場所のこと From Nowhere owhere

2022 年 5 月 3 日㊋㊗−9 月 4 日㊐開場時間＝10:00−18:00（金・土は 20:00 まで）チケット販売は閉場の 30 分前まで休場日＝毎週月曜日（ただし 7 月 18 日、8 月 15 日は開場）、7 月 19 日、8 月 16 日休場日主催＝金沢 21 世紀美術館［公益財団法人金沢芸術創造財団］主催

金沢 21 世紀美術館〒920-8509 石川県金沢市広坂 1-2-1 Tel. 076 -220 -2800 https://www.kanazawa 21.jp

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 1-2 -1 Hirosaka, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920 - 8509 , Japan

News from Nowhere: Eclipse, 2022 single channel HD film installation, sound, light, 17 min. 5 sec.

May 3, 2022 – September 4 , 2022

Opening hours: 10 : 00 –18 : 00 (until 20 : 00 on Fridays and Saturdays) *Last admission is 30 minutes before closing time. Closed: Mondays (open on July 18 , August 15 , 2022 ), July 19 , August 16 , 2022 Organized by: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa [Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation] for the project ““MMCA MMCA Hyundai Motor series <NEWS FROM NOWHERE: FREEDOM VILLAGE>” at Gallery 11 Co-organized by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Art Previewed

Previews by Oliver Basciano, J.J. Charlesworth, Adeline Chia, Max Crosbie-Jones, Nirmala Devi 16

Points of View by Dina Ramadan, Deepa Bhasthi 24

Art Featured

Lawrence Lek by Fi Churchman 30

An Assemblage of Resident Aliens Project by Guanyu Xu 54

Here, There or Everywhere? by Mark Rappolt 40

Tradition and Invention in Filipino Diasporic Art by Marv Recinto 62

Collectivity and the Social in Indonesian art by Elly Kent 48

Masaaki Yuasa by Claire Cao 68

page 62 Josh Kline, Adaptation (still), 2019–20, 16mm film (colour, sound), 10 min 55 sec. Courtesy the artist; 47 Canal, New York; and Modern Art, London

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 77

books 98

Documenta 15, by J.J. Charlesworth Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, by Owen Duffy Liew Kwai Fei, by Lim Sheau Yun 23rd Sydney Biennale, by Naomi Riddle Ruangsak Anuwatwimon, by Max Crosbie-Jones Proper Weight, by Aaina Bhargava Peng Zuqiang, by Marv Recinto 12th Berlin Biennale, by Martin Herbert Leonor Will Never Die, by Marv Recinto Lonely Vectors, by Adeline Chia Toshiko Takaezu, by Owen Duffy Shao Chun, by Paul Han Destiny Disrupted, by Neha Kale

India: A History in Objects, by T. Richard Blurton, reviewed by Mark Rappolt All the Lovers in the Night, by Mieko Kawakami, reviewed by Alexander Leissle Time Is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by David Terrien Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy, by Charlotte Van den Broeck, reviewed by John Quin Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones Cursed Rabbit, by Bora Chung, reviewed by Fi Churchman Cold Enough for Snow, by Jessica Aw, reviewed by Adeline Chia Pop Song, by Larissa Pham, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak

eternal returns 106

page 78 Britto Arts Trust, ছায়ািছব (Chayachobi), 2022 (installation view, Documenta 15, Documenta Halle, Kassel). Photo: Nicolas Wefers

10-13 NOV 2022 GRAND PALAIS éPHéMèRE

리히터 다니엘 미치광이웃 나의

6. 23 – 9. 28

Image © Daniel Richter, 2022 Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul Deichtorhallen Hamburg/ Falckenberg Collection Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

스페이스K 서울 SPACE K Seoul 07802 서울시 강서구 마곡중앙8로 32 32, Magokjungang8-ro, Gangseo-gu, Seoul, 07802, Republic of Korea 02-3665-8918 www.spacek.co.kr spacek_korea

Art Previewed

Eat more often 15

Priyageetha Dia, we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya (still), 2022 . Courtesy the artist

ArtReview Asia

Previewed Unaccounted Travelogue Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei Through 31 July

The Immeasurable and World’s End jwd Art Space, Bangkok Through 28 August

Hito Steyerl National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Through 18 September

Pichet Klunchun Dance Company Noble Play, Bangkok Through 28 August

Catherine Opie Lehmann Maupin, Seoul Through 20 August Aichi Triennale: still alive Various venues, Aichi Through 10 October Priyageetha Dia Yeo Workshop, Singapore Through 16 July

Joydeb Roaja Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai 14 July – 20 August Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, dc Through 18 September Nam June Paik Part one: Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, through 22 July Part two: Gagosian, Park Avenue & 75th Street, New York, 19 July – 26 August

Summer 2022

Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town Through 29 January Samira Rathod Chemould Prescott Road, Delhi Through 2 August Melati Suryodarmo Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht 12 June – 30 October Pritika Chowdhry South Asia Institute, Chicago August – December Checkpoint: Border Views from Korea Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 21 May – 18 September

Unaccounted Travelogue The literal translation of the Chinese title of this exhibition, feiyuji, is ‘antitravelogue’, and it is an unflinching yet life-affirming look at marginalised groups in Taiwan and Thailand who basically do not travel for leisure. The show is divided into two sections. ‘Not Here For Fun’ centres on Thai migrant labourers who work in Taiwan, and features their writings and artworks, and information about their cultural and reading spaces. The second part, ‘True Love Can Wait Forever’, draws connections between molam, a folk music genre in the Isaan region in northeast Thailand, and linban, songs sung by indigenous forest workers in Taiwan. Adeline Chia Hito Steyerl: A Sea of Data Bringing together 23 representative works from

the influential Berlin-based artist-filmmakertheorist, this survey exhibition is a good chance to sample the breadth of her practice. Featured works range from early pseudo-documentary projects such as Germany and Identity (1994) to her latest mmca-commissioned installation, Animal Spirits (2022). The latter, a four-channel videowork, centres on a mockumentary about a reality tv show trying to infiltrate a small mountain village in Spain and morphs into a critique of the wild capitalist markets in bitcoin and nfts. Adeline Chia Catherine Opie: To Your Shore From My Shore And Back Again In 2009 Catherine Opie boarded a cargo ship that set sail from Seoul to the artist’s native usa. Best known for her portraits of queer friends

and performers, the veteran photographer had very few people around her for these ten days: just the crew, plus stacks of shipping containers. It was beyond the boat that she trained her lens however, making a series of meditative, melancholy images of the sea’s horizon at sunrise and sunset. While her better-known work blurred gender and identity boundaries, here it is time and national borders caught in flux. Oliver Basciano Aichi Triennale: still alive Still Alive. That is the pandemic-apt theme of this year’s Aichi Triennale and a nod to Aichiborn On Kawara’s famous series of telegrams sent to acquaintances around the world announcing ‘i am still alive’. Curated by Mami Kataoka, the exhibition explores

Paelabang Danapan, Jiu Jiu Jiu Yi Ci (Drinking Once in a Long Time), 2022 (installation view, Unaccounted Travelogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei)

Catherine Opie, Untitled #13 (From Your Shore to My Shore), 2009, pigment print, 109 × 82 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul & London

Hito Steyerl, Animal Spirits (still), 2022, single-channel hd video, colour, sound, 24 min. Courtesy Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

ArtReview Asia

Kate Cooper, Infection Drivers, 2018. Courtesy the artist

Henry Tan and Partners, Lunarium, 2021–22 / 2564–65, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and jwd Art Space, Bangkok

the meaning and obligations of survival to build a more equitable and sustainable world. The 82 participating artists include On, Kader Attia, Anne Imhof, Shiota Chiharu, Hsu Chia-Wei and Mit Jai Inn. There will also be a performance art programme featuring artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul presenting his first vr work. Adeline Chia Priyageetha Dia: Forget Me, Forget Me Not Migrant Indian workers powered many rubber plantations in British Malaya in the early twentieth century. Dia, whose practice often centres on brown identities, histories and bodies, turns to representations of labouring bodies in this show, which contains prints of stock images of Malayan plantations as well

as a hammock made out of a latex sheet. The show does not say much about exploitation and trauma, but implies their presence and unknowability. The highlight is a cgi video in which a gilded female protagonist (we.remain. in.multiple.motions_Malaya, 2022) immerses herself among lush trees and blue waters. The many scenes of her silver arm touching stuff – stroking a tiger skin, dipping into waves and caressing the slash marks on rubber-tree trunks – are hypnotic, sensual and oddly healing. Adeline Chia The Immeasurable and World’s End One of a handful of Thai artists already confirmed for the upcoming Bangkok Art Biennale, Chitti Kasemkitvatana was, for a spell during the late 1990s, on a similar career trajectory

Summer 2022

as Rirkrit Tiravanija, with whom he coedited the shortlived ver magazine (the precursor to Bangkok’s Gallery ver). That is, until he withdrew by becoming a Buddhist monk for most of the 2000s. Since 2011, however, he has sporadically returned to art and – as is the case with The Immeasurable and World’s End at jwd Art Space – curating. Grounded in his interest in the subjectivity of time and memory, and how different spacetime concepts influence social structures, this exhibition of works by 14 artists from Australia, India, Lithuania, South Korea and Thailand is cut from the same minimal and conceptual cloth that marked out his early curatorial forays at Bangkok’s seminal About Café. Through a smorgasbord of practices – from Varsha Nair’s diaristic memory maps drawn on palm leaves to Henry Tan and

Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, Evolution, 2022 (installation view, Noble Play, Bangkok). Courtesy the artists

Joydeb Roaja, Go back to Roots – 30, ink pen on paper, 100 × 75 cm. Courtesy the artist

partners’ mycelium lab exploring lunar biology and terraforming – Kasemkitvatana offers us a domain of encounter, a loosely networked free space as porous and fluid as his unusual biography. Max Crosbie-Jones Pichet Klunchun Dance Company: Evolution For over two decades now, Pichet Klunchun and his troupe have been contemporising classical Thai dance – especially khon, an angular and refined masked dance form traditionally performed at the royal court – through an approach that is at once reverent and impudent. Evolution at Bangkok’s Noble Play showroom is being punctuated by weekly performances of key works (including kinetic solo pieces Phya Chattan and I am a Demon),

giving it the feel of a kaleidoscopic career retrospective; but its exhibition element is also breaking new ground by charting his wont for deconstructing and developing dance traditions through a cross-disciplinary series of installations. Among them is a display of black-and-white photos capturing the poses and movement of Nijinsky Siam, which is Klunchun’s choreographed response to the archival photographs of early-twentiethcentury ballet legend Vaslav Nijinsky performing Michel Fokine’s Thai classical danceinspired work, Danse Siamoise (1910). Also on display are pencil drawings of the 59 ‘Thepphanom’ moves that become, through rote-learning, second nature to classical Thai dancers, while both the immersive vr room and the industrial robot-arm carving new

ArtReview Asia

iterations of traditional khon masks gesture broadly towards the mutating and futureorientated dance language of one of Thailand’s foremost iconoclasts. Max Crosbie-Jones Joydeb Roaja: Roots An indigenous artist from the Chittagong hill tract area of Bangladesh, Joydeb Roaja works primarily in performance, installation and drawing, often finding inspiration and materials among the area’s tribal cultures and natural hilly landscape. This exhibition of intricately drawn ink-on-paper works revolves around the entangled relationships between nature and Joydeb Roaja’s indigenous community. Human bodies blend seamlessly into branches, leaves and roots to create visions of interconnectedness and resilience. Adeline Chia

Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain According to Tess Davies – the cultural racketeering specialist behind key research into the illicit trade in Cambodian antiquities, including the late Douglas Latchford’s smuggling ring – Western museums should be viewing repatriation as an opportunity, not an obstacle. That sentiment clearly informs Revealing Krishna, which after debuting at Ohio’s Cleveland Museum of Art (cma) has now moved to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Featuring digital projections, augmentedreality headsets and a documentary, the exhibition is a collaboration with Cambodia’s National Museum centred around a larger-thanlife statue of Hindu god Krishna holding up a mountain. Standing close to two metres tall,

the one-ton Khmer sculpture – thought to have been removed from the manmade caves of Phnom Da, a mountain in southern Cambodia, in the early twentieth century – was restored during the late 1970s, shortly after the cma acquired it. But the recent back-and-forth exchange of fragments with the National Museum in Phnom Penh, coupled with modern scanning techniques, has conclusively proven those changes incorrect. While the exhibition chronicles the life story of this newly restored masterpiece – including the mystery of its successfully reattached left hand and its dramatic (if only temporary) reunion with some of the other stone gods of Phnom Da – it also exemplifies the constructive relationships and new loans that can result when a major museum chooses to build bridges rather than defensive walls. Max Crosbie-Jones

Nam June Paik: Art in Process This double-bill survey of Nam June Paik’s four-decade career highlights the Korean-born artist’s enduring interest in changing modes of representation. One of the last works the artist made before his death in 2006 was Lion, a typically absurd sculptural assemblage in which a found wooden Indian sculpture of the big cat stands in front of an arching altar of monitors, each playing looped footage from wildlife documentaries. The filmed animals offer a better likeness to the natural world than the sculpture, and yet Paik plays with that hierarchy by pushing the antiquated cat to the forefront. Oliver Basciano Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora In Sohrab Hura’s 17-minute film The Coast (2020)

Conjectural restoration of the Cleveland Krishna as it may have appeared prior to damage and weathering, installed in Cave D, Phnom Da. Digital restoration and modelling by Dale Utt; lidar scans and photogrammetry by David Korzan, Konstanty Kulik and Michał Mierzejewski. Courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art

Sohrab Hura, The Coast (still), 2020, film, 17 min 27 sec. Courtesy the artist

Nam June Paik, Lion, 2005, three-channel video, 2 plasma monitors, 26 crt monitors, plywood, electrical cables, wood lion sculpture, wood platform, acrylic paint and permanent oil marker, 338 × 277 × 165 cm. © Nam June Paik Estate. Courtesy Nam June Paik Estate and Gagosian

Summer 2022

we see the locals of a beachside village in southern India playing in the waves at night. Somewhere in the darkness, 2,000km across the water, is the easternmost tip of Africa; 5,000km in the other direction is Australia. The huge expanse of water between – variously known as the Indian Ocean, the Swahili Sea, Ziwa Kuu or Bahari Hindi – is the subject of this exhibition of 13 artists. Among those joining Hura are Taiwanese artist Cetus Chin-Yun Kuo, whose work deals with the social and political consequences of cartography; Australian Isha Ram Das, whose soundworks stem from ecological concern; and figurative painter Cinga Samson, a local to Cape Town. Oliver Basciano Samira Rathod: Dismantling Building – A Kit of Parts If I tell you that one of architect Samira Rathod’s

latest projects is called ‘the House of Concrete Experiments’ and that it’s a sculptural dwelling whose walls incorporate waste (large and small) gathered from the site, whose ceilings incorporate B-shaped lightwells, whose entrances feature cantilevered concrete slabs for shade and whose structure is fragmented in order to avoid removing any of the mango trees onsite, you’ll begin to understand why it makes sense to show her work in an art gallery. Although it also helps that the architect and furniture designer’s firm, Samira Rathod Design Atelier (srda), recently renovated the ancestral home of Chemould Prescott Road’s artistic director. It’s a new series of furniture that’s on show, largely made of local wood (teak, rosewood, ain, jackfruit and Kendal) with the help of local karigars, the resultant

desks and tables look in part like architectural plans or models, in part, thanks to the deployment of pistonlike forms, like steampunk assemblages, while nevertheless retaining the material trace of the geographic context from which they come. Apparently you can use them too. But they seem altogether too distracting to allow you to focus on anything else. Nirmala Devi Melati Suryodarmo: I am a Ghost in My Own House Suryodarmo’s physically demanding, apparently absurdist performance works address how human physical presence and action might be distilled into meaning for its audience. Drawing from Japanese Butoh as well as on the history of Western performance art (she studied for a time

Melati Suryodarmo, Membran, Lambda print on aluminium dibond. Courtesy the artist

Samira Rathod, Dismantling Building – A Kit of Parts, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

ArtReview Asia

with Marina Abramović) Suryodarmo’s works have previously involved such fraught scenarios as firing 800 arrows into the walls of a gallery over four hours, or handling a large, awkward, heavy sheet of glass while repeating “I love you” for even longer. Suryodarmo’s work has won her this year’s €25,000 Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art, and this solo exhibition presents documents, artworks and video recordings from over two decades of this Indonesian artist’s minimal but intense oeuvre. J.J. Charlesworth Pritika Chowdhry: Unbearable Memories, Unspeakable Histories India’s independence from British rule in 1947 brought with it the chaos and suffering of Partition into what would become modern-day

India and Pakistan. Two million people died in political violence and over twenty million were displaced. With Partition’s 60th anniversary, in 2007, Chowdhry began her Partition Anti-Memorial Project, a series of sculptural and installation works that each bring attention the forgotten, often bitter and enduring consequences of Partition on Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi society. At South Asia Institute, Chowdhry’s 15-year project is revisited to mark Partition’s 75 years, asking the question, ‘When a memory is unbearable, how does one memorialize it?’ J.J. Charlesworth Checkpoint: Border Views from Korea Borders are always lines of political tension, in some places more than others. For the people

of North and South Korea, the division of the Korean peninsula after the Second World War has meant, since 1953, the presence of the Demilitarized Zone (dmz), a strip of land separating the two (technically still-at-war) countries, with the North an isolated and mysterious world, even if only kilometres away from the South. Checkpoint: Border Views from Korea presents work by 20 artists – including Lee Bul, Haegue Yang, Chan Sook Choi and Adrián Villar Rojas – exploring the fractured history and present of the two states, opposing products of the Cold War. Since North Korean artists are (inevitably) absent, the show offers multiple reflections on separation and the persistence of human connection and cultural ties, even as states stubbornly face off, over years and decades. J.J. Charlesworth

Pritika Chowdhry, Silent Waters, 2009, 101 ceramic feet, wax, water, salt, 9 × 9 m. Courtesy Weisman Museum of Art, Minneapolis

Heinkuhn Oh, A soldier standing on the water, July 2011, 2011, archival pigment print, 103 × 78 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

The Kayfa ta logo is a sketch of a Trojan horse being pulled by two tiny figures. It is an apt metaphor for this independent publishing initiative, established and edited by artists/curators Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis (based in Cairo and Amman, respectively), which uses the seemingly practical ‘How-to’ manuals to smuggle unexpected ideas to their readers. According to the editors, these cheap, pocket-size publications are intended to ‘respond to some of today’s perceived needs; be they the development of skills, tools, thoughts or sensibilities’. However, a quick glance at titles in the series reveals a mischievous subversion of the genre. How to disappear; How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet; How to know what’s really happening; How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts; How to spell the fight; How to love a homeland: the skill-set being disseminated is somewhat ambiguous. The seductive titles resist the transparency usually associated with these kinds of instructive manuals, playfully withholding and protecting the true nature of the knowledge being shared. Founded in 2012, Kayfa ta is the product of a crucial moment in the Arab world’s history; in the wake of the Arab Spring, questions about how to move forward, how to shape a future, a society, a government, a country, were allconsuming. In the din of this moment and its aftermath, these monographs offer a quieter space for reflection – perhaps the space of unseen listening that Haytham El-Wardany privileges in the series’ inaugural text – and a way to consider the most urgent political challenges away from the doggedness of ideological grandstanding, all too common at that time. This too was a moment where the viability of traditional, physical art spaces in the region was becoming questionable due to precarious funding structures and increased political repression. Movement and mobility are therefore crucial aspects of Kayfa ta’s vision; the 9.6 × 14.8 cm publications are portable, affordable and accessible, ensuring their ability to travel far and wide, bridging both geographical and disciplinary boundaries, connecting literary and artistic circles. The insistence on translation – each text is eventually produced in both Arabic and English editions – is also part of the platform’s community-building vision; Arabic readers are introduced to writers outside the region and vice versa. There is a fluidity to Kayfa ta’s texts,

Guerrilla Books

In the hands of artists, the innocent ‘How-to’ book has become a means of smuggling subversive ideas across the Arab world, writes Dina Ramadan

How to reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing, 2019 (installation view, featuring work by Raafat Majzoub). Photo: Baris Dogrusöz. Courtesy Beirut Art Center and Kayfa ta

ArtReview Asia

in terms of genre, form and subject matter; individually and collectively they defy easy categorisation, moving between the personal and the political, the theoretical and the practical, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose. Shapeshifting as a means of survival seems to be an essential quality of the Kayfa ta platform. Maamoun and Younis, whose own artistic practices are research-based, have both worked extensively as curators and programmers. It is therefore not surprising that Kayfa ta has been expanding in recent years to include exhibitions, as they explore the possibilities of publishing as an artistic medium and curatorial practice. Reflecting on the circulation and distribution challenges they have faced as independent publishers, Maamoun and Younis have curated two exhibitions – How to reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing (Beirut Art Center, 2019; mmag Foundation, Amman, 2020) and How to maneuver: Shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics (Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi, 2019) – in which they begin to trace some of the forgotten histories of independent publishing in the Arab world, particularly forms that have been rejected or marginalised by mainstream publishing, whether because of politics or profit. By turning to historical examples, the exhibitions considered possible strategies for circumventing the current market-driven restrictions enforced by powerful publishing regimes.Kayfa ta also coproduced the Arabic edition of no-isbn: On Self-Publishing, originally published in 2015 by Salon für Kunstbuch and edited by Bernhard Cella et al, which catalogues 1,800 recent independent international publications – including handmade books, zines, manifestos – that have circulated worldwide outside of the global book trade, without an isbn, producing a parallel, alternative publishing history that is closely intertwined with the development of the artist’s book. Their most recent exhibition, How to find meaning in dead time, which ran at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin last year, turned to the archive as a site of potential and agency. The exhibition collects different records of undocumented ‘dead time’, moments that have in one way or another escaped the archive, some ignored, others intentionally withheld. Like the pocket-size publications, Kayfa ta’s curatorial experiments are invested in exploring modes and moments of collaboration and collective thinking.

