ArtReview December 2023 by ArtReview

Power 100

NO ONE BUILDS A LEGACY BY STANDING STILL

PROGRAM: JANUARY – MARCH 2024 TIA THUY NGUYEN

TURSIC & MILLE

Paris, Matignon January 11 – February 24

New York, Upper East Side January 11 – February 24

SEYNI AWA CAMARA JOHN MCALLISTER _ ERIC CROES

DANIEL GIBSON _

Paris, Turenne January 11 – February 24

TSHERIN SHERPA Paris, Turenne, Front Space January 11 – February 17

TODD BIENVENU _ ELIOT GREENWALD Brussels January 18 – February 24

SASHA FERRÉ New York, Tribeca January 19 – March 2

MARCUS JAHMAL _ CHRIS SUCCO Shanghai January – February

HA CHONG-HYUN Gstaad February 10 – March

ROBY DWI ANTONO London January 12 – February 17

Tia-Thuy Nguyen, The sun rises brightly (Nắng lên thắp đầy) (detail), 2023 Embellishment on canvas - 100x140 cm, 39 3/8 x 55 1/8 in Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech - Photo: Ngo Nhat Hoang

Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys (Red background) (detail), 1980 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas. 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in) © Andy Warhol Foundation / DACS, London 2023. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi

The Joseph Beuys Portraits

Andy Warhol London December 2023—February 2024

Tomma Abts Njideka Akunyili Crosby Anni Albers Josef Albers Francis Alÿs Mamma Andersson Diane Arbus Michael Armitage Lucas Arruda Ruth Asawa Katherine Bernhardt Huma Bhabha Michaël Borremans Joe Bradley R. Crumb Noah Davis Raoul De Keyser Roy DeCarava Philip-Lorca diCorcia Stan Douglas Marlene Dumas Marcel Dzama William Eggleston Dan Flavin Suzan Frecon Isa Genzken Felix Gonzalez-Torres

On Kawara Toba Khedoori Paul Klee Barbara Kruger Shio Kusaka Yayoi Kusama Sherrie Levine Liu Ye Nate Lowman Kerry James Marshall Gordon Matta-Clark John McCracken Sarah Michelson Joan Mitchell Giorgio Morandi Juan Muñoz Oscar Murillo Alice Neel Jockum Nordström Chris Ofili Palermo Raymond Pettibon Elizabeth Peyton Sigmar Polke Neo Rauch Ad Reinhardt Jason Rhoades

David Zwirner

new york los angeles

london hong kong paris online

Gerhard Richter Bridget Riley Thomas Ruff Robert Ryman Fred Sandback Dana Schutz Richard Serra Steven Shearer Josh Smith Al Taylor Diana Thater Wolfgang Tillmans Rirkrit Tiravanija Luc Tuymans Andra Ursuţa Merrill Wagner James Welling Franz West Doug Wheeler Christopher Williams Jordan Wolfson Rose Wylie Yun Hyong-keun Lisa Yuskavage Portia Zvavahera

DONNA HUANCA

VENAS DEL CAPULLO November 9 – December 23, 2023

NEW YORK

DECEMBER 2023 — MARCH 2024

PARIS SHIM MOON-SEUP CHEN KE LAURENT GRASSO MR. JOHAN CRETEN THILO HEINZMANN GABRIEL DE LA MORA CHIHO AOSHIMA HONG KONG XIE QI OTANI WORKSHOP IZUMI KATO

TOKYO ARYO TOH DJOJO LAURENT GRASSO NICK DOYLE SHANGHAI

NEW YORK

HENRY GUNDERSON TAKASHI MURAKAMI MATHILDE DENIZE

GÉRARD SCHNEIDER JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL

DANIELLE ORCHARD XAVIER VEILHAN

XIYAO WANG JOHN HENDERSON KATHIA SAINT-HILAIRE

SEOUL

GAHEE PARK JASON BOYD KINSELLA

DOWN TO EARTH LOS ANGELES OPENING SOON

Sprüth Magers

Berlin Karen Kilimnik November – December John Bock Ex-Ego-Gynt November – December Pamela Rosenkranz Alien Blue September – December

London Peter Fischli David Weiss November – February Keith Arnatt Eden 69–89 November – February

Los Angeles GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS Louise Lawler November – February Nora Turato February – April

New York Kaari Upson Body as Landscape September – December Astrid Klein January – March spruethmagers.com

ArtReview vol 75 no 9 December 2023

dv Most of the time the world seems engineered to make most of us (ArtReview’s therapist is trying to get it to project as less aloof – the idea being that somehow form equals function and thus the projecting will effect a core change too: seems to ArtReview like its therapist has been mainlining rather too much E.H. Gombrich, but in the interests of projecting openmindedness, ArtReview is giving it a try) feel powerless. Engineered (yes, you have to go back to the top to connect this) by people, to be clear, not the product of the world’s inherent engineering. Indeed, as we look out at a horizon of conflict and violence that lies before, behind and to either side of us, it can seem as if any talk of ‘power’ in terms of contemporary art (or culture more generally) is at best laughable, if not utterly ridiculous. At least if one means ‘power’ in the sense of a force that comes with any degree of agency. And yet global conflicts, and the rhetoric of intolerance, antagonism and self-righteousness that frequently comes in their wake (and does seep into spheres such as culture), constantly remind us that human societies tend to operate according to power structures. It might be a bit much to say that that’s human nature, but the evidence suggests that it’s certainly a learned condition. And as a nonhuman itself, that’s something that ArtReview is surely qualified to judge. As opposed to its writers and staff, that is. It’s important to project the separation here. As ArtReview’s therapist is always telling it. Given that this issue contains its annual Power list, some of you might be wondering whether or not ArtReview is qualified to judge relative power within the artworld. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, as Juvenal once put it (although that reference is perhaps unnecessarily complex – and ArtReview’s therapist is trying to make it project its ideas in simple terms – because while one of the reasons ArtReview makes its list is in response to that ancient question, it nevertheless

Dust up

necessarily exposes itself to it in the process). The simple answer is that it isn’t. And perhaps it would prefer an artworld in which power dynamics were absent (that’s not the therapist talking btw). But ArtReview deals with the deck it’s given. It’s realistic as well as idealistic. So it relies on a panel of around 40 people from around the world to suggest which individuals are affecting the kind of art being produced and (as importantly) made visible wherever they may be. Then watches with glee as their learned conditioning takes over and they fight about what being the most powerful people in one place means to someone somewhere else entirely. Which is particularly contentious in a sphere that is now governed by artworlds rather than one artworld, and art histories rather than art history. Which ArtReview will admit rather mitigates against the idea of one Power list to rule them all. Which is also why ArtReview’s tech bods are working on a nonlinear list. (Despite the fact that ArtReview’s editors keep pointing out that that is a contradiction – but what do they know?) The 40 combatants are asked to ‘judge’ power in terms of how individuals influence the kind of art being produced right now, to focus on people who have been active over the past 12 months and to focus on those whose influence is more than local. And as locals may not be able to judge the last, that’s where the panel as a whole comes into play. btw, the 40 people remain anonymous in order to avoid the actions of power while they are judging power (although there is an argument that would suggest that either being smote or invited to an all-expenses-paid three-course meal might lead them to a better understanding of the operations of power). So, what’s the point of all this? To suggest that no one knows anything? Or that collectively we can figure something out? Or that there are some things you have to judge for yourself? Perhaps all three. But ArtReview couldn’t possibly say that; after all, its therapist keeps telling it that you people always want it to project a clear, definitive and authoritative vibe. ArtReview

Make up

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Dziewannas (After Branislav Simoncik), 2023, oil on canvas, 10' 2 ¹⁄16 × 82 ¹¹⁄16" © Paulina Olowska, courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo by Paweł Dudziak.

SQUELCHY GARDEN MULES AND MAMUNAS

PAULINA OLOWSKA

London

pacegallery.com

ESS RL

JENSE IT

T CH A

N OHNM O V

OND POW

SPEAKERS Elisa Silva Hernando Chindoy Paola Audrey Ndengue Rasha Salti Klaudia Schifferle Deborah–Joyce Holman Menelaos Karamaghiolis Christopher Kulendran Thomas Simone Fattal and more

26–28 January 2024 Zuoz Switzerland & Livestream

With a special cello performance by Franziska Aigner CURATORS Daniel Baumann Hans Ulrich Obrist Koyo Kouoh Philip Ursprung

Get your tickets now at engadin-art-talks.ch

A members club evoking the curiosity of an avid art collector’s home.

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December 8–10, 2023 Miami Beach Convention Center

Maria Nepomuceno, Treze bocas (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

∙GIULIA ANDREANI∙

L’IMPRODUTTIVA 29 October 2023 10 March 2024

Thursday—Sunday Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia – Italy collezionemaramotti.org

Power 100 Introduction 41 Power Players artists, art fair directors, collectors & philanthropists, curators, gallerists, museum directors, thinkers 43

Artwork by Feifei Zhou and Maria Saeki, for Elizabeth Fenn’s field report on pestilence in Feral Atlas, 2021–ongoing

Power 100 The List 50 Artist Project by Feral Atlas 98

Artwork by Feifei Zhou and Maria Saeki, for Michael G. Hadfield’s field report on rosy wolfsnail (Euglandina rose) for Feral Atlas, 2021–ongoing

YEARS

Piero Atchugarry Gallery Dec. 3, 2023 – Jan 31, 2024 5520 NE 4th Ave. Miami. FL. 33137

OCEAN HIGHWAY N e w Yo r K - Pa ri s - ST BA RTS

Fine Art Shipping

www.ocean-highway.com 5 5 E 5 9th Str eet, 8t h F l . NEW YO RK NY 10022 – 64 6 9 80 642 2

OCEAN HIGHWAY-23.indd 1

18/10/2023 15:37

Genres of Arabic Poetry The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s decision to celebrate the Year of Arabic Poetry re�ects its commitment to preserving cultural heritage and presenting it to the world, recognizing the value of poetry in imparting wisdom and knowledge. The Year of Arabic Poetry also signi�es the Kingdom’s unwavering support for intercultural dialogue. Poetic genres in ancient Arabic poetry are concerned with the objective behind the poem and the broader theme on which the poem’s words and meters are based. The most famous ones are pride, praise, satire, wisdom, romance (Ghazal), and elegy, among many others. Praise describes the good things in someone’s character, be it generosity, kindness, or any other noble trait. It can apply to one

person or an entire tribe. This form of poetry is widely prevalent and famous throughout Arab history. Elegy is the recognition of the virtuous qualities of the deceased, where the poet expresses the pain and sorrow su�ered by him as well as the family and admirers of the departed soul. It is a condolence and a call for revenge if the subject was murdered . Wisdom is concerned with stating the right thing and advising. Wise poets resorted to this form of poetry to recommend others to stay away

from desires and evil, get closer to righteousness, adopt good habits, and tell the truth—all through the use of simple words and a chain of thoughts. Ghazal is the description of the beloved as well as her beauty and strengths in poems. It mentions what the lover does for their love in terms of sacri�ces, displays of a�ection and fear, or complaining due to detachment and distance from her. Satire is known for belittling the opponent or denigrating or underestimating everyone. This style emerged since eternity and evolved into poems that reached us in the past centuries. Pride is centered on the poet being proud of himself, the tribe he hails from, or the ancestry he belongs to. He brags about his children, wealth, and power, besides describing one’s might in battles and their gallantry. It also talks about the money given away to those who ask for it, as well as the various virtues and matters of pride.

17—21 JAN 2024

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Power 100

THE POWER 100 2023 And nothing has changed Everything has changed The Power 100 list is where, every year, ArtReview exposes, enlists and accounts for the workings of international contemporary art. Not in the usual sense in which ArtReview does this (critical analysis and general commentary about the artworks that are put forward into the world), but rather in terms of the more general infrastructure of the artworld. Why is certain art being made or seen? How is it seen? (And the reversed version of those two questions.) Who decides what is seen? And what, more generally, is the relationship between making and seeing? It’s an attempt to illuminate some of the professionalised artworld’s obscured corners and track its shifts and changes over the past 12 months. It’s also an attempt to chart the reality of an ‘industry’ that can be seen at times to preach one thing and practise another, often making it feel like a world of confusion. Which some would argue is a means of keeping the artworld an exclusive world, but that ArtReview would suggest is (also) one of the ways in which it more generally mirrors the world in which we live. So, the Power list is a ranking of the 100 living individuals who are shaping art now. Or, more accurately, a little more than 100 individuals, given that some entries comprise groups or collectives. This year all of them are human. (This is not always the case – two years ago a blockchain protocol was at the top of the list; but then again, two years ago most people’s agency was restricted by a nonhuman entity in the form of covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns it triggered.) Making the list is a process – one that involves no small amount of questioning, discussion, bouts of frantic WhatsApp messaging and then going over everything all over again. Who should be where is a subject on which no one really agrees. What makes someone powerful in London or New York is not necessarily what makes someone powerful in Lagos or Kuala Lumpur. Consequently, the end result is often not what anyone imagined it might be at the beginning of the process. Indeed, a quick straw-poll right now might posit some Chatgptwielding, ai-spawned avatar as leading the list, given the way everyone is currently losing their heads about the looming threat of artificial intelligence.

December 2023

But gauging spheres of influence and schools of thought is about more than momentary fads. Art is constantly changing, and the past few years have seen no small number of upheavals. So, when ArtReview came through consulting its secret global panel (they’re secret so they don’t get harassed or bullied, but there are about 40 of them spread globally, and chances are they live near you), keeping tab of references and impacts, debating and rechecking its outcomes, what emerged on the other side was something more surprising, in that a large part of it was familiar: established artists, who have long been around, and their attendant galleries and institutions. Plus ça change? Though it’s more subtle than knowns and unknowns: at the top are artists who are using their work, and the platform their success provides, to shape communities and push at the boundaries of what making art and sharing it means today, from Steve McQueen’s film about the Grenfell Tower disaster, as a catalyst for legislative change, to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s open-ended interactions, from Chiang Mai to New York, as both an artist and curator, and Nan Goldin’s long-running and increasingly consequential leveraging of her art practice as a platform for wider activism. In parallel to this is an increased prominence, after several faltering years, of what you might call art’s establishment figures. Four of the people on the current list were on ArtReview’s very first Power List, in 2002 (when ArtReview was a spritely fifty-three). Then, as now, Jay Jopling, Larry Gagosian, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo were on the list (though Pace gallery was also present, headed by Arne Glimcher rather than his son Marc); ten years later, on the 2012 list, were 19 entries still present this year. The presence of these longstanding figures could be taken as indications of a wider consolidation. While the effects of the covid pandemic are still lingering, the artworld’s established forms and systems are reemerging from the pandemic period, with a corresponding resurgence of the structures and edifices of the art market – its galleries and fairs, and its persistent if somewhat more wrinkled faces, like the Rolling Stones of art. But as ever, there are multiple threads and narratives that run through and overlap in the list. There has been, in recent years, a steady and significant increase of those on the list from beyond the European–North American axis of influence, with art scenes that are finally finding their own voice on the international stage. Running through this year’s list are themes of ecology, Indigeneity and smallscale activism in an unevenly globalised world, and questions about whether or not artists – and art institutions – are able to influence the debates around the important questions of our time. There are, inevitably, contradictions and tensions. The centralising forces of the art market can only exert themselves so far, while art and inspiration might stoke more localised versions of power and agency away from the traditional centres. One important function of ArtReview’s Power 100 is to attempt to map geopolitical conflicts that aren’t about weapons and resources, but about aesthetics and ideas, and how art exists purposefully in a global society, where what happens on one side of the world affects those on the other – whether we like it or not. Back when the Power 100 list began, David Bowie was crooning ‘And nothing has changed / Everything has changed’ on his album Heathen (2002). So while some of the artworld’s long-present power players are here now, changes are afoot. Perhaps among the list now are the coming years’ number ones. The artist project in this issue is by Feral Atlas. For more information, see page 98

ArtReview

POWER PLAYERS ARTISTS Artists constitute this year’s top ten. What’s apparent is that an artist is now more than just a maker of images and objects, being also a central node in a network of people and a galvanising force for a movement or a community. Last year the list featured a separate category for ‘activist movements’; this year that category has disappeared, arguably because forms of activism, and many of the most activist agendas, are increasingly part of the activities of individual artists. While the uk tabloid the Daily Mail might note that Nan Goldin ‘changed the world of photography’, the fact that it gave her a glowing tribute at all is because ‘she also had a major impact on the pharmaceutical industry’. In truth, for the best artists, Goldin included, the social stuff is indistinguishable from their practice: this might take the shape of Hito Steyerl’s ruminations on war in and out of the gallery; Sammy Baloji’s long-running work on extractivist exploitation; Yinka Shonibare’s support for African and African-diaspora artists in his shows and through his Guest Artists Space (g.a.s.) Foundation; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s patient, observation-led movements between gallery, cinema and film school; and even Rirkrit Tiravanija’s dinners and ping-pong events. The Power 100 list also takes into account an artist’s wider aesthetic influence – whether an artist could be said to have a ‘school’ gathering around their way of working. The infectious and pestilential work of Candice Lin, for example, is not just prominent, but also corresponds to the branching mycelial growths of our mushroom-laden times; and while ai is a tool that many artists are still struggling to master, Cao Fei remains a leading figure in envisioning our metaverse-tinged future. Cecilia Vicuña has led a resurgence in textile-based making, while Agnes Denes has become a similar touchstone for the ecological turn in art. Nor is this just about who has been anointed with top shows: while, say, Jeffrey Gibson represents the us at the Venice Biennale next year, he has also finished a year of relentless touring and editing a book that highlights contemporary American Indigenous practices. Indeed, artists from first nations across the world are retaking the territory on which museums and arts institutions were built: from the Karrabing Film Collective in the country now named Australia, to Maya Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel. Yet one of the things about the artworld is that while it generates a politics designed to challenge those perceived to be in power – the holders of capital, the galleries, the institutions – those in power are equally doing their best to subsume those politics into their prevailing system. It can often appear, as a result, that those in power generated the politics in the first place. It becomes a question, ultimately, of who is leading whom, which is why artists lead this list over their galleries and institutions. There are 34 artists and 4 artist collectives on the 2023 Power 100

