ArtReview December 2024 by ArtReview

Power 100

Dominique White DEADWEIGHT

27 October 2024 16 February 2025

Dominique White, Deadweight, 2024, Whitechapel Gallery Editions, series of 21, signed and numbered

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

THRO GH THE F OODS

27 October 2024 16 February 2025

Federico Tosi, Ariel (Cuori in Antartide), 2018. Courtesy of Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano/Zuoz. Ph. Andrea Rossetti

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

PROGRAM: JANUARY – MARCH 2025

CARLOS JACANAMIJOY

GWEN O'NEIL

Paris, Turenne January 11 – March 1, 2025

New York, Tribeca January 17 – March 1, 2025

SERGE POLIAKOFF

JEAN MIOTTE

Paris, Matignon January 11 – February 22, 2025

Shanghai January 10 – March 15, 2025

JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET

TIA-THUY NGUYEN

ALY HELYER

Monaco December 10, 2024 – March 1, 2025

—

Brussels January 16 – March 1, 2025

CHICO DA SILVA London January 16 – February 22, 2025

GROUP SHOW VISAGES Gstaad February 13 – March 16, 2025

MARIE LAURENCIN New York, Upper East Side January 9 – February 22, 2025

Gwen O’Neil, 2024 - Acrylic and acrylic stains on canvas 162.6 × 127 × 3.8 cm, 64 × 50 × 1 1/2 in / © Gwen O’Neil Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech - Photo: Matthew Kroening

HOWARDENA PINDELL

20 November 2024 – 8 January 2025

White Cube, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong Howardena Pindell, Tesseract #17 (detail), 2024 © the artist. Courtesy White Cube and Garth Greenan Gallery

ROH

K AWA H O J O L HYUN NAHM 16 November 2024 - 5 January 2025

ROHPROJECTS.NET

São Paulo Brussels Paris New York www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

Solange Pessoa, Funduras, São Paulo, 2024

Mend e s Wood DM

Lisa Yuskavage

David Zwirner Opening Soon

NOMADS OF PERSIA FIROUZ FARMAN FARMAIAN 12.14.24 / 01.14.25

Salomon Arts Gallery Tribeca 83 Leonard St #4 Floor New York, NY 10013

WE R THE NOMADS AGENCY WERTHENOMADSAGENCY.COM

Joan Snyder, Come to Pearl Pond (detail), 2024 © Joan Snyder. Photo: Adam Reich

Joan Snyder Body & Soul

London December 2024—January 2025

ArtReview vol 76 no 9 December 2024

Loafers Recently, some of ArtReview’s more left-leaning (yes! ArtReview’s not sure what exactly that means these days either, but whatever – they wear berets as if they were all still living in the nineteenth century) acquaintances (as you know, ArtReview is completely apolitical; just as much as it is asexual) have been accusing it of failing to check its privilege. ArtReview knows! It’s a publication of the people! By them; for them; suffering for them (so that they don’t have to suffer themselves by having to schlep through all the exhibitions that ArtReview does on their behalf, so that they know which ones to expend their precious energy on and which ones they can skip in order to preserve their eyeballs, minds and, well, let’s face it, very souls). But, while you and ArtReview know that it’s practically a modern-day, socialist, working-person’s Jesus, other people think differently. Some people basically accuse it of loafing. Of swanning around ‘looking’ at things. And sometimes ‘thinking’ about them too. And looking and thinking are these days categorised as pastimes for the idle. But worse than that, people accuse ArtReview of ‘criticising’ things. Which is just how the privileged choose to describe grumbling or complaining. Which is all they ever do. And in any case, it’s not fashionable to be a critic anymore. Partly because, these days, apparently, everyone’s a critic, thanks to Instagram and Trip Advisor. But also because negativity is not something you’re supposed to be spreading around in these gloomy times. We’re supposed to leave all that to people like Creepy Keir and Sleepy Joe, Enervating Emmanuel and Nasty Narendra, all of whom are doing a spectacularly good job of it. Even if Sleepy Joe will be out of a job shortly. But the real point is that criticism is rather like manure, you see. The person dishing it out feels like they are providing nourishment for roots so as to sustain vigorous new growth; the person receiving it basically feels like they are covered in shit. Which perhaps they are. But of the nourishing kind. Did you know that in Japan nightingale faeces has been used in facial masks for centuries? Of course you did. So now

Soulless

you get where ArtReview is coming from – tradition! Seventy-five years of it in ArtReview’s case. But more than all the stuff ArtReview has been inventing, ‘criticism’ is an actual tradition. That someone else made up! Which always makes things better. That’s what traditions are for: to make things seem normal and thus better, because they are not examples of aberration or freakishness. Just things being as they should be and should always be. Don’t mock it. It has worked for centuries on Dalit communities. And the British public who still revere their lords and ladies and monarchs. And not just because it brings in the tourist dollars, but also because they are frightened of change. Even when they did dispose of their monarchs, they were gripped by fear and begged his relatives to come back. No hard feelings and all that. But an appeal to tradition is no defence against accusations of loafing. (Unless you are a British monarch, of course.) Because tradition is what every tyrant appeals to just before the guillotine drops. Instead, ArtReview would argue that looking carefully at the world around it (or even around you) isn’t so much an act of privilege; rather it’s one of necessity. Because if you don’t know what’s going on, if you don’t question why what’s going on is going on, you can’t ever hope to participate in the world, in terms of participating in the form of helpful or useful actions. Yes, ArtReview knows you’re all arty types and that usefulness is anathema to you, and that you spit in the face of functionalism. But it’s an arty type too! It’s even in its name – which isn’t short for Arthur btw. Still, what ArtReview is starting to realise is that arguing about it didn’t save anyone from the guillotine. And to some degree there’s a certain amount of loafing involved in that. What’s harder perhaps is figuring out the exact moment that theory necessarily becomes practice. And what exact form that practice might take. There’s some sort of ‘wisdom’ you can take from this year’s Power list in relation to that. It’s not just a queue of victims lining up, lamblike, for the chop. ArtReview

Soulful

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Icarus in the Moonlight, 2024, silkscreen and UV printed retroreflective mounted on Dibond, 72 × 48 × 2" | 182.9 × 121.9 × 5.1 cm © Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas

Kinship of the Soul

London pacegallery.com

LOUISIANA 11.10.24-27.4.25

OCEAN JOHN AKOMFRAH EL ANATSUI NINA BEIER JEANNETTE EHLERS ELLEN GALLAGHER SUSAN HILLER PIERRE HUYGHE KIRSTEN JUSTESEN GEORGIA O’KEEFFE HOWARDENA PINDELL PIPILOTTI RIST ALLAN SEKULA EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ SUPERFLEX YUYAN WANG ... Leopold & Rudolf Blaschka, Physophora myzonema. Siphonophore, glas, 1860-1890. Photo: James Turner © Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales

Power 100 Introduction 38 Power Players artists, curators, funders, gallerists and art fair directors, museum directors, thinkers 40

page 42 The Rebel (still), 1961, dir Robert Day

Power 100 The List 50 Power in Numbers 90 Artist Project by Josèfa Ntjam 96 eternal returns 102

page 102 Editorial introducing ArtReview’s first Power 100 issue, December 2002

Amy Cutler, Abettors, 2024. Gouache on paper. Sheet : 56 × 77.5 cm | 22 1/16 × 30 1/2 in. Frame : 74.6 × 95.6 cm | 29 3/8 × 37 5/8 in. ©Amy Cutler. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.

Ali Banisadr, The Fortune Teller, 2024. Oil on linen. Unframed : 215.9 × 335.3 cm | 85 × 132 in. Framed : 219.2 × 338.5 × 7.6 cm | 86 5/16 × 133 1/4 × 3 in. Photo : Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

ALI BANISADR

THE FORTUNE TELLER

NOVEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 21, 2024

AMY CUTLER

TRUCE

NOVEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 21, 2024

Calida Rawles, Thy Name We Praise, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin. © Calida Rawles

powering the world of art

Art is honor

Miami Beach Convention Center December 6-8, 2024

Discover over 120 Modern & Contemporary galleries 22–26 January 2025 21 January VIP Preview Business Design Centre Islington N1 0QH Book tickets londonartfair.co.uk

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Power 100

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THE POWER 100

The Power 100 list is an annual tally of who and what made art happen during the past 12 months. It’s a structural portrait of international contemporary art, identifying and accounting for the figures and faces who have created, inspired and crafted the art we see. And sometimes it questions the extent to which contemporary art can be or is truly international in the first place. Still, at heart (though heart has nothing to do with it, as it’s obviously just a matter of objective measurement, a ‘science’ if you like) it’s an attempt to illuminate how and why certain forms of art are being presented in one place, to imagine how they might manifest in another and to trace some of the strings being pulled to make that happen. It includes the artists and collectives who create the work, the curators, gallerists and museum directors who display the work, and the funders who stump up the cash to make and buy the work. The artists here (or anyone else here, for that matter) aren’t necessarily just the ‘most successful’ (whatever that means) or most visible or circulated; power is also about influence, and having the sway of emotion and insight, a spark that creates a ‘school’ around an artist. But also, as art isn’t about a chain of objects changing hands (most of the time), the list includes writers, philosophers and thinkers who are helping to spur on the art and exhibitions we see around us now. Still, when someone’s dropping a bomb on you, a fascinating artwork doesn’t necessarily feel like an object of much power. And neither, by extension, do the people who create, promote or distribute that artwork. Indeed, most likely those people don’t feel relevant to anything at all. Which is all a way of saying that, in the greater scheme of things, the question of art and its relation to power in any meaningful sense is something that’s quite relative. Relative to your own investment, whether that is emotional or financial, as well as to circumstance and to the space (in every sense) that art occupies in

various parts of the world at large. And to the influence that it can, or even might, exert upon that space, or more ambitiously, that world. But let’s not kid ourselves here. ‘In the world that we live in today, it is actually those without power, without any hope of power, who understand more about life,’ the art critic, novelist and sometime ArtReview contributor John Berger once said. ‘[They understand] more about this enigma of this shit of a life, sometimes, and more about its beauty,’ he concluded. His point was that in hierarchical societies (such as the ones most of us live within) those at the top are more distanced from reality, both in its terrible and beautiful aspects. But what Berger was actually trying to explain, as he said all this, was why he liked a particular artwork. Specifically, Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (c. 1638), an obviously invented portrait of the celebrated fabulist in the guise of a peasant. He liked it, Berger suggested, because stories and storytellers occupy a space near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Closer to life. Where the real stories are. Artists too are storytellers, and now more than ever we are demanding that art tell stories that relate to life, rather than to fantasies of escape from that life. Is this going to be a list dominated by those without power, then? A sort of peasants’ uprising? No. Because part of what this list aims to do is to remove the rose-tinted spectacles that most people assume the artworld sports at all times and to tell you about who might really be pulling the strings that operate the curtain that affects what (art) we do or do not get to see. And in that sense to be some sort of snapshot of what the artworld looks like right now. Before Donald Trump ascends to the top. So what is art’s power? It’s a question – perhaps the question – that ArtReview asks itself, not just once a year when it puts together the Power 100 list, but with every issue. Because although it doesn’t shout it out loud, the problem of what art does, can do or should do