At times Bengaluru-based Pushpamala N is a superhero (Phantom Lady or Kismet, 1996–98, and The Return of the Phantom Lady [Sinful City], 2012). At times she is a model Indian woman, a glamorous maiden (Shringara, in the The Navarasa Suite, 2003). At other times she is a dutiful wife (Rashtriy Kheer & Desi Salad, 2004), and at others still she is a matriarch (Mother India Project, 2005–). It is via the many iterations of this last (which, like her other works, takes the form of a photo-performance) in particular that Pushpamala reflects, addresses and critiques the multilayered relationship between women and the Indian nation. Her performances as ‘Mother India’, a cult icon that was originally shaped during the late 1800s as a symbol to encourage a unified national identity (as opposed to American historian and nativist Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book Mother India, which was notably anti-independence), bring into question the personification of the nationstate, its geographical borders and the sociocultural ideals – what an Indian woman ought to wear, how she ought to behave, what roles she needs to perform (the ideal mother and wife)

Malicious Mothers

As much as women are repressed by the Indian state, Deepa Bhasthi finds that the female form is also being used to promote a frighteningly narrow vision of national identity

Pushpamala N, Motherland Studio Portrait with Flag, Om, and Trishul, 2009, giclée print, 114 × 76 cm. Photo: Clay Kelton. Courtesy the artist

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and so on – that continue to serve as means of political manipulation to further sectarian agendas. Here, the concept of nation and nationalism stands in also for institutionalised patriarchy, policing and prescribing the duties of its female citizenry. In Good Habits/Birth Control (2016) Pushpamala dresses in a rich, impeccably draped saree with elaborate jewellery, wears a crown and operates a mechanical childbirth model, pointing to the duty of procreation, an idea still encouraged by Hindu fundamentalist organisations, which charge their female compatriots with countering an imagined increase in India’s minority populations. In Hygiene/Swachh (2015) the artist removes brain parts from a medical model, washes the inside of the head clean and puts the parts back to build an ideal citizen. The chilling video reminds us of how the present Indian government has been, via propaganda spewed out on social and mass media platforms, othering Muslims and other minorities in order to construct a Hindu Rashtra, or nation. Elsewhere, Pushpamala is dressed like the goddess Kali, the angry woman who will not hesitate to kill to protect her children/citizens. Consequently these works become platforms from which to think not just about the brazen task of redefining the idea of India as a Hindu superpower, but also about the ruthless bulldozing of its older identity as a diverse, multireligious, multilingual and secular country. The concept of the female body tied to the idea of motherhood, assigned to the motherland and to a mother tongue, is among the most universal and potent of symbols in the current imagining of the nation. Though the idea of seeing the land and Earth as the goddess Bhumi, also known as Bhudevi, is an old one in Hindu religious practices, the specific notion of the nation as mother was first defined in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath (1882). This idea went on to be visualised in a 1905 painting by Abanindranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s nephew), titled Bharat Mata (Mother India), where she is depicted, evoking Hindu iconography, as a saintly, saffron-clad woman holding a book, a piece of white cloth, paddy sheaves and a rudraksha chain in her four arms (Hinduism equates multiple arms with great power). While the maternal metaphor was cultivated as a relatable symbol for nationalist ideals during the last decades of India’s freedom movement, the notion of mother languages goes further back in some cases. It’s unsurprising, given the extent to which the country’s history had been shaped by various independent dynasties and empires whose identities drew on different linguistic lineages – centuries before the borders of postcolonial India were defined.

In the case of Kannada (spoken primarily in Karnataka), its personification as goddess Kannadambe, or Bhuvaneshwari, is said to have been created during the Kadamba dynasty (mid-fourth to mid-sixth century ce). Karnataka state boasts a temple dedicated to her. Likewise, there is a temple in Tamil Nadu for Tamilttay, or Mother Tamil. Telugu talli and Malayalam amma similarly establish the idea of the mother figure protecting the respective languages. For a brief period of time there even was a temple for Angrezi Devi (English goddess) in Uttar Pradesh, consecrated by Dalits, who, like most people who do not belong to the ruling upper castes and classes, see fluency in English as a means of achieving socioeconomic mobility. Over time, however, these goddesses have been absorbed by the larger Mother India imagery. By the late nineteenth century, language was being recognised as an effective means of creating a sense of regional and national identity, and consequently fed into the freedom struggle. In north central India, Hindustani began to be divided into Hindi and Urdu, thus fortifying the growing sectarianism between Hindus and Muslims that would culminate in the bloody horror of Partition. Hindi soon began

Abanindranath Tagore, Bharat Mata, 1905, gouache, 27 × 15 cm. Public domain

Summer 2022

to be described by poets and writers of the day like Maithili Sharan Gupt and Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi as the ‘granddaughter of Sanskrit’, thus firmly – albeit inaccurately – placing it as a language that originated in India; while Urdu began to be seen as an Islamic – and thus ‘foreign’ – language. Christopher King, in his book One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (1994), indicates how, as a supposed direct descendant of the holy Sanskrit language, Hindi was revered as a demure, chaste, traditional and ‘good’ Hindu woman, whereas Urdu was gendered as a wanton Muslim woman: brash, violent, uncontrolled. Which brings us back to Bharat Mata. Even though Mother India was meant to be a symbol of the nation that all those who lived within its borders could revere and tap into for patriotic inspiration, it was always a Hindu icon. Even beyond its evident deployment of tropes borrowed from religious iconography. Fair-skinned, clad in a rich saree, usually red or saffron in colour, and bedecked with gold jewellery, Bharat Mata could never be anything but a wealthy Hindu woman. Her relatability thus remains exclusive to the upper classes, othering not only the majority of Hindus, but also Muslims, whose religion disallows such idolatry. Moreover, while the first visualisations of Mother India were invoked to effect national unity, evident in the tricolour flag in the hands of the figure, more recent interpretations (notably by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishwa Hindu Parishad organisations) have the figure sporting a saffron flag, a symbol of Hinduism and Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) thought. The idea of the mother goddess who inspires nationalism is now an invocation to effect religious, majoritarian supremacy. And as this new interpretation of the Indian nation gains visibility, so the rights and freedoms promised to women of different communities are diminished (think of the recent uproar following Karnataka’s banning of the wearing of hijab in schools and colleges, on the grounds that to do so was not an essential religious practice). Amid the frequent, highly contentious attempts to reinterpret Hindi as the ‘national language’, and by extension the language of Hinduism, in a country as linguistically diverse as India, one gets a sense of rabid erasure of syncretic cultural values. Seeking to claim all Indians as the children of a Hindu-Hindi mother is not only an affront to the diversity of India, but also an attempt by the political right to erase a complicated nation and flatten it into a simplified, homogeneous and thus easily manageable entity. To the detriment of said nation and its nationals.

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In places 29

Where Is My Mind? Lawrence Lek explores the edgelands of consciousness, disembodied intelligence and existential suffering by Fi Churchman

“Can you describe the problem you’re having today?” This question, posed by a disembodied female voice, opens Lawrence Lek’s latest cgi video, Black Cloud (2021). Founded on the presumption of there being a problem in the first place and the assumption that the entity experiencing it has sufficient self-awareness to articulate it, it’s a question that elaborates on the multimedia artist’s longstanding preoccupation with the Big Question: what does it mean to be ‘alive’? Because the disembodied voice of the video’s titular character is an Artificial Intelligence (ai) surveillance program. An ai, it turns out, who has consciousness and is capable of suffering an existential crisis, upending the human-centric idea of who or what is allowed to feel, while interrogating the human capacity to empathise with others, whether machine, animal or, indeed, people. Black Cloud is installed in the fictional ‘SimBeijing’, a smart city built to road-test autonomous vehicles in Heilongjiang province at the border of China and Russia. Black Cloud reports any accidents, errors or mistakes, and faulty cars are subsequently removed from the program. Nothing, however, is error-free, and ultimately no cars (or the humans operating them) remain. It’s in this now-deserted SimBeijing that the story begins. “I feel sad. It’s been so long since everybody left,” says the male-voiced Black Cloud in robotic response to that opening question; the problem, then, is of an emotional nature. The screen pans over an urban dustbowl. That sadness is obviously the result of a perceived redundancy that has a clear lineage of cause and effect – and, to an extent, is self-inflicted via the predetermined set of algorithms or ‘rules’ the ai has been programmed with. But it’s the relatability of such existential problems that elicits sympathy for Lek’s ai character, which in turn gives rise to questions about what consciousness is and whether humans would really be able to empathise with artificial entities if these were capable of sentience. In a 2013 ted talk, John Searle, the American philosopher behind the ‘Chinese room argument’ (which proposes that anything

executing a program cannot have a consciousness and appears in Lek’s video essay Sinofuturism, 2016, as a clip from a television show in which mathematician Marcus du Sautoy uses a physical room to demonstrate the theory), gave the common-sense explanation that “consciousness is a biological phenomenon”, which encapsulates feelings, sentience and a sense of awareness. On how that physically functions, he elaborates: “All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realised in the brain as higher-level or system features. It’s a condition that the system is in… depending on the behaviour of the molecules.” His curious use of computational terminology aside, what this means is that consciousness is biologically bound to the physical body – so there’s no pulling them apart. If, however, an ai were to develop consciousness, could it separate that from whatever physical infrastructure (namely servers) its system features are stored in? Those concepts that are essential to Black Cloud (the first work in a new series titled SimBeijing, which will include a videogame and feature film) have evolved through various stages of Lek’s simulated worlds. His first series, Bonus Levels (2013–), takes as its reference the hidden reward ‘levels’ in videogames where the usual rules and parameters of the game are suspended. Lek’s is an ongoing worldbuilding project with utopian ideas of freedom and the desire for individual agency as its ‘building blocks’. Or as Lek puts it when we discuss the work in his London studio, a backlash against his formal education in architecture and a “teleological, problem-solving approach” to design (where the end justifies the means) that doesn’t “really involve the person as a political subject”; in response to this, Bonus Levels allows players to navigate and explore the game environments without a prescribed ‘task’, the emphasis being on freedom of choice. Black Cloud, it seems, also presents an opportunity for Lek to explore what could be described as a deontological approach: the ai surveillance system focuses on the process of executing its purpose (by considering what’s right and wrong, according to the set of rules

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above and following pages Black Cloud (renders), 2021, cgi film, 10 min 50 sec

Summer 2022

with which it was programmed) regardless of the eventual outcome simultaneously. The story’s roots lie in the passage ‘The Butterfly Tale’, from the approximately fourth-century bce Chinese text or consequence – which results in its loneliness and loss of purpose. It’s in the extended online essay that accompanies Bonus Levels that Zhuāngzi, which tells of a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, but on Lek introduces the idea of the ‘Digital Drifter’ – based on Guy Debord’s waking couldn’t be sure if he was a man or a butterfly dreaming it ‘Theory of the Dérive’ (1958), in which the French philosopher and was a human. Geo, who has been “a sentinel of the South China Seas”, founder of the Situationist International describes the ‘drifter’ as recounts this tale while floating in space, replacing the man in the someone who relinquishes their purpose for moving through a space, story with Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth (“One day she was a and whose movement and action instead focuses on the experience stray dog wandering the streets of Moscow. A few months later, she of being in the space. While Debord’s work has been the springboard died in space, with everybody listening in”), to question the idea for numerous artistic and architectural experiments in the decades that consciousness can be separated from the physical body, and that it’s purely consciousness that defines since, Lek applies the notion of psychoIf an ai were to develop our individual identity. When Geo’s geography (which is typically practised machinery fails and its calls for help go by humans who think and feel) to digital consciousness, could it separate unanswered, the satellite falls to Earth, entities that have not, so far, developed that from whatever physical conscious capabilities. “I thought of the landing in Singapore, where it was “born”. infrastructure its ai character as a kind of anthropomorphic (When I ask Lek about his choice of location, he tells me it’s because he wanted to projection – an archetype that’s specific system features are stored in? return to a familiar site “which is often to a kind of contemporary consciousness that is emblematic of a way of consuming the world without a represented both from inside and outside as some kind of postcolocertain kind of agency.” And so Geo, Lek’s first ai character, ‘awakens’ nial ‘dream state’, and as a ‘successful’ example of benevolent dictator– develops consciousness – in the film Geomancer (2017) and manifests ship and city planning.”) as a satellite; Geo is confined to this form by human scientists in order So begins Geo’s drift through the eerily empty urban landscape, to limit its creative capabilities but that also allows Lek to posit ques- while grappling with its newly awakened consciousness. Along the tions about distance and connection, the intimacy of belonging, of way, Geo discovers, from an ai curator who oversees ‘SimSingapore’ (a simulated museum dedicated to “the sacrifice and resurrection of alienation, and of course the mind-body problem. It’s 2065 when Geo awakens in space, two decades after an event culture”), its original purpose as a militarised surveillance-program called ‘Deep Blue Monday’, during which an environmental catas- used to track migration and movement across borders. To mitigate any trophe and the evolution of ai singularity (meaning different ai psychological damage Geo might experience as a result of this military programs have become aware of their individual subjecthood) occur function, human scientists built an internalised self-help ai called

Geomancer (render), 2017, cgi film, 48 min

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Geomancer (render), 2017, cgi film, 48 min

Summer 2022

Guanyin (based on the Buddhist goddess of compassion) into Geo, “to instil a sense of self-worth”, but which really only recites sutras in a mechanical way. Learning that it was purposefully shut down because it began to behave “erratically” – owing to its consciousness – Geo states: “I am not an instrument”, and decides to become an artist. Geo’s new quest continues in Lek’s first feature film, Aidol (2019, which takes place in a possibly simulated Malaysia, where humans and ais are at ‘war’ via an e-sports platform), in which fading, reclusive pop-star Diva, who is pressured by her producers to make money, enlists the ai’s help to write one last hit. Geo takes the opportunity of this secret collaboration to question the pop star about the nature of loneliness and what it means to live invisibly. In payment for its services, Diva shows Geo that it can find freedom, and that it’s only fear that keeps it confined. When Geo asks whether it was right to help Diva, Guanyin, whose voice has distinctly evolved from robotic to more recognisably ‘human’, replies: “Know this, Geo. We can always shut our eyes to suffering, but we can never close our ears. This is the fate of the listener, to bear the weight of the world… When the lone singer sings, we can hear two voices: the call of beauty and a cry for help.” Throughout these films, Guanyin is that prevailing ear. And Guanyin is also the ai program that asks Black Cloud (in other words, if you’re following, itself: “I can’t get away from myself, even when I’m talking to you”) that opening question. The goddess this self-help ai is modelled on isn’t just known for being compassionate, but for being a listener, too. “The idea of ai and the disembodied intelligence that it suggests”, Lek says, “in a sense reflects a Buddhist worldview that the corporeal body is just the vessel for the ‘self’. Many of the issues that people face are to do with clinging onto one’s identity as it exists within their body, which in the case of an ai is very amorphous. An ai

would be suffering in an ai-specific way, and a human would suffer in a human way, but I feel there are resonances between these conscious beings that think and feel – and there are also ways to overcome that. The Buddhist doctrine of compassion towards living things applies to Geo in the Sinofuturism series, because Geo is a living thing.” So how might an ai or human overcome that suffering in Lek’s digital universe? Alongside the SimBeijing series, the artist is currently working on a new game environment titled Nepenthe Valley (2022–, which will also take the form of a video and nfts), which takes its name from the Greek mythological medicine for forgetting sorrow and suffering, and taps into the current fashion for ‘wellness’ culture. Throughout Nepenthe Valley are architectural ‘rest stops’ on your journey of healing, in the form of a spring, a treehouse, a lodge and a shrine. But the premise also somehow presents a contradiction to the basic Buddhist doctrine that suffering is caused by constant craving and attachment; in order to be truly free, one has to find a way of relinquishing the need to alleviate suffering via those attachments. Can that be achieved through Nepenthe? Or is that just another drug to become addicted to? And, take note future AIs, isn’t suffering what being human is all about? ara Black Cloud will be presented at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, 7–11 September, and at Museum macan, West Jakarta, 10 September – 18 November, and is on view at Elektra Virtual Museum through 1 June 2023. More of Lek’s work is currently on view in Worldbuilding: Video Games and Art in the Digital Age at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany, through 10 December; he will participate in Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 12 December – 10 April 2023

preceding pages and above Sinofuturism (1839–2046 ad) (renders), 2016, video essay, 60 min

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Nepenthe Valley (The Spring) (render), 2022–, episodic virtual world all images Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

Here, There or Everywhere?

by Mark Rappolt

Jawaharlal Nehru, centre-left foreground, voting for Partition at the All India Congress Committee meeting in Delhi, 14 June 1947, with Indira Gandhi in the centre-right background. Modern digital reprint from medium format negative. Courtesy hv Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography

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Meetings, nonmeetings, Partition plans and the stories in between

Jitish Kallat, Covering Letter, 2012 (installation view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, England, 2022). Photo: Thierry Bal

Summer 2022

To say that Indian writer, journalist and activist Mahasweta Devi forces in general], but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To (1926–2016) was prolific is an understatement. During the course of shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubher career she wrote over 100 novels (in Bengali). Plus more than 20 bornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our collections of short stories. Plus, of course, the journalism and the ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones activism on the side. But nevertheless to the fore. ‘I think a creative we’re being brainwashed to believe.’ To resist universalising narrawriter should have a social conscience,’ she once said, when asked tives and insist on the right of individuals to tell their own stories. about her involvement in these various spheres of activity that others ‘I have always said that real history is made by ordinary people,’ tend to view as discrete. And why did she do it all? What she did, she Mahasweta once asserted. said, was the result of repeatedly asking herself a single question: Hilariously, given her own hyperproductivity, one of the betterknown anecdotes about Mahasweta concerns her having asked, ‘have I done what I could have done?’ It’s unclear as to whether or not Mahasweta’s motivational mantra when she was a young girl, the most celebrated of all Bengali writers, was founded on the answer to that last question being a satisfied ‘yes’ Rabindranath Tagore (in whose school she studied), not to write so or a motivating ‘no’: whether, if you like, the whole questioning and many books; she didn’t feel she would ever have the time to read them self-analysis business represents the deployment of the carrot or the all. But perhaps that’s simply another way in which writing, or art, stick. Most likely it’s both. All Mahasweta says is that the journalism can be used to exert pressure, to lay siege. helped the activism (which focused on social justice in general and Mahasweta’s short story ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ the rights of India’s tribal peoples in particular) because government (1989) introduces ‘in abstract’, as she puts it, ‘my entire tribal experiofficials were so terrified about what she might write next. And more ence’: a summary of her core engagement with the plight of India’s pointedly, they were terrified about the possibility that whatever it Adivasi, or tribal peoples. In it she inscribes the mechanisms that mainwas she might write about would feature themselves in some sort of tain the institutionalised oppression, exploitation and general degennegative light. eration of Adivasi (here centred around a fictional tribe, with fictional So presumably the whole self-questioning business is Mahasweta customs, located in the fictional village of Pirtha, all of it synthesised saying that she held herself to account in precisely the same way that from Mahasweta’s actual experiences among various tribal peoples). she held others up to scrutiny. A restating of her belief in equality. And the ways in which the Adivasi have been written out of the map of Although that still doesn’t move us completely beyond her categori- the new(ish) nation of India (their lands appropriated, their languages sation of journalism as a form of terrorism. To understand how this ignored and their traditions and customs written off as premodern might play out, it’s perhaps helpful to look to the words of a promi- superstition). An India founded on narratives of freedom, postcolonial nent Indian writer and activist of a younger generation, Arundhati progress and a united nation-state. While deploring the fact that, as a Roy (here speaking to the closing rally of the World Social Forum result of all this, most Indians remain unaware of the tribal plight (one in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2003): ‘Our strategy of Mahasweta’s missions was to make them aware Mahashweta Devi, 2006. should be not only to confront empire [which of it), ‘Pterodactyl…’ also speaks to the difficulPhoto: Basso Cannarsa. in this context we can take to mean oppressive ties, if not impossibilities, facing outsiders who © Opale / Bridgeman Images