December 2023

ART FAIR DIRECTORS Art fairs are the supermarkets of the artworld: sporadic manifestations of dozens to hundreds of booths at which galleries from around the world showcase and sell their wares. Following recent expansions by both Frieze and Art Basel, they’re extending their franchises. Once you factor in participation fees, shipping and transport, it’s an expensive business. International travel was, of course, curtailed during the covid-19 pandemic, with a consequent effect on the art-fair business; 2022 saw a bounceback in art-fair sales, with 74 percent of the collectors quizzed in an annual Art Basel-ubs survey saying they had made a purchase from an art-fair booth. That energy has not been sustained, however,with only 58 percent reporting spending money in the aisles in 2023 (making art fairs the third most popular place to buy art: direct from galleries being the most popular, and then at auction). The pandemic seems to have killed off a previous trend for smaller, more ‘boutique’ fairs, and the art-fair market has seen expansion and rapid consolidation centred on the two players who feature on this year’s list. Still the marker of gallery success, Art Basel runs its original Swiss event alongside fairs in Hong Kong, Miami Beach and, since last year, Paris, seizing the opportunity to displace the longstanding but struggling fiac and installing Paris+ par Art Basel in its stead; meanwhile, founded in London, Frieze now has fairs in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul. Expenditure is up in all markets, though the Art Basel-sponsored survey neatly sidesteps any mention of South Korea, where the second edition of Frieze Seoul took place this year. The general feeling was that the event was still finding its feet, but sales were made, albeit at the lower end of the art market’s price range. Meanwhile, Art Basel’s Asia base, Hong Kong, has fallen from favour as an artworld capital due to politics beyond the art fair behemoth’s control: it saw a 27 percent decrease in galleries taking part compared to its last regular pre-covid edition in 2019. mch Group, Art Basel’s parent company, seems to be testing the waters in other countries, with investments in Singapore’s Art sg fair and Japan’s Tokyo Art Week, reflecting the importance of the Asia market. The Global South, meanwhile, has only a tentative relationship to these northern (and still Western) institutions, though that might be changing – Art Basel’s home edition this year saw the largest participation of Brazilian galleries, 11 in all, and four from India. For now, however, Art Basel opened its second edition of Paris+ in October, receiving favourable feedback all around. It’s an expansion that Frieze, owned by us entertainment giant Endeavor, has answered with acquisitions of its own: in July it bought The Armory Show and Expo Chicago, further extending its North American presence. Such expansion illustrates the centralising forces of the art market, and the long-predicted consolidation and globalisation of the once-fragmented and homespun art fair economy. How these increasingly big players respond and adapt to the localities they are steadily assimilating remains to be seen. There are 2 art fair directors on the 2023 Power 100

COLLECTORS AND PHILANTHROPISTS Both now and in the past, art has been made with the resources available to those who make it. The link between culture and money is not, in this sense, necessary. But, like it or not, money does buy visibility in a global art scene. And so, when it comes to this list, collectors are the people who, to put it bluntly, buy the art, invest in its success and cough up the cash for projects. Of course, it helps that art is increasingly an asset class that can be leveraged against too. But if there is still a huge global appetite among the very wealthy for the buying of artworks (according to this year’s Art Basel-ubs survey of global collecting, the median spend of contemporary art collectors since 2021 was up almost 20 percent), it’s also the case that the characteristics of collector power have changed in recent years. Two decades ago (ArtReview launched the Power 100 in 2002), even the biggest collectors (some from then are still on the list this year) were known primarily for their accumulation of artworks, a straightforward activity. Twenty or so years later, merely collecting work is what lesser collectors do. Most of the individuals on this year’s list now assert their largesse in a more complex and active way. They of course spend money on buying art, but the contemporary ubercollector is no longer satisfied with following artistic and intellectual trends and would rather be involved in shaping them. That’s perhaps why almost all the ‘collectors’ on this year’s list have foundations of one form or other, which have established significant physical venues, often in several locations. And while an older generation of collectors were known to establish museum spaces to display the things they owned, the contemporary collector and their foundations are involved in a great deal more: many are run more like large galleries, supporting programmes of rotating exhibitions and new commissions, organising events, supporting artists’ residencies and funding research, staging conferences on cross-disciplinary issues such as neuroscience or climate change and underwriting the curatorial programmes of other (often public) museums and galleries. Collectors, then, have become far more active and outwardly focused than the term suggests, shaping the space in which artists operate rather than simply buying up their product. In that sense, they have become more like philanthropists than private individuals, which is why they share much in common with big philanthropic organisations, and which is also why the only ‘philanthropist’ on this year’s list is Darren Walker, head of the Ford Foundation, one of the us’s largest grantmaking foundations and a substantial funder of us art museums and their programmes. It’s worth noting that there are just as many collectors on the list as there are museum representatives, and those collectors often have wealth chalked up in billions rather than millions. (The number of billionaires worldwide, the ubs report tells us, has nearly doubled since 2013). With funding cuts and inflationary pressures facing many public institutions, private collectors, philanthropists and their foundations are becoming critical influencers in the programming that public institutions might have once been able to provide by other means. There are 7 collectors and 1 philanthropist on the 2023 Power 100

ArtReview

Gentle now, don’t add to heartache

Polyps are a pluriverse 46

GALLERISTS

CURATORS What’s a curator? It sounds easy to define: a curator cares for art collections and organises exhibitions. Though the invention of the ‘curator’ in a wider sense is perhaps the epitome of the rise in prominence of contemporary art in the past few decades: a free agent, who thrives off the networking and connections of the neoliberal world, aligning artists and ideas in a range of contexts and circumstances. Every aspect of the artworld, from talks programmes to gift shops, is now ‘curated’. While the globetrotting superstar curators of previous years aren’t as enviable a model as they used to be (or quite as freelance and footloose as they once were), those at the helm of largescale exhibitions (such as Adriano Pedrosa, appointed director of next year’s Venice Biennale) still wield influence in organising agendas and attention beyond the facts of their exhibitions in and of themselves. And yet, it is those working across multiple, often less flashy contexts who seem to point to a wider, more long-term shift, and it’s among curators that one finds some of the greatest change on the list: those who might be working at one institution while still organising a show here and a biennial there, like Natasha Ginwala’s simultaneous involvement in Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the next Sharjah Biennial (slated for 2025) and the much lower-key Colomboscope in Sri Lanka; or Sohrab Mohebbi, who is director of New York’s Sculpture Center while also asking American audiences to confront their country’s international warmongering in the Carnegie International 2022 (which closed earlier this year). It’s notable too that artists recognise the potency of the role, both as a means of amplifying their own ideas and as a way of placing them in discussion with those of their contemporaries, with Ibrahim Mahama curating the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, and Rirkrit Tiravanija organising the Thailand Biennale; not forgetting the ongoing ripples of last year’s Documenta, orchestrated by ruangrupa, that year’s no 1. It is among curators, also, that we find parallels with the role of activistartist, in those who are foregrounding and leading long-term drives to bring Indigenous artists and ecological thinking to wider audiences: from Carcross/Tagish First Nation curator Candice Hopkins at the Forge and Lucia Pietroiusti as the Serpentine Galleries’ Head of Ecologies, to Brazilian Indigenous curator Sandra Benites and Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton, who has recently been appointed adjunct curator at London’s Tate Modern. So while artists (and artists acting as curators) might lead this year’s list, it is the curators figuring later in the list who may be shaping the institutions of the future.

What’s a gallerist’s job? To promote the work of their artist clients, raising the work’s visibility and desirability in the process, and providing these artist clients with an income (preferably an increasing one) while, as the flipside to this, maintaining a stable and growing list of collector clients, and equally satisfying their needs and wants. Effectively gallerists are the artworld’s middle people; connecting points in the network of individuals that constitute the Power list. The past few years have been a rollercoaster for commercial galleries – closing doors during the pandemic, events and fairs cancelled, some surviving through wielding the blunt but seemingly effective tool of the Online Viewing Room. Now, with the memory of covid slowly fading, it’s mostly back to business as usual. Which means a continued slant towards largescale galleries (which approach the status and workings of public institutions) with feet on multiple continents, representing huge rosters of artists (people joining Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian and David Zwirner or bouncing between them), and a widening gap between the global footprint of a megagallery and everyone else. As such, some names who haven’t been on the list in a few years, like Jay Jopling, Thaddaeus Ropac, Emmanuel Perrotin and Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes and Matthew Wood, make a return this year, to acknowledge these manoeuvres. This is, of course, also just the old-fashioned Eurocentric view. As things continue to shift in Asia, there are multiple hubs for the art market, with cities like Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai all upping their games. On the other hand, some galleries, like Kolkata’s Experimenter and Accra’s Gallery 1957, work beyond their physical square-meterage to build wider networks in their cities and internationally. There are 16 gallerists on the 2023 Power 100

There are 19 curators on the 2023 Power 100

December 2023

MUSEUM DIRECTORS These are the individuals who gatekeep the hallowed halls of art’s institutions, carefully controlling what comes in and what is put out in the form of exhibitions. Of course, the question becomes: is it the institution itself that confers weight, or the person leading it? Behind each director is inevitably a team that makes the programme what it is, and while museums are represented here by individuals, it is the sum of an institution’s parts that places them on the list. There’s the question too of what precisely a museum is for. Depending on where you are in the world and which ones you live next to, the museum’s function certainly varies: developer and explainer of national consciousness and spirit, publisher of new ideas, cathedral of beauty; entertainment provider, temple of luxuries, scriptorium of histories; graveyard of unpopular culture or something fundamentally irrelevant to everyday life as it is experienced. They may equally position themselves as generators of art history and more generally as artistic research laboratories. More importantly, while a museum is something that presents itself as stable and timeless (through architecture or sentiment), it’s really a fluid concept. Exploring that fluidity (as say Hong Kong’s m+ does through its deployment of interconnected art, design and popular culture collections) can be just as powerful as doubling down on the stability (as is more often the case with institutions in the Western hemisphere). What’s not in doubt, however, is the fact that museums are the vessels that embed art in the public’s social, political and aesthetic consciousness. Today’s most influential museum models are much more active and more closely intertwined with the art networks and economies they inhabit in their part of the world. As public spaces, it is museums that have had to bear the highest scrutiny of accountability, intended to hold the ideals of representation, fairness, accessibility and sustainability, at a time when, culturally and politically, sitting on the fence is no longer an option. It’s a difficult balancing act, and the museums on this year’s list, largely occupying its middle ranks, are those that aim to find different ways of addressing that. But where, geographically, this is taking place is also changing. The list has, in past years, been dominated at the top by the big buildings in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin. Now the big conversations are just as likely being conducted in Singapore or Tokyo. While Adriano Pedrosa ranks highest of the directors on this year’s list, it isn’t just as curator of the forthcoming Venice Biennale, but also for the way, under his directorship, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo has carried out its focused programming umbrellaed under yearlong themes. Meanwhile, Koyo Kouoh at Zeitz mocaa uses the institution to cultivate a larger artistic ecology in the area. Today, as art and its activisms are expanding too, the fundamental question is, can any institution realistically keep up? There are 7 museum directors on the 2023 Power 100

THINKERS Nothing comes from nothing, as Parmenides used to argue. Accordingly, running along and within the practical and financial machinations of art- and exhibition-making are the ideas that shape the understanding of what artists do, and just as often have a big influence on how artists themselves think about their art; ideas generated by the writers, philosophers and theorists who are turned to for inspiration and provide the tools to dig deeper. Whether it’s inspiring whole bodies of work or providing the name for an exhibition or biennial – such as a line from Anna L. Tsing’s oft-quoted Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) providing the title for this year’s Helsinki Biennial, New Directions May Emerge – to getting namechecked in reviews and studio visits, thinkers might not always be the most visible or active figures in the artworld themselves, but their ideas will often be spreading like wildfire. While ‘thinkers’, as a category of entries on the Power 100, has only been part of the list for the past ten years, they are an integral part of understanding the how and why of current art. And yet, it was not, it can be said, a year for big pie-in-the-sky ideas or revelatory insights. (Unless, given the weather and wars, ‘Armageddon’ is considered as such.) Perhaps, in times of conflict, people turn to familiar ideas, with most of the names on this year’s list having become prominent during the ponderous pandemic years. What is apparent, though, is that people like thinkers who are also doers: if not activists who speak out regularly, like Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado and Sara Ahmed, then usefully punchy and quotable authors, like Byung-Chul Han. Teju Cole enters the list, as a novelist and writer, who with his recent book Tremor (2023) is becoming increasingly noted by artists; and while Manthia Diawara, also newly entered, is both a filmmaker and a writer, the films are his means of dissemination, reaching a wide audience to consider issues of decolonial thinking. Those like Fred Moten (who pops up himself in a number of artworks), Donna Haraway and Saidiya Hartman might have been quieter themselves, but their ideas of intersectional entanglement and convergence remain on everyone’s minds. There are 10 thinkers on the 2023 Power 100

ArtReview

1 NAN GOLDIN

‘I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,’ Goldin wrote in the catalogue for the 1989 exhibition Witness she curated in New York, bringing together artists to address the issue of aids. Over three decades later, that rage is still evident, in both her long-running body of photographic work capturing those around her, as well as her work drawing attention to the current opioid painkiller epidemic that has swept the us. Speaking at the New York Film Festival last year, director Laura Poitras said, “Nan has influenced a generation of filmmakers – generations, multiple generations of filmmakers, through her storytelling and the emotional depth of her work.” Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) depicts the opioid crisis and Goldin’s fight against the Sackler family, whose artworld philanthropy was sustained by the revenues of the pharmaceutical company behind the addictive drugs (the Sacklers deny any wrongdoing). After years of struggling with addiction, Goldin founded p.a.i.n. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017 to confront the artworld’s double standards and artwashing. Goldin tops the list as the most visible and prominent model of artist as not just documenter and witness, but also spokesperson, whistleblower, activist and ethical voice. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed missed out on an Oscar, but after winning a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year it was widely released via streaming channels. The buzz will have brought new audiences to the institutional shows Goldin had lined up, from This Will Not End Well at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which closed in February, moving to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in August, to a show of the 126 transgressive works from Goldin’s seminal The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) – in which lovers and strangers meet, cavort, party and fight in the beaches, bars and cars of Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin and Mexico – at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Younger generations of artists, as well as those from the world of film and fashion, will find that

the former self-described ‘go-go dancer’ (‘like a lot of women in the art world were doing at the time’) and sex worker was addressing decades ago so many of the themes current in today’s culture: raw confessional autobiography, queer identity, intersectional feminism, body autonomy and corporate ethics. Her embrace of the photobook as an enduring medium, alongside prints and slide projections, has ensured she’s won fans even in countries where her shows haven’t yet arrived (though since she joined Gagosian’s 19-strong gallery empire this year, her geographical reach is even stronger). Goldin has referred to This Will Not End Well, which will be followed by the publication of a nine-volume boxset featuring reproductions of the artist’s slideshows, as her last retrospective, noting, ‘I don’t have many years left’. But the battle against the Sackler family continues: while more museums drop their patronage (v&a Dundee and Oxford’s Ashmolean among the latest), America’s Supreme Court blocked bankruptcy proceedings in August that would have protected individual family members from civil suits. “I’ve never seen any such abuse of justice,” said Goldin when the Sackler’s legal move was originally waved through. Goldin’s insistence that art exists not in its own world but in the world at large, and should not be free of moral responsibility when it comes to that engagement, has led her to leverage her success as an artist to take prominent stances on other issues. Following the 7 October terror attacks in Israel and the subsequent bombing of Gaza, and the artworld’s desire to take positions on the Israel-Hamas conflict, Goldin called out the ‘blacklisting’ of artists, sticking to her guns despite pressure from collectors, galleries and institutions on artists to withdraw their public positions. For Goldin it’s not just about an artist expressing their rage, but channelling it into a move for change. For her, art is a medium that can remind people that they have agency in a world that constantly tells them that they do not.

ArtReview

1 Photo: Phil Penman

Artist American Last Year 8

2 Photo: Leon Kahane. Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery and Esther Schipper 3 Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner 4 Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis. © Simone Leigh

3 RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA Artist Thai Last Year 86

2 HITO STEYERL

Those with itinerant childhoods tend to be good at making friends; that’s a bit of cod psychology that might explain the Buenos Aires-born, Ethiopiaand Canada-raised Thai artist’s belief that with art ‘it is not what you see that is important, but what takes place between people’. If relational aesthetics is some 25 years old now, Tiravanija’s staging of social events feels as relevant as ever: his installations involving communal cooking, ping pong and t-shirt printing took over Haus der Kunst in Munich in spring, concurrent with a Bavarian State Opera production of Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjo (2004) for which he created a see-through set design, and then his moma ps1 survey in New York in the autumn. His shows this year include a solo at stpi in Singapore, which dwelt on animal extinction; a collaborative survey between his galleries at Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul; a solo at 1301pe in Los Angeles; and a show at Montreal’s phi Foundation. All this while cocurating the Thailand Biennale in March with Gridthiya Gaweewong, and somehow Tiravanija managed to find a balance between the momentary and the monumental, the local and the international.

Artist German Last Year 4 Sensing and representing the seismic shifts in culture and society have made Steyerl something of an oracle. A trailblazer of postinternet art, investigating technology and digital culture’s complicity with capital and conflict, the filmmaker told Artnet this year that ‘a reality in which internet is not accessible is already here’, thanks to climate change and spreading autocracy. Her contribution to the Hayward Gallery’s Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, titled Green Screen (2023), consisted of a primitive digital screen made of beer crates and plastic bottles – an experiment in thinking about how we might ‘extricate ourselves from our dependency on the large tech cartels’. This year Steyerl presented solo shows at the Portland Museum of Art and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. Her puncturing of artworld hypocrisies continues: she bought back work from collector Julia Stoschek, whose family company, Steyerl claimed, had overlooked its historic complicity in the Nazi regime, and suspended the intended awarding of the Hugo Ball Prize to her while organisers researched the antisemitic views held by the prize’s artist namesake.