ArtReview

2024

– what influence it has (and whether or not this influence is good, and how one decides what that ‘good’ is) – is one that exercises not only artists, but the whole edifice of contemporary art. The complex, interlocking system of galleries, institutions, curators, funders, thinkers and others who, collectively, define not only the idea of contemporary art, but its practical reality. The power of that set of intersecting or conflicting interests is the subject of the Power 100 list, but if ArtReview has learned anything in its 75-year existence, it’s that art exists in a context where greater powers hold sway, and which often dictates the limits and possibilities of what artists and the artworld can do. This has been a year of stark contrasts when it comes to the context in which art wields its influence. The year may have been marked by the latest edition of the Venice Biennale, that still-powerful institution whose curator this year sought to celebrate a decentring of power (perhaps paradoxically) away from the old centres of the artworld, to celebrate the marginal and the marginalised, while recentring the story of art on the rest of the world. But outside the artworld, 2024 was the year of rightwing electoral successes and rising anti-immigration sentiment across Europe; of Israel’s war in Gaza and confrontation with Iran and its proxies, and Russia’s war against Ukraine; the election of Donald Trump; and behind it all, the grinding realignment of geopolitical power from the West to the East. All of which shouldn’t have too much to do with power and influence in the artworld (because art, as we all know from traditional aesthetics, exists in its own special zone of exception), but eventually does, and reveals both the limits of the artworld’s power, as well as the points where that power intersects with those beyond it. After all, boycotts and cancellations have created deep rifts in sections of the Western artworld while battles over free expression have erupted in places ranging from Myanmar to Hong Kong and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, as the world economy struggles with the consequences of the energy crisis, the commercial art market sooner or later feels the effects. And as the dynamism of the market falters, the influence of funders and curators – staging art on bigger platforms than any commercial gallery could – come to the fore. In an age where culture has become a political battlefield, artists and thinkers with strong opinions and critical nous bring that weight to bear on an artworld trying to figure out where it stands on the issues of the day. All of these shifts, ArtReview notices, weave through this year’s Power 100 list.

December 2024

ArtReview

ART CLUBS

Back in 2002 when ArtReview’s Power 100 first appeared, the list hadn’t yet begun to group its power players into categories, though ArtReview knew enough to draw attention to the ‘artists, patrons, dealers, directors and collectors’ that it had decided constituted the ‘art/power axis’. A year later, it had identified ‘curators’ and ‘theorists’ as important power types. So to stop things from getting too serious the 2003 list also threw in a doorman and a dentist. Don’t worry, reader, they were only there for laughs (laughing was a thing in the noughties), ‘characters’ not categories, exceptions not types. By 2004, ArtReview had got its act together and started making power lists out of the Power list, handily sorting out four top tens – of artists, collectors, gallerists and museum directors – so that ArtReview’s readers didn’t have to crunch the numbers for themselves, or perhaps do the hard work of thinking it all through using their own thoughts. And by 2006, the Power 100 was starting to discuss its categories, which now included ‘critics’ and ‘architects’, observing that critics were few on the list since ‘the function of critics has passed over to curators’, while architects (this being the wild age of frantic museum-building) could shape ‘the way everyone views art’. By 2007, ArtReview had become obsessed with breaking things down, assigning categories to the list’s entries upfront, while starting to spin off statistics, pie charts and infographics to sate its increasingly megalomaniacal desire for to fit everything in the world of art power into visible trends, tendencies and, yes, categories. Compartmentalising gives the knowledge-hungry a way to break down reality into what’s important and what’s not. Anyone following the aftermath of us presidential election will hear pundits breaking down the various demographic combinations which propelled Donald Trump to victory – was it the non-college educated voters, or the young white men, or working-class, socially conservative, Rust Belt swing voters that made the difference, or… who, exactly? Working out why one or the other category made the choices they did is another matter, as old assumptions about who normally votes for one or the other party have been upended. But the Power 100 isn’t about democracy (have you ever heard a curator offer the public a vote on their next biennial theme, or a gallerist ask the

little people whether they actually like any of the work the gallerist shows? No? That’s right, because that’s insane, even if all art is about decolonising privilege, and so on), and while in this year’s Power 100 the big categories remain, it’s worth paying attention to what might be going on inside these monolithic artworld groupings. One big change to take place – after ArtReview had been relentlessly harried and pestered about it by its anonymous committee of advisors – is the merging of ‘collector’ and ‘philanthropist’ into the bigger and broader category of ‘funder’, a change which tries to makes sense of how the biggest players, once happy merely to sit in their armchairs and collect art, have become something more complicated – institution builders, programme enablers, artist patrons, thought-leader sponsors, conference organisers and more. Rather than following agendas, such figures are increasingly using their financial power to set them. That full-spectrum approach to supporting one form of art over another, in the name of broader social and cultural agendas, points to a more general shift within all these power groupings; that the most important figures these categories are often notable because they go beyond the narrow confines of what traditionally was thought of as their particular role in the art system. So the artists on the list are where they are not simply because of the strength and influence of their work, but because their activity extends into broader activities – activism, education, organising. Curators reach beyond the simple organising of shows in their own institutions to organise biennials simultaneously, or lead activist organisations while advising other institutions keen to tap their expertise. Gallerists, meanwhile, are extending into becoming ‘lifestyle purveyors’, catering to the whole collector ‘experience’, while encroaching increasingly on the role of museums. Museum directors, for their part, are finding that the museums they have shaped now do a great deal more than look after historical collections – becoming bigger forums for public culture, with all the competing claims and demands that come with it – while spinning satellites of their parent institutions ever further afield. Can the old categories hold, or is it time that new hybrids of power were given names?

December 2024

ARTISTS

Congo the chimpanzee painting at the London Zoo, 1957. Photo: Desmond Morris. Courtesy World History Archive / Alamy

The commonsense definition of an artist is someone (still necessarily a person – former ica London director Desmond Morris’s championing of the work of Congo and Betsy, chimpanzees residing at the London and Baltimore zoos respectively, never really took off as anything other than a novelty, though Morris did manage to curate an exhibition of their work at the institution in 1957) who creates objects or experiences that defy classification. ‘What artists do cannot be called work,’ wrote Gustave Flaubert in his posthumously published Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911), tongue firmly in cheek. Or, to be even more old-fashioned, artists create things that have no use-value. For the purposes of this list, they also make the stuff (artworks) around which the rest of the artworld ‘system’ orbits. Although from time to time it might be less than clear as to what’s orbiting around what. Which is in part why this list was originally ‘invented’ and why it goes through some degree of annual change (although it’s not without precedent that the people at the top stay at the top). Indeed, this year artists make up around a third of the people on the list. The remaining two thirds of the list relates to people who do something with the stuff that the artists create. People who may or may not like art, but know how to use it (a curator, for example, tops this list). Which tells you a lot about how the system of art operates. But may also be nothing particularly new either. What is at stake (on a regular basis, if past lists are anything to go by) is art’s fundamental nature. From this list, you might divine, for example, that we expect art to have an intrinsic truth-value. This would be why so many artists, such as Nan Goldin and Forensic Architecture in particular, set themselves up as crusaders for justice, private investigators or practitioners of what is generally known as artistic ‘research’. (The last of which cruel academic types might describe as research without the rigour of the academic.) You might conclude from all this that it’s not enough, today, for art to please the eye or even the soul; rather it needs to be for or against some part of the mechanism of civic life. It needs to have impact in the ‘real’ world as much as the artworld.

For these reasons also you’ll find that a number of artists on this list – Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Yinka Shonibare, Dalton Paula, Sammy Baloji and Ibrahim Mahama, for example – don’t just make things to put in galleries or museums, but also fund organisations dedicated to providing opportunities for others to overcome the social and economic hurdles that generally exist in maintaining art as a preserve of the rich or the otherwise privileged. Operating in a similar vein, you’ll find others, the Lusanga-based Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise collective, for example, who use their work and the value it commands to establish a postplantation ecology in their homeland. Or Julie Mehretu, whose multimillion-dollar donation to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York enabled the institution to provide free entrance to those aged twenty-five and under for the next three years. Then there are the artists who appear on this list not for their artwork at all, but for the organisations or institutions they helm, such as Bose Krishnamachari, cofounder of the KochiMuziris Biennale (which notably always has an artist as its artistic director) and Christopher K. Ho, executive director of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. And then there are those who seem to do it all, like Rirkrit Tiravanija, who produces innovative, often participatory artworks, cofounded a commercial gallery (Ver, in Bangkok) and curates exhibitions (the Thailand Biennale in 2023–24, for which he was co-artistic director, and Art Spectrum 2024, titled Dream Screen, at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, for which the Thai artist was artistic director and cocurator). The real question though is why we expect art to do all this. And whether the expectation that it should do these things is proof of the many shapes that art might take, or the result of the failure of other systems that should form the fundamental structures of society in general. Whether or not it’s proof, if you like, of just how fucked up is the world in which we currently reside.

ArtReview

CURATORS Despite the proliferation of specialist university courses dedicated to the subject, no one really knows what ‘curating’ means anymore. That’s not because of a lexicological crisis as such, but due rather to the activity’s increasingly wide parameters, which has led to its ubiquity. At this point, everything has the capacity to be curated, from capsule collections in fashion stores and bookshelves in hotel lobbies, to the drinks being served at your local bar: in short, any undertaking that involves choosing some things over others. ArtReview’s more revolutionary friends might see such an act as a form of censorship. Because prioritisation of any kind could be construed as just that. And only the refusal to choose could be equated with any notion of fairness. And yet in practice the option to abstain from any selection process never seems to be anyone’s first choice, and before you know it, a curator turns up, raring to go. It is fair to say that the curator occupies a complex position in the current climate, what with the art being produced today purporting to be a zone of justice (see the entry on ‘Artists’ for more on that). One way of resolving, or denying, that complexity manifested at this year’s Venice Biennale, where curator Adriano Pedrosa made a point of emphasising the fact that he was choosing artists who hadn’t previously been picked for the biennial as a result of (it was implied) racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, homophobia and various other prejudices. His Foreigners Everywhere exhibition might have come across like a salon des refusés for our contemporary times. A diatribe against conformity. Even if the real act of rebellion here might have been to select everyone or no one. But this is not the place to construct an archaeology of curatorial failings, nor contradictions – after all, this year’s list sees a curator in first place. Traditionally, views relating to what curating might actually entail – within the context of the artworld, that is – have typically centred on those who take responsibility for works of art (the word is derived from the Latin curare, to take care), which allows cruel people to cast curators in the same vein as caregivers in an old people’s home. Because, as others have said before, museums are where artworks go to die, having been

stripped of any connection to the societies and realities that generated them. Contemporary perspectives on curating, though, relate to how artworks can be massaged into arguments. Operating, if you like, at some sort of nexus at which theory becomes practice: these are the issues that art is supposed to care about (again, see the entry on ‘Artists’). In general, these are things that society at large doesn’t care about, or as is the case with the natural environment, pretends to care about. Because art (and by extension curating) is always about looking at the overlooked, not at what everyone is already looking at. (As the Venice template cited earlier demonstrates, this thought extends to artists from the past who were overlooked during their own lifetimes and are therefore now deserving of an extensive reappraisal. In the name of justice.) If such requirements weren’t being met, why would anyone go to an exhibition in the first place? However, there are times, like the one we presently occupy, when addressing things that people may not be addressing, or reinforcing voices that society has largely silenced, does carry weight. That’s because venues outside of the artworld where such activities might be welcomed are notably diminishing. And because the space, whether literal or otherwise, for presenting alternative points of view is becoming few and far between. We are in a time of cancelling on both sides of the political spectrum. Although you could also argue that the artworld itself, where cancelling is rife, has a propensity for advocating a point of view that will conform rather than result in any conflict. Curating today, then, isn’t merely a matter of ensuring that art exists within both public and private spaces, but is instead about ensuring that something has been done with it. And what an artwork does, we are realising more and more, depends on context. On when, where and how it is displayed. The same artwork shown in Beirut right now, for example, is very unlikely to read in the same way when it is eventually exhibited at a New York gallery, regardless of where the work was originally produced. And being sensitive to these changes, and the resulting effects, is what will determine the real efficacy of the curator working in this moment.