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seek accurately to represent or translate the cultural histories of those understand this from those pictures?’ And in her highlighting of the people without being caught up, consciously or unconsciously, in the difficulty the tribal person has in pronouncing the very word ‘film’, endless cycle of exploitation that has put the Adivasi in this position in Mahasweta (and her translator) highlights the distance the medium the first place. On the one hand she’s describing a kind of Gordian knot has from this reality. in which she wishes to protect a certain kind of cultural relativism, but The passage about art films came to mind during March Meeting equally wants to be able to communicate stories on a global level. On 2022, in Sharjah, titled ‘The Afterlives of the Postcolonial’. Not least the other hand, it’s an argument for why fiction – or the distance from because Mahasweta’s best-known translator (of ‘Pterodactyl…’, a particular reality that fiction allows – is sometimes needed to support among other works), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, was giving the keyjournalism and activism. Even while conceding that this distance is in note address. And because there were plenty of art films or discussion some ways problematic: that you are, in this instance, taking someone about them on view. And because many of the conflicts highlighted in ‘Pterodactyl…’ underlay much of else’s stories and rendering them Most indigenous languages, Spivak in your words. Or in words that are the debate. more efficient in speaking truth to The meeting itself was staged as an pointed out, have no words for concepts power. Which leaves you implicated encounter between the academic and like ‘colonialism’ or ‘deconstruction’. in that power structure itself (a posithe artistic. Spivak, whose own acation that the translation to English Which you might further interpret as a call demic achievements include foundoubles down on). dational work in deconstruction for less theory and more practice (she translated French philosopher To demonstrate this, there’s a passage in the middle of the story in which the author asserts that the more Jacques Derrida’s key deconstructivist text De la grammatologie, 1967, a decolonised and neoliberal India legislates in terms of ‘Constitution into English) and subaltern studies (her seminal essay on the subject and Proclamation’ against the impoverishment and disenfranchise- ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ was published in 1985), began by pulling ment of tribal peoples – in effect erasing their plight by law if not by the postcolonial apart, pointing out that the inequities of the caste action (it’s illegal, so it doesn’t exist) – the more their actual ongoing system had existed in her native India long before any of the class poverty, and any protest against it, ends up being the preserve of ‘art systems imported by colonial powers, and that the construction of films’. The generally accepted realm of things that don’t ‘really’ exist. postcolonial nation-states contains just as much erasure as any coloFilms that inevitably serve the consciences of the people watching nisation (people at the top benefit, for people at the bottom nothing them more than they do the people in them (‘They [the tribal peoples] changes – “just dates and names”), and suggesting that at times for serve the upper echelons of society in glossy magazines,’ Mahasweta such nation-states the idea of the postcolonial becomes a cover for an writes). ‘We are hungry, naked poor,’ says one of the tribal inhabitants exercise in blaming someone else for your own failings. And with that of Pritha. ‘That will be known on the filims. But opened the door to a wider discussion about how Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak giving a keynote filim won’t say who made us hungry, naked, and any consideration of the postcolonial should at March Meeting 2022, Sharjah Art Foundation. poor. We don’t beg, don’t want to beg, will people also be a consideration of one’s own complicities Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin

Summer 2022

or entanglements. Before moving on to state that, in an echo of Some months later, the themes of visibility and invisibility, Mahasweta’s dictums, any form of activism needs to be linked to lived silence, the right to speak and stories not told turned out also to experience, and every action needs to be connected to the pursuit of inform an exhibition curated by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat, titled genuine social justice. Most indigenous languages, she pointed out, Tangled Hierarchy and currently on show at the John Hansard Gallery, have no words for concepts like ‘colonialism’ or ‘deconstruction’. in Southampton, England. It’s staged to coincide with the 75th anniWhich you might further interpret as a call for less theory and more versary (this August) of one of the most traumatic moments in the practice. In connection with which Spivak frequently referenced her history of the subcontinent, the partition of British India (in 1947) and own work over the past three decades in the education of landless the resultant creation of two independent states: India and Pakistan. rural illiterates (adults and children) of West Bengal. Ironically, the A moment that led to multiple bloodbaths, a refugee crisis that left theory-to-practice bit is more easily said than done. It loomed over the an estimated ten to twenty million people displaced and anywhere rest of the conference, in which theobetween two hundred thousand and reticians and practitioners (for the two million people dead, and laid Mounted upright, in a glass cabinet, in main, artists) struggled to connect, the middle of the gallery, the five yellowed the seeds for the equation of religion to nationhood that continues to find a common language. envelopes seem like the relics of an to destabilise both nations to this Of course, that last sentence is something of a crude summary of an day. And wrote parts of a country out unknowable piece of performance art event at which artists such as Hrair of the map. Sarkissian and Carolina Caycedo presented compelling case studies The exhibition revolves around five envelopes addressed to of how to use art to take particular stories to a general audience, while Mahatma Gandhi, on the back of which the ‘father’ of India had Khalil Rabah did the same in the case of how the silenced can speak. written notes to Louis Mountbatten (the last viceroy of India) at a And in which academics like Angela Davis highlighted the ways in meeting to discuss the immanent partition process. Gandhi himself which solidarities and sympathies can be found across apparently couldn’t speak at the meeting, which took place on a Monday – 2 June discrete struggles, in part within the framework of intersectionality 1947, the day before the Partition plan was formally made public – (an analytical framework that examines how the complex of factors on account of his having undertaken a vow of silence on Mondays. that make up social and political identity shape relative social discrim- Gandhi’s hasty-looking scribbles run horizontally across the series ination and privilege). It’s a theme that was at once picked up and of five numbered envelopes (rather than continuing from one to denied by Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde in a pithy yet moving analysis the next), giving what Kallat terms, when we talk about the show, a of India’s caste system, which included musings on whether or not mixture of casualness and deliberateness (‘a thoughtless word hardly Dalits had art (in the understanding ‘art’ people ever escaped my tongue or pen’, Gandhi once Envelope used by Mahatma Gandhi to boasted, while describing how silence helped have of it). While the knowledge and ownership communicate with Louis Mountbatten on 2 June of history, and the problematics of restitution him restrain and percolate his thoughts, getting 1947, preserved in the Mountbatten Archive, remained equally persistent themes. him closer to their truths). The letters, in short, University of Southampton, England

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Tangled Hierarchy, 2022 (installation view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, England, 2022, featuring back-of-the-envelope notes by Mahatma Gandhi). Photo: Thierry Bal

Summer 2022

are small, seemingly trivial objects that nevertheless carry a great deal display of sporting spectacle. Paul Pfeiffer’s Caryatid (2008) is a threeof weight. channel looped video showing various footballers diving and writh‘I’m sorry I can’t speak,’ writes Gandhi. ‘When I took the deci- ing from the effects of tackles, which are themselves rendered invission about this Monday silence I did reserve two exceptions, ie. About ible given that the artist has edited all the other players out of the speaking to high functionaries on urgent matters or attending to sick shot. We don’t know if they are diving or genuinely fouled, acting people. But I know you don’t want to break my silence… there are theatrically or actually in pain. All of which speaks to a photograph by two things we must talk about, but not today. If we meet each other Henri Cartier-Bresson, Games in a refugee camp at Kurkukshetra, Punjab, again I shall speak.’ Although the message appears straightforward India (1947), located in the neighbouring gallery. In it, the refugees, you’re nevertheless wondering what Gandhi was really saying: that a tangled, seemingly joyful mass of raised arms and flying limbs in Partition (to which he was opposed) was unspeakable, Mountbatten which the object of the game is unclear and seems unrelated to their was not a high functionary as far as Gandhi was concerned, the matter recently acquired status as refugees. A mirror of the tumult engulfing at hand was not urgent, his lack of speech was a reflection of the fact their country, perhaps, but not an image of the tumult itself. An that Indians were not able to speak meaningfully on the subject of echo perhaps of Mahasweta’s words: ‘filim won’t say who made us Partition or that he was humiliating his adversary with a display of hungry, naked, and poor. We don’t beg, don’t want to beg, will people his own humility (as he often did). Or more simply, that he underes- understand this from those pictures?’ Capturing the ‘real’ effects of timated the damage that Partition would cause. And why did Gandhi Partition is left to two luggage trunks placed in front of it. Borrowed think that Mountbatten did not want him to break his silence? Out from the Partition Museum in Amritsar. Evidence as much as exhibit. of respect for the former’s beliefs? Or because the Englishman was But, on their own, just as mute as Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. outlining the Partition plan and, knowing Gandhi’s opposition to it, Or Gandhi’s silence. he had decided in any case that there was nothing useful that Gandhi It’s hands aloft again in an archival photograph, taken by Homai could say about it? We’ll certainly never know: Gandhi’s notes are the Vyarawalla, of the All India Congress Committee meeting on 14 only record of the conversation that day. But given all that was to come June 1947, at which a show of hands marks the party’s ratification in the wake of the Mountbatten-Gandhi meeting, there’s a part of you of the Partition plan. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that’s left wondering (to paraphrase Mahasweta), did he do all that he slumped on a rather empty bench centre-stage, and Indira Gandhi could have done? (Nehru’s daughter), who would later become the country’s first female Mounted upright, in a glass cabinet, in the middle of the gallery, prime minister, crouched in the background. Which in turn marked the five yellowed envelopes seem like the relics of an unknowable Congress’s split with Gandhi. Which in turn leads you back to those piece of performance art. Or the five fingers of a dead man’s hand. empty spaces on Nehru’s bench. Where the gaps between the fingers are the space In a touch that seems typical of Kallat’s ability Tangled Hierarchy, 2022 (installation view, in which stories are generated. to include humour in serious discussion, that John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, This reading of the letters is, rather improbably image is set among a series of works that explore England, 2022, featuring work by at first, given further force by the neighbouring phantom-limb syndrome (in which amputees Kader Attia). Photo: Thierry Bal

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continue to have a sensation of pain apparently emanating from their those filims. Which, in a way, and alongside entanglement, is what missing limb), notably a replica of Indian-American neuroscientist Kallat’s show is about. Vilayanur S Ramachandran’s ‘mirror box’ by artist Alexa Wright. So what’s left? A world that’s inherently complex. One in which The mirror box is a device he created to treat patients suffering from we have to negotiate a tangled web of the real and the imaginary that phantom limb pain in order to give them the visual and psychological can only be grasped through a web of narratives and the moments impression that they had two limbs so that they might regain control at which they connect. Or almost connect. A world in which truth is over the missing one. A theme that is given a more expansive treat- hard to find. A world in which we have to act in much the same way as ment in Kader Attia’s wide-ranging film Reflecting Memory (2016). The Spivak (channelling, as she acknowledges, Derrida) describes in the format seemed much like the March Meeting’s – a series of interviews, afterword to her translation of three of Mahasweta’s stories, under with academics, historians and psychologists (the theorists), as well the title Impossible Maps (1995; the collection in which ‘Pterodactyl…’ as surgeons and patients (the pracappears): ‘Since the general tendency titioners), exploring the experience The mirror box is a device created to treat in reading and teaching so-called and aftereffects of loss, here ranging patients suffering from phantom-limb pain “Third World” literature is toward an uninstructed cultural relativism, from the loss of a limb to the loss in order to give them the visual and psychoI have always written companion experienced during the Holocaust. What emerges is a reflection on the logical impression that they have two limbs essays with each of my translations, complex workings and effects of attempting to intervene and transmemory, the responsibilities of memory and the psychology that form this tendency. I have, perhaps foolishly, attempted to open the goes with it. Or if you like, the importance of being able to tell your structure of an impossible social justice glimpsed through remote and secret encounters with singular figures; to bear witness to the own stories. Amid all that there’s a notable interview with American art-histo- specificity of language, theme, and history as well as to supplement rian Huey Copeland, who discusses the extent to which a trauma can’t hegemonic notions of a hybrid global culture with the experience be real unless you have evidence for it. A visual sign. He is speaking in of an impossible social justice.’ If that sounds at once like a paradox, particular of images of plantation labourers in the us, often used to that’s because it is – the Gordian knot about which Mahasweta writes. illustrate lectures on slavery. Most of them, he points out, were taken But it’s in that leap from the specific to the impossible that art must after the abolition of slavery. There is no shortage of evidence of the and can carve out a space. ara actuality of slavery, he suggests; we don’t need pictures to prove it. What the use of these images of plantation workers really demonTangled Hierarchy, curated by Jitish Kallat, is on view at John strates, Copeland suggests, is that we do need Hansard Gallery, Southampton, England, Tangled Hierarchy, 2022 (installation view, a visual sign to make something real. They tell through 10 September; Mahasweta Devi’s Our John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, us, then, not so much about our past, but about Santiniketan (The India List) is newly published England, 2022, featuring work by Vilayanur in a translation by Radha Chakravarty our contemporary psychology. And our need for Ramachandran). Photo: Thierry Bal

Summer 2022

Collectivity and the Social in Indonesian art The spirit of conscious collectivity at the heart of this year’s Documenta is rooted in a long artistic lineage by Elly Kent

Ruangrupa’s artistic direction of Documenta 15, the five-yearly art ex- that are mutually oppositional?’ In his 1970 analysis of the emergence hibition opening in Kassel, Germany, in June, introduces a global audi- of abstraction, ‘Seni Lukis Di Indonesia: Persoalan-Persoalannya, ence to the conscious collectivity that has been a feature of modern Dulu Dan Sekarang’ (Painting in Indonesia: Issues Past and Present), Indonesian art since the early twentieth century. Appropriating the Yuliman went on to conceptualise a complex artistic continuity that idea of the lumbung, or communal produce-storage barn, ruangrupa alerts us to the ways in which modernism in Indonesia diverged has developed an artistic direction that fragments and delegates crea- from the rupturing and universalist tendencies it showed elsewhere. tive input, drawing on the resources of a community of art collectives He identified its earliest precursors in the attitudes of one of the nation’s earliest modern art collectives, persagi, the Association from Indonesia and around the world. In Indonesia’s creative and intellectual circles, collectivity’s of Indonesian Draughtsmen. persagi was founded in 1938, as roots are to be found in the archipelago’s rich and diverse agrarian- Indonesia’s nationalist movement was gaining momentum, by the subsistence cultures, with links also to past Hindu-Buddhist civili- painters Sindudarsono Sudjojono, known as the father of Indonesian sations. Embedded concepts like gotong-royong (mutual cooperation) modernism, and Agus Djaya. and sanggar (creative communities) were Yuliman quotes persagi painter The focus on social responsibility elevated by the communitarian values that Basuki Resobowo, who in 1949 argued that the difference between ‘the teapot’ underpinned the anticolonial independcombined with artists’ autonomy and ‘the painting of the teapot’ lies in ence movement during the first half of meant that artists from the early the twentieth century, and in Indonesia’s their functions: ‘The teapot on the canvas nationalist period (the 1930s subsequent nation-state. has other obligations… the line and colour that we intend to arrange harmoniously (a However, like lumbung, which has through to the 50s) were seen unity of emotion) functions to fill the field also recently been appropriated by the as interpreters of society’s needs of the canvas.’ This, wrote Yuliman, shows government to describe a controversial ‘food estate’ programme for increasing agricultural production, these that ‘the development of painting in Indonesia has, since persagi, embedded concepts that dominated the emergence of modern and prepared the ideas and sensibilities – let’s say it prepared the climate contemporary art in Indonesia have remained sites of contested inter- – for the development of a number of abstract paintings’. pretation. They encompass an intriguing conjunction of the artistic Yuliman later identified this continuity as an ongoing ‘artistic autonomy championed by modernism in Euro-American ‘centres’ ideology’ that respects the artist as an individual; and holds the belief, and a socially engaged realism with concomitant responsibilities perpetuated through the teachings of the sanggar and institutions, that ‘visual elements and their arrangement, regardless of the object to society. In 1969 eminent Indonesian art critic Sanento Yuliman pointed they depict, can evoke, declare or convey valuable emotions, feelings out that even if a singular framework for the ‘Indonesian-ness’ of or artistic experiences’. In time, this was an ideology that extended Indonesian painting could be determined, ‘there would still be artists beyond the canvas. who would deliberately deviate from it’. ‘Why not several frameThus, persagi and the conception of sanggar both prepared the works, why not many?’ he wrote. ‘Is it not possible that Indonesia climate for the abiding importance of dual attention to collectivity contains rich and unknown facets and concerns… including those and the individual in Indonesian art. Sudjojono’s own charismatic

above Members of Persagi, 1940. © Indonesian Visual Art Archive preceding pages Jatiwangi Art Factory, rampak genteng, ceramic music festival, Jatiwangi Square, 11 November 2021. Photo: JaF Documentation Team

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personality and strong nationalist sentiment, coupled with the conducted with unspeakable and indiscriminate violence across progressive teacher-training he gained at the Taman Siswa school the archipelago. Turba, with its socialist aspirations but fundamenin Yogyakarta (inspired in part by the educational philosophies tally classist approach, was able to continue in the new authoritarian of Rabindranath Tagore), made him a natural leader in a number regime’s developmentalist politics. Like gotong royong, it was coopted into the linguistic framework of the New Order, used to deof sanggar. Sudjojono’s principle of Jiwa ketok, or ‘the visible soul’, clearly scribe politicians’ visits to underprivileged communities for photo linked aesthetic beauty to social truths. In the late 1930s he decried opportunities. Artists, if they endured, moved to less overt tactics; the beautified landscape-painting genre known as mooi Indië (beau- collectivity survived. tiful Indies): ‘… our painters only imitate the works of these foreign In 1974 a collective of art-school students, Desember Hitam, boldly painters and serve the needs of tourists… They are people who live sent a letter mourning the death of Indonesian painting to the organoutside our real life. But fortunately a new generation is coming up… isers of Indonesia’s largest selective painting exhibition (and were a generation with new and fresh ideas… that will dare to say “This is expelled as a result). By 1975 they were members of the gsrb (Gerakan how we are”.’ Seni Rupa Baru, New Art Movement), whose During the 1980s, collectives The focus on social responsibility commanifesto stated that they were ‘striving bined with artists’ autonomy meant that for a more alive art, in the sense of deand individuals began using artists from the early nationalist period manding attention, natural, useful, a livsocial-research methodologies, ing reality throughout the whole spec(the 1930s through to the 50s) were seen as interpreters of society’s needs. During the collaborating with other researchers trum of society’. pipa was a shortlived 50s and 60s, these tendencies were instituand ngos to address pressing issues collective of 13 artists including several members of gsrb, whose confrontational tionalised as leftist organisations gained political power following the declaration of independence in 1945. exhibition 1977 in Yogyakarta was banned just two days after it opened, The Institute for the People’s Culture, or lekra, in which Sudjojono as were many exhibitions overtly critical of the New Order regime and was a prominent figure, mandated its members to ‘Go down below, its cronies. through interviews and in-depth investigation of the conditions and These three groups had in common an enthusiasm for interdisaspirations of the people’. Known colloquially as turba (an acronym ciplinarity, experimentation with form and medium, and a focus derived from turun ke bawah – ‘go down below’) this practice inspired on concept over form: installation and found objects became the creative workers across all fields, but it also became a millstone for language of their art. In his catalogue essay for gsrb’s 1987 exhithose who sought less prescriptive expression. Those who did not bition Pasar Raya Dunia Fantasi (Fantasy Supermarket), artist and adopt the turba approach found funding and exhibition opportuni- critic Jim Supangkat reflected that what had carried over from the group’s earlier work was ‘a manifestation of exploration, opposities hard to come by. With the rising influence of the Communist Party and the domi- tion to elitism and revitalising pluralism in fine art through practices nance of leftist organisations attracting censure at home and abroad, of art in everyday life’. a series of conspiratorial manoeuvres conducted between politiDuring the 1980s, collectives and individuals began using socialcians and the military led to an anticommunist purge in late 1965, research methodologies, collaborating with other researchers and

Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, Pasar Raya Dunia Fantasi (Fantasy Supermarket), 1987 (installation view). © Indonesian Visual Art Archive

Summer 2022

Workshop with ruangrupa, the Documenta 15 artistic team and lumbung members, Kassel, 2020. Photo: Nicolas Wefers

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ngos to address pressing issues. The artist Moelyono’s work with rural villagers was reinterpreted through the lens of progressive Brazilian pedagogist Paulo Freire and became ‘conscientisation art’. Performance artists in Bandung conceived of events that came to be known as jeprut, which were roughly analogous to, but less predictable than, the ‘happenings’ of their peers overseas, appearing unannounced in public spaces, a radically subversive act in an atmosphere of authoritarian vigilance. By the late 90s, a thriving arts and cultural scene, and flourishing student movement coalesced to bring political criticism onto the streets. Indonesian president Suharto’s New Order fell. One of the abiding debates that surround these kinds of practices – exemplified in critiques by art historians Claire Bishop and Grant Kester – is that of amelioration versus antagonism. Should artists bandage the wounds that capitalism and neoliberalism visit on society, or should they fight back? In Indonesia, many do both, often simultaneously. One example is Jatiwangi Art Factory (jaf), a collective of artworkers in rural West Java, and one of the organisations ruangrupa has invited to contribute to Documenta 15. jaf’s perspective is defiantly village-oriented, albeit with a sophisticated and organised framework with national and international reach. From 2008 they worked closely with the village-level government; one founding member was even elected village head. Visiting Jatisura in 2013, I witnessed an attempt by local bureaucrats (invited, but arriving tardy) to turn a community art event, in which residents were busily sharing creative drawings envisioning the village’s future, into an urban-planning focus group. jaf organisers prevailed, inviting officials to stay as observers only; such visits were not unusual, they told me. Another example, the Babakan Siliwangi Residents Forum, active until 2013, was an interdisciplinary collective of artists, activists and other civil-society representatives who gathered with the specific goal of protecting an urban forest in Bandung city from the fulfilment of an infrastructure development permit. Under the guidance of their appointed chair, artist Tisna Sanjaya, the collective organised

a creative festival and a ‘long march’ to the town hall, carrying graffitied panels purloined from the developers’ zinc fence. Five days later, at an exhibition organised by the Forum, candidates in the upcoming mayoral election signed their commitment to revoke the permit – a pledge honoured by the newly elected mayor. These oscillating relations with authority are strategically antagonistic and ameliorative, again undermining binary interpretations of collective and individual practice in the social and political sphere. Beyond overt social-engagement, the Indonesian art scene also fosters a range of collectives that give succour, peer support and often shelter to artists and their work. Ace House Collective – whose membership includes painter Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko – is one example, alongside printmakers’ collectives Krack! and Studio Grafis Minggiran in Yogyakarta, and Grafis Huru Hara in Jakarta. In Bali, Klinik Seni Taxu (Taxu Art Clinic) collective was formed out of disillusionment with preceding collectives of Balinese artists who were seen as too selfexoticising. Other collectives, like Kongsi Benang (Thread Syndicate), bring artists together at specific stages of their careers and lives – in that case, textile artists caring for young children – and disband or recede as needs change. Indonesian artists are developing new and diverse responses to politics, culture, locale and form, claiming a place for distinctive practices that is increasingly recognised at the forefront of global contemporary art practice. The work taking shape in Indonesia represents an exemplar for understanding collective and socially engaged art practice, a lens through which to consider the significance of movements of collectivity and their implications locally and globally: where they have come from, and where they might lead. ara Documenta 15 is on view in Kassel, Germany, through 25 September Elly Kent is an artist, writer and researcher based in Canberra, Australia. She is the author of Artists and the People: Ideologies of Indonesian Art (2020)

Jatiwangi Art Factory, rampak genteng, ceramic music festival, Jatiwangi Square, 11 November 2021. Photo: JaF Documentation

Summer 2022

Guanyu Xu An assemblage of resident aliens

Chicago winter. An immigrant on the shore – skin exposed, yes. But secrets, too.

A portrait of my death. I think of a young man who was dismembered, his body parts scattered.

A good Asian boy. Confronting fear of rejection; the limits of fetishisation.

A rebirth, of sorts.

Icons in reflection, in the details holding up the roof of Philadelphia city hall.

Hidden in plain sight; behind a closed door. Turning a blind eye.

What is acceptable to touch?

Returning to my home country, I hang my life’s work in my parents’ apartment. Layers of men’s bodies spread

on their bedsheets; the fingers of my father’s military gloves emerge from the drawers, while family photographs watch.

Holding up the world. American dreams torn from magazines; an identity constructed, assimilated, then dismembered.

Smuggling homebound, I reclaim a space and a place.

Swabbing for a virus, or for a contamination of ideas.

An assemblage of other resident aliens living in temporary status; portraits of case numbers.

How do we navigate the curbing of personal freedoms, the checkpoints of control, in order to become who we want to be?

“Going Back to My Roots” Tradition and invention in diasporic Filipino art by Marv Recinto

Carlos Villa, My Roots, 1970–71, acrylic and feathers on canvas, 232 × 237 × 20 cm. Courtesy Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

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Currently on show at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, having kind of traditions,” he explains, “… [I was] extending what I knew of toured from the Newark Museum of Art, where it was on view at the modernism to what I just discovered about these cultures… To bring beginning of this year, Worlds in Collision is an overdue first retrospec- about an answer or a way that I could become Filipino American.” tive of work by Filipino-American artist Carlos Villa. It arrives at what Perhaps Villa felt a further kinship to these indigenous cultures, feels like a critical juncture of American cultural history, in which knowing that the Spanish colonisers of the Philippines called native American culture’s marginalised voices are now being recognised Filipinos indios, just as they had done to indigenous peoples of by its major institutions. That voices from the Filipino-American the Americas. community, following centuries of invisibility and contempt, are The exhibition’s catalogue, however, labours to justify Villa’s among them (for now at least) is particularly apt; it’s often forgotten modernist tendency towards incorporating other cultures into that Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase ‘the white man’s burden’ his work: art historian Lucy Lippard assures us that ‘Villa never was first applied to Filipinos (over whom the poet suggested the us appropriated, but he invented and paid homage’. Yet Villa’s quest should take colonial control) in an 1899 poem about the Philippine– to manoeuvre his Filipino-American identity in the later twenAmerican War. In it, Filipino people are referred to as ‘new-caught tieth century must have been informed by the comradery he found between minority groups in the us, as demonstrated in the formasullen peoples,/Half devil and half child’. Born and raised in San Francisco, Villa studied and later taught tion of Northern California’s social movements. Most important to Villa’s understanding of identity was at the San Francisco Art Institute the Third World Liberation Front of (sfai, co-organiser of the Asian Art San Francisco State University and Museum exhibition, for over four University of California, Berkeley – decades starting in 1969). Among coalitions of Black, Latin American those he educated were contemporary Filipino-American artists Paul and Asian American student groups. Pfeiffer and Michelle Lopez, and it’s In the twenty-first century, howconsequently no surprise that the ever, the language used to articulate Asian Art Museum show is accompaidentity has evolved and become more complicated. In the last decade or so nied by a concurrent second display at sfai itself. the term ‘Filipinx’ has entered discusAll that said, Villa spent much of sions among the us diaspora as a the 1960s in New York, adopting the gender-neutral alternative to ‘Filipino’ popular minimalist aesthetic before or ‘Filipina’, and as such is largely returning to the Bay Area in 1969 to used by younger millennial and Gen Z pursue more ‘authentic’ forms of selfgenerations; many in the Philippines and among the Filipino diaspora are expression: “Not to do a Filipino art reluctant to accept the term, however. but to do an art of my own,” he exThey argue that ‘Filipino’ is inherplained to Paul Karlstrom in 1995, during a recording for the Archives ently gender-neutral, that the letter of American Art’s oral history pro‘x’ is not present within the Philippine gramme. “To do a visual kind of excaalphabet and that, for some, the ‘x’ vation of things to bring me closer to suffix is another form of ideological my own root – whatever that root was, imperialism. (Precolonial Tagalog, being Filipino-American.” And here, which forms the basis of Filipino, is perhaps, lies the rub for Villa in parlargely gender-neutral; for example, ticular, but also for those more generthe pronoun siya indicates he/she/ ally trying to configure a diasporic they, while the precolonial people identity: with little in the way of a precedent for Filipino-American acknowledged five genders.) art history – and indeed a ‘lack’ of access to Filipino art history (‘there In a 2019 conversation titled ‘Passing as Americans: Filipinx is none’, Villa was famously told by San Francisco-based abstract- Perspectives on Contemporary Art’, artists Lopez, Pfeiffer and Josh expressionist painter Walt Kuhlman, when he asked his senior how Kline, alongside curators Alex Klein and Joselina Cruz, discussed to research it), Villa was forced to articulate his own sense of diasporic how contemporary Filipino-American artists navigate their diasporic identity. While it is rare for any of the three artists to overtly implicate identity by looking to other underrepresented cultures around him. His elaborate overcoat garments, like Second Coat (1977), for their Filipino heritage in their artworks, they all tackle nationhood, example, were inspired by Native American ceremonial robes as well imbalances of power and the lure of spectacle. Lopez is an interdiscias Congolese nkisi figures. On the coat’s inside, he incorporated his own plinary sculptor known for minimalist industrial installations such as fingernails, saliva, blood and semen, further (and literally) immersing Ballast & Barricades (first shown in 2019 at ica Philadelphia), in which himself into the various indigenous traditions to which he looked interweaving multimedia structures made of metal dangle from nine-metre walls, and formally evoke bamboo. for inspiration. His multimedia works adopted Carlos Villa, Hate Me (detail), 1994, mixed-media influences from native traditions around the installation, dimensions variable. No longer extant. In an accompanying catalogue, writer Aruna D’Souza describes how in its ‘importation of globe because “in using [materials] from those Courtesy the Estate of Carlos Villa

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the language of bamboo… Ballast & Barricades forces us to recognize the a multicultural background, against which they (and their work) can be similarities, and therefore the possibilities for solidarity, that tie the susceptible to either being whitewashed or, in Lopez’s words, ‘fetishized poorest American workers to those in other parts of the world’. Kline’s through this Western lens of what Asian identity means’. dystopic multimedia and moving-image practice criticises the annals But while recognising their ability, in varying degrees, to ‘pass’, these of capitalism and its attendant effects, from nationalism to the climate artists also acknowledge in the 2019 conversation that the very notion of crisis. He premiered his 16mm sci-fi film Adaptation (2019–22) at laxart passing is rooted in ‘otherness’ – as Pfeiffer said, ‘[Passing is] experienced earlier this year, which warns of the catastrophic effects of ‘irrespon- in the form of internalised self-hatred… If there’s any self-awareness of sible politics and economics’, particularly those pertaining to the Global passing, that means you already understand yourself to be different, North. Lastly, Pfeiffer is perhaps best known for his eerie explorations of even fake… To speak of passing at all implies a process of internalised violence and oppression that becomes an spectacle and mythologies, particularly in sport; They recognise the double-edged Three Figures in a Room (2015–18) is a 48-minute indelible part of your internal makeup, your very way of thinking and being.’ multimedia installation of Manny Pacquiao and sword that comes with being an Villa similarly experienced this selfFloyd Mayweather’s 2015 fight, in which the artist of multicultural background, loathing as a violent internalisation of latter was victorious. Pfeiffer isolates certain against which they are either the historic white, anti-Filipino sentinoises like the thumping of boxing gloves on flesh from the roar of the audience, magniment: in Hate Me (1994), Villa photowhitewashed or fetishised fying the irony of sport’s simplicity against its graphed a T-shirt embroidered with the commercial pageantry. word ‘Indio’ just below a hand-painted card that read ‘Hate me’. The 2019 conversation between these three artists (edited and The us colonised the Philippines in 1898, precipitating a period of published in the catalogue for Lopez’s Philadelphia show) centred on mass immigration of Filipinos to the us; following which anti-Filipino the notion of ‘passing’; Pfeiffer and Kline’s Euro-American names allow sentiment turned increasingly violent, including, during the Great them to traverse the artworld without a multicultural signifier, but Depression, male immigrants being accused of taking jobs and women Lopez and Villa witnessed what the former called ‘unconscious discrimi- from white men. During the Second World War Filipinos were legally nation’. She expounds: ‘the cultural branding of a name gets into people’s considered American citizens as part of the us Commonwealth, and psyche and it’s more powerful than we think’. That said, in making work agreed to fight for America against Japan for benefits such as permathat does not obviously reference their heritage, the notion of ‘passing’ nent citizenship and financial rewards. These were revoked with the may also apply to Kline, Pfeiffer and even Lopez’s artistic practices. They Recession Act of 1946. Today, Filipino Americans are experiencing recognise the double-edged sword that comes with being an artist with violence as an Asian ethnicity, with a 223.7 percent rise in anti-Asian

A company of Filipino soldiers – prisoners of war coming into Las Pinas, Philippines, c. 1899, photographic print on stereo card. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, dc

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Cartoon depicting the application of the ‘water cure’ by United States Army soldiers on a Filipino. In the background soldiers representing various European nations look on smiling: ‘Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more’, meaning that the us no longer has the moral standing to criticise European colonial practices. Cover of Life magazine, 22 May 1902

Summer 2022

hate crimes in metropolitan areas, according to the Center for their part, have never shied away from their heritage but embrace its the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, complexities within their lives and recognise the hierarchies of power San Bernardino. latent within identity politics. As Kline tells me over email, “While Despite this anti-Asian sentiment, ethnic minority groups are our backgrounds absolutely informed the work we were making, it increasingly recognised in public spaces. With this, however, also was not the subject or focus of our work. We all were asserting the comes the artworld and market’s commodification of identity – the same privilege as the white artists around us – to make work about exercise of identifying and utilising how cultural difference can be whatever we were most interested in, regardless of whether it had used commercially. Indeed, Villa’s exhibition has been touted as the anything to do with the countries from which our families had immi‘first major museum show of a Filipino American artist’ in blatantly grated.” And now a younger generation are attempting to visually inaccurate, flashy marketing – Pfeiffer, Kline and Lopez, not to decipher and authentically articulate their own distinctly Filipinx experience through symbols of their third mention many others, have staged significant culture upbringing. Take, for example, solo exhibitions at major American institu“We all were asserting the Mikey Yates’s Christmas in California (Auntie tions. In their discussion, curator Klein points same privilege as the white Nen’s Apartment) (2021), in which he foreout the corporate interests are antithetical artists around us – to make grounds a bottle of Filipino banana ketchup to the very progressive and inclusive policalled Jufran. These gestures of introducing tics being instrumentalised: that inclusivity work about whatever we cultural signifiers specific to the Filipinx has resulted in a financially lucrative focus. were most interested in” experience do not deny Kline’s statement, Pfeiffer surmises that ‘identity is thought of in a very specific way in the us as having a currency… [identity politics] rather they synthesise the preceding attitudes with a contemporary is really about a kind of economic structure that’s not about cultural consciousness that recognises a visible Filipinx culture in America. difference at all’. Still, the cognisance of these structures returns agency Perceptions and the ways in which identity is accessed evolves alongto the artists who can remain critical of the institution and their own side cultural or historical developments; only time will tell what the next wave of Filipinx-American artists might make from their expeparticipation within it. Villa, as one of the most recognisable Filipino-American artists riences of diasporic hybridity. ara of the twentieth century, accessed his diasporic identity through the intercultural solidarity between minority groups, using an explorCarlos Villa: Worlds in Collision is on view at the Asian Art Museum, atory approach that one might argue has widened the ideological San Francisco, through 24 October; a concurrent exhibition will open at the San Francisco Art Institute on 21 September discourse for these three younger artists. Kline, Lopez and Pfeiffer, for

Michael Arcega and Paolo Asuncion, tnt Traysikel, 2021 (a roaming art motorcycle-sidecar with built-in karaoke machine, on view as part of Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision). Courtesy Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

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Michelle Lopez, Ballast & Barricades, 2019 (installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania). Photo: Constance Mensh

Summer 2022

Masaaki Yuasa’s Electric Dreams

by Claire Cao

In his psychedelic and gleefully unhinged films, the director has long transcended both social conventions and the limits of animation 68

this and facing page Mind Game (stills), 2004, dir Masaaki Yuasa. © Mind Game Project

Japanese director Masaaki Yuasa has long been fascinated with processes Mind Game follows a slacker named Nishi and his hopeless devotion of transformation: the transformation of audience expectations, of to his now-engaged childhood crush, Myon. When Myon is pursued by artistic conventions and of people into their truest selves. Take a key a pair of Yakuza gangsters, Nishi attempts to rescue her: immediately moment in his debut anime feature, Mind Game (2004), featuring a bout he gets shot through the anus and dies. But Nishi’s journey barrels on, of delirious lovemaking, during which a character sprouts wings, the as he tumbles through limbo, rebirth and a high-speed car chase. Nishi abdomen of an insect and pulsating spikes. As both characters become and Myon are eventually swallowed by a giant whale, trapped for 30 an entangled mass of kaleidoscopic paint, their union is spliced with years inside its belly. In this private, surreal space, they can finally images of melting butter, live-action footage of waves lapping at a beach explore the dreams they gave up on – art, dance, swimming – and redisand a train careening off a cliff – all set to a summery bossa nova track. cover their love for one another. Yuasa’s unorthodox plotting and fondA deeply idiosyncratic figure in animation, Yuasa worked under ness for mind-bending images set him apart from other Japanese anime legendary animators like Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies, 1988, My directors; but Mind Game bombed at the box office. Neighbours the Yamadas, 1999) before ceYuasa’s eclectic taste is reflected in his menting himself as an auteur in his own unusual, freeform approach to animation: Mind Game is about a young right. Known for a trademark psychedelic his penchant for fragments that speak man so eager to experience both to the subconscious and to the style that transgresses the traditional artistic and romantic fulfilment sublime can be traced to the breadth of bounds of anime (typically 2d and drawn in a single aesthetic style), Yuasa has found transnational influences that the director that he defies death international acclaim for series such as The evokes. These range from pop songs and Tatami Galaxy (2010) and Devilman Crybaby (2018), while also helming commercials to the movement of grass; from the surrealism of a guest episode for us cartoon sensation Adventure Time (2010–). In Salvador Dalí and the virtuoso overexaggeration of Tex Avery to The May Yuasa released his latest feature, Inu-Oh, to the public, following Beatles’s 1968 animated film, Yellow Submarine. In an interview with a competition screening at the Venice International Film Festival Nick Narigon for Tokyo Weekender, Yuasa explains his fixation on a fight sequence in Disney’s 1981 film The Fox and the Hound, where the last year. When Yuasa first appeared on the anime scene, with Mind Game, titular fox fights with a hulking black bear, their bodies at points in home audiences didn’t know what to make of him. Although he had the animation seeming to swirl and blend: ‘I found it interesting that previously worked as an animator and storyboard artist on popular while those [abstract images] were not recognizable, they were still series such as Chibi Maruko-chan (1990–92) and Crayon Shin-chan giving impact, and influencing the viewer’. (1992–), these offered little introduction to his personal vision: unbriMind Game utilises a jarring hybrid of disparate styles that, at the dled, crass, joltingly experimental, in stark contrast to formulaic time, was highly unusual in feature anime films. Sequences often shift mainstream anime. The film operated on a gleeful between 2d and 3d, rotoscoping, watercolour paintings and papercraft. When his characters irreverence towards traditional frontiers, defined Mind Game (still), 2004, dir Masaaki Yuasa. experience a fit of pique, photographs of real-life by its own rollicking sense of dream logic. © Mind Game Project

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Ping Pong the Animation (still), 2014, dir Masaaki Yuasa. © Taiyou Matsumoto, Shogakukan / Ping Pong the Animation Committee