4 SIMONE LEIGH Artist American Last Year 7 Leigh took her Golden Lion-winning turn at the 2022 Venice Biennale to Boston in April, showing nine of the works from the us Pavilion at the city’s Institute of Contemporary Art, part of a survey of 29 examples of the artist’s powerful sculptural meditations on Black femininity and feminism, ranging from Satellite (2022), an over-seven-metre-tall bronze semiabstract female figure, to the early video Breakdown (2011, created with Liz Magic Laser and in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran), in which an opera singer recites narratives of fictional breakdowns. On the Boston waterfront the artist placed Last Garment (2022), a bronze sculpture based on a nineteenth-century Jamaican washerwoman. The exhibition travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, dc, in November, and a new edition of another Venice work by Leigh, Sentinel (2022), entered the collection of the city’s National Gallery of Art in August. Such institutional acclaim naturally helps the bottom line: in May Leigh’s 2019 bronze Stick sold for a record $2.7m at auction.

December 2023

Chemical cocktails defy pathogens and regulatory paradigms

6 IBRAHIM MAHAMA

5 Photo: Thierry Bal 6 Photo: Carlos Idun-Tawiah. Courtesy White Cube 7 Photo: Wyatt Conlon. Courtesy Theaster Gates and Gagosian 8 Photo: James Stopforth

5 ISAAC JULIEN Artist British Last Year 52

Artist Ghanaian Last Year 47

It’s an anomaly that the British government recognised Julien’s contribution to art before the country’s museums did. After receiving a knighthood last year, the filmmaker, with his elegiac meditations on race, sexuality and history, is only this year getting his first institutional retrospective. What Freedom Is to Me, at London’s Tate Britain, also featured the European debut of Once Again… (Statues Never Die), his 2022 film that returned to the subject of the Harlem Renaissance, a work which featured in the Sharjah Biennial too this year. The glamour and radicalism of 1920s African-American culture is an enduring interest for Julien, whose film Looking for Langston (1989) made his name – a work now presented in its own permanent pavilion at Brazil’s Inhotim sculpture park. Other solo ventures include his homage to Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Playtime (2013), installed at Palais Populaire, Berlin. Lessons of the Hour (2019), which recounts the legacy of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum.

In the biggest arts events of the year it was hard to miss Mahama’s work. A monumental tapestry, A Tale of Time/Purple Republic (2023), pressed through a loom and featuring handwoven smocks, was one of the most spectacular commissions of the Sharjah Biennial, while the Bienal de São Paulo’s curators used Parliament of Ghosts (2019) – a field of clay vessels, a forum of brick-constructed bleachers and a long stretch of Ghana’s colonial-era railway tracks – to introduce their anti-imperialist agenda. A different iteration of the work, made from old train seats, was a major feature of the Venice Architecture Biennale, while kwaku minoona 2 (2012–19), featuring bartered cloth from Ghanaian markets, could be found at Art Basel. Having judged the Samdani Art Award in Dhaka in February, he had a whole biennale to play with as artistic director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in September. But beyond his own art, Mahama’s influence extends through the multifaceted institutions he operates near his home city of Tamale: Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Volini.

7 THEASTER GATES 8 STEVE MCQUEEN Artist American Last Year 18

Artist British Last Year 27

While Gates keeps an energetic exhibition schedule – a solo show at luma Arles, a public art project in Memphis, projects for the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Sharjah Biennial – his influence spreads far beyond the visitors to his shows. Gates’s Rebuild Foundation is credited not only with revitalising the South Side of Chicago but providing education and career paths for huge numbers of Black creatives. This might be through his collaboration with Prada, which offers a three-year incubator programme (he also chairs the fashion brand’s diversity and inclusion council), or the culinary trainee programme of an eatery run by the foundation. Next year, the latest in Gates’s repurposing of empty Chicago buildings as art spaces takes the form of an art deco former school, which will become a cultural hub and arts incubator; meanwhile the Black cultural archives held at the Stony Island Arts Bank were used as inspiration for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album. No wonder Gates’s wide-ranging practice was recognised with both the Isamu Noguchi Award and the Vincent Scully Prize.

When Grenfell Tower in West London caught fire in 2017, killing 72 people, McQueen felt compelled to document the tragedy, writing: ‘I feared once the tower was covered up it would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public’s memory. In fact, I imagine there were people who were counting on that being the case.’ The artist and Oscarwinning director sat on his deeply moving aerial footage of the building’s husk for five years, at last premiering it in London’s Serpentine South Gallery in April, with the Grenfell public enquiry and criminal investigation still unresolved. Former uk prime minister Gordon Brown said McQueen’s Grenfell (2019) film should ‘be seen by every politician’. McQueen took Occupied City (2023), his new four-hour-plus documentary on Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, to the Cannes Film Festival in May. Next year, a new commission will fill the halls of Dia Beacon with an immersive sound and light installation before travelling to the Schaulager just outside Basel in 2025. That might not sound as political as his usual work, but as McQueen says, ‘Everything is political’.

December 2023

10 CAO FEI

Artist Collective Indigenous Australian / American Last Year 21

Artist Chinese Last Year 12

The collective, who hail from the rural indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia, and whose members might number anywhere between 30 and 70 people, make films that bear witness to racism past and present and offer an alternative vision beyond that violent history. Their latest work, Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023), shown this year at solo exhibitions at Secession in Vienna, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Goldsmiths cca in London, as well as various screenings internationally, is typical, loosely centring on the story of eighteenth-century Macassan traders who sailed to the Australian coast from Indonesia to collect sea cucumbers, a moment of collaborative trade before the extractivist violence of white colonialism. As much as the content of their productions has won praise, woozily mixing documentary, sci-fi and humour, so has their decentred way of working, in which profits from screenings and prizes are ploughed into the development of their own community and their ongoing attempts to reclaim land from the Australian state.

“I’d probably try to leave,” a random man, glasses askew, tells Cao when asked what he would do if he found himself in the Metaverse. He appears in a video series, Meta-mentary (2022), shown in Duotopia, a new body of work presented at Sprüth Magers in Berlin in April that is optimistic about the digital future yet questions whether opting out will even be possible. Cao, who is also currently a professor and master adviser at the School of Experimental Art at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has spent two decades investigating virtual and augmented realities, and their intersection with the real world. In Berlin she debuted a new Metaverse avatar, Oz, half-human, half-squid and androgynous, a guise she later took to São Paulo for her retrospective at Pinacoteca. ‘Oz represents a blend of machine and human elements… As we encounter this turning point in technological development, it becomes imperative for humans to navigate the complexities of a technologically driven world,’ the artist told Dazed – or rather, the future is not a dream, as her South American solo debut was titled.

11 SAMMY BALOJI

12 LARRY GAGOSIAN Gallerist American Last Year 20

Artist Congolese reentry (67 in 2020) “Copper – it’s a bridge between the precolonial, colonial and the postcolonial”, Baloji says in a short video documenting a visit to his studio in Brussels, where he speaks of the industrial extraction that has been his subject over the last decade. His patient focus has paid off, with his investigations into mineral exploitation this year shown at Sharjah Biennial (in an archival installation featuring evidence of the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States to gain access to Belgian Congo uranium) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (where he received a special mention for his wide-ranging exploration of Belgian colonialism in Congo and beyond, as well as for a vast sculptural work of industrial debris made in collaboration with architect Gloria Cabral and art historian Cécile Fromont). For his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Mainz he invited 12 artists to produce a collaborative history of mining in his home Katanga region. Many of these are past participants in the Lubumbashi Biennale, cofounded by the artist in 2008 and returning in its eighth edition next year.

Succession speculation over Gagosian’s empire, which dwarfs all others in terms of square meterage and its estimated $1bn turnover, has been cranking up since he appointed a board of directors to the company (including Delphine Arnault, daughter of lvmh chief Bernard, fuelling much-denied takeover rumours). But the seventy-eight-year-old onetime petrol station attendant dismissed suggestions he was winding down, when profiled by The New Yorker: ‘I don’t know what else to do’, he summed up. This year he brought the estates of Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida (debuted in one of his New York spaces) and American photographer Francesca Woodman into the gallery; while Carol Bove (who showed in another of Gagosian’s six New York spaces), Cy Gavin (exhibitions in New York and Rome), Derrick Adams (a solo in Beverly Hills) and Nan Goldin also came on the books. Closing one of its three London spaces hardly makes a dent in Gagosian’s programming agenda, what with the gallery about to launch a public art programme in Britain and recently opening an office in Seoul.

ArtReview

9 Courtesy Karrabing Film Collective 10 Photo: Nan Jiang. Courtesy Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers 11 Photo: Nick Harvey 12 Courtesy Gagosian

9 KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE

He was looking for a home

13 Photo: Oliver Chanarin 14 Photo: David Needleman / August. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 15 Photo: Mauricio Jorge 16 Photo: Audoin Desforges. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery

14 IWAN WIRTH, MANUELA WIRTH & MARC PAYOT

13 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Artist Collective International Last Year 25

Gallerists Swiss Last Year 17

Palestine has long been a focus for the London-based group of architects, artists, journalists and software developers who use aesthetics, as leader Eyal Weizman puts it, to investigate human rights abuses. It was just days into the Israel-Hamas conflict that Forensic Architecture (fa) was providing modelling for pro-Palestine ngos and Britain’s Channel 4 News on the blast at al-Ahli Arab Hospital. fa says its investigations are legally admissible, but as six men appealing their conviction for arson at the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, with evidence from an fa investigation have found, justice can be a long process. With the hearing for the ‘Moria Six’ pushed back a year, fa presented findings prepared in the group’s defence at State of Concept Athens. Its form of politicised exhibitionmaking continues to spread in influence, with another solo show in August, at Santiago’s Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, that featured its Latin American investigations. For the Venice Architecture Biennale it made a bit of a departure, collaborating with archaeologist David Wengrow on topographical analysis to reveal an ancient egalitarian civilisation.

More artists, more square meterage, more former institutional bodies on the Hauser & Wirth payroll. Among those newly gracing the gallery’s 20 addresses globally are Venice Golden Lion-winner Sonia Boyce, Firelei Báez, Flora Yukhnovich, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Daniel Turner and the late Cathy Josefowitz, who spent a lifetime representing dance in paint. The extra gallery walls include Galerie Knoell in Basel, a takeover that encompasses its founder, Carlo Knoell, and the gallery’s entire inventory; a prints space in New York, which will also feature a bar inspired by Dieter Roth and designed by the artist’s son; a gallery in New York’s SoHo district (to be joined by a restaurant the Wirths are opening next year); and a gallery in Paris, its first French space inaugurated with a show of over 30 works by American painter Henry Taylor, titled From Sugar to Shit. Ingrid Schaffner, formerly of the Chinati Foundation, and Kate Fowle, former moma ps1 director, are among those getting fresh business cards in the us; meanwhile the gallery has announced a forthcoming space in Hong Kong, to open next year.

16 CARRIE MAE WEEMS

15 ADRIANO PEDROSA Museum Director Brazilian Last Year 59

Artist American Last Year 22

The director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (masp) has probably spent more time on planes this year than he has in his glass-and-concrete institution on Avenida Paulista. Such is life when you’re also curating the next Venice Biennale. If all that travel – he’s been spotted on studio and gallery visits across Africa, Asia and the Arab world – is discombobulating, it will serve him well in Venice, where the 60th Biennale takes the title Foreigners Everywhere, a paean to ‘immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees’ and to those alienated by other types of identity. His work at masp, which is expanding to a neighbouring building, bodes well for this: each year Pedrosa addresses a particular theme with a central survey show, from which unfolds the rest of the institutional programme. This year Histórias indígenas, featuring around 170 artists (and then travelling to Kode Bergen Art Museum in Norway) spun off parallel solo exhibitions at masp for Brook Andrew, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe and others. For all Pedrosa’s efforts, Bard College has presented him with the 2023 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

The artworld’s growing attention to artists confronting structural violence and sexism towards people of colour feels almost unthinkable without the unwavering example of Carrie Mae Weems. Since the 1980s, the Oregonian artist’s multimedia approach – centred on photography both found and staged – has reflected racism back on itself, whether by redeploying historical images of enslaved Americans used to support theories of ethnic inferiority (From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–96), building enveloping theatrical portraits of complex Black womanhood (the self-starring series The Kitchen Table, 1990) or addressing the disproportionate incarceration of Black men (Remember Me, 2019). Two sizeable current shows – her touring retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel and a showcase of recent work at luma Arles – speak respectively to Weems’s considerable achievements and, at seventy, her refusal to rest on her myriad laurels. This year, as part of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, she received a new camera; count on her using it.

December 2023

17 SUHANYA RAFFEL & DORYUN CHONG

18 ANNA L. TSING

Museum Director / Curator Australian / Korean Last Year 56

Thinker American Last Year 13

19 DAVID ZWIRNER

When the curator of the 2023 Helsinki Biennial, Joasia Krysa, was searching for a suitable title, she alighted on New Directions May Emerge, from a quote by anthropologist Anna L. Tsing. She is not alone: Tsing’s understanding of the Anthropocene – not as an existential planetary event, but as something occurring locally and with different intensities and causes and consequences – has been enthusiastically adopted by the artworld. Tsing’s redefining of the relationships between human, nonhuman and object has had wide influence, evident in the ecological turn taken by many artists and curators in their work. The author of the bestselling The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) herself has been lecturing internationally on her new research area, the former petrochemical town of Sorong, West Papua, the landscape of which has been transformed by rampant sandmining: the kind of bottom-up, localised damage that Tsing says is our greatest planetary danger. This informs the new book Tsing has coauthored with her fellow collaborators of the Feral Atlas research group, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature, out early next year.

20 MARC GLIMCHER

Gallerist German Last Year 9

Gallerist American Last Year 23

At the upper end of the gallery league, artists’ comings and goings can feel like football’s transfer season – see Carol Bove’s departure from Zwirner for Gagosian in the autumn. Less business-as-usual was Gerhard Richter’s exit from Marian Goodman for Zwirner’s eight-gallery empire. One of the most highly valued living artists, the ninety-one-year-old German declared that the paintings shown in March at one of Zwirner’s two Chelsea spaces would be his last. While Zwirner backed out of a longplanned new gallery space in Chelsea this year, citing the developer’s financial difficulties, he’s come up with a smaller alternative next to his other Chelsea space. It’s not all about dollars; other artists who joined are less safe bets than Richter, not least dancer Sarah Michelson, who will stage a show next year at Zwirner’s upgraded la outpost. Rirkrit Tiravanija was supposed to debut with the gallery in its Hong Kong space last year, but the pandemic delayed the opening of The Shop to 2023, for which the white cube was turned into an umbrella emporium (though it was only the whole installation, not individual brollies, that could be bought).

The Pace ceo (and, until he formed in December a ‘round table’ of the six most senior directors to lead the business, president too) has long been a forthright press presence. Marking the announcement of a new Tokyo gallery, opening in 2024 in the city’s new ‘modern urban village’ Azabudai Hills, Glimcher admitted this Asian expansion makes up for the loss of their Beijing gallery in 2019 and the unpopularity of the Hong Kong space with artists. ‘Life’s too short to go somewhere and make all this investment and huge effort and then the next day someone says, “The rules just changed”. Japan and Korea, the rules do not change,’ he told Japan Times. Pace will newly represent Lawrence Weiner’s estate in Asia, as well as those of Yoo Youngkuk (in tandem with pkm Gallery), John Wesley, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen internationally. The very-muchalive Grada Kilomba (who has just cocurated the Bienal de São Paulo), Pam Evelyn (Pace’s youngest artist) and Alicja Kwade also joined. Pace opened an office in Berlin too, the gallery’s first presence in the eu post-Brexit.

ArtReview

17 Photo: Winnie Yeung / Visual Voices 18 Photo: Damien Maloney 19 Photo: Jason Schmidt 20 Photo: Suzie Howell

In a letter to the South China Morning Post, a museumgoer bemoaning the apparent self-censorship of China-critical art described m+ in Hong Kong, where Raffel is director and Chong is chief curator, as a ‘battleground’. The correspondent was writing of Another Story, the second showcasing of the m+ Sigg Collection – which was billed as ‘art for art’s sake’ but in reality featured political works by the likes of Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei. Uli Sigg, the Swiss collector who donated the work, admitted that, in light of the National Security Law, ‘It is now up to Hong Kong’s institutions to test how much breathing space that may entail’. The debate hasn’t harmed footfall, with 2,034,331 visitors in 2022 and The Art Newspaper predicting over three million in 2023. They came both for the museum’s layered showcasing of its collections of art and daily design objects, and for a retrospective of Song Huai-Kuei, the Chinese cultural icon known as Madame Song; a restaging of Angela Su’s Hong Kong Pavilion from the Venice Biennale; and, in December, a solo show of Japanese artist Ay-O.

22 PAUL B. PRECIADO

21 KOYO KOUOH

Thinker Spanish Last Year 31

Museum Director Cameroonian Last Year 35 21 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa 22 Photo: Leo Freeman 23 Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy Perrotin 24 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han

‘I’m here to serve first and foremost the continent of Africa and its diaspora,’ the director of Zeitz mocaa in Cape Town told the Financial Times, defining Africa in the broadest possible terms. ‘I like to make the joke that America is just another African country, that Brazil is just another.’ In doing so Kouoh has taken the institution well beyond the private collection of philanthropist Jochen Zeitz it was set up in 2017 to highlight, bringing in a changing advisory group that this year includes artists Carsten Höller and Oscar Murillo, and staging the landmark When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, a sprawling survey of 150 artists that tours to Kunstmuseum Basel in 2024. Having founded raw Material Company in Dakar, the curator is familiar with what it takes to cultivate an active, discursive scene, establishing a pan-African curatorial fellowship programme at Zeitz – which aims to ‘contribute towards a redefinition of curatorial practice and art history scholarship’ – the 2023 cohort ranging from a Mozambican architect to a Namibian anthropologist.

23 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

If Preciado’s cv already covered writing, philosophy and curating – all three in the service of gender, sexual and body politics, and becoming a mainstay reference for the artworld – then from this year you can add filmmaker to that mix. Asked to write his autobiography, Preciado initially rejected the idea ‘because Virginia Woolf – that asshole – wrote it for me in 1928’, referring to the modernist author’s Orlando, and the titular character’s transition from male to female. Instead, Preciado made the hybrid experimental documentary Orlando: My Political Biography (2023), weaving his own transition and that of 26 contemporary trans and nonbinary people, from eight to seventy years old, as an embodiment of the literary character. It won four awards at the Berlinale and has been picked up for distribution across various European territories and the us. Meanwhile his new book out this year, Dysphoria Mundi, chronicled the idea of sickness, from the pathologisation of trans identity, to racism, feminicide and global warming.