Velvet Buzzsaw (still), 2019, dir Dan Gilroy. Courtesy Netflix / Alamy

December 2024

FUNDERS Back when the Power 100 was in its infancy, the big-spending individuals on this list were known simply as ‘collectors’. After making their mark with their million-dollar collections, these megabuyers of artworks, mostly male or occasionally a married couple, then realised that they needed to build private museums and galleries to show off (at least some of) the things they had bought. Pinault, Arnaud, Cohen, the Broads – these were the names that conjured up the spending power of the ultrarich. Collectors made the art market go round, or so conventional wisdom would have it, and to a large extent the rising fortunes of galleries and the art fairs that they exhibited at were founded on the global expansion of the collector class. According to this year’s annual art market reported prepared by ubs and Art Basel, those collectors bought $65b worth of art in 2023. But when it comes to buying art, things aren’t what they used to be. Over the past decade, using one’s major assets to influence the workings of the artworld has evolved into something more elaborate than the narrow, largely transactional relationship between gallerist and collector, which is why ArtReview has this year taken the categories of ‘collector’ and ‘philanthropist’ and merged them to reflect something that feels more accurate: ‘funder’. In part this new category reflects what the old-school collectors have become, namely founders of institutions that seek to shape the contemporary art discourse while catching the attention of the wider community. Such individuals are increasingly placing their focus on infrastructures within the industry itself, using their money to finance programming, residencies and awards that benefit artists and curators, while their organisations take a more active role in directing the artworld’s critical agendas. Miuccia Prada’s foundation, for example, stages thematic exhibitions year-round in Milan, Venice, Shanghai and Tokyo, while investing in collaborative activities through its ‘Human Brains’ project – a series of neuroscience-focused shows, conferences and publishing initiatives that have resulted from multidisciplinary research undertaken since 2018. Similarly, Maja Hoffmann’s luma Foundation presents a host of curated exhibitions at its huge campus in Arles, while this year saw the third edition of its annual conference on ‘Environmental History’ (the cultural centre also supports eco-conscious and tech-tinged programmes further afield, such as at London’s Serpentine, where luma adviser Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director). In bringing together artists and architects

with scientists and psychologists, through initiatives like those noted, funders make a case for themselves as facilitators of a much bigger set of cultural and social objectives, of which art is only a part. Of course, such a direction isn’t exactly surprising given that so much contemporary art directly intertwines with other fields, whether politics, academia, science or social activism. Consequently, private funders have had to shed their roles as mere collectors or museum makers, while being increasingly proactive about what they fund and increasingly thoughtful about their reasons for doing so. It’s why Darren Walker appears on the list, head of the Ford Foundation, one of the biggest philanthropic foundations in the us, which, in 2023 alone, gave over $64m in grants supporting ‘creativity and free expression’. Funding, then, is increasingly a form of soft power, which extends everywhere. Kiran Nadar’s collection is a reference point for modern and contemporary art from India and the subcontinent, and her eponymous museum, gearing up to open its new building in Delhi in 2026, projects its own view of India’s postwar artistic history. Recently it loaned a number of major works to an exhibition that it also helped fund, at London’s Barbican, that charted Indian art in the late twentieth century, and presented an exhibition about the pioneering painter M.F. Husain at this year’s Venice Biennale, where, notably, India has only twice been officially represented. Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, through their Dhaka Art Summit, connect the global artworld to Bangladesh’s contemporary scene. And it’s soft power that also defines the presence of the Gulf states on this year’s list: Saudi Arabia’s minister for culture, Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, is largely responsible for modernising (and internationalising) the country’s cultural profile; Qatar’s Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani heads up what is an ever-growing group of museums in Doha; and the list’s number one entry, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, drives forward the uae’s well-connected and influential Sharjah Art Foundation, while also a curator being tapped to lead biennials and triennials abroad. Of course, collecting is still a key activity for these funders. It’s just that acquiring art has now been integrated as part of a greater vision that considers how wealth can be directed towards other, very particular goals, whether influencing global agendas or reconfiguring a country’s profile on the world stage. Does art end up as a pawn used to play much bigger games? Probably. And, from the Catholic Church to the cia, it probably always has been.

Hands Across America at Eakins Oval along Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, 25 May 1986. Photo: Sam Cali. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons / cc by-sa 3.0

ArtReview

GALLERISTS AND ART FAIR DIRECTORS

Art Basel Paris 2024 at the Grand Palais. Courtesy Art Basel

Aside from playing a vital role when it comes to career management, galleries, even more importantly perhaps, provide the artist with a source of income. In keeping the artist away from the grubby side of finance, galleries help to preserve the illusion that their dependants are in fact aloof from such distractions and dedicated wholly and exclusively to art. Of course, this is how the artist is still often perceived within the public imagination: as some sort of dreamer, detached from, and perhaps unburdened by, the realities of everyday life. Let’s remind ourselves, then, that galleries are shops – places where (some) people go to buy art. Why someone chooses to spend their money on a painting or sculpture is not important here – it might be because they find it beautiful, thought-provoking or simply ‘interesting’, or that they think it’s funny (in a comedic sense or otherwise), or that by owning it, aspects of their personality that may not actually exist could be revealed: that this artwork could make them appear interesting and sophisticated within their social circle or the one they aspire to join. Or they may simply figure that whatever they’re buying is going to make them even more money in the long or (preferably) short term. But, like ArtReview said, the whys do not matter here. Unless, of course, you’re a gallerist and therefore responsible for giving all potential shoppers a reason to spend their money with you. As such, a successful gallerist will be adept at keeping these diverse factors in play. Nevertheless, galleries are a curious kind of shop. The aesthetic experience that they’re ultimately trying to sell, often interchangeable now with some sort of ethical experience, is available to all who visit, regardless of whether they’re in the market for a piece of art. Being a powerful gallery isn’t just about selling lots of art, then, but instead about being motivated to give a platform to artists who call into question all of the dynamics that are involved when engaging with art, while staging exhibitions that inform our understandings of art being made today. The galleries on this list tend to combine the former with the latter. Going back to money: the art market has seen something of an economic downturn over the past 12 months (insiders call this a ‘correction’ in an attempt to normalise such a decline and reduce any negative connotations). Zealous aesthetes might interpret such a plunge as an upturn, believing that the artworld could now operate on its own terms without having to accommodate the needs and desires of those who fund

it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, as Isaac Newton was fond of telling anyone he caught dodging the falling apples in his orchard. The real point being that everything can mean what we want it to mean. Which is not to say that the world is meaningless, even though some cynics might suggest that’s the case, but rather that it is open to interpretation: it’s a sort of ‘multiverse’, to use the language of today’s children. Ultimately, it’s that (the openness, not the language of children) which forms the founding principle of the contemporary religion of art. And as the current spate of cancellations and boycotts against organisational structures persists, demonstrating the readiness with which artists have taken considered (or specific) positions with regard to world events, it will be the collectors and institutions who hold the artworld to that principle. What goes around comes around, as Newton probably didn’t say. Sales of art at auction were down by around 26 percent during the first half of this year according to the annual collecting survey compiled by ubs and Art Basel, published in October. Global turmoil was to blame, along with the many elections that took place, in addition to the relatively stable status of other investment assets (treasury bonds and the like). The consequence of all this is that many small-to-medium-sized galleries have been struggling to survive. Traditionally viewed as the kindergartens for new artistic talent, such galleries have become even more sensitive to the often extortionate costs that participating in global trade fairs incurs – an activity that is now regarded as an essential part of the art market ‘game’. Of course, there have also been concerns about the environmental impact of constantly circulating art objects all over the world, not to mention the people to install them and the people to sell them. But sometimes this is just a loincloth to cover up deeper financial concerns. It’s been a tough year for galleries all round. Which is one of the reasons why, this year, there are fewer of them on the list, and why even the biggest, most international and globally present galleries have tended to fall in the rankings. But there’s another component to the turmoil that galleries have recently been experiencing, one underpinned by a growing sense that where you stand nowadays (politically, ethically) is more than ever under scrutiny, and that remaining neutral is increasingly difficult. If experiences based on aesthetics are becoming increasingly ethical, or political, that’s not a development that galleries today can so easily influence.