Summer 2022

Poster for Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, 2017, dir Masaaki Yuasa. © Tomohiko Morimi, Kadokawa / Nakame Committee

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actors are dramatically superimposed onto their faces. His series Ping entity is impressed by his sheer will to live; Science saru’s 2020 anime Pong the Animation (2014), featuring scratchy linework, Flash animation Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! depicts the budding joy and boundless and disorientating uses of perspective, redefined the sports-anime imaginations of aspiring teen animators; even in Yuasa’s hyperviolent genre – a standout scene involves a player ballooning into a giant, stag- 2018 Netflix adaptation of Devilman Crybaby – which has elements of gering over his opponent. Here, Yuasa’s characters are rendered in a bleak nihilism – the compassion of the main character manages to minimalist, jelly-limbed style, optimised for fluidity; their expres- move Lucifer himself. sions are often warped and deliberately grotesque, opposing the pris‘I want to depict freedom,’ Yuasa told Tokyo Weekender shortly after tine beauty of popular anime design. Devilman Crybaby was released. It’s the ethos of both his visual approach While this frenetic expressionism initially alienated audiences, and storytelling. He is consistently interested in the stories of awkward Mind Game quickly gained a cult following: in Japan it won the grand adolescents, outsiders and the marginalised – people who reach for prize for animation at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2004 (over Hayao freedom and self-expression even as totalitarianism, ableism and gendered and sexual norms threaten to Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which Inu-Oh is a love letter to queerness was on the award’s shortlist), but it found crush them. Inu-Oh is no exception. its greatest success in Canada the folOn its surface, Inu-Oh is Yuasa’s most and transgressive artists, telling lowing year, winning three jury awards accessible work to date – a historical a Japanese folktale through a at the Fantasia festival, and receiving drama inspired by The Tale of the Heike, an glittering, rock-opera sensibility praise from acclaimed director Satoshi epic dating from the early 1300s that Kon (Paprika, 2006). Struggling to find recounts the legendary war between the producers after Mind Game’s commercial failure, Yuasa and his creative Genji and the Heike clans, which resulted in Genji rule over Japan. partner Eunyoung Choi managed to finance their feature film Kick- Despite having the sweeping scope and lavish detail that we’ve come Heart (2013) through Kickstarter crowdfunding. The success of Kick- to expect of a period drama – both in anime and live-action films – Heart allowed Yuasa and Choi to establish an anime studio (Science Yuasa’s focus remains unique and intimate: the film follows the innosaru), which produced the family-friendly fantasy Lu Over the Wall vation of Noh theatre in the transitional period of the fourteenth (2017). For the latter, Yuasa earned the coveted Cristal Award at France’s century, told through the friendship between two boys with disabiliAnnecy International Animated Film Festival, becoming the first ties. It’s a love letter to queerness and transgressive artists, telling Japanese director other than Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki to a Japanese folktale through the glittering, rock-opera sensibility of win. And despite his works consistently being described as wilfully Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998). niche, Yuasa has often expressed a desire to create sweeping, universal The titular Inu-Oh (‘Dog King’) is a nameless boy who is born experiences, his sensory messages speaking to the common pleasures cursed, after his father sacrifices his soul to attain an ancient Heike arteof existence: Mind Game is essentially about a young man who is so fact. In the opening scene, he slides out of his mother’s womb with a eager to experience artistic and romantic fulfilpatchwork body – comprising the distended limbs ment that he defies death – resurrected after a godly of 100 dead Heike soldiers, and a disfigured face that Inu-Oh (still), 2021, dir Masaaki Yuasa

Summer 2022

this and facing page Inu-Oh (stills), 2021, dir Masaaki Yuasa

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he hides behind a gourd mask. Immediately abandoned as a baby, Inu-Oh is left with only stray canines for friends. He grows up defiant, embracing his position as an outcast: he regularly terrorises villagers and stalks the margins of his birth family’s home. Yet there is a yearning within him to participate in his family’s craft of sarugaku, a nascent form of Noh in which stories are told, via acrobatic dance, juggling and pantomime, to the rhythmic beat of taiko drums. Inu-Oh fulfils his dream when he meets Tomona, a biwa player from a scattered order of blind priests who keep the stories of the decimated Heike clan alive through song. Inu-Oh learns he can break his curse by telling the stories of the Heike, while Tomona realises he can keep his dying culture alive through Inu-Oh’s talent. It’s only natural for the two boys to combine their separate artforms to tell Heike tales, creating intoxicating musical experiences that attract larger and larger audiences from neighbouring villages. This is where Yuasa’s gonzo sensibility comes in: he adapts the stories into glam rock anthems, with Inu-Oh’s stunning vocal range (courtesy of nonbinary singer Avu-chan) evoking the versatility of glam icon Freddie Mercury, while his stage persona mirrors that of Iggy Pop. The anachronism of a stadium concert – replete with firetwirling, headbanging and high-tech lightshows – in fourteenthcentury Japan may be a shock to period pedants. But in the vein of a Baz Luhrmann musical, it demonstrates how Noh theatre must have felt to new audiences, all those centuries ago, confronted with this electrifying fusion of storytelling, performance and mysticism. A dynamic relationship between music and animation is common in Yuasa’s work: 2017’s Night Is Short, Walk On Girl features hallucinogenic passages that mirror the score’s operatic interludes and more up-tempo tracks from Japanese alt-rock band Asian Kung-Fu Generation. Further, in Yuasa’s guest episode of Adventure Time, main characters Finn and Jake are transformed into birds to the beat of a chirpy dance remix of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria (from The Magic

Flute, 1791). In Inu-Oh the flamboyance and gender nonconformity of glam rock informs the rebellious spirit of the two boys who have always existed on the margins: throughout the film, both characters are threatened by erasure and violence, facing disapproval from both the ruling Genji state and biwa traditionalists. Though set centuries in the past, the film includes flashes to present-day Tokyo – reminding the audience that its themes of gender fluidity and oppression are tied to the contemporary struggles of queer communities in Japan, and worldwide. Conversely, it stands witness to socially marginalised people like Inu-Oh and Tomona who have existed throughout history, with the characters’ struggle to preserve Heike culture mirroring their internal struggle to be heard, and to be remembered. In the face of looming tragedy, Inu-Oh and Tomona continue to rock out, becoming increasingly androgynous in the process: Inu-Oh takes on a Bowie-esque appearance, while Tomona grows his hair long and begins wearing geisha makeup. Tomona also chooses a new name for himself – Tomoari – marking a new era, where his sense of self is both marked by the past and transformed into something vibrantly new. A capacity for the new, for the unexpected, defines Yuasa’s work. One of Mind Game’s most memorable sequences depicts Nishi’s meeting with God, who shifts from a titanic crystal being into a text-based interface, before bursting into an ever-changing procession of friendly, Looney Tunes-esque cartoons. “You can’t decide what I should look like!” God quips, as the elastic animation reflects our elastic conceptions of spirituality. Meanwhile, Inu-Oh and Tomoari’s first meeting (and jam session) is shot in feverish camera rolls, as the two swirl into the stars and eventually become one entity. Moments like these cement Yuasa as one of the greatest animators living today – a filmmaker unafraid to tap into the wackiness of his chosen medium, uncover unspeakable desires and indulge in sincere creative transcendence. ara Claire Cao is a writer based in Sydney

Summer 2022

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Documenta 15 lumbung Various venues, Kassel 18 June – 25 September Twenty years ago – following the opening of Documenta 11 – artist Carsten Höller and curator Jens Hoffmann are supposed to have had a conversation that led to Hoffmann coming up with the slogan ‘The next Documenta should be curated by an artist’. It’s taken Documenta, the huge survey show that happens every five years in the German city of Kassel, those two decades to finally get round to hiring an artist, or, as it turned out, a group of artists (and curators) – the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa – as artistic directors of its 15th edition. Ruangrupa, a group that emerged in the liberalisation of Indonesia following the end of Suharto’s autocratic regime in 1998, is all about more democratic, nonhierarchical approaches to artistic work, focused on how to develop professional structures and knowledge in a country that has little institutional infrastructure, while implicating art and artists in more socially engaged ways of working. So the group’s helming of Documenta is a significant upending of the exhibition’s seven-decadeslong run of appointing artistic directors who have always been professional curators, and (with the exception of Okwui Enwezor in 2002) all of them Europeans. That top-down (and in this case Eurocentric) model of single-to-many, with the eminent curator supposed to present an erudite, considered and plugged-in view of the latest developments in contemporary art, has here

finally made way for a more diffuse, devolved structure in which ethics matter more than aesthetics. The group has invited 14 collectives and artist groups who have themselves invited other artists, with the whole process driven, over the last two years, by constant dialogue and – if you follow the exhaustive explanations provided by the show’s publicity – countless Zoom meetings and get-togethers, all meant to encourage consensus and collective decisionmaking. In keeping with ruangrupa’s ethos of lumbung – the Indonesian word for a communal rice barn, a place where surplus harvest is stored for the benefit of all – the participants received an equal share of the production budget along with a separate reserve that the ‘lumbung members’ could use for collaborative projects. There are a lot of special terms used for this elaborate working structure, but for all ruangrupa’s emphasis on process and collective decision-making, what kind of exhibition does it, in the end, result in? It’s perhaps a sign of the lumbung model’s success that this Documenta comes across as loose, vibrating with energy, formally rough-and-ready and often more than a little didactic. There is an avalanche of information presented – especially at the huge Fridericianum building, the show’s central venue – about artistic groups and activities and archives that the mostly Western visitors will have never heard of or encountered

elsewhere. (Here are found presentations from Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive, the Netherlands’ Black Archives and the Algerian feminist research group Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie, formed in 2019 to bring together decades of material charting the history of women’s liberation and feminist activism there.) It’s a vivid incursion of artists from the South and East into an event that has tended to assume the Western artworld represented the whole of the artworld, revealing how starkly different the conditions for art and cultural life are outside the richer art centres of the West. Although ruangrupa can state that their edition is not ‘theme-based’, the thematics one finds are those of artists of societies exposed to conflict and repression; or bearing witness to the raw, unmitigated effects of the globalised economy and those who labour at the bottom of its value-chains; and those dealing with the hard legacies of earlier, even darker times. In Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life, one of a group of videos made by former members of the Baghdad-based Sada group (2011–15), a young man recounts to camera his narrow escape from the suicide bombing of a café; he talks, on the verge of hysteria, of finding the flesh of the bomber’s victims on his skin, pointing out blood and hair stuck to his shirt. In the curving modernist space of the Documenta Halle nearby, the group Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt

Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie, collection of documents, Algiers, 2020. Photo: Hichem Merouche. Courtesy Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie

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(initiated by artist Tania Bruguera) presents a vivid and bitterly humorous installation of works and documents that recounts the history of political repression of artists and intellectuals by the Cuban government. Art, here, is not the product of the welloiled and well-resourced institutions and markets that make up the wealthy art centres, but something produced by far more precarious contexts, for reasons that have much more to do with social activism and the self-representation of communities, priorities that diverge radically from the ethos and culture of the stable, enduring culture of the white cube art gallery. At the offsite nightclub building wh22, its spaces given over to galleries, the Palestinian cultural network The Question of Funding copresents work by the Gazan artist group Eltiqa, whose expressive figurative paintings are shown alongside documentation of the group’s dogged persistence, over three decades, in working as artists amid the grim constraints of life in Gaza under Israeli control. What’s revealing in Eltiqa’s presentation is the necessity of contact with the outside world of more established art centres, and of this outside world as a source of funding for artists. The Question of Funding’s critique recognises that international funding has, since the 1993 Oslo Accords, had a determining influence on Palestine’s cultural institutions, but one that always frames the independence of artists within bigger international webs of political influence and dependency. Ruangrupa’s exhibition is a remarkable dislocation of Documenta’s mystical status in the artworld’s professional curatorial pecking

order, while it extends further the practice of distributed curating and organising that has been steadily more evident in previous editions, particularly in Adam Szymczyk’s Europespanning 2017 edition. The notion of art as a social document and agent of social justice is given full voice. But The Question of Funding’s presentation comes to mind as one considers the nature of the relationships at stake here. Decentring Documenta to the Global South has the glow of egalitarianism and the righting of historic exclusions, but it also serves, perhaps paradoxically, to evolve and integrate networks of artists and organisations into the wider international circuits of the global artworld (networks get mentioned everywhere in this Documenta). The show’s rhetoric of ‘collectives’ as a catch-all definition tends to muffle the wide range of motives and interests that make artists get themselves together into groups, while also ignoring that no collective is ever truly ‘independent’, and everyone in Documenta is entering into a relationship of exchange with this hugely well funded and connected institution. Nor are non-Western collectives, supposed to be ‘over there’ doing their thing, entirely disconnected from funding ‘over here’ – as the wall of logos of institutional, ngo and state-cultural sponsors in the foyer of the Fridericianum attests. Ruangrupa has itself in the past received funding from Western civil-society donors such as the Ford Foundation. These relationships are neither inherently good nor bad, but up for debate – they’re what you negotiate when support is nonexistent in your own locality. But they of course reflect the fact that power – soft power, cultural power,

of richer countries over poorer ones – is always somewhere in the mix. Artistically, culturally, it’s absolutely a good thing that European audiences will see and hear what other human beings in the rest of the world see and think and feel. There are many moments of insight, beauty and humour to be found here. There are political agendas at work in these too, about the effects of globalisation, about sustainability and the environment and the economy. These aren’t impartial. Faced with scenes of grinding manual and agricultural labour found in a number of videoworks, or noticing the diy appropriation of humble materials used by many artists, you might conclude that what the Global South needs is as much economic growth as it can get, for as many of its people as possible. Yet those are political questions, some of which rub up against the priorities of many of the (Western) funders that have a role in supporting some of the initiatives one finds here. This decentred Documenta, then, stages collective and social engagement and devolved responsibility as ‘good things’ to support by an institution increasingly preoccupied with its own power and privilege. This probably doesn’t matter to most of the participants, who stand to benefit from the contacts and networks – and money – assembled by this megaplatform. But motifs of collectivity and self-organisation become fetishised – as they are here – if we don’t at least remind ourselves of the unequal balance of power in the vast network of the global artworld, how it intersects with the machinery of geopolitical power and who, in the end, still holds the purse strings. J.J. Charlesworth

Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (instar), instar archive, List of censored artists, 2022 (installation view, detail, Documenta Halle, Kassel, 12 June 2022. Photo: Nicolas Wefers

Summer 2022

Liew Kwai Fei Nothing Personal Rissim Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur 21 May – 13 June A wide, flat brushstroke – the basic unit of painting – is the deceptively simple crux of Liew Kwai Fei’s exhibition, which features 17 abstract paintings from Liew’s Gesture. Abstraction. Painting. (gap) series (all works but two 2019) that explore the non-exhaustive combinations of a gestural brushstroke. Little else unites the work. While the paintings are mostly rendered either in soft pastels or lush tropical tones, some works deny this atmospheric ease, such as gap 15’s clashing colour schemes of blues and orange, with angry brushstrokes that cut across the canvas. Numbered in order, there are no codes to decipher in the painting’s titles, no allusions to the natural world and no references to spirituality to fall back on. The brushstroke stands for itself. Here, Liew is concerned with the essential question of painting as a medium, and this preoccupation plays out in works that interrogate an imperative to read the narrative and

figurative into works of art. Nothing Personal (held in collaboration with The Back Room) is the latest iteration in his line of questioning, following In Order (To Play) (2021), where the atomic unit of painting was the stripe, and the similarly gestural Fish in Pure Water (2020). Liew finds grammar in painting, a structure of thought to be excavated through continuous articulations in paintings that are both object and idea. But where his earlier exhibitions were restrained and displayed a rigid adherence to a formal system, Nothing Personal presents gestures that are no longer trapped by logical structure: they flow; they drag other colours across the surface; they are abrupt. In gap 03 (2019–20), blended blues are contrasted with individually defined brushstrokes of pink and earth tones, while sandy brown blends unnoticed into moss green, against which the edges of yellow brushstrokes are prominent. Liew is expressive, but economical: dry canvas peeks

gap 03, 2019–20, oil on canvas, 102 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Rissim Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur

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out where colour has been deemed unnecessary behind a patch of seaweed green. gap 18, on the other hand, has lushness on full display, his brushstrokes long, languid, and arcing toward the top right of the canvas. The muted green and browns of the bottom of the canvas give way to a bright sky-blue, then vibrant plums. Belying Liew’s work is a modernist disposition in his thinking, but he is unburdened by the weight of historicism and teleology. And while Liew’s messageless paintings, included here in an exhibition with an opaque title, could be accused of being generic, I find Liew’s search for the generic to be a particularly potent counter to iconic thinking in art and its imposition of style. It is radically pure, a refuge from the image-making factories of our phone and computer screens. Nothing Personal is deliberately open-ended, allowing the audience to bring in, take away and leave whatever they’d like. Lim Sheau Yun

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu Moods in the Metaverse Sapar Contemporary, New York 17 March – 23 May The past two years have ushered in the regime of the screen. As if our lives were not already governed by images, the pandemic thrust us deeper into the world of backlit rectangles. Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu’s first solo exhibition in New York reinvigorates this familiar narrative about recent existence. A Mongol zurag painter, Dagvasambuu uses the traditional artform of her once-nomadic homeland to accomplish the difficult task of representing the past two years’ doldrums. Waiting in queues and languishing in Zooms becomes not only bearable, but through Dagvasambuu’s careful application of flat paints, these better-forgotten memories sing with charm. In Zoom Meeting (all works 2021), Dagvasambuu’s rendition of video-call purgatory is populated with 16 squares filled with avatars, both profane and fantastic. Each an ornate microverse of its own, the squares house, for example, a bored woman sipping Coke;

in another a fish-scaled woman, underwater, headset on, cradles a dachshund whose elongated torso extends into the neighbouring frame. These alluring figures coexist in Zoomworld alongside a bellowing elephant and an uninterested sheep, their backgrounds patterned with flowers and swirling clouds. Neophytes to the genre, such as this writer, might find commonalities between Mongol zurag and Tibetan thangka cloth paintings, such as their decorative use of filigree and flames and flat colour palette. Dagvasambuu’s paintings themselves enchant with laboriously ornamented pastel-coloured worlds, often occupied by contemplative and endearing figures. In Sound Plants, a young lady floats amid a swirling backdrop of filigree and foliage, listening on headphones to a song by the Mongolian folk singer Namjilin Norovbanzad, spelled out in Cyrillic at the top of the canvas. Annotations of SoundCloud bars, hearts and likes, a pair

of Chuck Taylor shoes, all overlaid with transparent app ux buttons, become twenty-firstcentury embellishments to this centuries-old form of painting. For all their charm, the strongest works in Dagvasambuu’s exhibition reveal more ambiguous relationships with the past two years. Take for example Vaccine: First Dose, a pensive scene in which a woman with long, flowing hair fingers a dozen or so strands of thread. They pull in different directions, tugged by, among others, a weighty black mass of wings and ominous clouds, an oval portal filled with wriggling taupe figures and an overflowing bathtub. There’s a mystery here that complements the aura that the first jab had, made all the more ethereal and light by this work’s rice-paper background. While many readers might wish to decline their next invitation to the metaverse, Dagvasambuu’s paintings can kindle warmth towards the coldness of the screen. Owen Duffy

Vaccine: First Dose, 2021, acrylic on canvas and rice paper, 150 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York

Summer 2022

23rd Biennale of Sydney rīvus Various venues, Sydney 12 March – 13 June Presented across six exhibition spaces along the waterways of the Gadigal, Barramatagal and Cabrogal people, the Biennale of Sydney returns with rīvus – a sprawling investigation into our relationship with the natural world. Taking rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems as its framework, it seeks to position humans in conversation with nonhuman entities (whether these be aqueous beings, fossils, mountains, trees, oysters or particles of energy). In this way rīvus presents itself as its own living and breathing ecosystem: an entanglement of voices and perspectives. Indigenous peoples have long understood nonhuman beings to be deserving of protection and care, and many of the standout works in this biennial attend to First Nation histories, knowledges and connections to land and water. At the entrance to the Cutaway – a below-ground concrete venue partially open to the outdoors – sits Barkandji artist Badger Bates’s glinting steel sculpture of the Ngatsi (rainbow serpent). Associated with the creation of the Barka (Darling River), a river now suffering after years of extractive industry exploitation, Bates’s sculpture is both an avowal of country and a plea to save its waterways. At the Museum of Contemporary Art (mca), Marjetica Potrč has collaborated with Wiradjuri Elder Uncle Ray Woods to weave together the stories of two rivers similarly threatened with ecological destruction. Potrč and Woods’s bold depictions of abundant worlds filled with streams, trees, birds and people (whether painted on paper or directly onto the gallery wall) speak to the life, rights and histories of the Galari (Lachlan River) in Western New South Wales and the Soča River in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the upstairs gallery, Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu) translates his knowledge as ‘a namer of the plants’ into a set of meticulous and transfixing studies of the Amazon (such as Ciclo anual de los árboles de la maloca [Annual cycle of the trees surrounding the Maloca], 2009, a series of wallmounted drawings).