24 BYUNG-CHUL HAN Thinker German Last Year 48

Gallerist French Last Year 46 Perrotin has many big-ticket, pop-culture-friendly artists on his books – jr, Takashi Murakami and Mr. among them. But maintaining ten galleries across Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Dubai, New York and Los Angeles takes cash, and the gallerist this year brought in an investor – French private-equity firm Colony Investment Management, which took a 60 percent stake in the business (Perrotin holds onto the remainder). The aim? ‘To facilitate Perrotin’s long term growth plans.’ Which isn’t to say the famed party boy and prankster has entirely grown up: at his Art Basel Miami booth he hosted art collective mschf’s functioning atm, which gathered fairgoers’ bank balances (from millionaires to paupers) on a video leader board. The gallery exhibitions ranged from Daniel Arsham, who is celebrating 20 years with Perrotin, to Bernar Venet, who installed a vast steel sculpture at the Place Vendôme as part of his Paris show. While the gallery mourns the loss of Dansaekhwa-founding father Park Seo-Bo, who died in October, the gallery welcomes onto its roster Julian Charrière and Emma Webster.

The South Korean-born philosopher who has made the short essay his own continues his prodigious publishing output – a bit ironic, given that his major contribution to contemporary discourse has been to call out the self-exploitation that he sees as rampant in everything from late capitalist work ethic to social media. That was the message of his breakthrough, The Burnout Society (2010), hugely influential in Latin America, Korea, Spain and Italy. More recently his short-form, aphoristic writing has turned to questions of absence and presence in Eastern versus Western societies: Absence, written in German, is newly translated into English, while this year alone ten of his books have been translated into Chinese. In Die Krise der Narration (2023), expected in English and other languages next year, he argues that humans are no longer storytellers but ‘storysellers’, our identity packaged as self-advertising. All this astute thinking, and pointed brevity, have made him a regular reference for artists and curators, namechecked in press releases and essays of shows from Beidaihe, China, to Athens, Greece, this year.

December 2023

Cities are subterranean disasters

25 MONIKA SPRÜTH & PHILOMENE MAGERS

26 SARA AHMED

Gallerists German Last Year 30

Thinker British-Australian Last Year 71

25 Photo: Christian Werner 27 Courtesy Ford Foundation 28 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

The pair’s galleries in Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York continue to serve up intellectually robust fare. Queer avant-gardists Kenneth Anger (who died in May) and John Waters, subject of a vast show at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles (offering a deep-dive into his filmmaking process via costumes, handwritten scripts, props, photos and more), are both represented by the gallery – evidence of its commitment to showing mostly older and more established artists, who still have a bearing on the work of younger generations. Seemingly uninterested in the other frills that similar-sized galleries rush to offer (podcasts, inhouse magazines and so on), the focus instead is just on exhibitions: Jon Rafman showed at a temporary Sprüth Magers in Hangzhou in December and at the London gallery in February. Similarly mining the digital realm is Cao Fei, who premiered a new avatar at the Berlin mothership in April, with millennial angst already served up this year courtesy of Anne Imhof’s show in the la space in February.

27 DARREN WALKER Philanthropist American Last Year 10

Ahmed’s rise to prominence accelerated after she left her position as director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2016, over what she said was the art school’s failure to address institutional sexual harassment of students by staff (Goldsmiths has denied the accusation). Unshackled, Ahmed has become one of the most important voices in feminist and queer-activist discourse, especially when it involves exposing hypocrisy within supposedly liberal, progressive institutions. This year, publication of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook offered a practical guide to rocking the boat, which includes ‘being willing to confront institutional problems… and to challenge how [institutions] use our efforts to change them as evidence they have changed’. She has been supporting the book with a lecture tour of university campuses in the us and elsewhere. Her messages, such as ‘I like to call diversity practitioners institutional plumbers’ – offering temporary fixes that are in turn claimed and trumpeted loudly by management – have resonated in the staffrooms of museums and galleries internationally.

28 MAJA HOFFMANN Collector Swiss Last Year 42

Walker might be the head of the Ford Foundation, which, sitting on $16bn, is one of the most generous grant-giving organisations in the world, but ‘generosity’ is not a word he likes, as he wrote in a new book, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, which argues that philanthropy isn’t about giving out cash, but enacting change. “Most philanthropy in [America] goes to wealthy institutions that often serve the wealthy and the privileged,” he told pbs. Not so the Ford Foundation, whose activities range from million-dollar arts grants, plus funding for both the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum, to $50k for a festival of two-spirit performance in Seattle, supporting in the background a wide range of practices. Naturally, Walker is a target for institutional boards, acting as trustee to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and the High Line, New York; and cochairing New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers.

Any doubt among critics regarding the seriousness of Hoffmann’s now fully open luma Foundation campus in Arles was put to rest with the exhibition of work by Diana Arbus, 454 printer’s proofs owned by the collector: ‘a dizzying installation’, reckoned Artforum, ‘extraordinary’, said The Guardian. With a curatorial advisory board including Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tom Eccles, Hoffmann has the clout to bring in the big names: Carrie Mae Weems and Theaster Gates were among the other shows. And she has the finances to back them too: part of the Roche pharmaceuticals dynasty (profits boosted by covid-19), her shares are worth around $5.3bn, and the financial press have speculated she was the family member who, in February, sold a 2.5 percent stake, though the company refused to confirm. Reflecting, perhaps, on the future of artists and the increasingly dematerialised art they make, Hoffmann’s luma has backed Arcual, a ‘blockchain ecosystem built by the art community, for the art community’, a venture in partnership with Art Basel.

December 2023

29 EUGENE TAN

30 FRED MOTEN

Thinker American Last Year 5

Director of both the National Gallery Singapore (ngs) and the Singapore Art Museum (sam), Tan, the consummate diplomat as the city-state attempts to situate itself among the newer art hubs of Asia, doesn’t often ruffle feathers. This year he managed to lure Filipino curator Patrick Flores to the role of deputy director of the ngs. Yet questions were asked in parliament about the use of live chickens in Apinan Poshyananda’s How to Explain Art to a Bangkok Cock (1985), part of a large survey of video art at ngs. The cocks were well looked after, a minister assured the chamber. Less contentious were exhibitions at sam’s new harbourfront warehouse premises, opened in January while the old museum buildings undergo a much-delayed revamp (currently scheduled for completion in 2026). Among those showing are Hito Steyerl and Singapore-based artist Jane Lee, with forthcoming shows looking at the relationships between Southeast Asia and Latin America. And when the old space does eventually reopen, there’ll be more art to house: Tan announced a new annual purchasing fund of us$25k to buy works at the city-state’s s.e.a. Focus fair.

31 DONNA HARAWAY

Through his poetry, critical writing and teaching in the us, Moten provides much of the theoretical framework behind recent Black aesthetics, bypassing a Western philosophical model that does not encompass Black experiences. His statement that ‘my problem with the various critiques of appropriation is that they assume the legitimacy of property’ is one such founding principle. In May Moten released a new volume of poetry, perennial fashion presence falling, which meditates on futurity; this year he has also contributed texts to monographs of Noah Davis and Jack Whitten, and artist Zun Lee’s compendium of found photography of Black American family life; spoken with jazz ensemble Onyx Collective at New York’s Artists Space; became a fellow at Harvard (he already teaches performance studies and comparative literature at New York University and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside); and has lectured globally – ‘The Fugitive and the fugitive’ at the University of Washington, and ‘Observance and Observation’ at the University of Oslo, being just two examples of many.

32 ARTHUR JAFA

Thinker American Last Year 16

Artist American Last Year 26

This year Pope Francis cited the philosopher’s premise of ‘contact zones’ – how a person or thing is constituted by its relationships with another person or thing – in a new apostolic exhortation; but Haraway might feel equally anointed by being namechecked in curatorial statements and press releases, for shows including Laure Prouvost in Vienna, Gianni Colombo in Milan and Ana Mendieta in São Paulo. Mousse magazine even cited her when announcing its redesign this year. Though it has been a quiet year for publishing, with limited public speaking beyond her professor emerita role at the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz), it’s understandable why she remains such a touchstone: her writing addresses so many of our current issues, from the environment, to gender and queer identity, to ai and tech. Haraway’s thinking is nothing if not intersectional: regarding her papal citation, coming despite her long history of criticising the Catholic Church, she quipped, ‘Some baby Jesuit who’s into animal studies and science studies and feminist theory for some weird reason has been reading me’. They’re not alone.

In January the American filmmaker was ruminating on being a Black artist adored by museums. ‘We could come in there saying, “We just want to be one of the guys, we just want to be a part of the canon,” but they know we don’t know how to do anything but break shit. We come to fuck shit up.’ That fucking up of shit takes the form of mesmerising films concerning Blackness, death and history. At Luma Westbau, in Zürich, he remixed his 2013 work apex, slowing down the original eight-minute video collage to 33 minutes and adding accompanying beats by Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood. A newfound interest in abstraction was present in loml (2022), which paid homage to the late writer and musician Greg Tate, shown at the Gwangju Biennale. Meanwhile Melbourne audiences got the greatest hits, including Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, and last year’s survey at ogr Torino closed in February. Meanwhile a collaboration with Supreme became mired in controversy when the fashion brand’s creative director departed, citing the company’s ‘systemic racism’.

ArtReview

29 Courtesy Singapore Art Museum 30 Photo: LaMont Hamilton 31 Photo: Rusten Hogness 32 Courtesy Arthur Jafa and Gladstone Gallery

Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 40

Long ago my ancestors could walk across the river on the backs of salmon

34 SAIDIYA HARTMAN

33 © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery 34 Courtesy Saidiya Hartman 35 Photo: Harit Srikhao 36 Photo: Sebastian Böttcher

33 JOHN AKOMFRAH Artist Ghanaian-British reentry (94 in 2018)

Thinker American Last Year 38

Akomfrah began this year with twin honours: a knighthood and selection as the uk’s representative artist at the next Venice Biennale. Both plaudits underscored his achievements in moving image over the last four decades, since cofounding the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982 and directing the landmark Handsworth Songs (1986), a searing filmic collage that foreshadowed his career-long exploration of Black identity, postcolonialism and diasporic experience. While the bafc’s importance becomes more widely acknowledged internationally, Akomfrah’s centrality to British art and film has been articulated over the past decade via increasingly ambitious and widely seen multiscreen installations, such as 2021’s engulfing ‘real-time archive’ Five Murmurations, exploring the entwined pressures of covid-19, racial division and climate change. What visitors to his first overview show in Germany, at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, as well as his uk premiere of multiscreen film Arcadia (2023) at The Box, Plymouth, and the British Pavilion next year will discern is that the world going to hell in multiple handcarts is raising Akomfrah to the peak of his powers.

35 APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL Artist Thai Last Year 32 In May New York’s Lincoln Center opened The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a festival dedicated to the filmmaker’s ambulatory docufiction work stretching from his 2000 feature debut, Mysterious Object at Noon, to the 2021 Tilda Swinton-starring Colombian-jungle set Memoria, in which the main character is plagued by a single sound only she can hear. Increasingly present in the gallery as much as the cinema, Apichatpong saw over seven hours of his short films exhibited across Kiang Malingue’s two Hong Kong premises at the start of the year (the dealer went on to take them to various art fairs, including a screening at Art Basel Hong Kong). Yet Apichatpong is perhaps most comfortable on set, among the lush landscapes he had made his own, and in August he returned to the forest, specifically the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, to lead a ten day Herzogesque workshop for emerging filmmakers; next year he will be in Sri Lanka, making a film inspired by Arthur C. Clarke, cowriter of the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and longtime resident of the country.

When Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, was reissued last year, it included newly commissioned art by Torkwase Dyson and Cameron Rowland. That’s far from the only sign of the American thinker, cultural historian and 2019 MacArthur Fellow’s profound imprint on contemporary art, due to her intersectional, archive-delving expansion of incomplete written histories – particularly those of people of colour, women and queer communities. She’s had a longstanding and productive dialogue with Arthur Jafa, for example, whose own acclaimed moving-image work reflects Hartman’s granular and speculative approach to storytelling in the gaps left by official narratives, or what she’s termed ‘critical fabulation’. Currently, it appears, Hartman is working on Graces of the Unsung, an exploration of Black radicalism and the transformative actions of ordinary citizens; not a few artists will have it on preorder.

36 HOOR AL QASIMI Curator Emirati Last Year 50 Playing host to the Africa Institute, the March Meeting conference, an art fair, year-round exhibitions, an annual photography showcase, a new performance festival and artist and curator residencies, Hoor’s Sharjah Art Foundation is far from just about the Sharjah Biennial, though that event remains its crowning glory. The covid-postponed 15th edition, which finally opened in February, was originally supposed to be curated by Okwei Enwezor, who fell ill and died during the process. With his blessing, Hoor developed his initial ideas under the title Thinking Historically in the Present, bringing together 170 artists, among them Doris Salcedo, Ibrahim Mahama, Cao Fei, Coco Fusco and John Akomfrah, and more than 300 artworks, to exhibit in historic venues across the emirate. It’s an experience that she will take to the Aichi Triennale in 2025, the first non-Japanese appointed as artistic director, and a legacy that Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika and Megan Tamati-Quennell will build on as curators of Sharjah Biennial 16.

December 2023

37 BARBARA GLADSTONE

38 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI

Gallerist American Last Year 94

Curator Indian Last Year 89 Just hours before the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was due to let in visitors, Krishnamachari, its founder-president, announced it would be delayed by ten days, as three venues weren’t ready. To The Art Newspaper, the artist-curator blamed ‘adverse weather, a lack of timely access to our main venue, shipping delays, higher travel and logistical costs’. Over 50 participating artists wrote an open letter condemning bad organisation, though; and at least one artist pulled out. When the show, curated by Shubigi Rao, did open, it was well praised, proving again to be India’s most important contemporary exhibition. It remains the touchstone biennial for the region and beyond: ‘evocative, poignant, and moving’, wrote Ocula; a ‘ray of hope’, said Art News. While the biennial brings in international artists, Krishnamachari is firmly interested in the value they bring to his local Kerala, speaking at the India Today Conclave South conference about ‘democratising’ art, a desire manifested in the show he curated in November for the government-backed Keraleeyam festival, a showcase of neurodiverse artists.

40 RUANGRUPA

39 LIZA ESSERS

Artist Collective Indonesian Last Year 1

Gallerist South African Last Year 64 ‘Finally, the world is really paying attention to artists from the Global South,’ Essers, who has owned Goodman Gallery since 2008, told The Art Newspaper, having long been ahead of this curve. From its base in Johannesburg, the gallery has expanded under her watch to Cape Town, then London in 2019, and this year Essers opened a viewing room in New York. There won’t be shows per se, but hangs that, she hopes, will help connect curators with gallery artists. Of course some, such as David Goldblatt, William Kentridge and Sue Williamson, need no introduction, but Goodman in giving plenty of lesser-known names international attention: Zimbabwean painter Misheck Masamvu showed in the Cape Town space in January; Zambian multimedia artist Nolan Oswald Dennis exhibited in Johannesburg in May; and Egypt-born installation artist Ghada Amer was in London in November. Continuing to branch out, the gallery staged a pop-up group show in Miami in March that showed Amer alongside Kentridge, Goldblatt, El Anatsui, Kapwani Kiwanga and others.

In January the investigation convened by Documenta into ruangrupa’s 2022 edition of the exhibition found it ‘served as an echo chamber for Israel-related antisemitism and sometimes pure antisemitism’, but also defended artistic freedom. If the Indonesian collective hoped to return to lives not under constant scrutiny – no such luck: Documenta put out apologetic statements after two members ‘liked’a social media post depicting a pro-Palestine celebration the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel (Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono, both currently visiting professors at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, also apologised, saying they mistakenly thought the video showed police breaking up the demonstration). Despite the controversies, and while less overtly and creatively active this year, their mode of nonhierarchical working is spreading, both through inspiration and ongoing collaborations: Momentum 12, the Norwegian biennial, made explicit reference to their project by including the archives of Gudskul, the free art school the collective operates in Jakarta, as did Asia Art Archive’s exhibition The Collective School.

ArtReview

37 Photo: Sharon Lockhart. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York 38 Photo: A.J. Joji 39 Photo: Anthea Pokroy 40 Photo: ruangrupa / Iswanto Hartono

Despite attempts by artists, thinkers and social movements to propose different ways of working, the market model remains resilient. But Gladstone’s artists are often witty commentators on such tensions. Serve the Dominant Ideology or Stop Being a Pussy, Frances Stark’s first exhibition with the gallery since her old home, Gavin Brown Enterprises, folded into Gladstone in 2020, opened in June and featured 12 paintings of open books. Another astute commentator on the artworld, artist David Salle, and the lucrative estate of Robert Rauschenberg also joined the gallery’s roster this year. With locations in New York, Brussels and Seoul, and artists ranging from Matthew Barney to Marisa Merz and Rachel Rose (all of whom had shows), as well as the likes of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sarah Lucas (who have had significant shows elsewhere this year), Gladstone has colossal spread. But sometimes trouble presents itself closer to home: a lawsuit by a former New York employee made its way through the courts.