December 2024

MUSEUM DIRECTORS

Protest targeting Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery, London, 27 September 2024. Photo: Jamie Lowe. Courtesy Just Stop Oil

‘Citizens don’t trust politicians or the media, but they do trust museums. We have an obligation to them,’ stated Suhanya Raffel, director of m+, Hong Kong, and president for the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (cimam), in an interview earlier this year. Although in light of current debates around issues of restitution, repatriation, representation and the aftereffects of various forms of colonisation, it would be foolish to take the public’s trust in any museum for granted. Yet, whether you believe Raffel or not, such issues of shared values, civics and belief in the public institution are certainly at stake in today’s art museums. Museums are under more stress and scrutiny than ever before: what do they actually do? What should they do? Who are they for? Should they even exist? A slew of books released just this past year attempted to answer that question, from Tate director Maria Balshaw’s vision of the museum as a site for hosting society and its disagreements, a sort of contemporary Greek agora; to curator and writer Fatoş Üstek’s call to network the museum and restructure it less hierarchically; to scholar Eunsong Kim’s and thinker and activist Françoise Vergès’s indictments of the biased foundations of museums themselves. There does, however, seem to be a tacit agreement that the museum is a shared and very visible space, simply based on the number of protests over the past year that used art institutions as the stage from which to make a public statement. Buildings have been occupied and exhibitions have been closed down with climate protests and groups protesting artworks or events they view as problematic. The year began with pumpkin soup dashed all over Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–06) in the Louvre in the name of sustainable food systems, while in June Claude Monet’s poppy field at the Musée d’Orsay was pasted over with a desert wasteland scene. The same day this September that protesters were handed a jail sentence for throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) in 2022, someone did it again (with tomato soup, again)

at London’s National Gallery, while a few weeks later Picasso’s Motherhood (1901) was pasted over with an image of a distressed mother and child in Gaza. On the one hand, such protests are having an impact, though maybe not the intended one: the National Gallery has since banned visitors from bringing liquids into the building, while the National Museum Directors’ Council issued a statement saying that such uses of artworks ‘had to stop’. Citizens trust museums, but do museums trust citizens? It’s worth asking whether the power wielded by such art institutions is largely through the symbolism and weight invested in them as ‘national’ or ‘public’ spaces. Largescale and national museums are increasingly precarious, underfunded while stretched trying to tackle a broad range of agendas, reliant on donors and funders who can steer the programme. In recent years, larger commercial galleries have been attempting to occupy the terrain that was once the preserve of the museum, as gathering places for culture and history, fudging the line between private and public. But despite, or even because, of all this, it would seem we still need museums, and the nine museum directors on the list reflect an international set of spaces that, in some cases, embody the more traditional role of canon-making and maintenance, and in others a more open-ended role of nurturing a scene. Many of the directors included here are the public faces of vast organisations, representatives of all the work that goes on in the buildings they oversee, generally not doing any of the actual curating, but acting more like ceos. (Though, of course, there are different styles of ceos – like the hypemachine Musk type, or the faceless bureaucrat type.) Who is on the list hasn’t really shifted this year; but what’s worth noting is what is happening around them: the artists making use of their museums as hangout spaces, social centres and workshop labs (artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija), and a swell of curators working beyond their institutions to figure out what the future of the museum might be. Who do you trust?

ArtReview

THINKERS ‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ as Parmenides used to tell anyone who would listen while wandering around the Greek colony of Elea (in what’s now southern Italy) during the sixth and fifth centuries bce. And despite its insistence that it’s all about ‘invention’ and ‘novelty’, the same is true of the ideas that come to permeate contemporary art. Often the ideas – many of which are about power dynamics themselves, from feminist and queer theory to the importance of the more-than-human world to postcolonialism and decolonisation – that artists obsess about today have been filtering through the brickwork that supports academia’s ivory towers, or (more rarely) through the shifting sands of public consciousness for several years beforehand. That ‘thinkers’ is a separate category here is not to say that anyone not categorised as such does no thinking. Rather, it exists in order to suggest that the people within the category assert their influence through the generation of ideas rather than, say, the production of artworks or of capital. (And you might argue that each of these factors – the production of ideas, of material artworks or of capital – provides a different criterion by which the ‘value’ of art might be judged. With, generally speaking, each one providing a different value result.) The exception to this rule – and there always is one (more often many), if only to prove the folly of creating rules in the first place – might be someone like Fred Moten, a cultural theorist and professor in both the departments of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University, and an ‘artist’ contributing to, for example, this year’s Busan Biennale. Or Legacy Russell, whose influence has been channelled through books such as Glitch Feminism (2020) or this year’s Black Meme, as much as through her work as director of The Kitchen in New York. Or artist Hito Steyerl, who is as influential for her lectures and essays on subjects ranging from ai to identity as she is for the way she expresses those same ideas in the form of artworks. The bigger point perhaps is that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The work of prominent anthropologists such as the late David Graeber or James C. Scott (who died earlier this year) or the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant continues to provide fertile ground for those sowing

the seeds of biennial thematics and the artworks that take root within them. Death, however, is the absolute barrier to making it onto this list. Ashes to ashes and all that stuff. You might argue, of course, that when it comes to human activities, ‘thinking’ is a pursuit of the past. That the rapid development and deployment of ai over the course of the last two years alone has begun to render such cerebral activities quaint if not redundant, and that it is bound to keep doing so at an accelerated pace in the years to come. But the composition of this list isn’t about what’s to come; rather it’s about the here and now. And for now, given the already stated reliance on existing ideas in the world of art, thinking is still generally the preserve of humans, even if a growing number of human thinkers are ready to attribute forms of thinking to the more-than-human world (of animals, minerals and machines) – as the number of prominently exhibited artworks that work with entities from these categories can attest. In a year in which the value of art in purely economic terms has generally declined, you might think that it’s natural for a magazine such as ArtReview to turn to the value of the ideas and thoughts behind artworks as more reliable measures of the field’s relevance to society as a whole. Yet the one doesn’t necessarily follow the other. Because they are not necessarily linked. It might be better yet to consider that the rise of populist authoritarianism, across the globe, makes the spaces in which some form of free or alternative thinking is possible – or, better yet, permitted – more valuable than ever. This, in turn, might be one reason why people such as American academic Saidiya Hartman (best known for her work in the field of African-American studies), Cameroonian political theorist and historian Achille Mbembe (a piercing critic of colonialism and its aftereffects) or anthropologist Anna L. Tsing (best known for her work on the ethnology of mushrooms and transdisciplinary approaches to the understanding of the Anthropocene) feature highly on this list; each of them, in different ways, demands a reimagining of the past so that we might reseed our individual and collective futures. On the other hand, you might consider those perpetuating the oppression of free thought more powerful still.

Auguste Rodin, Le Penseur (installation view, Musée Rodin, Paris), 1881–82, bronze. Photo: Thibsweb. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons / cc by-sa 4.0

December 2024

HOW,WHY,WHAT & FOR WHOM? So, how does it work, this measuring of power? It goes without saying that this is one instance in which ArtReview is waiting for a suitably accomplished ai to take over. But this list has never been about wishing, or about what might be. (At least ArtReview tries to make it so. Even if its therapist would point out that all trying is inevitably lying.) Those are merely childish dreams. Rather the list is an attempt to fix a snapshot of how the artworld really operates. Of who decides whose art gets shown, what subjects our institutions address, what type of art we get to see today, where we get to see it and what barriers to accessing it are constructed or deconstructed. The artworld, as we all know, is not the open space in which anyone can say anything, or where everyone has an equal space, regardless of who they are, what they believe and where they come from. Even if that is generally how the artworld prefers to present itself to those who live in the real world. A belief in that really would be a matter for a therapist to get to the bottom of. But this list certainly is not a form of therapy. (Although, in the sense that it’s some kind of reality check for those so immersed in pure aesthetic contemplation that they lose track of everything else, the impurities in their contemplation included, twiddling their fingers while the world burns, perhaps it is a therapy of a sort.) Indeed, it’s often the opposite of therapy. A site of escalation rather than its inverse. Within the panel that decides who goes on or off, and who ends up where, there is inevitably intense debate, if not straightforward argument. And door slamming, fist thumping, cake smashing and toys definitively ejected from the pram. The list is shaped through a long process of input and debate, casting for opinions and insight from a global panel, and subject to no small amount of fiddling, tweaking, revision and rearranging, and then repeating it all over again. And although the result looks like a sequence of ordered facts, it’s anything but so; instead it’s the optimal synthesis of widely differing points of view. We await the day when the list will simply be a matter of what the computer says. ‘Whose points of view?’ ArtReview hears you squeal. That’s where things get complex. The ‘panel’, which now numbers more than 40 people, is made up of individuals based in different world geographies. (The panellists are all part of the ‘artworld’ in various capacities – artists, curators, critics, consumers – but panellists are not allowed

to be on the list themselves – either they are off the panel or off the list. And ArtReview never reveals who they are, because its friends from the cia told it that this was best practice, and this way they can freely pass judgement over their friends, colleagues, nonfriends and complete strangers without fear of reprisal or retribution.) Each of them gives the ‘group’ an account of who’s shaping the art people get to see from their (geographical) point of view, and then the ‘group’ whips out a series of more or less wicked chains and knives and battles it out to decide whose point of view will prevail. And in a world that’s decreasingly made up of centres and peripheries (when it comes to art, that is), the fight tends to last longer with each successive year, and gets more violent and bloody. Although, rest assured, ArtReview makes sure that no one actually gets hurt. Physically or emotionally. ‘What does “shaping the art that people get to see” actually mean?’ ArtReview hears you snarl. Well, that’s not straightforward either. Although ArtReview certainly wishes it were. It’s a combination of influencing the type of art that’s being produced, influencing the type of art that’s being shown and, for the purposes of this list, having an influence that extends beyond the local cultural ecology. Of course, however ‘pure’ the world of art thinks it is, money inevitably helps to grease the wheels that make it move (sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes little more than a wobble from side to side), just as much as do politics (both local and global) and the natural environment (or more generally the world around us). Increasingly too, in line with what ArtReview’s more hippyish friends describe as ‘the spirit of the times’, there’s an importance given to those who manage, somehow, to bridge the gap between the world of art and, well, the world. ArtReview’s Wiccan friends are really into that – crossing between worlds – right now, although ArtReview wonders if they stole that idea from Marvel Comics. Anyhow, as far as ArtReview knows, neither the hippies nor the Wiccans nor the Marvel suits had any influence on the composition of this list. Even though ArtReview generally assumes that they have a subtle influence on everything these days. Which leads us neatly to the final point: that perhaps real power is of the kind that you never see; the kind that you never know is influencing you in the first place. At least that’s what ArtReview’s priestly friends keep telling it. ArtReview

December 2024

1 SHEIKHA HOOR AL QASIMI

Emirati

1 Photo: Chieska Fortune Smith

Curator

Last Year 36

Artist, curator, institutional director – Al Qasimi can claim to belong to nearly every constituent sector of the artworld (albeit these days she’s not really that well known for her painting). Plus, in the real world, she’s royalty. And yet, in recent years she has leveraged her expertise and knowledge of art from the Gulf region and further afield, to operate in geographies beyond the Emirate and areas in which she can absolutely rely on royal privilege. An exhibition of paintings she curated by the senior Māori artist Emily Karaka, which opened this autumn at the Sharjah Art Foundation, of which she is also president and founding director, may be indicative of the direction planned for the 2026 Biennale of Sydney. Al Qasimi was this year appointed curator of the Australian survey, which she will work on while developing her plans for the 2025 Aichi Triennale in Japan, of which she is artistic director (the first non-Japanese person to occupy the position, although she speaks the language, having studied there). Having previously curated the Lahore Biennale (in 2020) and the United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Al Qasimi is in demand, and her global presence is reflected in her home institution’s programming, which, in addition to Karaka, has featured survey exhibitions of South African multimedia icon William Kentridge, Brazilian painter Antonio Dias and Pakistani artist and Women’s Action Forum cofounder Lala Rukh, not to mention the annual March Meeting conference. Next February marks the opening of the 16th Sharjah Biennial (Al Qasimi curated the 2023 edition, developing a programme initiated by the late Okwui Enwezor, having been involved with the event – as director – since 2003, when she cocurated the sixth edition). For this edition,

Al Qasimi has appointed an all-female team of curators that includes many of the leading lights among curators operating in the context of the global majority, including Sri Lanka’s Natasha Ginwala, Indonesian curator Alia Swastika, Bahraini-Singaporean artist Amal Khalaf, New Zealand artist Megan Tamati-Quennell and Turkish curator Zeynep Öz. Moreover, in the context of an artworld in which cancellations and boycotts are rife – coming from every direction – and generating a consequent culture of fear, Al Qasimi remains one of the few voices still prepared to use the platform art (and royal privilege) affords them in order to express their opinions directly and to keep discussions that most people allow to fade away firmly in the spotlight, whether they concern the current carnage in Palestine and Lebanon or those suffering from other conflicts across the globe. Beyond all that, Al Qasimi also serves as president of the International Biennale Association, president of the hugely influential Africa Institute in Sharjah and on the board of Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. She is also on the advisory boards of the Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi and Darat al Funun in Amman. Beyond her involvement with art, she also founded the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and earlier this year presented a clothing collection in London which was developed from the work of her late brother, who worked in the fashion industry. But beyond her personal achievements, Al Qasimi is also a symbol of the increasing influence of the Gulf region in the spheres of finance, commerce, politics, sports and entertainment, and, of course (but perhaps primarily by virtue of the first two elements on this list) art.