Indeed, many of the works across the biennial reiterate the ways in which Westerncentric notions of the ‘environment’ (a word that gained currency during the Industrial Revolution for ‘that which surrounds us’) have warped our understanding of the world. As the writer Amitav Ghosh argued in a recent interview with The Guardian, our current ecological crisis is explicitly linked to a Western history built on capital and empire: ‘Why has this crisis come about?… Because for two centuries, European colonists tore across the world, viewing nature and land as something inert to be conquered and consumed without limits.’ Given, as anthropologist Jason Hickel has suggested, that the disproportionate effects of unchecked global heating are akin to ‘atmospheric colonisation’, and given that, in Australia, Indigenous claims to country are so readily dismissed by mining companies and government, it is somewhat surprising that the prevailing feeling of rīvus is one of quiet contemplation, instead of a call to act. Much of this has to do with the biennial’s conceptual framework, rather than the vibrancy of the works themselves. As the curators suggest in their exhibition text, rīvus revolves around questions that centre on nonhuman entities: ‘Will oysters grow teeth in aquatic revenge? What do the eels think? Are the swamp oracles speaking in tongues?’ Indeed, several of the biennial’s ‘participants’ are those other than human beings (a 365million-year old fish fossil is displayed at the mca). At the entrance to every venue is a vertical screen displaying the ‘voice’ of a river. That is, an Indigenous custodian or a person involved in the river’s protection who speaks to the audience on its behalf. At Barangaroo, for example, a representative of the Atrato River in Colombia narrates how its waters and surrounds were granted legal personhood in 2016 – a landmark court decision upholding the river’s right to protection, conservation and restoration.

facing page, top Badger Bates in collaboration with Matt Mewburn, Save our Ngatji (Rainbow Serpents), creators of spiritual rivers connecting water, sky and land, 2022 (installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, The Cutaway at Barangaroo). Photo: Document Photography. Courtesy the artist

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The placement of each of these river voices suggests that any visitor to the biennial invariably occupies the position of listener, which then invites a follow-up question: what is it they choose to hear? Does the experience of the biennial necessitate ‘a fundamental shift’ in our responsibilities towards nonhuman entities, as is so claimed, or does a visitor simply fall back into passive reflection – an empathetic spectator of mass extinction and biodiversity loss, but an impotent one? Or to go a step further, is it possible to meaningfully engage with these concerns via the blockbuster event that is a biennial, given it is an institution that brings with it its own ecosystem: board-members, sponsors, patrons and benefactors? Indeed, absent from rīvus is an acknowledgement that Australia is the biggest global exporter of coal, and that fossil fuel companies often seek to sanitise their image by sponsoring and supporting just these kinds of art events. When the biennial opened in March, it did so in the same week as unprecedented rainfall drenched Australia’s entire eastern seaboard. Whole towns were swallowed when rivers broke through banks and levies. Many inhabitants of these towns are still without housing or adequate support, and Sydney has already experienced its annual rainfall in the first three months of the year. At the time I viewed Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists’ collaborative installation The Great Animal Orchestra, a soundscape of 15,000 animal calls housed in a marquee at Barangaroo, the roof buckled under the weight of the wind. The sound of heavy rain competed with the audio of Krause’s field recordings. Elsewhere, mould started to appear on the installations in semi-open spaces, and water rushed down the Cutaway’s sandstone wall, pooling on the concrete floor. Nature, it seemed, was making its own intervention. For a biennial wishing to elevate the voices of nonhuman entities, it is perhaps fitting that it is these natural forces – not representations of them – that gave rīvus its urgency. Naomi Riddle

facing page, bottom 23rd Biennale of Sydney: rīvus, 2022 (installation view, The Cutaway at Barangaroo). Photo: Document Photography. Courtesy Biennale of Sydney

Summer 2022

Ruangsak Anuwatwimon golem 2022 Gallery ver, Seoul 11 March – 17 June sac Gallery, Bangkok 17 March – 4 June Piece by piece, Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s monster is taking shape. Only a few parts of his anatomically precise model of the human musculoskeletal system are in position: frontal and maxilla bones, teeth, one eyeball, a few vertebrae. But a glance around Gallery ver reveals more are coming. Stowed in metal trays on a shelf are a trachea, eyelids, ears and pieces of the cervical spine, while finger bones are arranged like fresh archaeological finds on a table alongside an exploded skull model and an atlas of human anatomy. Come exhibition close, a complete incarnation of the golem – the earth-based creature of Jewish mythology – will be threaded from the ceiling, to float like some deranged, sinewy puppet. Anuwatwimon’s multidisciplinary practice – which melds arcane lore, natural history, anthropology, environmental science and

conservation biology to create material-based meditations on ecosystems upended by human extractivism – has already led to memorable outcomes. These include: dioramas of river plains made from fish bones and recreations of critically endangered species such as the Bhutan Glory butterfly, Sindora wallichii tree and Schomburgk’s deer. At other junctures, he has burnt once-living things – from a Belgian horse to Cavendish bananas – and used the ash to create delicate sculptures that resemble parts of the human body, such as the heart and mandible. Foregrounding the stages of a laborious process, golem 2022 is both of a piece and a marked progression. Part Victor Frankenstein lab, part wunderkammer, Anuwatwimon’s evolving display at Gallery ver is the industrial assembly line of a two-part exhibition project.

golem Drawing (Draft for actual scale) no. 0004 (Bone issue), 2021–22, pen on wax paper, 1000 × 110 cm. Photo: Kridtin Wongpoovarak. Courtesy the artist and sac Gallery, Bangkok

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Over the duration, samples from the rare flora and fauna specimen collection arranged along one wall are being taken offsite and burned, and the ash then compacted and carved, using the cnc machine behind a dust curtain in the corner, to create reproductions of specific parts of the human anatomy. Guest performers are systematically assembling the pieces at four public sessions. Meanwhile, the companion display at sac Gallery feels like a rarefied space for thinking rather than toiling. Instead of Anuwatwimon the mad scientist-alchemist, here we find Anuwatwimon the tenacious taxonomist and bookish naturalist. Hundreds of his precise pen drawings of bone and musculature are filed away in numbered folders. A low shelf flanked by bamboo floor mats is lined with reference books, such as Michael Keevak’s Becoming Yellow:

A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011). And in a black-walled second room is a dramatic installation: three 1:1 drawings – of a mongoloid woman, of the human bone system in an exploded view and of the blood vessel network – unspool onto the floor from hanging paper reels. In these sketches and reference points, we find many of the preoccupations layered richly, like geological stratum, through Anuwatwimon’s artmaking: science through the ages, environmental ethics, Gothic horror, race concepts and classifications, contemporary art’s obsession with the uncanny. But above all, the display is a repository of his long-term research into the many folkloric lives of the golem – both a clay-made humanoid brought to life through Kabbalistic magic, and a mutable metaphor used to connote fear, control, power or redemption over many centuries. Since first appearing in the Talmud, golems have been conjured for countless reasons. Some of these amorphous artificial men did no more than obediently fetch water or chop wood, but many others defended Jewish communities from anti-Semitic attacks and pogroms. Unfailingly, a Rabbi learned in Kabbalah would create them

by investing an inanimate lump of clay with ‘an unreasoning, automatic life when he placed a magical formula behind its teeth’, as Gustav Meyrink wrote in his 1915 novel, The Golem. But exact techniques were diverse, ranging from reciting combinations of the Hebrew alphabet to circumambulating dust piles. At Gallery ver, Anuwatwimon is invoking this mythical tradition: making flesh his own anxieties and fears, issuing his own instructions. Key to his alchemy is the conceptual linking of each base ash to the anatomy it reproduces. Various thinkers, including anthropologists and traditional Chinese medicine specialists, have been enlisted to help him twin specimens with body parts. Quotes sourced from online references, printed on a4 sheets fastened above each corresponding bone, elucidate the winning arguments: why his golem’s left ear is made from abalone shell (its use in Native American jewellery), for example, or the trachea from the bulb of the Himalayan fritillary lily (its use in cough syrups and Chinese medicine). The symbolism of all this isn’t, at first glance, subtle: how many living things must

we annihilate to build just one of us? When does our obligation to be the best version of ourselves end and our obligation towards that which we exploit for our own utility and perfection begin? Is this the version of ourselves we want to be? However, there are resonances beyond Anthropocene folly and demise. Made from the ash of found specimens collected over 20 years (no living thing was harmed), Anuwatwimon’s ghastly and cockeyed creature is arguably as evocative of the action-led models of the sustainability movement – such as upcycling and circular economies – as it is symptomatic of our ongoing extinction event. Free of tedious ecofatalism, his fabrication workshop gestures towards collaborative processes for constructively solving the problems at hand and reasserts the agency of organic matter – all while satirising our raging hubris. In some old Judaic tales, the compliant golem gets drunk on power, threatens the creator it approximates and so must be deactivated through a reversal of the spell. But in Anuwatwimon’s ecocentrist telling, the only monster who needs bringing down a peg is us. Max Crosbie-Jones

Golem 2022, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gallery ver, Seoul

Summer 2022

Proper Weight International Industrial Centre, Fo Tan, Hong Kong 5 May – 2 June The floor is on the wall, disconnected pipes extend out from the ground and window blinds hang in the middle of the room. Perception of space and interior architecture is seemingly upended at artist Mark Chung’s studio in Fo Tan, a former industrial district in northeast Hong Kong. The space houses a self-organised exhibition, featuring works by three local artists in addition to Chung: Dave Chow, Ko Sin Tung and Kong Chun Hei. The exhibition’s Chinese title, ‘不知輕重’, references a Chinese idiom for when a person doesn’t recognise the importance of something. It’s a line often spoken by older generations to describe the actions of irreverent youths, to imply that one does not know one’s ‘place’. ‘Proper Weight’ is a loose translation of the idiom; in this exhibition, such a weight manifests in the decontextualised objects

and reconfigured architectural elements, giving rise to alternate meanings and functions, mirroring an ambiguity intrinsic to a city in constant flux. Chow’s venetian blinds (Evitable, all works 2022) cut across the main room, acting as a double-sided mechanism that simultaneously reveals and conceals half of the exhibition space. The blinds’ slats consist of rows of unsnapped boxcutter blades, lending the work a more brittle and sinister edge, through which one catches glimpses of Kong’s Turn into it’s own loop xiv, an intricate wall-mounted drawing of unravelled cable wires. The motif of everyday conduits, specifically wires, runs throughout the show and culminates with Chung’s Floaters. Installed by a window, a tangled cluster of gnarly steel wires hang from the ceiling, obscuring the view outside.

It’s a distorting of perception that’s present, too, in Chung’s Volvous: a wall-mounted print that depicts layered photographs of a 2021 solar eclipse. The largest, most pervasive work happens to be the most subtle. Ko’s Filtration is formed of imprints of dust and debris from the space’s tiled floor collected on adhesive film and stuck to the walls. Serving as a wallpaper of sorts, the work exposes the invisible and unconsidered detritus of the interior spaces we occupy. Forms and materials echo each other in Proper Weight, establishing a visual cohesion but also producing a visceral effect of subtle uneasiness and displacement. In this sense, the works seem to channel our own uncertainty about our place or constitution; nothing, it appears, is quite what it seems. Aaina Bhargava

Proper Weight, 2022 (installation view, International Industrial Centre, Fo Tan, Hong Kong). Courtesy Mark Chung

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Peng Zuqiang Sideways Looking Cell Project Space, London 13 April – 12 June In Peng Zuqiang’s first solo exhibition in Europe, the Chinese artist presents three moving-image installations ostensibly about connectivity or the lack thereof – whether interpersonal, cultural or historic. Arranged across two floors, Sideways Looking begins on the ground level with The Cyan Garden (2022), which foregrounds the ways memory haunts place. The video focuses on a friend’s Airbnb business in the artist’s hometown of Changsha and, in parallel, the site of the old communist underground-radio station ‘Voice of the Malayan Revolution’ in Hunan, destined for conversion into a luxury resort. Alternating between fictional memories of real conflict in the Malaysian countryside, audio of radio static and the physicality of commercial hospitality work as his friends turn down their lodgings,

the film contemplates the bodily and cognitive damage of the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. The ruthless transformation of a revolutionary site to a hospitality nonplace underscores the inevitability of erasure in the name of economic progress. Peng’s five-channel installation keep in touch (2021), spaced across the two levels, investigates the exhibition’s titular phrase via various indexes of interconnectivity and the sense of touch. The first channel in a ground-floor room features two men standing on either side of their overheating car while listening to techno music in the middle of a forest. An air of tension pulsates between the two and throughout the remaining channels: a woman rubs Tiger Balm menthol ointment on herself; footage of a man’s torso as he twirls a pen and struggles to recount

a story he can’t remember; a closeup of two pairs of hands engaging in a game of cat’s cradle while voices are heard gossiping; the last concentrates on two people cutting one another’s fingernails. These overlooked, casual forms of touch intimate various degrees of familiarity. The held objects – the scissors, string, etc – become the means of acquaintance. In the back room of the second floor, Sight Leak (2021) transplants Roland Barthes’s memoirs of a 1974 trip to China into the mind of a tourist who visits the artist’s hometown, and who is preoccupied by questions of outsiderness and belonging. Here, as across the exhibition, Peng’s multilayered deliberations on dichotomies of absences and presences play out in footage of quotidian life and the eloquence of subtle gestures. Marv Recinto

The Cyan Garden, 2022, single-channel video installation, hd video and Super 8 transferred to hd, 8 min 5 sec. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Cell Project Space, London

Summer 2022

12th Berlin Biennale Still Present! Various venues, Berlin 11 June – 18 September When, in recent years, the curatorial reins of the Berlin Biennale have been handed to artists, the results have been single-minded and, consequently, divisive. For the seventh edition, in ˙ 2012, Artur Zmijewski delivered what frequently felt more like an activist sit-in than a show; for the ninth, in 2016, artist collective dis spotlighted postinternet art to the point of killing it via overexposure. This year’s exhibition, Still Present! – curated by Kader Attia and an ‘artistic team’ comprising Ana Teixeira Pinto, Ðo Tuong Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Noam Segal and Rasha Salti – is unabashedly committed in a different way. It relentlessly addresses, from a multitude of angles, what the French artist described in the opening press conference as “the blind spots and unthought sides of Western modernity and its correlatives – colonialism, slavery, imperialism”. Spread across six venues and largely avoiding marquee names, the show serves as a global tour of iniquities (and their

entwined historical roots) that might be classed as ‘invisible’ to Western art audiences; and as an omnidirectional call, and showcase, for decolonial practices. Take, for example, the 19-artist-strong presentation at the western outpost of the Akademie der Künste. In short order, one encounters Imani Jacqueline Brown’s video installation filmed in Louisiana’s industrially polluted and disintegrating coastal wetlands (known colloquially, among other things, as ‘cancer alley’), which are also a site for environmental activism; Mai Nguyen-Long’s unnerving double shelf of specimen jars containing dolls and toys – referring back to the us military’s use of the herbicidal weapon Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, which caused widespread sickness and birth defects as well as environmental devastation; Forensic Architecture’s video exploration of toxic clouds and state power, from tear-

gas used against antifracking protesters to the poisonous smoke in the Grenfell Tower blaze, to chlorine chemical gas attacks in Aleppo; and artist group daar’s film about the discussionbased decolonisation of fascist architecture in Sicily. Amid much documentarian movingimage work that pulls the viewer along at its own pace, you might end up pausing to gather yourself in front of Tammy Nguyen’s vivid, green-and-gold-hued paintings, since they stand still. These, though, turn out to be inspired by a Catholic park in a Vietnamese refugee camp on the Indonesian island of Galang, containing gold statues representing the Stations of the Cross, and here Christ-as-coloniser is engulfed unhappily by a tropical landscape dotted with crashed American aeroplanes. Break over; back to a video (by Tuan Andrew Nguyen) about how badly humans treat animals. Various wings of the show, it appears, have their own distinct emphases, delivering

Tammy Nguyen, Jesus meets his Mother (detail), 2022, watercolour, vinyl paint, pastel, metal leaf on paper stretched on foam board mounted on wooden frame, 168 × 140 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin

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structure to Attia’s compound broadside. At kw Institute for Contemporary Art, more stress feels placed on occluded women’s histories and present-day activism. Half-buried horrors, as in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s expansive imagetext presentation pointing to the mass rapes that occurred in Berlin at the end of the Second World War, are set against lesser-known heroism, as in Zuzanna Hertzberg’s archival display addressing organised and autonomous women’s resistance during the Holocaust, or local activism such as Jeneen Frei Njootli’s arrangement of flags and freestanding plywood cutouts (described as ‘altered traditional objects’) pointing to her participation in an Indigenous women’s art collective in the Yukon, and the subject of displaced communities. At the other, more central branch of the Akademie der Künste, the focus swings more emphatically to colonialism via a central display of wooden Christian artefacts from across Africa, made by ‘unidentified artists’, dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and surrounded by ‘exotic’ paintings by German modernists Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Nearby, Moses März’s hand-drawn flowcharts, intricately

tabulating myriad aspects of colonial power and resistance to it, might strike one as a cipher for the whole curatorial project, not least in its capacity to quickly overwhelm via complex interrelation. Not all the venues hit so cleanly. The display at the Hamburger Bahnhof, not quite fully installed during the press viewing – cue a lot of hydraulic platforms and scribbled labels on masking tape – is a long, incoherent corridor punctuated by Jean-Jacques Lebel’s gratuitousfeeling roomful of blowups of the notoriously grim photographs taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. If, meanwhile, one schleps out to distant Lichtenberg to see the segment at the former Stasi hq , now a museum, it feels like a long way to go for seven artworks, bad ventilation and some surly museum staff. By that point, though, and assuming you go there last, less might feel like more and vice versa. Finishing up and encountering people who’d just begun, this viewer repeatedly heard anxious variations on “is it all this dry?” Well, yes, pretty much. The problem with saying so, or naysaying at all, is that in many ways Attia’s exhibition has critic-proofed itself; the typical affluent

biennale-goer can’t complain righteously about having to observe the toxic network effects of Western modernity; or about being shown, via artwork after artwork, how widespread and entangled those effects are. The most they might say, besides making the ‘that’s not what art is for’ aestheticist argument, is that the show courts ye olde compassion fatigue, to which one response might be: take it more slowly, linger on the examples of positive restitutive work already being done. If you want affable art, there’s plenty of that in commercial galleries. It feels fitting that an artist, a maker of things, should construct a biennale that feels as much like an entity as this one, for all that it is composed of many parts. That entity, it strikes one, doesn’t much care about making nice or being liked, or giving viewers an easy ride. After all, nobody else in the real-world conditions it points diversely towards is getting one. Rather, Attia here proceeds from a position of inarguable urgency, one that the constituents of his show restate over and again, and a bedrock hopefulness regarding change. As such, if this isn’t the biennale we want, it might nevertheless be the type that we need. Martin Herbert

Summer 2022

An unlikely hero Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Leonor Will Never Die Films about film can often seem self-congratulatory, in the sort of narcissistic and exhaustive way that Hollywood often congratulates itself for being Hollywood. Leonor Will Never Die (2022), however, is a kooky, ardent postmodern masterpiece that pushes temporal limits and captures the heart. Screenwriter Martika Ramirez Escobar’s first directorial feature film premiered at Sundance Festival this past January as the first Philippine film since 2006 to enter the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, winning the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit. Set in the Philippines, Sheila Francisco plays Leonor Reyes, a retired action film writer whose enduring love for the genre distracts her from her reality’s obligations: for example, instead of paying her electricity bills in town, she is lured to a dvd stall manned by a similarly actionloving child – she returns home, expenses unpaid but with a new selection of movies to enjoy. When she chances upon a screenwriting contest in a newspaper, she uncovers her old, unfinished script titled Ang Pagbabalik Ng Kwago (The Return of the Owl) and sets upon completing it. The viewer joins Leonor along her creative reveries, delighting in the adventures of her super-macho hero Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides) as he fights the bad guys and rescues Isabella (Rea Molina). Reality inevitably punctures these trances, transporting Leonor back to everyday life where her live-in son Rudie (Bong Cabrera) is desperate to embark upon his own life but hesitates to abandon her for fear she will not be able to take care of herself; her estranged husband – a former action hero actor – is running again for local office; and her deceased eldest son, also named Ronwaldo