This is our culture turned inside out

Uninvited guests take advantage of the feast available in the city

41 ZANELE MUHOLI

42 GLENN D. LOWRY Museum Director American Last Year 54

Artist South African Last Year 28 41 Courtesy Zanele Muholi 42 Photo: Peter Ross. © Museum of Modern Art 43 Courtesy Adrian Cheng 44 Photo: Stefan Gutermuth

‘At the beginning, showing what I did was very risky,’ Muholi told Numéro on the eve of their retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. ‘This was at a time where many hate crimes happened in South Africa and people wanted to use queer people’s presence as a scapegoat for their own failures.’ The Paris show was the latest stop of an exhibition that has already travelled to Gropius Bau, Kunstmuseum Luzern and the National Gallery of Iceland (and is heading to Tate Modern next year), showcasing 20 years of photography focused on Black lgbtqia+ subjects. ‘It has been a very long journey to get to where we are now,’ says the self-styled ‘visual activist’. They opened the Muholi Art Institute in Cape Town last year, offering residencies lasting six months to a year, with a stipend, housing and studio costs covered; the fruits of which were featured in an exhibition at Jonathan Carver Moore gallery in San Francisco in June. In February the institute presented a group exhibition, embodying #her, spotlighting the work of established and emerging women-identifying and queer artists.

moma bucked a trend among New York’s arts institutions and increased attendance in 2022 over 2019 (albeit from an artificially low level: moma was under renovation for part of that year), but costs are on the rise, including admission (from $25 to $30). Then there’s the politics to navigate (Lowry told the The Art World: What If…?! podcast that the museum isn’t looking to be “woke”, but to “do the right thing”); questions of restitution (returning several Egon Schiele works looted by the Nazi regime); controversies regarding the board (16 climate activists were arrested protesting the museum’s ties to a private equity fund with substantial fossil fuel investments, through donations made to the museum by fund founder Henry Kravis and his wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, current moma chair); and new staff (former Hammer Museum director Connie Butler took the helm at moma’s ps1 branch). Lastly, and hopefully not least in terms of claims on his attention, the exhibitions: an Ed Ruscha survey, shows of Barbara Chase-Riboud and An-My Lê, and the museum’s largest presentation of video to date, among them.

43 ADRIAN CHENG

44 JUDITH BUTLER

Collector Hong Konger Last Year 43

Thinker American Last Year 37

When the Hong Kong government was looking for someone to head its new hk$60m funding pot for largescale arts events, aiming to reestablish the city as a cultural hub, Cheng was an obvious pick to chair the committee. While the founder of k11 Group combines art and commerce through a series of mall-based galleries across Hong Kong and mainland China (bringing in Jeffrey Deitch to curate a street-art show; partnering with the British Council on a Phyllida Barlow installation) – including the in-development us$1.4bn k11 Ecoast complex in Shenzhen – Cheng has international reach. He sponsors residencies at the Royal Academy, leads fundraising for m+ as chair of its Gala Board and operates an online exchange programme with the Mori Art Museum, among numerous museum trusteeships. Full disclosure: k11 also organises a Wuhan-based artist residency in partnership with ArtReview, and Cheng took on a cochair role at the magazine’s parent company, Meta Media, in February, but resigned in October (he continues as Meta Media’s art consultant).

Characteristically, Butler has been one of the most nuanced thinkers on the Israel-Hamas war, writing an essay for the London Review of Books that looks not just at the conflict but at how it is communicated. They write, ‘political morality takes time, a patient and courageous way of learning and naming’, a slowness lost in the media churn of outrage and easy condemnation. Considerations such as these come naturally to the Gender Trouble (1990) author and comparative literature professor at uc Berkeley, who remains a champion of queer and gender theory, and who published The Livable and the Unlivable this year (coauthored with Frédéric Worms), a treatise on intersectional care in the face of identity-based and ecological violence. It was these subjects and more that they picked up with a series of speakers – among them philosophers Paul B. Preciado, Elsa Dorlin, Hourya Bentouhami and psychoanalyst Monique David-Ménard – in the first of their events organised as part of being the 2023–24 intellectualin-residence at the Pompidou in Paris.

December 2023

45 MARIA BALSHAW

46 CANDICE HOPKINS

Museum Director British Last Year 73

Curator Carcross / Tagish First Nation Last Year 55 ‘It was really me trying to convince people that there are still Native artists,’ the executive director of arts initiative Forge Project recalled of her time as a student at the Center for Curatorial Studies (ccs) at Bard College, in Upstate New York. Two decades later the greater awareness of Indigenous production is partly her win, through her work designing Forge Project’s programme, in a setting located on the ancestral homelands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck, some 20km from Bard. This year she returned to her alma mater, too, where she is employed in the newly established role of Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies. Bard College and Forge Project have announced a $50m funding partnership to support more Indigenous faculty; for recruitment and scholarships for Native students; and to expand relevant library and archival material. In June Hopkins curated a show of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Alaska Native artists at Bard’s Hessel Museum, with loaned works and others drawn from Forge Project’s 150-strong collection.

48 WU TSANG

47 LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE Artist British Last Year 58

Artist American Last Year 14

On closing her four-venue European travelling show at Tate Britain in February, Yiadom-Boakye was confirmed as one of Britain’s foremost painters, leaving critics enamoured with her oil paintings of timeless figures – all Black, some posed, some acting out everyday playful scenes. ‘A living old master’, The Guardian reckoned. ‘Her touch is sublime. She animates a face with a few marks and patches of bare canvas,’ commented the Evening Standard. ‘[A] very, very good painter. Thick and rough with the brush but just precise enough,’ thought Time Out. Ever prolific, she went on in March to fill the Guggenheim Bilbao with a selection of over 70 paintings and charcoal drawings, all shown for the first time and made in the last three years. Being one of the leading practitioners of Black figuration comes with commercial success too: her 2015 painting Six Birds in the Bush, a portrait of a young Black man sporting a purple feather in his hat and who appears as though caught in a daydream, sold for £2.95m at Sotheby’s in October.

Since she shot her first film, Wildness (2012), in a Los Angeles gay bar frequented by the Latin immigrant community and set up a weekly club there for both patrons and queer artists of colour, Wu Tsang has been a lodestar for concerns since adopted by the wider artworld, particularly in relation to collaboration, inclusivity and decentred authorship. Anthem (2021), for example, a film portrait of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, was as much the transgender singer and activist’s work as Tsang’s; and the group she cofounded in 2013, Moved by the Motion, encompasses musicians, performers and the theorist Fred Moten. Given Tsang’s interest in fluidity of all kinds, it looks retrospectively perfect that in 2022 she and her collaborators began making works based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. Between the featurelength, emphatically queered silent-film version – sometimes accompanied by live music and performance – and the psychedelic, extended-reality video installation that premiered at the last Venice Biennale and has been touring much of this year, Tsang’s Melvillian collaborative fantasia reaffirmed her as an artist of ocean-sized imagination and ambition.

ArtReview

45 Photo: Jai Monaghan. © Tate 46 Photo: Thatcher Keats 48 Photo: Gina Folly

A year away from the headlines for the director of Britain’s Tate galleries is a relief given the controversies that have previously faced Balshaw: one such, the postponement of a touring Philip Guston retrospective after partner institutions got cold feet over the American painter’s Ku Klux Klan imagery, had its denouement, with the show opening in October at Tate Modern to rave reviews. But despite remaining the fourth most-visited art museum in the world, Tate Modern’s struggle to return to 2019 levels of footfall postpandemic will be a top priority for new director Karin Hindsbo (poached from the top job at Norway’s National Museum), while Balshaw will be focused on Tate Britain’s collapsing visitor numbers, counting on a major collection rehang in May to revive its fortunes. Tate Liverpool, meanwhile, shuttered for a two-year refurb in March (though its programme will continue via collaborations with other venues in the city). Though the Tate Britain rehang was criticised for ‘sermonising’, its Sarah Lucas show was well received – and there were positive reviews, too, for the Casablanca School survey at Tate St Ives.

49 HANS ULRICH OBRIST 49 Photo: Lukas Wassmann 50 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow 51 Photo: Noé Cotter. Courtesy Art Basel 52 Photo: Romain Duquesne. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

50 AGNES DENES

Curator Swiss Last Year 34

Artist Hungarian-American new

The programmatic range of London’s Serpentine Galleries, where Obrist is artistic director, provides a peek into the brain of the curator and networker: such is the array of names (from food activist Kamal Mouzawak to sociologist Richard Sennett), ideas (from ecology to tech) and initiatives (community workshops, a podcast called Intimacies featuring artist Brontez Purnell’s previously unreleased sex column). That is even before considering the exhibitions this year: Grenfell, the agenda-setting response to the Grenfell Tower fire by Steve McQueen, and Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition addressing the climate emergency. Obrist is as restless as ever outside the London institution: from public conversations and interviews to an Instagram account documenting his studio visits (ranging from Ndebele painter Esther Mahlangu to pioneering German digital artist Manfred Mohr and cellist Kelsey Lu in a four-week stretch); the latter resulting in a new book of 100 artist-annotated Post-it notes. Also an adviser at luma Arles and The Shed, New York, Obrist is the ubiquitous curator from whom everyone knows what to expect: an unstoppable force always moving on to the next ‘urgent’ thing.

51 NOAH HOROWITZ Art Fair Director American new

An iconic figure in ecological art since the 1960s, and becoming even better known with Wheatfield (1982), a field grown on nearly a hectare of landfill in Lower Manhattan, then worth $4.5bn, Denes has seen the importance of her message increase as the climate emergency intensifies. With solo shows at Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, and acb Galéria, Budapest, she has also been featured in a vast list of environmentally minded surveys: Extreme Tension (2023), at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; How is Life? (2022), at Toto Gallery Ma, Tokyo; Groundswell: Women of Land Art (2023), at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and Dear Earth (2023), at the Hayward Gallery, London, to name a few. Her work extends into considerations of data, technology and artificial intelligence – yet again ahead of the curve, with large coding and ai-themed group exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and la’s lacma to round out her pervasive exhibition presence this year, while she is set to unveil a new work in the AlUla desert in Saudi Arabia next year.

52 THADDAEUS ROPAC Gallerist Austrian reentry (33 in 2019)

The art historian has returned to Art Basel, the company where he’d worked for six years until 2021. Now he is ceo, overseeing the art fair’s mainstay events in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami, as well as more recent arrival Art Basel Paris+. After turbulent years at parent company mch, stabilised by the entrance of investor James Murdoch, Horowitz’s task is to further steady the ship, and to provide a bulwark against the buying spree of rivals Frieze. He did that with the Hong Kong event, which bucked political uncertainty with 177 galleries this year (it had 134 in 2022), but exhibitor levels still have not reached their prepandemic numbers. If Art Basel now has to contend with three American fairs under the Frieze umbrella, the French event has been judged a success. mch might be looking to accelerate its global reach in the future too (though it cancelled Masterpiece in London) and experiment with different formats, with Murdoch recently speaking admiringly of the ‘travelling circus’ business model of Formula 1 racing.

The former assistant to Joseph Beuys’s assistant, a job he got by knocking on the great artist’s studio door, has since notched up 40 years as a gallerist. He celebrated – how else? – with a show of Beuys’s works on paper at his London gallery at the start of the year, and another at Ropac’s Seoul branch at the end of the year. Having opened in Salzburg in 1983, and adding two London and two Paris spaces along the way, Ropac landed in South Korea in 2021 and this year doubled the square meterage there by adding another floor, allowing for a simultaneous exhibition of Donald Judd’s sculptures and paintings in September. As well as some of the great American estates, Ropac has become the de facto rep for canonical artists of the German-speaking world, among them valie export, Anselm Kiefer, Not Vital and Imi Knoebel. Georg Baselitz turned eighty-five this year, so there were more celebrations to arrange, with shows staged by the painter at nine institutions around the world, including at London’s Serpentine galleries and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

December 2023

53 CECILIA ALEMANI Curator Italian Last Year 2

Art Fair Directors American / British Last Year 53

With over 800,000 people passing through her Venice Biennale last year, Alemani fell into the groove of in-demand curator, albeit not of the airport-hopping kind. While her Biennale remains a touchstone of how to handle a largescale, in-depth exhibition, this year she has collaborated with various commercial sidelines within spitting distance of the High Line, New York, where she is director. Alemani’s commissions at the latter include work by Pamela Rosenkranz, Yu Ji and Gabriel Chaile, among others. At Gagosian, just a block from the linear sculpture park’s entrance, Alemani curated a Tetsuya Ishida retrospective, featuring more than 80 of the late Japanese artist’s nightmarishly surreal paintings. And a mere two blocks further on, at the old Dia Chelsea premises, Alemani staged an exhibition of work by 70 women artists owned by collectors Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg (which will travel to California’s Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and the Kemper Art Museum in St Louis). Whether the carbon-footprint-conscious Alemani left Chelsea to sit on the jury of Canada’s Sobey prize is unknown.

‘The us art market is the biggest in the world,’ Frieze ceo Fox told Art News, having bought up art-fair rivals Expo Chicago and The Armory Show, New York, in a single sitting. If, with Paris+, Art Basel has locked down European fairs, Frieze has locked down the us. Fox now controls four of the country’s major art fairs (including Friezes New York and la), putting pressure on the fifth, Art Basel Miami Beach. The new acquisitions bring challenges: Armory is scheduled for the same week as Frieze Seoul, whose second edition landed in September. Emanuel, ceo of parent company Endeavor, was bullish, stating that Basel ‘made a mistake [opening a fair] in Hong Kong. I think we made the right decision in South Korea.’ Back in London, where the first Frieze art fair celebrated its 20th anniversary, the company’s permanent gallery space (rented primarily by those who take part in the fairs) hosted a range of shows, from Tehran’s Dastan Gallery to Cape Town’s Blank Projects, as well as an Afro-Cuban summer carnival.

56 JAY JOPLING

55 CECILIA VICUÑA Artist Chilean Last Year 29

Gallerist British

If textiles, ecofeminism and an interest in Indigenous culture seem everywhere in art, Vicuña has been combining all three for five decades now. From penniless roots in a radical poetry collective, scraping through life on the streets of Santiago, to today’s endless stream of museum shows, the artist hasn’t stopped producing. Quipu menstrual (the blood of the glaciers) (2006; Quipu is the Spanish transliteration of the word for ‘knots’ in the Cuzco Quechua language of Peru) was the largest of the 200 works showing at Santiago’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, a homecoming show that will travel to Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires and Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Brain Forest Quipu (2022), her commission for Tate Modern, London, featuring knotted wool, sound, music and video, was packed up in April. Despite the recognition, Vicuña has resisted temptation to make her work slicker: at moca Tucson, the new installation, Sonoran Quipu (2023), was composed of debris gathered from local kitchens, gutters, gardens and streets.

reentry (33 in 2019)

The White Cube founder and gossip-column regular continued the expansion he embarked on in 2021 (when he opened his Paris and West Palm Beach locations), this year fulfilling a decade-long ambition to open a gallery space in New York, and joining many other Western dealers on the Seoul train. (While he’s successfully opened two new spaces, Jopling’s also keeping his finger on the secondary market pulse – selling via his own private collection as well as White Cube’s ‘Salon’ initiative.) Presently, Jopling estimates a third of his business is stateside, and is expecting that to grow, with the promise of adding artists to a list that already features David Hammons, Theaster Gates and Bruce Nauman, alongside the yba veterans – Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin – with whom he is synonymous. The group exhibition inaugurating the South Korean venture, The Embodied Spirit, featured just one local artist, so there’s room to grow there too. If Jopling Snr is looking for talent, he can ask his daughter Angelica, who has opened Incubator, in London, showcasing Gen-Z artists.

ArtReview

53 Photo: Liz Ligon. Courtesy High Line 54 Courtesy Endeavor (Emanuel). Photo: Harry Mitchell (Fox). Courtesy Frieze 55 Photo: William Jess Laird. © and courtesy Cecilia Vicuña / Artist Rights Society (ars) and Lehmann Maupin 56 Photo: Julian Salinas Hugo Rittson-Thomas

54 ARI EMANUEL & SIMON FOX

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58 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

57 REEM FADDA

Collector Italian Last Year 60

Curator Palestinian new

57 Courtesy Reem Fadda 58 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi / Getty 59 Photo: Richard Schlaggmann 60 Photo: Efsun Erkilic

With the Gulf states emerging as a new powerhouse of contemporary art, Fadda can claim, over the past decade, to have played a key role in laying the foundations. While the big bucks spent on commissioning and acquiring art from the Western hemisphere often attracts more attention, the director of the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi, who also oversees the cultural output of uae venues Manarat Al Saadiyat, Bait Al Oud and Berklee Abu Dhabi, has been tireless in promoting and offering a platform for art from the region and the Middle East more generally. Last year saw her curate the Saudi Arabia Pavilion in Venice, as well as cocurating the inaugural Desert X in AlUla. Prior to that, and in addition to curating numerous solo and group exhibitions, Fadda played a key role in the development of the Guggenheim’s preparations for its new outpost in Abu Dhabi, as well as organising programmes for the Sharjah and Marrakech biennials. Up next, she will cocurate the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial and the Manar Abu Dhabi Light Festival, which aim, in part, at creating new audiences for art in the uae.

59 IWONA BLAZWICK

What happens when your favourite proposal doesn’t win a public sculpture competition? If you’re Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, you commission it yourself. Goshka Macuga’s rocket-shaped idea for the Fourth Plinth on London’s Trafalgar Square was realised and found a home at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, as part of a show marking 30 years of Sandretto Re Rebaudengo buying art. Her collection, now comprising over 1,500 artworks, can be seen at her private foundations in Turin and Guarene (where she also has a sculpture park), with shows this year by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Julian Opie, and in Madrid, where she stages exhibitions in city venues (such as Lucas Arruda’s landscapes in the library of Ateneo de Madrid). By the next Venice Biennale, she hopes to open a new space on the island of San Giacomo in Paludo, a former military garrison, as another outpost. She admits younger artists have called her ‘mamma’, but as Macuga told The New York Times, the reason artists really like Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is because ‘you know your work is going to be seen’.

60 REFIK ANADOL

Curator British reentry (47 in 2012)

Artist Turkish-American new

The Saudi Arabian government is due to spend $15bn turning the AlUla desert valley into a contemporary arts hub. The former director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery was appointed as the project’s curator last year, and announced the first of around 25 commissions, with public works by James Turrell, Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer, Manal Al Dowayan and Ahmed Mater due to be completed next year. Then there will be two museums, the one dedicated to contemporary art, designed by Beirut-born Lina Ghotmeh, developed in a deal inked this year with the Pompidou (the second institution, the Museum of the Incense Road, is dedicated to ancient trading routes). Blazwick is already buying work by the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Carmen Herrera, Etel Adnan and Ibrahim El Salahi for the walls and floors. Not without controversy, Blazwick also pipped Defne Ayas to be curator of the 2024 Istanbul Biennial, against the advice of the nonbinding independent selection committee (on which she originally sat).