ArtReview

2 RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA Artist Thai Last Year 3

2 Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner 3 Courtesy Saidiya Hartman

‘My interest is always to break down the distance between what we think [of] as art or high art and what we do in our daily life,’ Tiravanija once told The Korea Herald. During his close-to-40-year engagement with what has been characterised as relational aesthetics, the Thai artist has become known for his participatory events, from cooking pad thai for gallery goers to providing them with ping-pong tables. You’d think it might be tricky to encapsulate such a career in a retrospective, but his moma ps1 survey, which closed in March, before moving to luma Arles in June, had a go, as did a second retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which opened in September, serving curry and Turkish coffees, and providing hangout spaces where the interactions are the work. Given the social aspect of his practice, it is unsurprising that Tiravanija hasn’t hidden himself away in his studio: he has also established himself as a consummate curator. Building on his curating of the triennial Okayama Art Summit in 2022 and cocurating of the Thailand Biennale in 2023, he oversaw this year’s edition of Art Spectrum,

a biennial exhibition featuring the next generation of Asian artists, including Heecheon Kim, Riar Rizaldi and Vivien Zhang, which was held at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul. You might see the last, which was as diverse as it was intriguing, as an extension of the artist’s ongoing teaching activities (at Columbia University, New York) and his support of Gallery Ver, a commercial gallery space in his native Thailand. One thing’s for sure though, Tiravanija is as open and generous to other artists as he is to those who attend and at times become a part of his exhibitions; even if repetitive, it is effective, offering a form of openness that feels increasingly relevant to artists, given the fractious nature of our current times. Amidst everything else, Tiravanija also found time to contribute two new works to this year’s Forest Festival in Okayama (which includeda series of textile works and ceramic bowls, offering visitors a lunchbox filled with locally sourced ingredients), an exhibition in Montreal, where he hosted a rehearsal space for local bands, as well as a roomsize installation at Pilar Corrias in London, just in time for Frieze Week.

3 SAIDIYA HARTMAN Thinker American

Last Year 34

Hartman’s self-stated mission statement to ‘reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities’ has made her a vital commentator on the consequences of slavery – and a signal example to artists exploring whitewashed narratives of history. Her reach is wide: a new Japanese translation of the writer, thinker and cultural historian's 2006 book Lose Your Mother won Japan’s Best Translation Award this year. All of this continues to spread her work and her influential methods of delving into archives, exploring their gaps and absences, and reanimating them with both academic rigor and the tools of fiction, what she refers to as ‘critical fabulation’. Her aim in 2019’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, as she wrote, of ‘reconstructing the experience of the unknown and retrieving minor lives from oblivion’ could also be read as a guide for many artists working today. This year, while teaching in the English Department at Columbia University and continuing work on a book about unsung heroes of Black radicalism (under the title Graces of the Unsung), and alongside her

inclusion in the publication Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World (2024, based on a lecture series from last year), Hartman resumed her ongoing collaboration with artist Arthur Jafa through an ambitious three-part multimedia performance, Minor Music at the End of the World. Commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation and currently in rehearsal, with theorist Tina Campt involved as dramaturg, the production is based on two of Hartman’s essays, ‘The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance’ and ‘Litany for Grieving Sisters’. It also draws on the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly his science fiction story ‘The Comet’, published in 1920 in the wake of the Great Influenza pandemic, in which a black man and a white woman are the sole survivors of an apocalyptic event. Hartman and Jafa’s work will premiere in Amsterdam next year, and the questions it promises to raise testify to Hartman’s conceptual scope and hopefulness: ‘How does one live at the end of the world? Is it possible to envision a world without racism? And what would be required to produce such a world?’

December 2024

4 STEVE MCQUEEN Artist

British

Last Year 8 the documentary Occupied City, in which he slowly traced and filmed all the locations that appear in author, historian and producer (and McQueen’s wife) Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940–1945 (2019). Offering a meditative study of the Dutch capital under the Nazis, it was a cinematic tour de force that lasted nearly four-and-ahalf hours. So far, so auteur. McQueen’s second celluloid outing this year, Blitz, however, which opened to mixed reviews, demonstrated how mainstream he can go. Telling the story of a young boy during the World War ii bombing of London, it was ‘an old-fashioned children’s adventure movie, a rollicking yarn that might have been on television on a Bank Holiday afternoon’, thought the bbc. ‘Shockingly conventional’, Variety noted. But McQueen seems confident straddling both documentary and fiction forms, as well as arthouse and (attempted) blockbuster modes, and continues to serve as a model to artists who might want to make work that can occupy the gallery, the cinema, as well as home streaming platforms.

5 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Artist Collective International Last Year 13 This research group, founded in 2010 by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and consisting of over 20 artists, architects, journalists and researchers who investigate human rights violations, has never been busier. The group has long worked in Palestine, and in January the first exhibition of its Ramallah-based offshoot, the Forensic Architecture Investigation (fai) Unit, was staged at the uc Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences. The exhibition displayed its trademark analysis of found field recordings, media imagery and satellite pictures, as well as 3d animated reconstructions used to create second-by-second retellings of contested events. The unit, set up in 2020, is a collaboration with Al-Haq, a human rights organisation, but one that has been designated a terrorist group by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and Forensic Architecture has been the subject of much criticism from commentators, particularly in Germany. Shows at Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart and Museum im Kulturspeicher (MiK), Würzburg, both concerning racist and antiimmigration violence in Germany, went ahead, however.

The methodology they pioneered, in applying aesthetic analysis to news and events, has proven widely influential, while affiliates and former members, including artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan and curator Anselm Franke, have spread this further in their own work. Positioning artistic tools and interdisciplinary creative research as means to generate evidence of what they term ‘state and corporate violence’, their work’s proposal of art as something that can be instrumentalised is apparently an alluring one for many artists, suggesting art installation as antidote to an imagedominated, post-truth landscape. The current show at civa, Brussels, shows their 2023 work on prehistoric architecture in what is now Ukraine; their work on former plantations in Louisiana, usa, becoming petrochemical factories on view at the Wellcome Collection, London; and a selection of their ongoing work on medical staff in Gaza over the past year being exhibited in Vienna. Alongside museum exhibitions also in Istanbul, Portland and Cali, and biennials in Rotterdam and Yogyakarta, their work continues to have both global focus and audiences.

ArtReview

4 Photo: James Stopforth 5 Photo: Natalia Sliwinska

Following on from several years of more hard-hitting, London-focused film projects – including the 2020 Small Axe series of five films that charted the lives of West Indian immigrants to the city, codirecting the documentary Uprising (2021) on a 1981 fire in South London, and his filmic monument Grenfell (2023), a single-shot circling of the site of the tragic 2017 apartment block fire – the gap between McQueen’s art and cinema projects feels wider of late. This year, McQueen received a solo exhibition that continues to occupy both Dia sites in New York, with several film works and a new photographic series on display in the institution’s Chelsea space, and in a massive former factory site Beacon is his new installation Bass, the basement space filled only with coloured lighting and reverberating with snatches of music. (The music an extended jam session, recorded in-situ, between different forms of the titular instrument, played by a stellar ensemble that included Meshell Ndegeochello and jazz veteran Marcus Miller.) The show received widespread acclaim, and will travel to Switzerland’s Schaulager next year. He also released

7 NAN GOLDIN 6 WAEL SHAWKY

Artist American Last Year 1

At the opening of the Venice Biennale, conversations centred on the length of the queue to enter the Egyptian Pavilion. People were happy to wait an hour, even two: such was the buzz around Shawky’s video installation Drama 1882. The 45-minute work operatically told the story of the Urabi revolt, the nationalist uprising in the Khedivate of Egypt that ended British imperialism and French influence within the country, with actors (including a donkey) moving through candy-pink sets. Another new work by Shawky, I Am Hymns of the New Temples, debuted concurrently at Venice’s Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Made in collaboration with Pompeii Archaeological Park and developed from extensive archival research, the artist’s film delved into Greek mythology, specifically probing how myths are disseminated. The New Temples film is also included in his show outside of Italy, the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea holding a collection of his installations, films and sculpture, as well as a new film, Love Story (2024), connecting his host country to myths in Egypt and Pompeii. An upcoming show in Seoul early next year at the Barakat Contemporary will complement this with a selection of older works that feature his trademark balance of light-hearted means to depict weighty subjects. Drama 1882 was the first of Shawky’s work to make use of professional actors, having in the past retold political events using children and puppets. His presence in Venice is a culmination of a body of work that has long playfully picked at colonial pasts and violent events, recasting history as a kind of myth. mass Alexandria, the independent art school Shawky previously ran, may have gone dormant, but such energies will be put to use in his new role as artistic director of Qatar Museums’ Fire Station, as was announced last month: in addition to developing the artist residency programme, Shawky said he intends turn the space into an educational platform.

8 KERRY JAMES MARSHALL Artist American reentry (39 in 2022) When Marshall painted A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self in 1980, it protested the lack of Black faces to be found in figurative art: the face staring out is entirely in silhouette bar two eyes and a wide smile that plays off racist caricature. It’s taken 40 years, but now Marshall’s influence can be felt globally, with Black figuration a dominant genre of current times. Consequently Marshall’s work can be found at any given time in a group show acknowledging Black artmaking: this year there was Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at Art Institute of Chicago; The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at National Portrait Gallery, London (travelling to The Box, Plymouth; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh); and Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy, London (at which he showed Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, 2007, a refiguring of the eponymous, enslaved African-American artist into art history). Marshall’s participation in this last is a prelude to a solo exhibition at the institution next year.