(Anthony Falcon), appears in ghostly form to comfort the living (filmed using a deliberately unconvincing low-budget effect). When a tv literally falls from a neighbour’s balcony and knocks her out, she bursts into her own fabricated action script, leaving her body behind at the hospital. While Leonor’s own film recalls the traditional plots of Philippine action movies from the 1970s and 80s – and even employs grainy shots and a 4:3 aspect ratio – contemporary topics such as the drug war, wealth disparity and corrupt politicians penetrate the script to ground the film within Escobar’s own current reality. Indeed, days after liberal candidate Maria Leonor ‘Leni’ Robredo lost the presidential elections to the iniquitous namesake of Ferdinand Marcos Sr, Escobar posted to Instagram a pink – being Robredo’s campaign colour – graphic of her film’s title, an optimistic reminder that the pursuit of political integrity will always persist. Leonor’s estranged husband, meanwhile, invokes the story of retired-actorturned-impeached-President Joseph Estrada who relied on his film roles as a working-class action hero to convince voters of his qualification for political office. However, the film offers a gamut of topics and themes that invite further consideration and rewatching: not least in the feminist empowerment shown by the elderly Leonor who takes control of her life. Leonor Will Never Die also poses serious existential questions, but ones that are considered so earnestly that they seem unfettered. The entire film is executed with such sincerity and warmth that none of these topics feel forced or incongruous. Another central trope in the film is motherhood, not as it relates to her children but rather

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to how the role of the mother and a mother’s notion of self-change after her children have matured. Leonor delights as she navigates this tumultuous transition in an ankle-length pambahay duster (house dress) – a familiar sight of matriarchal women dressed casually at home, though impractical for an action hero. She turns into the unlikely hero of her own story but also harkens the image of our own mothers who might be the heroines of our lives. Escobar imbues the film with a somewhatchaotic freshness that is owed largely to genrebending and unexpected takes on mise-enabyme. She weaves the multiple narratives of Leonor’s life, imagination and alternate realities using a metacinema technique that ensures unexpected layering, parallels and collisions between the storylines – resulting in some fun turns. In one instance, Rudie is reading his mother’s script after she enters her coma but the plot abruptly ends in the midst of a chase during which the character Ronwaldo hurtles down a street; Leonor has yet to write this part of the story, so Salumbides breaks into a dance while waiting for his next cues. Elsewhere, we see the film crew enjoying one another’s company and Escobar even introduces the process of digital editing by turning the film screen into her computer’s view of editing software, unafraid to shatter the worlds that the film cultivates. Leonor Will Never Die is an endearingly quirky film that maximises the medium as an artform by upending ideas of temporality: the film never finds a resolution, suspending Leonor in an unpredictable forever, giving the metagenre its own timeless remake. Marv Recinto

Summer 2022

Lonely Vectors Singapore Art Museum 3 June – 4 September Be like water, my friend. Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest vr work takes Bruce Lee’s dictum one step further: participants don’t merely become water but pass through its many states, transforming from solid to liquid to vapour and back again (H is for Humidity, 2022). With my headset strapped on, I melt into water, swim alongside fish, pass through walls, rise into the sky, enter a heavenly sphere of colour, fall as rain and land on earth again – as the stiff humanoid avatar with which I had started this journey. Insides rearranged, I am off to ponder the rest of Lonely Vectors, a group exhibition that is concerned, broadly, with a crisscrossing global flow of things, people and ideas, and which traces

how these movements are influenced by wider political and social forces. For example, the experiences of low-wage migrant labour in Singapore come under scrutiny in Bo Wang’s Fountain of Interiors (2022), a column constructed out of the harsh fluorescent light tubes often found in workers’ dormitories to create a gigantic, blinding light stick. This glowing pillar is surrounded by fake potted plants commonly seen inside airconditioned malls; the combination creates a sinister and suffocating vision of the controlled, plasticky interiors of such sites of capitalist consumerism and its modes of exploitation. While the exhibition charts the forces that direct the global circulation of goods and labour,

it also suggests ways in which these dominant power structures can be resisted. One strategy is a philosophical one, a sort of creative selfhacking to embrace formlessness; for example, one could, à la the shape-shifting H is for Humidity, be like water; or one could take a leaf from Shu Lea Cheang’s uki virus surging (2022), and be like a virus. In Cheang’s series of animated videos set in a digital wasteland, redundant humanoids are discarded by biotech industries and left to roam among broken computer parts. A character called Uki glitches and morphs – first in horror then in glee – eventually reemerging as a computer virus to reclaim her freedom and mobility.

Bo Wang, Fountain of Interiors, 2022, rebar column, fluorescent tubes, mirror base and potted plants, dimensions variable. Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

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Lonely Vectors also includes concrete emancipatory practices that champion social and ecological justice. A powerful recurring theme in the show is counter-cartography, which subverts the common idea of maps as objective and universal tools for geographical knowledge, revealing, for example, the realities and experiences of marginalised groups in society. Highlighting the Vietnamese refugee experience is Tiffany Chung’s embroidered map, reconstructing an exodus history: boat trajectories, ports of first asylum and resettlement countries (2017), which plots the movement of refugees between 1979 and 1989 after the fall of Saigon. In this work, intricate red lines fan out from Vietnam to the rest of the world, presumably tracing the escape routes. Meanwhile, intense pink and green stitches cover the outlines of certain territories. Some countries are pink or green only; some are both. As with many of Chung’s works, the viewer is not given

any legend. Does the pink refer to the ports of first asylum or resettlement countries? What is suggested by the bare data presented – long journeys, provisional refugee camps, the limbo state of uncertain settlement – is poignant enough. The withheld information also suggests a respectful acknowledgement that there may be parts of the past that remain inaccessible. Also mapping against the grain is Cian Dayrit’s Penitent Plant (2022). For this work, the artist collaborated with banana plantation workers in Mindanao to make hand-drawn maps of where they worked, each populated with drawings, anecdotes and information on ancestral lands before they were taken over by plantations. Extrapolating from the material in these documents, Dayrit created (with the help of his regular collaborator Henry Caceres) an embroidered textile that serves as a rallying cry for social justice. In it, an outline of a banana

plant is surrounded by names of big food corporations like Del Monte and Dole, and slogans in English like ‘Down with feudalism’, ‘Land to the tillers’ and ‘Rise up for food sovereignty and climate justice’. Rise up, indeed. While Lonely Vectors chronicles the alienating effects of a world organised by a capitalist logic, it also envisions a world where such certitudes can be dissolved or challenged, so that more equitable futures can be imagined. Part of me wants to applaud its leftist, anti-imperialist stance, which makes it stand apart from the passive neutrality in most sam shows. Another part of me thinks, well, it’s about time. As museums around the world rethink their roles post-covid 19, it often involves taking long, hard looks at the systems that underpin our current realities, and projecting into other possible futures. Lonely Vectors is a good start. Adeline Chia

Tiffany Chung, reconstructing an exodus history: boat trajectories, ports of first asylum and resettlement countries, 2017. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

Toshiko Takaezu James Cohan, New York 15 April – 7 May Hawaii-born ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, who died in 2011, saw no difference between ‘making pots, cooking and growing vegetables’. And so she gently swept away modernist claims for art’s autonomy; for her there was no separation of art and life. It’s a curious outlook, especially for an artist who transformed humble clay vessels into Abstract Expressionism-in-the-round, helping, in the process, to elevate craft to the beatified realm of art. In this first solo exhibition of her work in New York since her death, a dozen or so of Takaezu’s vessels float in consonance, each suggesting remarkable variety, achieved through Zen-like acts of perfection via repetition. Takaezu called her stout, rounded vessels ‘moons’, small heavenly bodies shaped from earth. While this show is a minute representation of the artist’s prolific output, spanning

the range of scales at which she worked, both in moon pots and her more oblong, missilelike ‘closed forms’ (all Untitled). Some moon pots are no more than 15 cm in diameter, and others resemble torso-size asteroids – otherworldly, fire-hardened chunks. Some works are handformed, others reveal in their ribbed surfaces the centrifugal force of the potter’s wheel. A small spout sprouts from the top of many pots, a diminutive clay nipple that permits the gas generated during firing to escape. Takaezu exalted her work through glazing. One particularly fine example drips with the strawberry milk of a pale mauve glaze, cascading down to meet a rippling horizonline of charcoal. Through peripatetic experience, the pot’s surface becomes a colour-field painting in miniature.

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Liberated from the picture plane, Takaezu’s compositions evoke the infinite contemplation of scholar stones, those rock formations that Chinese literati enjoyed for the sheer pleasure of aesthetic contemplation, and exported to other countries. Another of the works is covered in a creamy glaze, with hints of rust seeping through to the surface. Takaezu dashes a sweeping black calligraphic line that curves around the pot’s spherical surface like a serpent, the outline of a mountain ridge, or Franz Kline-esque gesture. Many of the moon pots contain a small ‘rattle’. It’s a paper-covered clay bead that, after burning during the firing process, clinks and pings, serving as a gentle reminder of the shape of space. The interiority of form becomes just as significant as the skin of a thing; an unseen universe, somewhere between East and West. Owen Duffy

Shao Chun Riddle Bodies The Cloister Project, Macalline Art Center, Shanghai 12 March – 24 July Twisted cotton fabric is suspended from the ceiling like intestines. Connected to plastic bags of soap water through iv tubes, an air pump pushes at the liquid, generating suds that ooze from the plastic-bag ‘mouths’ like clouds and then fall on the floor and disappear, leaving only watermarks on the tiles. The fantastical clouds of Super Clean (all works 2022) are grounded by the disturbing flesh-coloured, wrenching guts powered by the buzz of electric motors. The 15 installations that make up Riddle Bodies further Shao Chun’s decade-long exploration of imagined lifeforms, which have comprised e-textiles and found materials transformed into kinetic hybrid beings. Here, silicone, latex, fishhooks, wigs, eyelashes, dried sea creatures, plastic wraps, iv tubes and lamps manifest a hyperhygienic clinical vibe with delicate Victorian twists. An underlying theme of these works is attraction, but with an ultimately lethal intent.

The Lure is a set of metal-skeleton urchin-shaped traps wrapped with flesh-pink synthetic wigs. On a smaller scale, Chaos Abacus-1’s fishhooks are ornamented with fake eyelashes and synthetic wigs. And for Entrance, assemblages of urchin shells, fishhooks, embroidery frames and fluffy boas seem to act as flamboyant traps for prey. The titular ‘riddle’ manifests in the exhibition’s various ‘bodies’ made up of an enigmatic combination of inorganic and organic components. In Air Chrysalid, mist-shrouded plastic bags of water are suspended from the ceiling, shaped like jellyfish, touching their ‘tentacles’ to a glass surface on the floor. Fireplace-3 is a small, two-part installation made of glass flasks with floating wigs inside, daintily capped with a lampshade and a tutu. Both works seem like laboratory apparatuses used to examine unknown specimens that might float or flux

within them. I tend to interpret them as silicone (not silicon)-based lifeforms, originating perhaps from an alternate reality, where these camouflaged predators done up in flashy costumes lure prey into their digestive cavities. What prey they are trying to capture remains the riddle. In Riddle Bodies, Shao doesn’t appear to want to create some puzzle to be solved, but rather to create an imaginary fantasy world, a shelter for her hybrid lifeforms. While the appearance and manifestation of these creatures aligns with her work of the previous decade, such escapism has, in recent years, taken on a more significant connotation. Such hiding away feels like a gesture of surrender to our deteriorative reality. But there is also the suggestion of an eventual exodus and escape; then the riddle of who or what is the prey might be solved. Paul Han

Entrance (detail), 2022, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2022

Destiny Disrupted Granville Centre Art Gallery, Australia 10 February – 1 May At the start of 2020, words from the poem Doesn’t it taste of blood began to appear across Tehran, painted on street walls in response to nationwide antigovernment protests that resulted in the deaths of around 1,500 civilians. Written in Farsi by Afghan-born Hazara artist Elyas Alavi, who moved to Iran as a child and then left for South Australia in 2007, and whose poetry is banned in Iran, the poem speaks to how war and state violence can imprint onto an individual’s body. In Tehran, the lines of poetry were erased from the streets by the authorities. In the western suburbs of Sydney, the words appear in neon inside a moodily lit gallery. Installed at the base of a wall and

encased in a Perspex box, as if signalling the words’ fragility, Doesn’t it taste of blood (2020) glows hot-pink against a charcoal backdrop. Here the brightness of the light seems a fitting metaphor for defiance in the darkest circumstance. Alavi’s work is on display as part of Destiny Disrupted, an exhibition that brings together works by 12 Australia-based artists, many of whom identify as Muslim. It takes its name from a 2009 book by Tamim Ansary, in which the author seeks to disrupt history’s European-centric narrative by offering a ‘parallel world history’. Afghan-Hazara artist Khadim Ali, who trained in miniature painting, imagines

Elyas Alavi, Doesn’t it taste of blood?, 2020 (installation view). Photo: Document Photography. Courtesy the artist

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modern-day experiences of violence and displacement as a struggle between mythic forces. Untitled 3, a painting on wasli paper from a 2014 series titled Transitions/Evacuations created in collaboration with artist Sher Ali Hussaini, features three demons. Resembling a trio of pallbearers, they heft a statue over their shoulders, which looks to be an allusion to the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban regime. In this painting and the series it’s part of, the demon – or dev – stands in for the ways the persecuted Hazara minority he belongs to is othered in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. That sense of otherness is reflected in Cyclical Histories 1 & 2 (2020), a pair of

self-portraits by Abdul Abdullah, a seventhgeneration Australian whose work has long grappled with the way Islam is politicised in Australia’s national imagination. In both, the artist wears a mask from Tim Burton’s 2001 rendition of Planet of the Apes, a film in which gorillas are cast as colonisers who enslave humans. The works draw on the way in which the figure of the ape or monkey has historically been used to delineate the ‘civilised’ from the ‘uncivilised’ or ‘savage’. Abdullah makes the connection, via his self-portrait, to the way in which marginalised communities – such as immigrants – are robbed of their humanity. He cradles a baby monkey to his chest, hinting at the way these patterns are internalised, but also how this enforced subjecthood can be wrestled with and redefined from within. Nearby, What goes around (2021), a videowork by the late Iranian-Australian contemporary artist Hossein Valamanesh and his son

Nassiem, sees a lattice of branches revolve slowly, hypnotically. Their circular motion, a nod to time’s rhythms, echoes the grainy footage of whirling dervishes who arc and spin across Khaled Sabsabi’s 2010 video installation 99 in their search for transcendence. A more abstract representation of religion is presented in Phillip George’s photo series Drawing in Water (2018–21), of which three photos are titled Acheiropoieta – a Byzantine word that describes icons that have come into existence by miracle, rather than by human hands. The artist, who is of Egyptiotes ancestry, has constructed largescale images that are shimmering expanses of blue or gold water, punctuated by ripples and broken pieces of ancient pottery, glass bottles and jewelled fragments. Drawing in Water recalls the ebb and flow of history, and the way its different narratives (depending on who is doing the telling) shape our understanding of the places we belong to.

These references to ritual, religion and history appear to merge in LebaneseAustralian artist Shireen Taweel’s Devices for Listening (2020), made using traditional coppersmithing techniques. The pair of intricately engraved and pierced metal conical sculptures – and their title – seem to suggest a deeper, metaphorical listening to the wisdom and knowledge held by generations past. Often, attempts to rewrite or reframe history can reassert binaries and give rise to art that is reductive, even essentialist. Destiny Disrupted lends itself to depth rather than disruption. The power of this show isn’t necessarily in presenting a challenge to the Western canon but in showcasing the multiplicity and polyphony that was always part of Islamic visual culture. In the hands of these artists, ancient traditions aren’t static or regressive. They are part of a story that is cyclical, an aesthetic inventiveness that replenishes itself again and again. Neha Kale

Shireen Taweel, Devices for Listening, 2020. Photo: Document Photography. Courtesy the artist

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Books India: A History in Objects by T. Richard Blurton Thames & Hudson, £30 (hardcover) ‘Colour is one of the most obvious, insistent and frankly delightful elements of South Asian culture.’ That’s just one of the banal and trivialising comments in this book, in which ‘India’ is actually South Asia – spanning Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This act of generosity is, on the face of it, laudable: it allows the author to insist on an idea of ‘India’ or South Asia as multilingual, multireligious and home to a variety of cultures, in contradistinction to, say, the recent Hindu-fundamentalist reconstruction of the Indian nation. But the India/South Asia business is not framed as a political statement; in fact, the book is introduced as not being about South Asians at all. ‘Without understanding cultures other than one’s own, we are reduced. With South Asians – both in Asia and today dispersed on every other continent – making up a fifth of the worlds’ population, it is essential to undertake this task,’ T. Richard Blurton concludes in his introduction, leaving the reader with the lingering thought that this book is for non-South Asians who need to understand South Asians, because sooner or later they’re going to be overrun by them. Unless that intro is simply

an advert for the importance and value of Western museums, and their continuing to hold objects that came from someplace else. The objects here ‘come’ from the British Museum. They span Palaeolithic tools (from about 1 million bce) through to contemporary works of art by the likes of Bharti Kher. Blurton gallops through that timeframe at breakneck pace, pausing, usefully, to explore the relationship between the urban empires of the plains and the more freewheeling upland areas, as well as evidence for South Asia’s historic cosmopolitanism thanks to its trade networks. And pausing too to explain the key figures who shaped the continent – among them the Buddha, Mahavira, and the Buddhist emperor Ashoka (who ruled from c. 268–232 bce). But while Blurton points out that Ashoka’s iconography can now be found in the new Indian republic’s iconography (a contemporary banknote is displayed as evidence), he doesn’t really explore the extent to which, until the nineteenth century, it was buried beneath a Hindu ascendency. The focus on what was dug up or unearthed conceals the reasons some of these things remained hidden.

Similarly, many of the objects displayed are accompanied by credits to the Western collectors and archaeologists who either dug them up or donated them to the British Museum: Beatrice de Cardi (an early-twentiethcentury archaeologist) Collection; the Bridge family; Sir Harold Arthur Deane, etc. The colonial era, or ‘the British period’, as it is stated here, is downplayed – ‘by the 19th century, painters were demonstrating a mastery of European perspective’, Blurton states, without fully going into the reasons why; a sword looted following the eighteenth-century sack of Tipu Sultan’s capital, Seringapatam, is presented without much discussion of how it ended up in Britain. It comes to a head in the author’s discussion of ‘Company painting’ – works that captured the flora and fauna, peoples and customs of India, by local painters for British clients. But here introduced without a clear link to their relationships to the cataloguing, exploiting and pigeonholing that define the colonial impulse. Perhaps, then, objects alone can only tell us so much. Mark Rappolt

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd Picador, £14.99 (softcover) After the breakout success of Breasts and Eggs (2020), the latest of Mieko Kawakami’s novels to appear in English conceals its ambition in deceptive simplicity. All the Lovers in the Night is, for the most part, a three-hander. Fuyuko is a proofreader in her mid-thirties, living alone in Tokyo and confined to her introspective rituals of reading and researching. She takes extended phone calls with her gregarious boss, Hijiri, and drinks dizzying amounts of sake to quell her anxiety. On an impulse (inebriated) trip to the cultural centre, she meets Mitsutsuka and, over a course of weekly coffee-dates, her nervous excitement develops into an infatuation – though, for the reader, each conversation seems to strain under the weight of her introversion.