The nft-triggered mix of hype and genuine innovation that recently pushed digital art into the mainstream has seen reputations of artists (and artworks) balloon and burst as quickly as a crypto bubble. (Bored Ape, anyone?) But la-based Anadol has been patiently building his sophisticated (yet still crowd-wowing) merger of big data, machine learning and immersive largescale video for over a decade, hypnotising audiences with huge shapeshifting projections, spawned from image libraries and live feeds such as environmental and weather data. Unsupervised, presented at New York’s moma, has become a yearlong hit, its constantly morphing forms a machine-learning interpretation (Anadol calls these ‘hallucinations’) of the database of moma’s artworks. (The museum acquired it in October.) From a solo show of ‘Living Paintings’ at la’s Jeffrey Deitch in February, to a takeover of (and homage to) architect Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona in May, Anadol’s take on data, dematerialising architecture and the digital sublime is spreading, currently taking over the exterior of the recently opened entertainment megaplex The Sphere, in Las Vegas.

December 2023

62 PRATEEK RAJA & PRIYANKA RAJA

61 FELIPE DMAB, PEDRO MENDES & MATTHEW WOOD

Gallerists Brazilian / Brazilian / American reentry (89 in 2020)

Gallerists Indian Last Year 65

63 JEFFREY GIBSON

64 MAMI KATAOKA

Artist American new

Museum Director Japanese Last Year 69

Gibson is in full production mode for his exhibition in the us Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale, but that doesn’t mean he’s hiding in the studio. The artist showed his hypercolourful paintings and intricate textiles, which play through the artist’s Choctaw-Cherokee background with a queer identity, at Jordan Schnitzer Museum at Washington State University and at his two us commercial galleries, Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. His touring exhibition from 2022 continued this year at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and he had work in 21 group shows across the us, and in the uk and Canada. This while maintaining his position as artist-in-residence at Bard College, where, with Arielle Twist, he produced a performance based on the Dionne Warwick anthem Don’t Make Me Over (1962). Enough? No: he did the set design for Justin Peck’s abstract ballet Copland Dance Episodes at the New York City Ballet and edited An Indigenous Present, a new 448-page survey of Native North American art, a present he is helping to define.

Until last year Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, was president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. With her tenure now ended, she has had time for a new role, becoming director of Japan’s new National Center for Art Research, which will promote links between cultural institutions and other fields, with the aim of producing, ‘a positive impact on health and wellbeing’ for the nation. As such, her aim in exploring what an art institution can be in the present continues. At Mori her programme has been similarly socially engaged, with the exhibition Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living, featuring artists ranging from Kudo Tetsumi to Ian Cheng and Agnes Denes, in October; the innovatively organised World Classroom in April (in which works were divided across an average school curriculum, from physical education to maths); and an enquiry into human wellbeing and the built environment via Heatherwick Studio’s Building Soulfulness in March. As if two jobs weren’t enough, she is also an adviser to the next Bangkok Art Biennale and appeared at Museum Summit in Hong Kong.

ArtReview

61 Photo: Bruna Guerra 62 Courtesy Experimenter 63 Photo: Brian Barlow 64 Photo: Ito Akinori

‘A space for fearlessness’ was Prateek’s ambition for Experimenter, the Kolkata- and now Mumbai-based gallery he runs with wife Priyanka. That translates as a programme with a political sensibility, which privileges intellectual rigour and experimentation over sales (including No Starting Point for Revolution, Kabul-based artist Aziz Hazara’s solo multimedia study of living in a warzone, and the group sound-art exhibition In Between Notes). Running alongside the gallery’s regular learning, outreach and outpost programmes, this year’s Experimenter Curators’ Hub (now on its 13th edition) brought together the likes of Inti Guerrero (codirector of the Biennale of Sydney 2024) and Shubigi Rao (artistic director for last year’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale), with Mayank Mansingh Kaul, who studies postcolonial histories of Indian textiles, and activist and poet Jacinta Kerketta. In Mumbai, where Experimenter’s third space, after the two in Kolkata, opened last year, the pair staged a show by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, who presented Sonam’s father’s personal archive relating to the cia’s opportunistic involvement in Tibetan resistance.

As much as wanting art to hang on the wall, many collectors are searching out a more bohemian lifestyle, and the trio behind Mendes Wood dm are happy to sate both appetites. With its rakish reputation, the gallery was always going to be at home in the Marais in Paris, where it opened a fourth official space in October with a group show that typically mixed Brazilian and international names. ‘Official’ because the restless trio don’t tend to contain themselves solely to their addresses in São Paulo (a warehouse mothership), Brussels (opened in 2017) and their New York TriBeCa gallery. They spent their summer staging a group show at a seventeenth-century church in the bucolic Dutch coastal village of Retranchement, with a large group show of works on paper by artists including Michael Dean and Mariana Castillo Deball; while a show by painter Marina Perez Simão was the fourth to be staged at Villa Era, a nineteenth-century estate in the Italian countryside. Now they’ve refurbished a property in Upstate New York for residencies, starting with Paulo Nazareth and Paulo Monteiro.

66 BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG

65 Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland 66 Photo: Alexander Steffens / hkw

65 LUCIA PIETROIUSTI Curator Italian Last Year 90

Museum Director Cameroonian-German Last Year 76

67 Photo: Chase Hall 68 Photo: José Frade / egeac. Courtesy Maumaus / Lumiar Cité

In October luminaries ranging from Malian cultural theorist Manthia Diawara to Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno gathered at London’s Serpentine Galleries to ask: what is underrepresented on the environmental agenda today? What is not yet on the agenda, but will be in the near future? The event was a prelude to next year’s Infinite Ecologies Marathon, marking ten years of climate-focused events organised by Pietroiusti at the Serpentine, and representative of the curator’s belief that art can platform cross-disciplinary ideas on tackling the climate crisis. One of the leading ecologically minded curators, she is a regular on the panel discussion and jury circuit. This year she curated a screening programme for a ‘more-thanhuman curiosity’ symposium in the Czech Republic, and serves as a trustee of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which includes hundreds of galleries and institutions worldwide. Sun & Sea (Marina), the ‘climate change’ opera she curated for the 2019 Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, also continues its seemingly never-ending global tour: Taipei, Paris, Cork, Vienna, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Sydney this year.

When Ndikung arrived as director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (hkw) in January, he promptly closed the museum for four months. It was ostensibly for maintenance, but it signalled too that a new broom was coming. On reopening, every space had been renamed after women in arts or social movements, and a new curatorial team was in place. The latter included Senegalese curator Marie Hélène Pereira, Colombian artist Carlos Maria Romero, Filipina activist Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Cameroonian curator Dzekashu MacViban and Turkish-born curator Can Sungu. Their opening programme was reflective of that multiculturalism: a 68-artist exhibition inspired by the quilombos, communities founded by formerly enslaved people in Brazil; a festival centring on the Haitian Revolution; and another concerning ai and ancestral knowledge. Long used to running his own show, at Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary for 13 years and as artistic director of the troubled Sonsbeek 20–24 exhibition in Arnhem, among other projects, Ndikung knows he is now part of the establishment and will have a tricky line to run.

67 VINCENT WORMS

68 MANTHIA DIAWARA

Collector French Last Year 68

Thinker Malian new

The venture capitalist, whose latest investments range from a Kenyabased college-course comparison platform to a Vietnamese payday app, has an equally diverse interest in art. Worms’s Kadist Foundation includes two physical locations for exhibitions and residencies, this year hosting Wang Tuo’s look at Chinese protest movements at its space in San Francisco (while Yina Jiménez Suriel and Erika Mei Chua Holum also had residencies); and a group show from the foundation’s collection in Paris (including work by Farah Al Qasimi, Joanna Piotrowska and Lisa Oppenheim). It also funds projects for others, coproducing Al Qasimi’s work for the Sharjah Biennial; a monthlong video programme at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca and a group show regarding mythologies at the artist-run Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh. International in scope and ambition, this programme has regional curators such as Magalí Arriola, director of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Hyunjin Kim in Seoul and Adam Kleinman in New York on hand to advise.

Art ‘is not an immediate solution – otherwise it would become an ideology’, Diawara told an audience in Porto this year, who had gathered to watch A Letter from Yene (2022), one of his three documentary essay-films, alongside ai: African Intelligence (2022) and Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023). Nonetheless, treading a path between art, philosophy and journalism, A Letter from Yene (which premiered at London’s Serpentine Galleries last year) concentrates, from an African perspective, on the ecological degradation of a Senegalese fishing village. ai: African Intelligence, which investigates the intersection between African rituals of possession in Senegal and emerging ai, was unveiled at the Berlinale this year. Having long made work that follows, and follows through on, the work of thinkers like Édouard Glissant, Wole Soyinka and Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Diawara is reaching a wider audience, with In Search of Africa, his 1996 book delineating the border between African and African-American culture, newly translated into Portuguese. Diawara also released his portrait of Davis at Sharjah Biennial 15.

December 2023

70 YINKA SHONIBARE

Artist British-Kenyan Last Year 70

Artist British-Nigerian new

‘My first audience would be a Kenyan audience… I wanted them to see something… that would have relevance to them and their lives,’ said Armitage this year. Yet his figurative paintings – often ambiguous scenes, ‘points of contention… that I don’t have a clear moral attitude on’, created not on canvas (to avoid the Western-centric history of the material) but lubugo, a Ugandan textile used in funerary rites made from fig tree bark – have found an audience internationally as much as at home. While Armitage has put much of his energy into his Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a nonprofit for East African art he set up in 2020, this year he won the uk Government Art Collection’s Robson Orr TenTen Award and had a solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, while his art has passed through many hands: the £1 coin he designed should be going into circulation soon. ncai meanwhile has provided a platform to showcase Kenyan artists, including a retrospective of Kenyan artist Chelenge Van Rampelberg and an exhibition of Syowia Kyambi’s recent work across media.

Three decades into his career, Yinka Shonibare is an elder statesman of British art, his work instantly recognisable thanks to his longstanding use of mannequin figures wearing colourful Dutch-made ‘African’ batik fabrics that capsule postcolonial histories. But Shonibare, who diverts frequently into quilt-making, woodcuts and more, has shown a consistent ability to gearshift within his established framework; his latest art draws effusive inspiration from Dada’s own borrowings from exuberant African and Oceanic cultures, while other recent sculptures address debates about decolonising public statuary. The British-Nigerian artist also recently moved into mentorship: in 2022, after years of inviting emerging artists to share his East London studio space Guest Projects, Shonibare’s g.a.s. Foundation opened two new live/work residency spaces in Lagos and Ijebu, Nigeria, hosting artists, researchers and curators. Next year, meanwhile, expect the continued relevance of Shonibare’s serious yet serotonin-boosting explorations of cultural identity to be reaffirmed, in his home city, with a solo show at the Serpentine Galleries.

72 MIUCCIA PRADA

71 HAEGUE YANG Artist Korean reentry (36 in 2019)

Collector Italian Last Year 45

When the international artworld came to Seoul in September, it was natural that Kukje, which represents Yang, would dedicate a show to her – she is one of South Korea’s biggest art stars. Yang, however, is rarely at home. Incorporating Venetian blinds, clothing racks, synthetic straw and other such diverse materials, her sculpture featured in a vertiginous number of exhibitions this year, ranging from Several Reenactments at smak Ghent, which became Continuous Reenactments at Helsinki Art Museum; to Quasi-Colloquial, which inaugurated Pinacoteca de São Paulo’s new contemporary museum; and Changing From From To From at the National Gallery of Australia, the Canberra institution buying most of the show for its collection. For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale she showed a work featuring over 100,000 bells, and at Performa in New York she staged the sixth iteration of The Malady of Death (2015–), a rare performance based on the eponymous Marguerite Duras text, while she prepares for a largescale survey show in the Hayward Gallery, London, in autumn next year; all this while continuing as a professor at Frankfurt’s Städelschule.

Late last year Prada stepped back from her role as co-ceo at her fashion company, putting in place succession plans. That freed her up to formalise a hands-on approach to her foundation – with its three museum sites in Milan and Venice, and smaller project spaces in Shanghai and Tokyo – becoming its president and director in September. This restructuring also saw a new steering committee, featuring among its number artist Theaster Gates, with whom she is collaborating on mentorship programmes for designers of colour, three of whom she and Gates showcased at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition programme remains eclectic, from exhibitions for cineaste David Cronenberg and video art pioneer Dara Birnbaum, to a show of historical folding screens curated by Nicholas Cullinan, director of London’s National Portrait Gallery. If that’s not enough for Prada, the foundation continued its exploration of neuroscience and neurodegenerative diseases, launched in Milan in 2022, and convened an exhibition and scientific conference in Shanghai in April.

ArtReview

69 Photo: Anna Kucera. Courtesy mca Australia 70 Photo: Leon Foggitt 71 Photo: ham / Sonja Hyytiäinen. Courtesy Haegue Yang 72 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

69 MICHAEL ARMITAGE

Chernobyl is on your breakfast table 83

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73 MARIANE IBRAHIM

74 TORKWASE DYSON

Gallerist Somali-French Last Year 62

Artist American new

73 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim 74 Photo: Suzie Howell 75 Courtesy Moving Image Studio 76 Photo: Wim van Dongen. © Otobong Nkanga. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

‘It is a collective mission to emancipate and change mentalities that society may have about artists of African origin,’ Ibrahim told Vogue of her relationship with her artists. This mission started in Chicago with Ibrahim’s gallery in 2019, before expanding to Paris in 2021 and this year opening in stately Mexico City premises, complete with Porfiriato facade. Along the way she has brought attention to many of the new stars of the Black figurative painting renaissance, not least Ghanaians Amoako Boafo and Zohra Opoku, and Nigerian Peter Uka (who showed at the Paris gallery in October). The cdmx gallery opened with an exhibition of Hawaiian-born, locally based Clotilde Jiménez’s largescale cubistinflected collages, paintings and ceramics. Ibrahim is winning fans: veteran conceptualist Lorraine O’Grady quit her mainstay representative Alexander Gray Associates for the gallery, even as an expansive retrospective tours American museums, while Ibrahim debuted Haitian painter Patrick Eugène at the Chicago space in April.

75 CHRISTOPHER HO

In her dwarfing steel sculptures, Dyson centres a Black experience of space and architecture. ‘Black people are still living in the wake of that industry, in the wake of those oceans,’ she told Frieze. ‘We’re still in the wake of this thick air of what it means not only to survive such dispossession but to move on to autonomy without the granting of emancipation.’ The sleek corporate shine of Blackbasebeingbeyond (2023) at the Bienal de São Paulo belied its formal reference to a castle in which recaptured enslaved people were imprisoned. Iterations of Liquid a Place (2021–), a series relating to the political space of water, appeared at the Liverpool Biennial and Desert X Coachella, while she also took part in Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Her works are often platforms for performances by poets, musicians and dancers, the monumental structures enabling a wider network of collaborators and ideas. Alongside a solo show at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St Louis, Dyson presented Birds and Lava (Scott Joplin), a pavilionlike public sculpture throughout which the music of titular ragtime pianist played.

76 OTOBONG NKANGA Artist Nigerian-Belgian Last Year 81

Curator Hong Konger Last Year 24 The Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, where Ho is director, continues cataloguing and promoting the art history of the continent, from major cultural trends and the papers of individual artists to obscure subcultures in danger of being lost to time. One recent research programme, made public through talks and symposia, took Southeast Asian women artists as the subject; another looked to the small magazines of 1960s Gujarat, the result of an aaa grant to researcher Pankti Desai. Exhibitions included the archives of New Delhi sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee and The Collective School, in collaboration with ruangrupa’s Gudskul. While John Tain, who helped establish the reach of the archive as head of research, has recently left to curate the forthcoming Lahore Biennial, Ho continues to be flanked by curator Özge Ersoy and researcher Anthony Yung’s longtime work with the archive. Meanwhile aaa’s American offshoot moved into new Brooklyn premises, where artist Naeem Mohaiemen takes up the semiannual artist-in-residence.

The curators of Dear Earth, at London’s Hayward Gallery, said they took inspiration from Nkanga’s maxim that ‘caring is a form of resistance’, with care being afforded to both the human and nonhuman subject. In that exhibition she showed Double Plot (2018), a vast tapestry depicting the solar system, while more recent textiles, drawings, photographs, sculptures and performance works featured in solo shows at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern. ‘Care’ is not just a modish curatorial buzzword for Nkanga, but the driving force behind O8 Black Stone, a black soap made of petrol sediment (namechecked in Teju Cole’s new book), sold in aid of her Athens project space, Akwa Ibom, and an organic farm in Nigeria that promotes biodiverse planting practices and doubles as a hub for the rural community. While shifting galleries, from Mendes Wood dm to Lisson, Nkanga remains as formally innovative as she is socially conscious, winning this year’s $100,000 Nasher Prize for Sculpture.

December 2023

Artists American / British Last Year 66

Artist Indian Last Year 84

With striking Hollywood actors and ai-generated artworks winning art competitions, the question of whether machines are going to take over artmaking is a hot topic. Musician Herndon and artist partner Dryhust have been ahead of that particular question for years; Herndon’s clearsighted experiments into ai songmaking resulted in Holly+, her ‘digital twin’, who can reshape existing songs in Herndon’s own voice. (Herndon is also on the 2024 jury for the Paris-based ircam’s prestigious Generative Music Prize.) As the implications of ai learning from art made by humans become clearer, the pair have been vocal advocates of artists’ rights; in March their online tool – allowing artists to check if their work has been used to train ai models, and opt out – attracted 40,000 signatories, with several ai companies agreeing to respect artists’ wishes, including Stability ai. It’s no wonder that Herndon made Time magazine’s ‘100 ai’ list in September. As Dryhurst told Freethink magazine, ‘I don’t see any conflict between being very, very excited about… machine learning, and also being very loyal to or concerned about artist welfare’.