ArtReview

6 © Wael Shawky. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Lia Rumma, and Barakat Contemporary 7 Photo: Thea Traff 8 Photo: Jason Bell. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy Kerry James Marshall and David Zwirner

Artist Egyptian new

‘The greatest love that the human species has attained was on a Gucci shoot,’ Goldin proclaimed in October. After the pain of her opioid addiction, and the crusade to bring down the Sackler family (museum patrons who made their fortune through the prescription opioid Oxycontin), the photographer was rewarded with a campaign for the fashion brand (an emotional moment, apparently, featuring the likes of Debbie Harry). Alongside her first big-bucks commercial deal was a show of older work presented by Gagosian at the Welsh Chapel in London, while her dealer’s New York space premiered two of her newest moving image works: the apocalyptic You never did anything wrong, in which the models are all animals, and Stendhal Syndrome (both 2024), which pairs personal photographs with portraits of masterpieces from famous museums (now devoid of Sackler sponsorship, naturally). Does this represent a mellowing? Not at all: in October Goldin was arrested outside the New York Stock Exchange while protesting Israel’s bombardment of Palestine.

9 ANNA KORNBLUH Thinker American new

10 JOHN AKOMFRAH Artist British-Ghanaian Last Year 33

9 Photo: Jenny Fontaine 10 Photo: Christian Cassiel. © John Akomfrah. Courtesy Lisson Gallery 11 © Audoin Desforges / Rolex 12 Photo: Heike Huslage-Koch. Courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons / cc by-sa 4.0

Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism was the most buzzed-about book of art theory this year, and with good reason. It persuasively links myriad twenty-first-century cultural developments – from experiential art, to first-person narration in fiction and tv, to the personality cult of artists themselves – in their rejection of that foundational quality of artistry, mediation, and ties this in turn to a wider impatience fostered by contemporary capitalism. For Kornbluh, a Chicago-based writer and academic, we’ve been conditioned to expect everything now, frictionlessly, whether art or online shopping, and to sell ourselves too. After reading, you may see everything from the revival of digestible figurative painting to the leveraging of artists’ identities through Kornbluh’s lens. The book’s subtitle boldly positions it as a successor to Fredric Jameson’s era-defining Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). But it’s not bragging if you back it up, and Immediacy does.

11 CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Some artists might struggle to deal with the historical and political baggage that comes with representing at a national pavilion, but Akomfrah, a totemic figure in British art, was only too happy to lean into that contextual weight. He created Listening All Night to the Rain, a disorientating walk-through featuring 62 screens that played 31 hours of footage and archival material, with references ranging from Stokely Carmichael to Mark Rothko, and which meditated on the artist’s enduring themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change, while asking audiences to ‘attune’ to an ‘ethics of sonics’ that served as the installation’s narrative. Akomfrah’s interest in the formal texture of filmmaking, as much as its social and political message, was honed not least during his years as a member of the Black Audio Film Collective (with former members David Lawson and Lina Gopaul still working alongside him). The Independent thought the Pavilion was ‘a visual feast, exploring the best and worst of our country at a time when the notion of British identity has never been so contested’.

12 ACHILLE MBEMBE

Artist American Last Year 16

Thinker Cameroonian reentry (39 in 2022)

Described as the ‘third in a suite’ of survey shows (her 40-year career was pored over by the Barbican Art Gallery, London, last year, and then at Kunstmuseum Basel, in a show that closed in April), this year’s Remember to Dream, at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, New York, looked back on the politically engaged photographer via some of her lesserknown and rarely displayed works. Weems, who was awarded the us National Medal of Arts by the departing President Biden in October, also revisited The Kitchen Table, her 1990 series of images capturing a fictional drama featuring the artist herself amid scenes of Black American domestic life. She referenced the project in a commission for fashion brand Bottega Veneta, with a campaign showing rapper as| ap Rocky and his baby child sitting down for dinner. Two works from the original series were included in a tv advertisement for Kamala Harris, and Weems produced a billboard for the Democratic presidential candidate, as well as hosting a programme of readings, live music and food at New York’s Gladstone Gallery on election day.

The philosopher, who is known for his erudite observations on the intersections of power, capitalism and identity, and the relationships between these around the world and on the African continent, has become a key reference for artists and curators who are feeling the neoliberal hollowing out of democracy. Mbembe’s most recent book, The Earthly Community (2022), presents the bleak trajectory of technocapitalism, but also posits a possible escape route through African cosmologies and the power of African aesthetics and figurative objects. The author has been touring his book globally and received rave reviews for his radical call for an African future: in June he gave a lecture at the University of Bergen (while receiving the Holberg Prize, the first African to do so), and in November he was billed as the star attraction of the biennial Maputo Fast Forward Festival. In São Paulo for the 9th International Theatre Festival, he told Veja that ‘we must fight to ensure that no person of African descent is a stranger in Africa’, arguing that the continent should institute a right of return.

December 2024

13 CAO FEI

14 IBRAHIM MAHAMA Artist Ghanaian Last Year 6

Cao came to prominence during the early 2000s as postinternet art thrived. While her videos, performances and, most recently, virtual reality works continue to speak to technological progress and the transformation of China, it is the human experience in all of this that fascinates her the most – and has led to her staying power. ‘I come from the pre-internet era,’ she has said, ‘and what moves me is the relationship formed through emotions, people, objects and the world, not only algorithms and data.’ It is this broadness in her curiosity that registers with audiences, not least those visiting the Lenbachhaus in Munich, where her work explored the relationship between digital culture and the real and virtual worlds. The artist also had solo exhibitions at scad Museum of Art in Savannah, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (where the artist transformed the galleries into, for example, a Beijing cinema foyer and a yum cha restaurant, with the help of Hong Kong-based Beau Architects) and Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, the last being Cao’s largest to date.

15 NICOLE EISENMAN

‘The idea is to reverse the capital,’ Mahama told The New York Times in September on the occasion of his exhibition at White Cube New York. The gallery was showing a spell of good things, an installation featuring old hospital beds and upholstery taken from derelict railway carriages, as well as charcoal drawings depicting the construction of Ghanaian railways by men exploited under British rule. The artist’s comment relates to his interest in taking money out of the West, through the sale of such sculptures, and funnelling it back into Tamale, the region of northern Ghana where the artist was raised and still lives. There he has built three institutions, Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Volini, each with its own programme of exhibitions and education initiatives. This reparative practice has won him fans: institutional shows this year include Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Barbican Centre, London; and Mönchehaus Museum Goslar; while newly commissioned works were presented at the Lagos Biennial and Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia.

16 KOYO KOUOH

Artist American new Figurative painting may have ceded some ground to abstraction recently, but identity-driven figuration is still thick on the walls and Eisenman is one of its leading proponents, if not its feisty godmother. This year, the American artist’s superb touring retrospective What Happened reached its only us stop, the mca Chicago, showcasing queer politics and art historical references alongside evocations of digital anomie and processionlike forays into three dimensions. (It was an apt choice of city, too, since the Chicago Imagists’s mix of humour and scabrousness is part of Eisenman’s artistic dna.) For a summer–autumn show at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, meanwhile, she allowed painting and sculpture to commingle in ways that felt inventive, from paintings with sculptural addenda to paintings of sculpture to, well, just sculptures surrounded by paintings. And in October, doubling down, Eisenman unveiled a monumental public sculpture – an assisted readymade of a toppled 1969 crane titled Fixed Crane – in New York’s Madison Square Park.

Museum Director Cameroonian Last Year 21 Kouoh told Artforum in August that there is an ‘energy of Pan-Africanism that is being revived on the continent and across its vast diaspora’. At least in part, the growing mightiness of the African artworld is down to the curator’s own efforts. As the director of Cape Town’s Zeitz mocaa since 2019, and having established her name through the raw Material Company in Senegal, Kouoh has become a leading light at home and abroad. Current shows at the institution include solos for GhanaianAmerican artist Rita Mawuena Benissan and South African Nolan Oswald Dennis. Earlier this year, Kunstmuseum Basel opened When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, a survey exhibition curated by Kouoh that debuted at Zeitz. Not that it has all been plain sailing: in June, the artist Tracey Rose lambasted Kouoh and Kunstmuseum Bern, claiming that a work about Palestine had been censored in her solo show at the Swiss institution, curated by Kouoh. Earlier this year, Kouoh oversaw Zeitz mocaa’s annual gala, the proceeds of which help fund its educational and curatorial programming.

ArtReview

13 Photo: Nan Jiang. © Cao Fei. Courtesy Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers 14 Photo: Gideon Asmah. Courtesy Red Clay, Tamale 15 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy Nicole Eisenman and Hauser & Wirth 16 Courtesy Koyo Kouoh

Artist Chinese Last Year 10

18 HITO STEYERL

17 SAMMY BALOJI 17 Photo: Kevin Faingnaert 18 Photo: Leon Kahane 19 Photo: Sean Shim-Boyle. © Mark Bradford. Courtesy Mark Bradford and Hauser & Wirth 20 Photo: Jana Edisonga / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Artist Congolese Last Year 11

Artist German Last Year 2

Based between his hometown of Lubumbashi and since 2010 his adoptive home of Brussels, Baloji mines the ramifications of Belgian colonisation and extractivism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His research culminated in a survey show this year at Goldsmiths cca in London, which featured, among other things, a new commission that drew connections between extraction and Belgian art nouveau, and a collaborative performance that recounted the story of the first Black bishop appointed by the Catholic Church in the fifteenth century. But Baloji’s actual power lies in his role as a catalyst for his hometown’s art scene: as a cofounder of an independent association that supports local artists, Atelier Picha, he has been instrumental in establishing the Lubumbashi Biennale, which launched its 8th edition in October under the title Towards an Antidote to Toxicity. Focusing on the legacy of Congolese thinker ValentinYves Mudimbe, this year’s iteration seeks to imagine the possibilities of anticolonial engagement with the colonial archive through the works of artists from across the country and beyond.

‘There is no discussion of art anymore,’ concluded Steyerl at the close of 2023 when contemplating the artworld in Germany. ‘It’s Israel– Palestine, and that’s it,’ she told The New York Times. The artist had removed her work from Documenta in 2022 due to what she perceived as inaction by its curators over antisemitism, and was scathing of many of her peers who had publicly criticised Israel, telling The Guardian that many were merely practising ‘art as social media performance’. Furthermore, she bemoaned that it was those who only condemn violence on one side ‘that dominate the debate’. Steyerl’s engagement with the conflict comes as no surprise: questions of power, violence and mediation have been her subject matter for two decades now, parlayed into her video essays and multimedia installations. This year she premiered three new works that take the Nord Stream oil pipeline system as their subject at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, and settled into her new role as professor in Emergent Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

20 19 BONAVENTURE SOH MARK BRADFORD BEJENG NDIKUNG Curator Cameroonian-German Last Year 66

Artist American new “If I have a certain amount of power and I’m able to create a platform for some young creative people who don’t feel that they have as much power or value, that’s a conversation I’m very interested in,” Bradford told ArtReview in October. Parallel to his exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, the artist collaborated with young people involved with Bridge+ Living Art Space, a community centre in the Sham Shui Po neighbourhood, working with them to make a mural. Bradford introduced these students to his distinct brand of political abstraction: vast canvases of collage and paint incorporating aesthetics referencing the posters, products and materials of the Los Angeles neighbourhoods he grew up in. Such is Bradford’s vision of the ‘artist as citizen’: in 2013, he cofounded the nonprofit Art + Practice in South Los Angeles, and for the past eight years (starting in the leadup to representing the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale) the artist has collaborated with Venetian nonprofit Rio Terà dei Pensieri, which provides employment to those currently or recently incarcerated in the Veneto region.