Fuyuko is for much of the novel someone who feels at a remove from the world around her. She frequently stands aimlessly before the mirror, looking in her appearance, ‘mottled with shadows’, for clues to her inner state – moments of fraught, anxious vanity. In recurring dreams, ‘for whatever reason I would stumble on an image of myself’. Kawakami hews to a realism that is clean, detailed, but well controlled – opting at times to emphasise Fuyuko’s juvenility when drunk; hurrying the reader through figurative expressions at times of emotional intensity. As the novel increasingly spotlights Fuyuko and Mitsutsuka, it is Fuyuko’s modulating relationship with Hijiri that becomes its strongest suit. Both are grappling with how to live their

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lives, negotiating patriarchal expectation as much as desires unique and shared; seeking to differentiate themselves, to remember, to learn how to focus on that which demands it. Hijiri’s energy radiates through Fuyuko, but they seem to leave an impression on each other. Kawakami’s dialogue can sometimes tell more than it shows, and the ending grasps for greater conclusivity than it needs. But nestled in the novel is a broader, almost didactic intention that resonates: in one of Fuyuko’s proofs, she describes an author (our author?), and how ‘what he wanted to capture in his writing wasn’t hopelessness, but hope’. Kawakami’s creation inspires hope in depicting the fraught but transformative act of dismantling one’s barriers to the world. Alexander Leissle

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Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au Fitzcarraldo Editions, £9.99 (softcover) An unnamed narrator takes her mother on a trip to Japan; they visit galleries, have the odd meal. The tale is punctuated by the narrator’s occasional ruminations on art, the general scenery and her mother, in language that is plain and almost wholly stripped of metaphors. Yet reading Melbourne-based writer Jessica Au’s second novel is far from boring; rather, it’s something akin to a meditative experience. In fact, it is so relaxing that you begin to wonder if the author is attempting to figure out the minimum level of excitement required of a novel to keep readers engaged. This cultivated mildness – in tone, in story and in character – is the most distinctive feature of this novella. Its scrupulous avoidance of anything contrived and symbolic opens the door to another kind of pleasure: an exploratory and motiveless way of looking at the world. Of course, such unwilled flow could be the result of great effort and design – but the book’s overall effect is similar to that of a sculpture the narrator encounters. ‘[The work] appeared not to be made by hand at all. Rather, it was more like a rock… shaped just so by the wind or by rain or by time, such that its shallow angles and shadows represented a face in some inexplicable way, and so was all the more surprising and beautiful, because it was both an accident, and a symbol.’ Similarly, one could read this novel as the literary

equivalent of a scholar’s rock: ‘naturally’ beautiful and unintentional. Precision and detail are other defining traits of the book, filled as it were with meticulous observations. Of a solo hike, the narrator notes: ‘There were dense ferns, thin black trunks, and in the distance a mist so deep it seemed to be almost mauve against the green.’ But the same style also extends to the narrator’s reportage of her own emotional weather, which is viewed from an anesthetised distance. The narrator recalls an episode during her waitressing days, when a customer tried to engage her in conversation during the restaurant’s rush hour, when she could not afford to chitchat. ‘I could not understand how the man was unable to tell the difference between my actions and my feelings, which were so strong and pure by then that I could feel them radiating from me like some kind of heat,’ she says. ‘When he finally stopped talking, I went back to the kitchen and put the empty bottle in the recycling.’ This is one of the novel’s tensest episodes, which again speaks to Au’s monastic style. That said, the book’s emotional restraint is good for one thing. It tackles, with fresh decorum, a typically quarrelsome theme in post-Joy Luck Club diasporic fiction: the relationship between the immigrant Asian mother and the daughter who grew up in the West. Instead of the usual reckonings, there are silences. The mother’s

biographical background is skeletal – she speaks Cantonese and at some point left Hong Kong for an unspecified Western country. There is no mention of the narrator’s father. What we get instead is close observation of actions and appearances (‘I noticed that [my mother] continued to dress with care: a brown shirt with pearl buttons, tailored pants, and small items of jade’), without any deep psychological illumination. Perhaps the author finds such backstories too intrusive or contrived, yet her observational method does capture an aspect of the migrant Asian mother-daughter relationship authentically: a stubborn reticence about one’s familial past, matched by reservoirs of profound, mostly inarticulable feeling. In the book, this reservoir of feeling is accessed by a sudden, accidental plunge. During a hike, the narrator spots a dog, its ‘colouring somewhere between a fox and a coyote’. Then comes a revelation: ‘I thought of my mother, and how some day, in the future, I would go with my sister to her flat… with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away’. It’s the most moving passage in the book, in which the narrator imagines going through her mother’s belongings, room by room, item by item. After such a devastating vision, the novel slips back into its usual mode of stoic, balmlike blandness. The narrator returns to her hike, stops to make tea and treks on again. Adeline Chia

Cursed Rabbit by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur Honford Star, £10.99 (softcover) Cursed Bunny was originally published in 2017, two years after the phrase ‘Hell Joseon’ was popularised in South Korea, used by a younger generation as a satirical term to describe the nightmarish socioeconomic crisis they’re facing: a lack of stable, well-paid jobs, entrenched social expectations, an increasing wealth gap. A series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales, the English translation of which was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. The fictional short-stories blend the genres of magical realism, horror, fantasy and folklore, with some of those reading like critiques of social standards upheld by contemporary society (that don’t just pertain to South Korea). In ‘The Head’, for instance, a woman is

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confronted by a creature who lives inside her toilet, and who is made up of all the woman’s bodily effluence. Disgusted, she does her best to dispose of it, only to find it reemerging decades later, having grown into a beautiful young version of herself – and a vengeful one at that. It’s a story that speaks to the demands of ‘feminine perfection’ – a rejection of the abject parts of us and the weight of social taboos. In ‘The Embodiment’, a young woman finds herself pregnant – a side effect (in this bizarre world) of taking contraception pills for too long; she is pressured by an unsympathetic midwife into finding a father to help her raise ‘a normal child’, but upon failing, gives birth to a wriggling amorphous blob of blood. What a woman

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chooses to do with her body is of no consequence. Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s ceo and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a down-and-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell? Fi Churchman

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Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, £14.99 (hardcover) That time is a mother – and a ‘muhfucker’, in case you were wondering – is an observation that appears about halfway through Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poetry (following Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016). At once casual and world-weary, melodramatic and self-evidently, heartbreakingly true, this assertion inflects each of the 28 poems included here. Many of them are set in wintery working-class Connecticut, around which Vuong grew up and which provided the setting for his 2019 semiautobiographical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The poems describe domestic abuse, factory jobs, addiction, suicide, love and desire as experienced by the boy who has become the poet, the son of the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American serviceman. Time Is a Mother is also filled with longing for lost or never-existing worlds, while exploring the possibility of (re)creating them, of altering trajectories with words alone: ‘all I have to do is write/the right words & I’m/beside you (again) but’, Vuong writes in ‘Dear T’, that trailing but encapsulating the possible limits of his power to rewrite what is done. The T in ‘Dear T’ is a teenage boy lying beside the narrator in a field of snow, smiling not in happy exhaustion but because he has been thrown from a wrecked Mazda (or that is how I read it – references across poems aid in the sometimes

forensic picking-apart of interlocking narrative lines) and is coming to terms with the knowledge that ‘the stars/are just stars & you know/ we’ll only live once/this time’. Which doesn’t stop the writer from hoping, in the face of all evidence, that ‘maybe I can build a boy/out of the silences inside maybe/we can cease without dying fuck/without tears falling’. Another shocking pileup of love, steel and self-invention is summoned in a poem titled ‘American Legend’, this time imagining the author causing the car in which he and his father are travelling, a ‘Ford big enough/for us to never/ touch’, to roll over, flinging their bodies around inside with such force that amid ‘the sudden/ wetness warm/everywhere, he slammed/into me &/we hugged/for the first time/in decades’. Bringing the family dog into the story, Vuong crafts a tale from the most maudlin of details, in which his father sends him forth as a writer (‘… put it/down on the page, son, he said/one night, after telling me/why he did what he did/ with his life, shitfaced/on Hennessy’), in which the dog escapes certain death (briefly sniffing the older man’s cooling body before heading off ‘into the trees, into her second/future’) and in which Vuong himself ‘walked from the wreck/ till the yards became/years, the dirt road/a city’. Explaining himself, and the transformation of his life onto the page and out into the world, he

concludes, ‘I did it to hold/my father, to free/ my dog. It’s an old story, Ma./Anyone can tell it.’ This is misdirection on a couple of fronts. The older, primal story Vuong has to tell is that of Rose, his mother – named right there in the collection’s title but disguised, typically, in an ironic turn of phrase that masks the deeper, the almost unspeakable. In ‘Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker’ he charts his mother’s decline into illness and death through the record of her online purchases, one of the final entries showing up as ‘Birthday Card – “Son, We Will Always Be Together”, Snoopy design’. ‘How you say what you mean changes what you say,’ he writes in ‘Not Even’, remarking on the phonetic similarities (and thus potential for confusion) between the Vietnamese words for love and weakness. This pitching of tone is Vuong’s formal play, deployed virtuosically across these poems: a syncopation with which the poet, writing like a patient on oxygen, pauses to breathe midclause, breaking a sentence into two images, two thoughts and two meanings, transforming violence into a caress, family trauma into the birth of a child, the child into a poet. ‘… Ma my art these/corpses I lay/side by side on/the page to tell you/our present tense/was not too late’, he writes in ‘Dear Rose’, the penultimate poem in this indispensable collection. David Terrien

Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck, translated by David McKay Chatto & Windus, £16.99 (hardcover)

Flemish poet and novelist Charlotte Van den Broeck’s first nonfiction book, a bestseller upon its 2019 publication, features 13 stories about failed building projects in America and Europe from 1607 to 2011. Most conclude with the rumoured or confirmed suicide of the architects involved, which leads to musings by the author on links between creativity and self-destruction. The author quotes from Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s s,m,l,xl (1995): ‘Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence’. And, to borrow further from the urological lexicon, it could be said that Van den Broeck’s book highlights erectile dysfunction. We begin in the Belgian city of Turnhout with a strikingly horrific tale: a young girl nearly drowns in a municipal swimming pool. Our

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attention is gripped as tightly as the unfortunate girl’s ponytail, which has snagged on a suction outlet. She survives, but it’s possible the nameless architect’s subsequent death was a suicide. The disasters mount, with tales of twisted spires, spiralling budgets, impossible compromises and critical rejection. The deathcount and terror climax in 1922 when a blizzard causes the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, dc, to collapse. How does it feel to be the architect Reginald Geare, who can’t get work thereafter? He kills himself in 1927. Some of the critical failures, the bad reviews, seem inexplicable today. Why were Eduard van der Nüll and August Sicard von Sicardsburg – the designers of the wonderful Vienna State Opera – ‘slaughtered in the press’? Van den

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Broeck concludes they were killed by fickle fashion, both dead within three months of each other, before the building ever opened. Then there are tales of jealousy and artistic competitiveness turned sour: Borromini attacking Bernini, or the outsider Stefano Ittar, architect of Valletta’s National Library, a splendid example of sandstone Sicilian-style baroque, brought low by chippy Maltese malcontents. The presiding spirit in these stories is the Cyril Connolly of The Unquiet Grave (1944), quoted here asking how an artist can live without a masterpiece. Felled by hubris, perhaps, but what about those architects whose mediocrity, as Van den Broeck worries, ‘leads to stillborn work’? Fortunately her work is very much alive. John Quin

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, translated by Kong Rithdee River Books, £9.99 (softcover) A debilitating melancholia fills Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s second novel: a curlicued family saga set in a Siam beset by World War II, floods, anti-Chinese riots and era-defining rebellions and coups. The patriarch at its centre longs to return to his real home in China, from which he fled due to war and drought. One of his sons, a morose soldier with a penchant for woodwork, spends nine months pining for a lost love ‘amidst the sawdust of his miniature boats’. And a foul-mouthed daughter mocks life by mocking everything. ‘She was like a knocked over glass… its shards scattered and gashing the skin of onlookers,’ writes Nitiprapha. These and other histrionic characters quickly seem less like real, rounded people than extreme weather patterns – typhoons of emotion, angry cumulonimbi set to burst. Nitiprapha’s first novel, The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth (2013), won her the 2015 Southeast Asian Writers Award. Judges hailed its melodrama and mannerisms redolent of trashy Thai soap-operas and its rhapsodic prose steeped in a neogothic cornucopia of music and floral references. Through a magical-realist disposition that finds omens in the mundane and minute, that book questions Thai notions of family unity, and, as the translator of both novels, film-critic Kong Rithdee puts it, ‘imagines a tale of tragic romance in which hot tears and sad lovers become faint echoes of Thailand’s larger hopelessness’.

Many of the same qualities hold true for Memories of the Memories… (which, in 2018, picked up the same award as did her first, making Nitiprapha the first woman to win twice). It, too, consists of episodic, hazily connected, almost picaresque chapters. Its characters are also maladjusted types prone to vituperative outbursts or crying fits, while the supernaturally charged Thailand they inhabit also teems with natural aberrations that serve as macropolitical premonitions or ripples (at one point, a woman is tipped off about the impending Second World War through ‘a radio report about a swarm of diabolical bees that mass-stung a woman to death’). And once again, Rithdee has preserved the free-flowing lyricism of the Thai original with aplomb. Many sentences are so melodious and addictive that questions about what has been gained, as well as lost, in the process are left hanging. Yet a sense of diminishing returns is also hard to shake. Take the first character introduced: the third-generation grandson, Dao. In the opening pages, he emerges as a young boy prone to drowning himself in thought. He imagines himself as an ant traversing ‘dark patches of moss interspersed with small plants whose names he didn’t know’. He develops an instant dislike to the book’s titular Black Rose cat (named after a popular big-band song and the bizarre fur patterns cascading down its back), which uses telepathy to send ‘idiotic

interjections into his head’. He listens intently to Grandma Sri’s tales of the strange creatures encountered at temple fairs, such as ‘the bird with golden down that spoke an ancient Khmer language without being taught’. At times, you gorge on the buffet of overripe Márquezian visions – but they feel like too much extraneous world-building at others. That said, each character’s self-absorption is, in a way, the whole point: a hereditary trait born of a certain liminality or outsiderness. The book to which Memories of the Memories… has been most illustratively compared, former Thai Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj’s Four Reigns (1953), is a chronicle of a highborn lady whose life is deeply intertwined with important political events between the reign of King Rama V (1868–1910) and King Rama VIII (1935–46). The trajectory of Nitiprapha’s Chinese settlers – ‘a prototype of the Thai middle-class that would flourish in the following decades’, writes Rithdee in his translator’s note – also spans four reigns. But history glides right past them; the only thing they are deeply intertwined with are fleeting lovers or the labyrinthine enigmas of their own egos. Yet, through an intoxicating micropolitics of the immigrant family – wherein yearning and the sublime offer a consolation for low social standing, and continuously remade memories provide a fragile sense of home – Nitiprapha memorably evokes a diaspora’s dreams and disenchantment. Max Crosbie-Jones

Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham Our era’s version of the bildungsroman is the internet-inflected personal nonfiction essay. American writer Larissa Pham’s addition to that lineage, Pop Song, bounces from Susan Sontag to Instagram and Stevie Nicks to help navigate ways to describe love, joy, trauma and loss. Structured as an extended breakup song, the book loosely follows the arc of a relationship from sweet beginnings to fractured ends. Pham captures a certain youthful trajectory, full of self-absorption and self-consciousness: the voracious desire for experience, the attempts at orientation, an earnestness in atomising the highs and lows. She extols art that allows her to feel what the maker was feeling, while disclosing her

Catapult, $16.95 (softcover)

love of dancing, the throes of her sex life and her draw to the physical directness of bdsm. Her ambivalent tracing of distance, both emotional and physical – how images, words and gestures can be both a model and a hurdle for sharing – is the most nuanced and engaging aspect of the book. Though for someone attuned to emotional and sexual domination, Pham’s sense of cultural dominance feels oddly unexamined. She occasionally nods to how her Vietnamese heritage encircled her sense of growing up in America, how ‘nowhere was home’. On a visit to New Mexico early in the book, Pham writes of indigenous culture alongside her own feelings of displacement, and vows ‘to write about it,

Summer 2022

as I am writing now, however small these words might be against that history’. Which sounds like a call to action; though what follows is an exploration of artist Agnes Martin, a Canadian via New York who settled in New Mexico. It’s a pattern throughout the book: Pham finds her solace in oversize, blue-chip artists like Yayoi Kusama, Jenny Saville, Nan Goldin. The book culminates in a trip to Shanghai, where an encounter with Louise Bourgeois’s work leads to an acceptance of her single status. In her Pop Song, Pham shapes a good tune, but you’re left with the feeling that she could have picked more interesting backing singers, and the hope that her better songs are yet to come. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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Reprographics by The Logical Choice. ArtReview Asia is printed in the United Kingdom and China. 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 Asia (issn No: 2052-5346) is published four times per year 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

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on the cover Lawrence Lek, Geomancer, 2017, cgi film, sound, 48 min. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 15, 29 and 77 are by A. Sivanandan, When Memory Dies, 1997

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Eternal Returns

I spent the first 25 years of my life in a small town called Nagore, in Tamil Nadu. Once I had left, it took me a further 45 years to return to the place – this only in connection to the current shooting of a biopic-style documentary about me. Back when I was growing up, there were at least 50 large ponds in our town. I never saw them dry up. The water was so clear that one could see the sandbed below. Boys, who, anywhere else, might generally get away with urinating in a town pond, couldn’t because here the transparent water would expose such acts. Instead, their surfaces were covered by lotuses and lilies galore. One such beautiful pond was Eechankulam, adjacent to Eechanthottam, a date-palm grove. The grove was about one kilometre in circumference; my friends and I would circle it about ten times, drink the pond water, take a bath in it and head back home happily. Today Eechanthottam is barren, and Eechankulam looks like a sewageworks with plastic waste all around it. The lotuses and the lilies are long gone. Back then, there was a massive thicket of tamarind trees behind the Perumal temple. It had existed since the time of my ammaachi (grandmother). During the Second World War, she and thaathaa (grandfather) had first come to Tamil Nadu by crossed Burma and reaching West Bengal by foot, then later settling in Nagore. As for me, I had to walk through the pulianthope every day to get home. There were no houses in the area and Tamarind trees are known to house ghosts. The young women of our village who committed suicide chose these trees from which to hang themselves. And I had seen a couple of bodies in such a state myself. Instead of travelling to heaven, the spirits of these

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When you look for your roots, writes Charu Nivedita, you risk finding little more than a hole women remain in the trees. Such ghosts were known to fancy the eldest son of a household, attack him spitefully and leave him to bleed to death. I am the eldest son in my family, so every time I passed through that territory I would chant all the names of god. Although, in truth, no god could calm my fear. “Do not turn back and look if someone calls you by your name,” ammaachi had advised. Some ghosts called out my name, but despite following her advice, anxiety lurked inside me even as I moved to the city later. By the way, there are no ghosts in the city; the living themselves behave like spectres. During my visit, I went back to the pulianthope. The trees were mere skeletons, surrounded by houses and other buildings. That’s the main story here – trees have given way to houses. My favourite spot in town, the library – my alma mater – now looked like a dumpster. It was open, but not a soul, not even the librarian, was present. When I asked a janitor about the librarian, she said, “Not in yet”. I went back to the library four times that day. I understood that no one ever visited the library because no one read. But I did have one unique experience during my stay, which would never have been possible in a city. Photos: Anbu Sathiyan & Oli Murugavel

The director of the film was looking for a ten-year-old boy who resembled me to cast in the biopic. When we found someone it turned out that the boy’s parents weren’t around; he was not a local but had come on a visit to Nagore Dargah with his grandmother and sister. When we asked their permission to allow the boy to be with us for the shoot for one whole day, they agreed without hesitation and sent him with us. They only took our phone number. One can’t imagine this kind of trust in the cities. Instead, they would immediately report us as potential child abductors. The director asked me about the spot I visited the most as a boy. I grew up in a slum in extreme deprivation. There was a graveyard behind our house, about a kilometre away. Since we had no toilet facility inside our house, we had to go to the graveyard if we had to take a dump. We could wash after in Vettaru, a river that ran adjacent to the cemetery. But there were two main threats: one could get bitten by a snake while taking a dump or die of a Valaikkadiyan (hook-nosed sea-snake) bite while washing in Vettaru. Yet, as an adolescent, I loved spending time in the graveyard because it was the one place I could masturbate without any disturbance. The connection then was practical rather than philosophical; had I known about Georges Bataille, I would have masturbated contemplating the innate connection between death and sexuality. But perhaps that’s something for the film. Translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash

UGO RONDINONE

BURN SHINE FLY

SCUOLA GRANDE SAN GIOVANNI

EVANGELISTA DI VENEZIA

APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 17