‘Retrospective’ is a tricky word to apply to Singh, despite her largest-ever exhibition, Dancing with my Camera, which looks back over her threedecade career, touring to Mudam, Luxembourg, and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, this year (after stops in Gropius Bau, Berlin, and Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, in 2022). For Singh’s work is in constant flux: the artist seeks out new arrangements from her vast archive of images and exhibits them as ‘minimuseums’ of concertinaed books and portable display walls; her unusual formatting encourages viewers to play a role in the sequencing of her photographs, allowing a democratic sensibility to permeate her work. At both the Gwangju and São Paulo biennials this year, she presented these alongside a regular foray into moving image with Mona and Myself (2013), a video portrait of Mona, a third-gender eunuch whom Singh met during the 1980s, and who became a close friend and muse to the artist. Long before questions of gender identity were a mainstay in the artworld, Singh was investigating this, and other subjects pushed to the margins of society, with a keen eye and great empathy.

80 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO

79 EDGAR CALEL Artist Maya Kaqchikel / Guatemalan Last Year 97

Gallerists Mexican Last Year 85

When Sohrab Mohebbi was casting around for a title for the Carnegie International that encompassed the multiplicity of cultures, the curator settled on Is it morning for you yet?, the title of Calel’s work for the exhibition, which, in turn, was adopted from the Maya Kaqchikel greeting. In May they collaborated again for Calel’s solo at New York’s Sculpture Center (which Mohebbi directs). Challenging Western artistic hegemonies, Calel’s work often sits somewhere between artwork and ritual, foregrounding an Indigenous cosmological worldview. He made news in 2021 by allowing Tate to be custodians of Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge, 2021), a work that involved the invocation of his ancestors – which also appeared in this year’s Liverpool Biennial. At the Gwangju Biennale, Calel showed a new iteration of the work, and at the Bienal de São Paulo the artist presented an installation of embroideries representing the collective architecture and rituals of the Brazilian Guarani community.

Itinerant for many of its early years, the couple’s Kurimanzutto gallery, founded in 1999, now has two expansive sites, in Mexico City and, more recently, New York. In both they emphasise an international roster, bringing Mexican artists to America (fashion designer Bárbara SánchezKane garnered good reviews for her New York debut of gothic sculptures, as did the work of research-based Minerva Cuevas). In Mexico, at the gallery Kuri described as quintessential to the country’s urban fabric (“You see an anonymous, mute door on the street, but inside it takes you to another world,” he told the About Art podcast), were shows of Nairy Baghramian’s amorphous sculptures, a Mexican premiere of Paulina Olowska’s ghostly work and Abraham Cruzvillegas’s so-called autobio-choreo-graphy by French choreographer Jérôme Bel. With an eye for international opportunity, the couple also collaborated with Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul, on a show for Rirkrit Tiravanija, and took their artists to Portugal for a group show with Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel gallery in the resort town of Comporta.

ArtReview

77 Courtesy Herndon Dryhurst Studio 78 Courtesy Mudam, Luxembourg 79 Photo: Julio Calel. Courtesy Proyectos Ultravioleta 80 Photo: Fabian ml

77 HOLLY HERNDON & MAT DRYHURST

78 DAYANITA SINGH

Plastics saturate us, inside and out

82 JULIA STOSCHEK

81 NAEEM MOHAIEMEN Artist Bangladeshi new

Collector German Last Year 79

84 BLAXTARLINES

Curator Iranian new

Artist Collective Ghanaian Last Year 98

There was defensive huffing and puffing in the American media on Iranian-born Mohebbi’s Carnegie International, titled Is it morning for you yet?, which closed in April, having traced ‘the geopolitical imprint of the United States’. One New York Times reviewer sulked that ‘I knew that the United States had left bloody footprints in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in Africa – and so on. But I don’t think I’d ever before tried to keep all those separate wars and coups and interventions in mind at the same time’. These were represented by works ranging from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1988 four-panel painting of the Palestinian flag to a survey of Indonesian painter Kustiyah (1935–2012), and the archives of Chile’s once-exiled Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. Now back at his job as director of New York’s Sculpture Center, Mohebbi’s outlook is no less pointedly international, programming shows of Mayan Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel and the tactile sculpture of Mexican Tania Pérez Córdova.

The network of transgenerational artists, academics and curators, which has a base at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, but stretches far beyond, grew out of teacher Karî’kachä Seid’ou’s project to ‘transform art from commodity to gift’. An “institution… privileging no centre”, is how member Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh described blaxtarlines during an Art Basel talk this year. While staging its own shows – like broaching alchemy: a contingency of emergent visions in Kumasi this year – its more established members bring attention to those less visible internationally. Members curated Ibrahim Mahama’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück in June, and when Mahama was appointed artistic director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, he brought in blaxtarlines operatives Exit Frame Collective, Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah and Selom Koffi Kudjie as cocurators. Collaborating with artist organisations Africa and internationally, they staged a group exhibition in Masaka, Uganda, in November, and have ongoing exchange programmes with Städelschule, Frankfurt; State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe; and Art Hub Copenhagen.

ArtReview

82 Photo: Sirin Simsek 83 Photo: Sabrina Santiago 84 Courtesy blaxtarlines

83 SOHRAB MOHEBBI

It’s now two decades since Julia Stoschek started buying art. During that time, as the energetic heiress has showcased her collection at dedicated venues in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Stoschek’s taste for moving image, time-based and digital art has marked her as a rare collector with a clearcut, non-identikit agenda. In 2023, while continuing to sit on the board of kw Institute, Stoschek oversaw shows by underknown septuagenarian Black video artist Ulysses Jenkins and emerging South Korean multimedia artist Young-jun Tak, a six-decade survey of videobased performance art and a Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated exploration of the intersection between art and videogames. Meanwhile, after a 2022 marred by revelations of her great-grandfather’s wartime involvement with the Nazi Party, this year Stoschek sought to redirect the narrative forwards, her foundation announcing a long-term resourcesharing collaboration with the Düsseldorf Art Academy. For someone so frequently invested in art’s present and near future, it’s an on-brand move.

81 Photo: Munem Wasif

‘The idea of Bangladesh remains contingent and contested. Cultural workers can reinforce essentialist ideas around this, or they can choose to challenge majoritarian views,’ wrote the artist in the introduction of Midnight’s Third Child (2023), a new anthology of his essays. As art scenes from the Global South assert their presence, Mohaiemen’s writing and his essayistic films on leftwing struggles in the region offer a blueprint to imagining a new structure beyond the established neoliberal norm. His work screens internationally, with fans in activist-academic circles as much as gallerygoers. Most notably Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) (2020) was a key moment of the Gwangju Biennale this year, while the newer, more personal feature film Grace (2022) premiered at his solo at Colby College Museum of Art, in Maine, which closed in April; the Documenta 14-commissioned (and Turner Prize-nominated) Two Meetings and a Funeral film (2017) was shown at Kölnischer Kunstverein. ‘The people, projects, and conversations in this anthology frequently take on a role of speaking back to power,’ he wrote. The same can be said of the rest of his oeuvre.

85 CANDICE LIN

86 AARON CEZAR

Artist American new

Curator American Last Year 63

85 Photo: Georgia Arnold 86 Courtesy Delfina Foundation 87 Photo: Fabian Landewee 88 Photo: Randolpho Lamonier

Opium poppies, cactus tinctures, dead bats, turmeric, stuffed iguanas, lard, fungi – Lin’s uniqueness could be asserted solely through her installations’ components. The Los Angeles-based artist uses her unconventional tools (as well as sculpture, painting, video and templelike presentation formats) to reveal clandestine connections across space and time, and to address, as she’s put it, ‘notions of cultural, gendered and racial difference, rampant sexualities and deviant behaviour’; all of which results in a practice that appropriates and upends modes of presentation often found in natural history exhibitions. Pigs and Poison (2020) interlinked the history of biological warfare, the Opium Wars, indentured Chinese slavery in the us and anti-Asian sentiment in the wake of covid19; this year’s installation Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory folded ghost stories and reports of Asian women experiencing demonic possession in electronics factories into a sprawling, object- and video-driven narrative in which horny spirits haunt a lithium battery factory. Lin’s work is a timely guide for how ambitious and unpredictable contemporary art can be.

The Delfina Foundation, where Cezar is director, restarted exhibition programming after a long covid-induced hiatus, inviting two former participants of the private institution’s main focus – the residency programme – to make shows. That the la-based Iranian Gelare Khoshgozaran and Brooklyn- and Abu Dhabi-based Farah Al Qasimi are both established names internationally is a testament to the career-boosting open calls and invitations made by Cezar that bring artists and curators from across the globe to live in a London townhouse that boasts Buckingham Palace as its neighbour. While currently undertaking fundraising to secure Delfina’s building and expand operations, Cezar remains a consummate networker on behalf of his guests, with stays sponsored by myriad embassies, private foundations and individual patrons. Cezar hosts regular ‘family meals’ to introduce residents to artworld insiders, as well as a public programme of events (whether a talk on textiles and resistance by Argentinian curatorin-residence Andrei Fernández, or an installation concerning Romantic landscape painting by Lima- and Madrid-based artist Daniel de la Barra).

88 RAPHAEL FONSECA

87 AZU NWAGBOGU Curator Nigerian Last Year 92

Curator Brazilian new

Hopefully Nwagbogu has a good filing system, given how many projects he’s juggling at the moment. The founder of the Nigeria-based African Artists’ Foundation, which staged the latest stop of Dig Where You Stand: From Coast to Coast at the Palais de Lomé in Togo in August, and the 14th Lagos Photo Festival in October, will curate Benin’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale next year (having got the call from Patrice Talon, the country’s president). With work by artists Romuald Hazoumé, Chloe Quenum, Ishola Akpo and Moufoli Bello, it will be a group show centred on questions of restitution, a subject Nwagbogu has long been vocal about. The curator will bring a similarly decolonising perspective to his various contributions in a new role as a National Geographic Society ‘Explorer at Large’. When the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam was looking for a curator for its incubator Buro Stedelijk initiative, which opened in December, it picked Nwagbogu, working with Rita Ouédraogo; they have been given almost total autonomy from the main institution to pursue their shared agendas.

‘Art and politics are present in all exhibition projects; I am not particularly attracted to projects that make this relation evident and literal,’ Fonseca told March journal this year. His shows, poetic in themselves, together foreground the Global South as the future of art production and champion a new generation of artists. Who tells a tale adds a tail, an exhibition of millennial South and Central American artists at the Denver Art Museum, where he is curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art, closed in March. Fonseca’s edition of Videobrasil, Memory is an Editing Station (cocurated with Renée Akitelek Mboya), which presented work by 60 artists and collectives, drew subtle lines of connection through shared colonial experiences. As well as two further group shows, prize juries and an essay for Phaidon’s new Latin American Artists compendium, Fonseca is an international force for South and Central American artists, organising an exhibition for Vera Chaves Barcellos in Porto Alegre in May, and returning to the city in 2024 to curate the Mercosur Biennial, while advising Prospect.6 in New Orleans.

December 2023

89 SOPHIA AL-MARIA

90 TEJU COLE

Artist Qatari-American Last Year 80

Thinker Nigerian-American new

91 NICHOLAS GALANIN

Cole established his innovative style of art-inflected writing and criticism, often embedded in autofiction but no less laser-sharp and academically piercing, by accident; his training as an art historian of Dutch painting going wayward while writing on a trip to Lagos in 2005. The breakthrough was Open City, the 2011 novel that made his name, and ‘a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn’, as The New Yorker wrote recently. With publication of Tremor, the overlaps between plot and art are even more acute: Tunde, a Nigerian photographer teaching at an Ivy League university, tries to photograph a street at night, but is interrupted by a suspicious (white) homeowner and shooed away. The resulting intricate meditation on the act of looking, concentrating, who gets to see what and from what perspective (with a cameo for Otobong Nkanga’s soapproduction project) is why artists increasingly turn to his work for insight. When Tunde speaks, we can imagine Cole’s own thoughts. Cole teaches in the Harvard English department, as well writing for The New York Times (where he produced a photography column until 2019).

92 HYUN-SOOK LEE

Artist Lingít / Unangax̂ / American new

Gallerist Korean Last Year 75

For a new public sculpture in Brooklyn, Galanin was able divert and utilise steel that would have otherwise been used in the construction of the us–Mexico border wall. Instead, he used the material to spell ‘land’ in a style recalling Robert Indiana’s love works. The sculpture wasn’t just a protest against Trump’s (and now Biden’s) wall, but was, in keeping with the Alaskan Lingít / Unangax̂ artist’s wider practice – on show at his solo exhibition at Site Santa Fe in New Mexico from October, and at the Liverpool Biennial – against colonial borders in general, as well as a rumination on historic demarcation, land ownership and the complexities of identity. It was in that same vein that, in November, Galanin and artist Merritt Johnson removed their collaborative work, Creation with her Children (2017), a figure wearing seventeenthcentury dress stitched from mass-produced textile, from a group show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, in protest of the us government’s military aid to Israel.

Sometimes influence finds you as much as you seek it. Geopolitical shifts far beyond the Kukje Gallery founder’s control have made Seoul a power spot in the Asian artworld. Yet with 40 years under her belt, representing the likes of Lee Ufan (who showed in two of her three Seoul gallery spaces in April), Anish Kapoor (who in August took over all three with his visceral sculptures and paintings) and Haegue Yang (who has long worked with Kukje, showing over the summer at the gallery’s Hanok, a traditional Korean house), Lee is no ingenue. While Park Seo-Bo passed away in October this year, it was Lee who had helped renew interest in his work and the wider Dansaekhwa movement. In Busan, where she has had a gallery since 2018, there were shows for a similar mix of blue-chip names from both the West and East, including Wook-Kyung Choi, Julian Opie and Byron Kim. Not that the glamour of Frieze Seoul did her any harm: when asked, K-pop heartthrob Eric Nam declared Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 95-011 (1995), a black oil paint on hemp monochrome presented by the gallery, as one of his favourites.

ArtReview

89 Photo: Tosh Basco 90 Courtesy Teju Cole 91 Photo: Merritt Johnson 92 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery

For her current solo show at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Al-Maria created a new wall installation, together with a series of collages, that highlighted the breadth of the reference materials that go into her filmmaking and ruminations on what she has termed ‘Gulf Futurism’ and the capitalist sublime. This included artefacts of American pop culture, Arabic literature, punk cinema, childhood drawings and photographs relating to the artist’s childhood, spent between Washington State and the Middle East. The show also featured her trilogy Beast Type Song (2019), which was the subject of a solo at Turku Art Museum in Finland; Tender Point Ruin (2021); and Tiger Strike Red (2022), lo-fi sci-fi works that present possible futures haunted by imperialist pasts, dystopias threaded through with the hope of what she has called ‘counter-histories’. As the Emirates increases its footprint in the arts, Al-Maria has emerged as one of the region’s most prescient voices. Her interest in future ruins was evident too in the video she made for Miu Miu and the Italian fashion house’s Spring/Summer 2024 runway show.

93 ATSUKO NINAGAWA

94 NATASHA GINWALA

Gallerist Japanese Last Year 93

Curator Indian reentry (77 in 2020, with Defne Ayas)

93 Photo: Katsuhiro Saiki 94 Photo: Victoria Tomaschko 95 Photo: Nii Odzenma 96 Photo: Noor Photoface (Samdanis). Photo: Samdani Art Foundation (Campbell). Both: Courtesy Samdani Art Foundation

The founder of Take Ninagawa gallery spearheaded the launch of Art Week Tokyo in the midst of the pandemic. awt completed its third edition in November, welcoming a freshly returned international art crowd attracted by the 50 galleries, institutions and artist-run spaces taking part. This year the programme introduced a ‘new curated sales platform’ called ‘awt Focus’, a selling show of work by 64 artists at the Okura Museum of Art, led by the private institution’s director, Kenjiro Hosaka; and video programme ‘awt Video’, an exhibition of moving image organised by Chus Martínez and installed at the imposing, mirrored smbc East Tower. Plus a specially designed art week bar. If this is a grab to become Asia’s art capital (amidst Hong Kong’s political problems and surging Seoul), then Ninagawa is well placed to make the move: her artists range from locals Ryoko Aoki and Taro Izumi to international names Thea Djordjadze, Danh Võ and Wang Bing. For awt she showed two early filmworks by Derek Jarman alongside the late British polymath’s Black Paintings (1986–93).

95 MARWAN ZAKHEM

Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora, the exhibition Ginwala organised with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, is a good example of the big thinking the curator embraces, using the Indian Ocean as a muse to connect culture, food, histories and politics between the continents the water separates and conjoins, with works from artists like Oscar Murillo, Shiraz Bayjoo and Rossella Biscotti. After closing at Zeitz mocaa in January, the exhibition travelled to Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary and Gropius Bau, where Ginwala is associate curator at large, in April. Ginwala also curated a show of Sri Lankan artist and activist Vinoja Tharmalingam at Experimenter in Kolkata, some of which work had been created for Colomboscope, the biannual Sri Lankan art festival where Ginwala is artistic director, and whose 8th edition opens in January, with projects from Anupam Roy and Jayatu Chakma, among others. The next couple of years will be busy too: Ginwala was named one of the five curators handling Sharjah Biennial 16, due to open in 2025.

96 NADIA SAMDANI, RAJEEB SAMDANI & DIANA CAMPBELL

Gallerist Lebanese new The engineer and pipeline magnate started buying West African art during business trips through Ghana and Senegal, his collection growing until he met Serge Attukwei Clottey, Ibrahim Mahama and the blaxtarlines group around 2013. With their encouragement, Zakhem established Gallery 1957 in Accra in 2016, expanding to three spaces in the Ghanaian capital, and opening London premises in 2020. Clottey came on board, as did Gideon Appah, recently picked up by Pace; so too Collin Sekajugo, who represented Uganda at the Venice Biennale last year; joined, this year, by veteran Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor. In September former ica director Ekow Eshun curated Donkar and other newly signed artists in a show in Accra. Zakhem has kept his original promise to support the local scene, not just by participating in art fairs internationally but also through the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize, which supports Ghanaian and diaspora female artists, and a residency programme that this year featuring 14 pan-African artists.