This year was a fraught time to lead a German cultural institution, as Israeli bombing of Palestine converged with the long shadow of German twentieth-century history. During his leadership at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, which commenced in January 2023, Ndikung has had to accommodate the institution’s commitment to artists of the Global South, where support for Palestine is high, while being alert to the pro-Israel stance of much of the local audience and media. In November last year, pro-Palestine protesters hung a banner at the entrance to the institution, and in April they interrupted a conference titled ‘Remembering Colonialism’. In the exhibition halls, the Euro 2024 football tournament provided a structure for the museum to reflect on migration, gender and racism in sport. The announcement then that Ndikung will curate the 2025 Bienal de São Paulo under the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice offered a welcome relief, with a series of precursor research conferences already underway in Morocco and Guadeloupe.

December 2024

21 SHEIKHA AL-MAYASSA BINT HAMAD BIN KHALIFA AL-THANI Artist British Last Year 5

Funder Qatari reentry (87 in 2015)

Julien’s 2022 five-screen film installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) explores the relationship between Albert C. Barnes, an early collector of African art, and Alain Locke, the Harlem Renaissance instigator and proponent of restitution, with all the sensuality that has become characteristic of the British artist’s work. The film was exhibited this year at the Whitney Biennial, New York, and mca Australia, Sydney, where The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘in an age where so-called political and postcolonial art tends toward sermonising’, found the film ‘unexpectedly healing’. Julien’s work meditates on the sins of the past, finding balm in the intersection of race and sexuality, not least in Lessons of the Hour (2019), his cinematic portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, which was shown for eight months in New York, first at Skidmore College’s Tang Museum and then at moma (Julien’s iconic Looking for Langston, 1989, is also currently on show there as part of the permanent collection). Meanwhile, Julien became Fellow of the British Academy this year, and his survey exhibition, What freedom is to me, travelled to Bonnefanten, Maastrich.

23 AMY SHERALD

24 EUGENE TAN Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 29

Artist American new Her donation to an ‘Artists for Kamala’ benefit auction might have been in vain, but the Democratic Party’s favourite artist is quickly being inaugurated as a cultural figurehead of liberal usa – and a leading proponent of Black figurative painting. Sherald found fame with her 2018 official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, and now almost 50 of the painter’s portraits, dating from 2007 to today, of Black figures shown at leisure, in love or modelling bright, exuberant clothes, form American Sublime, a retrospective that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art in November. In 2025 the show travels to the Whitney in New York and finally to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, dc, where Sherald will be the first Black female artist to present a solo exhibition. ‘Figuration is important because it’s a definite mark and a stamp that I was here, in a narrative that was absent of our presence,’ Sherald told Harper’s Bazaar. That presence can be felt in the numerous us and uk group shows she appeared in too, including The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

A promotion for Tan this year: after 11 years as director of the National Gallery Singapore (ngs), while also directing Singapore Art Museum (sam) since 2019, he became ceo of both institutions in April. The advancement added another asset to his portfolio: the stpi Creative Workshop & Gallery. Three months later, a partnership deal was announced between ngs, where 70 percent of the collection is dedicated to Singaporean artists and 30 percent to Southeast Asian artists, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts to encourage loans, research partnerships and residency programmes. The 2024 exhibitions programme at ngs featured a retrospective of Kim Lim and shows for Cheong Soo Pieng, pioneer of the Nanyang art style, and centenarian Lim Tze Peng, Singapore’s oldest living and active artist. Meanwhile, Pratchaya Phinthong and Yee I-Lann received shows at sam, which also supported the organisation of Robert Zhao Renhui’s Singaporean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (ngs also made a substantial loan of eight works to the Biennale’s Central Pavilion, curated by Adriano Pedrosa).

ArtReview

22 Photo: Thierry Bal 23 Photo: Kevin Bulluck. Courtesy Amy Sherald and Hauser & Wirth 24 Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

The sister of Qatar’s ruling emir, Al-Mayassa is chair of Qatar Museums, giving her authority over a string of venues (including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Islamic Art) and public art (such as the recently unveiled monumental sculpture by Rashid Johnson installed outside Doha International Airport) in the Gulf state. Soon to be added to this portfolio are the Lusail Museum, which will house the world’s largest collection of Orientalist paintings, and Doha’s Art Mill Museum (both slated to open in 2030), which will be ‘part global think tank and part art museum’ and feature international modern and contemporary work. The latter is already programming, co-organising Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices during the Venice Biennale with Mathaf and the Doha Film Institute (also under Al-Mayassa’s purview), an exhibition featuring the moving image work of 40 mena-based artists. While in Venice, Qatar Museums signed a ‘protocol of co-operation’ to invest in Venetian heritage projects.

21 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

22 ISAAC JULIEN

26 JULIE MEHRETU

25 Photo: Drew Kelly for Future Observatory 26 Photo: Josefina Santos 27 Photo: LaMont Hamilton 28 Photo: David Needleman / August. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

25 ANNA L. TSING

Artist Ethiopian-American new

Thinker American Last Year 18 This unusually associative anthropologist has remained an indispensable guide to where we, as humans on Earth, find ourselves now. And as she points out in her most recent book, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024), coauthored with her longtime Feral Atlas research group collaborators Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, ‘you cannot consider place in the Anthropocene without attuning to more-than-human histories’. The book, which has evolved from the Feral Atlas online project, considers (as has come to be expected from the uc Santa Cruz professor), the unexpected outcomes and responsibilities of humanity’s methods of populating and extracting from the planet – as told through the nonhuman presence of, for example, beetles, water hyacinths and dry rot fungus. While this year saw publication of a new edition of her 2004 book Friction, using forest fires in Indonesia to reflect on globalisation, her more recent articles and talks have focused on concrete and how its use in the built environment precipitates floods. As climates continue to shift, artists continue to look to Tsing to help map the new terrain.

27 FRED MOTEN

Mehretu’s largescale gestural paintings have made her a major presence both in museums and the saleroom. In March, Venice’s Palazzo Grassi staged Mehretu’s largest exhibition in Europe to date, with more than 50 works on show. Such is the artist’s standing, however, that she invited some of her ‘closest friends’ along for the ride: her practice contextualised with works by Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin. The next generation might also have reason to be thankful: in October she donated $2.1m to the Whitney Museum in New York, where she is a trustee, to ensure free entry to all visitors twenty-five and under for the next three years. She’s breaking free from the canvas too: this year Mehretu designed the bmw Art Car, her work appearing on the bodywork of the racing m Hybrid v8, and Barack Obama commissioned a 25m-tall stained-glass window for his forthcoming presidential museum and library in Chicago. Meanwhile, the artist’s first exhibition in the Asia-Pacific region just opened at mca Australia in Sydney.

28 IWAN WIRTH, MANUELA WIRTH & MARC PAYOT Gallerists Swiss Last Year 14

Thinker American Last Year 30 A signal voice in boosting and articulating Black aesthetics and cultural theory over the last two decades – via much-read books including In the Break (2003), The Undercommons (2013) and Black and Blur (2017) – Moten is also a walking testament to stylistic freedom. This year found the 2020 MacArthur genius-grant awardee taking time out from lecturing on performance studies at nyu (as well as his fellowship at Harvard and other-coast gig at uc Riverside) to lecture on subjects including the poetics of W.E.B. Du Bois and to participate in the Harvard conference ‘Jews and Black Theory: Conceptualizing Otherness’. (In a report on the latter, his performance-inflected keynote was described as a talk that ‘defies summarizing’.) But Moten, who has historically collaborated with artists such as Wu Tsang, is himself as much a creative maker as a parser of ideas. In 2024, in addition to giving onstage poetry readings (he’s now published ten books of verse), he released and gigged the blacksmiths, the flowers, his second album alongside jazz rhythm section Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, with Moten – who else – taking care of the words.

Is 19 the magic megagallery number? With a new Basel address and a second London space opening next year, Hauser & Wirth, run by husband and wife Iwan and Manuela, alongside Payot as president, will shortly equal Gagosian’s real estate. It is ‘a whole world you step into’, consultant Barbara Guggenheim told the Financial Times. She was not just talking about a global reach that spans from Hollywood to Hong Kong to Gstaad to New York, nor the 103 artists and artists’ estates the gallery promotes (veterans William Kentridge, Jeffrey Gibson and Nairy Baghramian joined the roster this year, as well as youngster George Rouy and Michaela Yearwood-Dan). The trio have also established themselves as lifestyle purveyors via their ‘art centres’ in Somerset and Menorca, and, above all, through Iwan and Manuela’s loss-leading Artfarm hospitality company, which owns restaurants, hotels, pubs and, not least, London’s Groucho Club, all adorned with the work of gallery artists. If, as one cynic put it, also to the ft, ‘galleries are event organisers for rich and lonely people’, then Hauser & Wirth definitely fills the void.

December 2024

29 30 MAJA HOFFMANN SUHANYA RAFFEL & DORYUN CHONG Australian / Korean Museum Director / Curator Last Year 17

Funder Swiss Last Year 28

Of the 2.8m visitors who came to m+ in Hong Kong last year, its first full year of operation (it opened in 2021 but was closed for periods during the covid-19 pandemic), Raffel chose to highlight to cnn the older women who use the grounds for group exercise each morning. “The museum is an extension of their lives,” the director said proudly. Those visitors (half of whom are tourists from mainland China; 30 percent are locals) make m+ more popular than Florence’s Uffizi Galleries and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Art Newspaper reported. Those who made it into the galleries would have enjoyed chief curator Chong’s programme, which included the first extensive retrospective of architect I.M. Pei, as well as shows celebrating Lee Mingwei, Zhang Peili, Haegue Yang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose seminal video installation Primitive (2009) was shown in Hong Kong for the first time. Earlier this year it was reported that West Kowloon Cultural District, of which m+ is something of a flagship, faced a funding shortfall; the authority managed to secure government funding, but continues to look for steady private investment.

31 BROOK ANDREW 32 THEASTER GATES Artist American Last Year 7

Artist Wiradjuri / Ngunnawal / Australian reentry (41 in 2022) During this year’s Venice Biennale, the artist, curator and researcher organised the Indigenous Visions conference, which featured contributions from artists and curators including Denilson Baniwa, Kimberley Moulton, Nicholas Galanin and Raphael Fonseca. The programme was organised as a collaboration between the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, where Andrew is adjunct curator, and the University of Melbourne, where he is ‘director of reimagining museums and collections’, and where he founded blak c.o.r.e., a collective driven by First Nations methodologies, research and cultural practice. Andrew continues as artistic associate of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, where he is curating a show on global Indigeneity in 2026. There was also a public lightwork for Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, featuring Andrew’s trademark black-and-white Op-art patterning; and preparations are underway for a second architectural commission, next to Sydney Central station. Now represented by Sydney- and Singaporebased Ames Yavuz, he had a show earlier in the year at Frieze’s No. 9 Cork Street gallery in London, alongside Pinaree Sanpitak.