Collector / Collector / Curator Bangladeshi / Bangladeshi /American Last Year 82 The Samdani’s Dhaka Art Summit has made the Bangladeshi capital a regular destination in the artworld calendar – its sixth edition in February attracting 572,000 visitors to see the work of 120 local and international artists. How does that square with a country likely to feel the effects of the climate emergency most sharply? It is something the summit addressed head-on with works, curated by Campbell, ranging from Joydeb Roaja’s largescale immersive installation addressing environmental displacement to puppetry performances by children that reflected on climate change. The Samdanis are also establishing the Srihatta, their permanent foundation and sculpture park in rural Bangladesh, delayed but set to open to the public and for artist residencies next year. Away from Bangladesh, Nadia received the Order of Arts and Letters from French Ministry of Culture, and Campbell took control of Desert X in the Coachella Valley in March, again on the climatic beat, linking droughts and floods in California and Bangladesh.

December 2023

98 LEGACY RUSSELL

97 KIMBERLEY MOULTON Curator Yorta Yorta new

Curator American reentry (94 in 2021) Her 2020 book Glitch Feminism, a manifesto for finding gender and identity liberty through technology (surveying a genderqueer generation of internet-friendly artists such as Juliana Huxtable, Sondra Perry and boychild), is a mainstay reference for artists, its influence growing with each new translation. Meanwhile Russell is working on a new title, Black Meme, to be published next year, tracing how the dissemination and communication of Black imagery and culture has evolved. Russell’s interests are writ large at The Kitchen in New York, where she has been director since 2021, the institution operating under a manifesto that proclaims it is ‘qtpocia+ driven, centered, and celebrated’, evident in events ranging from an archival retrospective of artist group Red, White, Yellow, and Black (the collective’s name alluding to its members racial identities), and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s Filling Station, a ballet performed at a local petrol station and at Dia Beacon, alongside a solo show of the American artist at the institution’s offsite loft space.

99 SANDRA BENITES

100 STEFANIE HESSLER Curator German new

Curator Guarani Ñandeva new ‘How can I put out this call for people who are not recognised as artists?’ Benites asked the environmental journalism platform Sumaúma this year. The curator was already the most visible promoter of Brazilian Indigenous artmaking and its intersection with other communities previously ignored from the canon. She was the first Indigenous curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, but quit last year after a series of photographs representing leftwing workers and Indigenous rights movements were cut from a show (the museum denied censorship, saying the works were delivered too late). In April she cocurated the first Bienal das Amazônias in Belém, exposing ‘the reality of the Amazons, especially around the idea of fetish the Amazon represents’. As that opened, and with Nhé ẽ Se, an exhibition cocurated with artist Sallisa Rosa at Caixa Cultural Brasilia already in the works, she became the new director of visual arts at Funarte, a government-aligned foundation, giving her immense influence over the country’s visual arts budget and policy, and marking her out as a model for Indigenous curating internationally.

Go to Hessler’s offices at the Swiss Institute in New York and you might think she’s let the place go since becoming director last year. In fact, the mismatched paint on the walls are part of the changes she’s made to improve the New York nonprofit’s sustainability (building on experience with the research-based exhibition Sex Ecologies, 2021, at former workplace Kunsthall Trondheim, and from her time preceding that curating at the ocean-focused tba21-Academy). While these include carbon audits and the like, the curatorial initiative ‘Spora’ aims at ‘environmental, institutional critique’, inviting artists to make suggestions – such as Helen Mirra’s, that only leftover paint be used when touching up nongallery spaces. Hessler inaugurated her programme with shows for, among others, Lap-See Lam and her portrait of the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora, and Ali Cherri’s sculptures with their invocations of mud and its symbolic qualities. When visiting, just mind the staff member taking their lunch scraps to the roof: they are depositing them in a composting sculpture by Jenna Sutela.

ArtReview

97 Photo: Eugene Hyland 98 Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath 99 Courtesy Funarte 100 Photo: William Jess Laird

Moulton told The Sydney Morning Herald that her curatorial work over the last 15 years at Victoria Museums ‘is based on relationships and ensuring that the community feels heard and supported… I love my people’. From 2015 to this September she was in charge of the 4,000-strong historical and contemporary South Eastern Australian First Peoples Collections. Moulton is currently deputy chair of Shepparton Art Museum and is a board member for the First Nations nonprofit Adam Briggs Foundation. As senior curator and artistic associate for Melbourne’s Rising festival, she curated Shadow Spirit, an exhibition of immersive commissions by First Nation artists installed in an abandoned train station in June, which will tour to Adelaide; this summer, Moulton also cocurated More Than a Tarrang (tree): Memory, Material and Cultural Agency at Melbourne Museum. She has spoken of the ‘overwhelming sadness’ she feels seeing looted or sacred indigenous objects in colonial museums. Now the British institutional world will hear her voice louder: she has recently been appointed Tate Modern’s adjunct curator in First Nations and Indigenous Art.

Before, goannas were here forever

WITH WORKS BY TOURMALINE RYAN GANDER TREVOR PAGLEN TAVARES STRACHAN EMMA TALBOT CANDICE LIN BERTILLE BAK JOSH KLINE AGNIESZKA KURANT POPE.L PILVI TAKALA TETSUYA ISHIDA ANDREA BÜTTNER AGNES DENES MARGUERITE HUMEAU JUMANA MANNA AND MORE… Tourmaline, Summer Azure, 2020. Farvesublimeringprint. Foto: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy of the Artist and Chapter NY.

THE 2023 POWER 100 1 Nan Goldin

34 Saidiya Hartman

68 Manthia Diawara

2 Hito Steyerl

35 Apichatpong Weerasethakul

69 Michael Armitage

3 Rirkrit Tiravanija

36 Hoor Al Qasimi

70 Yinka Shonibare

4 Simone Leigh

37 Barbara Gladstone

71 Haegue Yang

5 Isaac Julien

38 Bose Krishnamachari

72 Miuccia Prada

6 Ibrahim Mahama

39 Liza Essers

73 Mariane Ibrahim

7 Theaster Gates

40 ruangrupa

74 Torkwase Dyson

8 Steve McQueen

41 Zanele Muholi

75 Christopher Ho

9 Karrabing Film Collective

42 Glenn D. Lowry

76 Otobong Nkanga

10 Cao Fei

43 Adrian Cheng

11 Sammy Baloji

44 Judith Butler

77 Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

12 Larry Gagosian

45 Maria Balshaw

13 Forensic Architecture

46 Candice Hopkins

14 Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth & Marc Payot

47 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

15 Adriano Pedrosa 16 Carrie Mae Weems 17 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong 18 Anna L. Tsing 19 David Zwirner 20 Marc Glimcher 21 Koyo Kouoh 22 Paul B. Preciado 23 Emmanuel Perrotin 24 Byung-Chul Han 25 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 26 Sara Ahmed 27 Darren Walker 28 Maja Hoffmann 29 Eugene Tan 30 Fred Moten 31 Donna Haraway 32 Arthur Jafa 33 John Akomfrah

48 Wu Tsang 49 Hans Ulrich Obrist 50 Agnes Denes 51 Noah Horowitz 52 Thaddaeus Ropac 53 Cecilia Alemani 54 Ari Emanuel & Simon Fox 55 Cecilia Vicuña 56 Jay Jopling 57 Reem Fadda 58 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 59 Iwona Blazwick 60 Refik Anadol 61 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood 62 Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja 63 Jeffrey Gibson 64 Mami Kataoka 65 Lucia Pietroiusti 66 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung 67 Vincent Worms

78 Dayanita Singh 79 Edgar Calel 80 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto 81 Naeem Mohaiemen 82 Julia Stoschek 83 Sohrab Mohebbi 84 blaxtarlines 85 Candice Lin 86 Aaron Cezar 87 Azu Nwagbogu 88 Raphael Fonseca 89 Sophia Al-Maria 90 Teju Cole 91 Nicholas Galanin 92 Hyun-Sook Lee 93 Atsuko Ninagawa 94 Natasha Ginwala 95 Marwan Zakhem 96 Nadia Samdani, Rajeeb Samdani & Diana Campbell 97 Kimberley Moulton 98 Legacy Russell 99 Sandra Benites 100 Stefanie Hessler

FERAL ATLAS by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou

Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, published online in 2021 by anthropologists Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger and Alder Keleman Saxena, and architect and artist Feifei Zhou, is a digital project that sets out to map the more-than-human histories transforming life on earth. An experimental and collaborative project by nature, Feral Atlas rejects a hierarchical approach that emphasises particular genres, disciplinary-bound views and methods, and instead diversifies and revitalises natural history as an urgently needed mode of observation and description for our times. Gathering together scientific reports, stories, videos, sound recordings, maps, illustrations and diagrams from natural and social scientists, humanists and artists, Feral Atlas draws attention to the nondesigned ecological effects created by imperial and industrial infrastructures that develop and spread beyond human control; which, Feral Atlas argues, create the Anthropocene. The infrastructures Feral Atlas focuses on are apparatuses that materially transform land, water and atmosphere through human design. However, instead of studying what the infrastructures are supposed to do, Feral Atlas pays attention to the nondesigned effects produced by unexpected entanglements between nonhuman entities and infrastructure projects. For example, the prevalence of industrial monoculture, in the hope of yielding agricultural crops with highest efficiency and productivity, creates a perfect condition for the spread of pests and pathogens; the use of pesticides and herbicides in attempts to control agricultural disease outbreaks result in the chemical pollution of soil, water and air, threatening ecologies and the ongoing existence of many species. These infrastructural effects, though unintentionally created, can be not only devastating, but irreversible. Paying attention to nonhumans is central to Feral Atlas’s analysis. The pests and pathogens mentioned above are what the Feral Atlas cocurators refer to as ‘feral entities’, which are both living and nonliving beings that proliferate through infrastructure programmes. Salmon pests propagate at an uncontainable rate as a direct result of contaminated discharges from commercial salmon farms, which pollute the coastal waters of British Columbia and threaten wild fish populations; brownfield toxins from previous industrial activities leak, spread and remain in soil and water sources, contaminating the living environment for generations to come in hidden ways. Understanding how nonhumans respond to human infrastructure in autonomous ways that resist human control offers critical insight into how we can better comprehend, analyse and respond to the Anthropocene. The digital platform is primarily organised around 79 field reports on 64 feral entities. The vectors that structure the user experience enable one to discover the interconnected nature of the feral forces at play. Each feral entity, pictured as a watercolour painting by Feifei Zhou and Maria Saeki, is embedded within one (and sometimes two) of the Anthropocene Detonator Landscapes by Feifei Zhou and her collaborators – drawings that juxtapose the infrastructure programmes that have initiated and continue to create feral ecologies.

The four Anthropocene Detonator Landscapes are titled Invasion, Empire, Capital and Acceleration. The making of Detonator Landscapes was also a collaborative process – elements of various artworks from several Indigenous and diasporic artists have been incorporated into the Detonator Landscapes through collaging, which enrich the visual narratives unfolding as a whole; a weaving together of perspectives that addresses the ecological impacts and violence of power dynamics that have shaped the world today. The contributors include Aboriginal Australian artist Nancy McDinny (Story of Mayawagu, in Invasion), First Nation Canadian artist Andy Everson (Heritage, in Invasion), Ghanaian-British artist and architect Larry Botchway (Contract, in Empire) and Filipino artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho (waka waka gudetamananggal and brutto netto manananggal, in Acceleration). For the Power 100, Feral Atlas has assembled the Anthropocene Detonator Landscapes, as well as a selection of feral entities presented together with a ‘thought bomb’ from the associated field report. Inspired by ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986), by Ursula K. Le Guin, Feral Atlas, as well as its upcoming book Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature (Stanford University Press, 2024), offers a carrier bag of Anthropocene stories. Le Guin’s theory differs from the linear, singular way of history-telling and instead focuses on women’s gathering activities that diversify storytelling. Embodying this feminist approach, the various visual elements shown in this year’s issue of the Power 100 showcase Feral Atlas’s intention in disrupting the homogeneity in disciplinary hierarchy and rejecting a single, common perspective, offering a collection of narratives, approaches and analyses intended to inspire more discoveries beyond the atlas. Detonator Landscapes pp 40, 49, 56, 64 Capital, by Feifei Zhou pp 73–78 Invasion, by Feifei Zhou, Nancy McDinny and Andy Everson p 84 Empire, by Feifei Zhou and Larry Botchway pp 90–91 Acceleration, by Feifei Zhou, Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien

ArtReview

Feral Entities (all artwork by Feifei Zhou and Maria Saeki) p 45 Stream pollution; words from Juliana Spahr, ‘Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache’, 2011 p 46 Jellyfish polyps; words from field report by Isabelle Carbonell p 52 Banana fungicides; words from field report by Alyssa Paredes p 55 Boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis); words from Huddie William Ledbetter, aka ‘Lead Belly’, The Boll Weevil, 1939 p 60 Brownfield toxins; words from field report by Scott Frickel p 63 Salmon pests and pathogens; words from field report by Ernest Alfred

p 67 Marine plastic; words from Chris Jordan, Albatross, 2018 p 68 Marabou storks (Leptoptilos crumenifer); words from field report by Jacob Doherty p 83 Radioactive blueberries; words from field report by Kate Brown p 87 Plastic bags; words from field report by Kelsy Nagy p 95 Cane toad (Rhinella marina, also known as Yätj Garkman in Yolngu Matha); words from field report by Russell Ngadiyali Ashley p 99 Induced mud volcano; words from field report by Nils Bubandt

Mud overflows boreholes, politics, and reason

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On the covers ( from left) ‘Resistome’, ‘Mitten Crab’, ‘Salmon Pests and Pathogens’, ‘Argentine Ant’, artworks by Feifei Zhou and Maria Saeki for field reports in Feral Atlas, 2021–ongoing, digital project by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Zhou. Courtesy the collective

Words on the spine are by Lu Xun, ‘A Madman’s Diary’, 1918, in Selected Works, Vol. 1 (trans Yang Xianyi and Gladys Young, 1956)

December 2023

101

The topic of art is something about which I have been aware since I can remember. Art, after all, was our excellence that we demonstrated as Dalits: we had to be creative to get by. We have always created, crafted, rehearsed, performed and developed various genres. Yet the wretchedness of caste could never allow for a talent springing from someone that others declared to be filthy and untouchable. Dalits are the outcastes of Brahminical Hindu caste society, kept at the bottom socially, economically and religiously, through an all-out assault on the mind and creativity of a people others consider to be less than human. Nevertheless I have witnessed art in the form of finished works. My father, Milind Yengde, even enrolled me in a painting class. On which I promptly bailed. I knew it to be a celebrated but poorly paid profession. But I was fascinated with art. My maternal uncle, Raju Suryatal, a cop, was also an extraordinary portraitist. He would draw Bollywood actors. Addicted to the taste of tobacco, he would put in a mouthful and sit with his pencil and white paper as soon as he came home. And I kept wondering why he would choose a profession so divorced from his art practice. There are many Rajus in the world: those whose natural artistic talent and unresolved curiosity can synchronise in their mind and hands to produce meaning; but who never give everything else up to do it. Yet their performances, inquiries, dogmas and cryptic messages lie pregnant in whatever artworks they do leave behind. For those of you who have grown accustomed to art being the preserve of the glamorous and the chic, and an alternative world of tax avoidance, this should serve to remind you that simply to have a free spirit is to practise a form of art. It is a fleeting emotion that marks its space in the memory of the mind. So what is art for in a social context? Art’s staging of tense coded dramas is an invitation to the audience to contemplate and theorise their own experience of reality. We all know that experiences are subjective and that, individually, they might deflect from any generally perceived or agreed reality, but generally we conform. The artist exists to be unafraid to discard that orthodoxy; to advocate for a point of view that stands away from the flock. And yet the artworld, in its comfortable form, has restricted itself to performing as a courtesan to a select economically or socially privileged few. Art exists to create a connoisseur class; the larger audience, the general public,

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What and who is art for, asks Suraj Yengde. A new generation of Dalit artists have some answers

is thought to be incapable of comprehending the apparently nonsensical dilemmas presented to them. And the international artworld, as it is constituted at present, doesn’t care. Or have to care. It’s obvious how this might chime with those belonging to an outcaste class. Over the past 200 years, Dalit artists, who are located in the rawness of everyday reality, have not found it necessary to seek out intentional obfuscation. They create, craft, rehearse and perform to liberate their kind. Their energy gets everyone on their feet. The songs of Vaman Kardak (1922–2004), performed in the vernacular, Vikrant Bhise, Worli Riots, Dalit Panther, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist

brought knowledge of the Dalit community to rural Indians. Savi Savarkar’s (1962–) portraits of the hierarchy of castes made the maddening Manu – the historic creator, with a little help from generations of commentators, of the laws of castes (sometime between the first and third centuries ce) – a recognisable feature of Indian artwork. Raja Dhale (1940–2019; founder of the Dalit Panthers) was a trained artist who brought the sensitivity of his calligraphy and paintings to his speeches and actions. Art is the medium of universalist sensitivities in the path of Dalit liberation. The new generation of Dalit artists, like Prabhakar Kamble, Vikrant Bhise, Valay Shende, Sanjeev Sonpimpare, Tejswini Narayan Sonawane, Sajan Mani, Bhimrao Panchale and Arivu, among others (who we shall meet in future columns), are building on this. Skipping the dogmas that belittle their talent and trade, the Dalit artform is now settling into divulging its own stories. A Dalit as a creator and a subject is a new form now visible in galleries, art festivals and commissioned works. It’s important to say that the Dalit does not exist apart from the world. The Dalit artist is finding a kinship with the outcastes of the wider world, not least via the lineage of colonisation but also through the modern archives that these communities have created. The African artworld radically asserts itself by critiquing the oppression that only saw it perform as a subject to be consumed, rather than as an original creator. The Dalit community has always been looked down upon, even in India, for reasons of hereditary extended oppression. The Dalit looks for black resemblance and sees the space of the African artworld as a shared space. In these columns, we will take a closer look at the Dalit artworld and how it manifests and expresses itself. It is a monumental time for Dalit artists. They are establishing their presence as equals. They have demonstrated their abilities at the Berlin Biennale, Documenta, Dakar Biennale and the African Biennale of Photography, among others, while in India they are curating each other’s works for the first time at the National Art Gallery, in Chennai. It is incumbent upon the artworld to take notice of this and theorise this freshness. Suraj Yengde, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, Cambridge (ma), is the author of Caste Matters (2019) and associate editor of Caste: A Global Journal of Exclusion