Gates is an artist who knows as much about the intricacies of planning law as he does about the inside of a studio. His sculpture was the focal point of a survey that opened in May at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, materially derived from dilapidated architecture and the urban realm, and specifically informed by Freedmen’s Town in Houston’s Fourth Ward. With regards to the latter, Gates is advising an initiative that plans to preserve this historic neighbourhood built and shaped by Black people following emancipation: an endeavour that’s in the mould of the socially engaged mini-empire he has been building on the South Side of Chicago since 2006. Over in Tokyo, the artist’s Afro-Mingei exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, which imagined ‘the artistic possibilities of combining Black aesthetics and Japanese craft philosophies to envision hybrid-culture futures’, laid the groundwork for incense and sake collaborations with small family-owned businesses in Japan. This mix of commerce and creativity made him an obvious choice for Prada’s diversity council, where Gates has spearheaded a mentorship programme for designers of colour.

ArtReview

29 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 30 Photo: Winnie Yeung / Visual Voices (Raffel); Photo: Dan Leung (Chong). Courtesy m+ 31 Photo: Trent Walter. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia 32 Photo: Lyndon French. Courtesy Theaster Gates Studio

A decade since its conception and three years after opening, Hoffmann’s 11-hectare, eight-venue art campus luma Arles continues both to wow firsttime visitors and to impress with its restless, conscious exhibition programming and food culture. This year saw solo presentations for William Kentridge and Erika Verzutti, and a postapocalyptic, robot-centric show by Diana Thater. During the annual photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles, luma was also the backdrop for a collaborative exhibition between Lee Friedlander and Joel Cohen, in which the filmmaker cast a subjective glance on the photographer’s work while acknowledging its influence on his own films. Meanwhile, the billionaire philanthropist continued her usual commitments: presiding over the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation in Arles and Swiss Institute in New York, and sitting on the boards of the New Museum, Tate and the Serpentine Galleries. But this year, Hoffmann – who studied film – also became the president of the ailing Locarno Film Festival in order, she told the press, to ‘give something back’ to Switzerland, while admitting she hadn’t attended the festival in the past 27 years.

33 ADRIANO PEDROSA

34 CECILIA VICUÑA Artist Chilean Last Year 55

Museum Director Brazilian Last Year 15 33 Photo: Daniel Cabrel 34 Photo: Bruno Savelli 35 Photo: Nick Harvey / WireImage. Courtesy Gagosian 36 Photo: Tom Jamieson

‘It compels us to see the world through the eyes of the previously marginalised,’ India’s Frontline magazine said of the Venice Biennale, curated by Pedrosa under the title Foreigners Everywhere and predominantly featuring art (namely in the form of painting, collage and drawing) made outside the West by 332 artists. The Financial Times agreed: ‘Pedrosa’s thoughtful, serious approach showcases the joys and opportunities, as well as the trauma, of displacement and marvellously balances aesthetic pleasure and politics.’ Yet opinion was far from unanimous: the works on show, The Art Newspaper thought, ‘measured by technical rather [than] representative properties, are, frankly, ropey’; Folha de S.Paulo complained that Pedrosa ‘reduced the artists to slogans’. Pedrosa’s interest in identity will be familiar to visitors of Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he is director (and which expanded into neighbouring premises in November), where he uses a different theme every year to programme. This year ‘lgbtqia+ diversity stories’ encompassed solo shows of work by Francis Bacon, Catherine Opie and Leonilson.

35 LARRY GAGOSIAN Gallerist American Last Year 12

‘When I was little, I understood that my thoughts were different, and I decided not to live colonized,’ the Chilean artist told Casa Vogue this year. Vicuña suffered as a result, for decades often at the brink of destitution but continuing nonetheless with her knotted textile sculptures, agitprop paintings and poetry. Now the world is eager to listen, what with the ecofeminist and Indigenous turn in artmaking that Vicuña’s work has always embodied. Dreaming Water, one of several recent retrospectives, which opened in Santiago and Buenos Aires last year, arrived at the Pinacoteca of São Paulo in May, while Pérez Art Museum Miami installed a nine-metre quipus, one of the artist’s cascading sculptures of unspun wool. Her work was present in 15 group shows this year, including Pacific Standard Time, California, and two biennials (Malta and Toronto). In addition, the artist presented spoken word performances at venues including Triple Canopy, New York; Harvard University, Cambridge, ma; and Tate Britain, London. In November, Vicuña was awarded $100,000 as a recipient of the inaugural moca Los Angeles Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize.

36 YINKA SHONIBARE Artist British-Nigerian Last Year 70

For the past few years the press has been speculating on seventy-nineyear-old Larry Gagosian’s succession plans for what is regularly estimated as a business with a $1 billion annual turnover (accumulated through the sale of works by the likes of Nan Goldin, Carol Bove and Richard Prince, who each had a show this year in at least one of Gagosian’s 19 galleries around the world). There was talk of Gagosian implementing a corporate structure, but that narrative was thrown into disarray this summer with the ousting of Andrew Fabricant, chief operating officer for the past five years and a rumoured successor. For some, the gallery is already far too financially oriented. Thomas Houseago, upon leaving Gagosian this year, remarked, ‘Is that a warm environment? See the people at the desks? You see the terror in their eyes.’ But Gagosian is also keen to remind people of his own legacy within the industry. Earlier this year he returned to the shop floor to curate Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street, an exhibition focused on the work Basquiat created in la after taking up Gagosian’s invitation to come and stay awhile during the early 1980s.

It feels like the artworld is only now catching up to Shonibare’s art, a longstanding prism for what have become our era’s central concerns. In his Serpentine solo this year, the British-Nigerian artist’s signature figures wrapped in colourful faux-African Dutch batik took the form of imperial statues, radiating colonial pasts and asking to be toppled. Simultaneously in London he appeared in museum group exhibitions related to textiles and British colonial history. In the Venice Biennale’s international show his hunched, possessions-carrying refugee astronaut embodied incoming climate displacement, while in the Nigerian Pavilion he addressed restitution via clay statues harkening back to objects looted from Benin by British colonists. In Nigeria Shonibare also inaugurated his first public sculpture in Lagos, where the artist spent a part of his childhood. Meanwhile, he continued to pay it forward via his five-year-old nonprofit gas residency programme in Lagos and Ijebu (which welcomed over 20 new residents this year), facilitating exchange between diverse practitioners in order, it appears, to alter the fabric of culture itself.

December 2024

37 DARREN WALKER

38 DAVID ZWIRNER Gallerist German Last Year 19

Funder American Last Year 27

Zwirner’s eponymous gallery celebrated its 30th anniversary this year by doing the thing megagalleries like to do best: adding more artists to its roster. Painter Emma McIntyre was the gallery’s youngest artist when she joined back in February, until Sasha Gordon was signed up at the age of twenty-six in September. Both have retained the representation of their original galleries, as have Walter Prize and Raymond Saunders (who also joined the gallery earlier this year): it’s a move that is indicative of Zwirner’s long-held belief that the gallery ecosystem should be more collegiate. Balancing out the age average, seventy-eight-year-old Scott Kahn came onboard too. In May the gallery opened a new three-storey flagship in Los Angeles, its third in the city, highlighting a commitment to bricks and mortar (there are eight further addresses across New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong) over digital sales: in August Zwirner made ten e-commerce employees redundant, and Platform, a Zwirner-financed digital marketplace selling work and merch by emerging artists, launched a new micro art fair in Chelsea.

40 WU TSANG 39 BYUNG-CHUL HAN Artist

Thinker German Last Year 24 As our premier philosopher of burnout, boredom, tiredness and tools-downing – and, some would say, apolitical quietism – Han continues to be especially beloved by the artworld precariat. He’s also a stylist whose steady stream of digestibly short, aphorism-filled books pair well with social media-tinged attention spans. Titling his 2023 book Via Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity might seem a little at odds, coming from such a prolific writer, though it’s a paean to the unhurried contemplation of reality, rather than commendation for doing nothing at all. And if said reality gives you the shivers, this year the KoreanGerman thinker published the Anselm Kiefer-illustrated The Spirit of Hope – ‘a plea against the crisis of fear’ by the same writer who also in 2024 put out The Crisis of Narration, which lamented the loss of richly complex storytelling and the social media-fuelled shift towards ‘storyselling’. Problems everywhere, then, but it’s all grist to Han’s fast-moving diagnostic mill.

American Last Year 48

Upending the classics seems to be the theme this year for the multidisciplinary artist, who embraces a state of in-betweenness both in terms of personal identity and in the mediums of her projects, which variously include filmmaking, performance and installation. Over the past five years she has been scandalising conservative critics and audiences at the stately Swiss theatre Schauspielhaus Zürich in her role as a guest director by staging avant-garde updates to canonical works including Orpheus (2021), Pinocchio (2022) and The Tempest (2024), while increasing gender and racial diversity in the productions. (The magnificent Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 2022, a silent film retelling Herman Melville’s novel, premiered there, and has since travelled the world to acclaim.) Together with her longtime collaborators, the open collective Moved by the Motion, Wu closed her stint at the Schauspielhaus with a hybrid operatictheatrical take on Georges Bizet’s 1875 Carmen. The show received mixed reviews – but judging by the upcoming touring schedule of Wu’s projects, she’ll be keeping busy.

ArtReview

37 Courtesy Ford Foundation 38 Photo: Jason Schmidt 39 Courtesy Byung-Chul Han 40 Photo: Gina Folly / Schauspielhaus Zürich

Seven billion dollars. That’s how much Walker has given out as president of the Ford Foundation during the past 11 years. More important, though, is who he has given that money to. Walker has spent much of his time at the foundation reorienting the philanthropic trust, from which, it was announced in July, he steps down next year, to address inequality and social justice.Funding arts programmes has long been a focus within that framework: in 2024 alone this has ranged from the $1.1m the foundation gave to bankroll Jeffrey Gibson’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the us at the event), to the $500k each given to the Los Angeles Museum of Art, New York’s The Kitchen and the Whitney (specifically for the exhibition of choreographer and Civil Rights activist Alvin Ailey), and the $2k given to National Portrait Gallery staffers to attend a migrant justice conference. Eyeing up his future spare time, in October Walker, already a trustee to the Smithsonian, became president of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc.

41 Courtesy Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia / cc by-sa 4.0 42 Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy Perrotin 43 Photo: Clara Deshayes 44 Photo: Riccardo Ghilardi

41 BADR BIN ABDULLAH AL SAUD

42 EMMANUEL PERROTIN

Funder Saudi Arabian new

Gallerist French Last Year 23

Ministers of culture don’t normally find a place on this list, their position transient, their power too remote. In Saudi Arabia, however, Prince Badr has no fear of being voted out and enjoys drilling down to the nuts and bolts of the Kingdom’s focus on culture (part of its wider Saudi Vision 2030 economic diversification programme). His portfolio includes the General Culture Authority, which oversees all the Kingdom’s arts centres; the Misk Art Institute, which gives grants, residencies and career support to local artists, hosting the annual Misk Art Week in December; the Royal Commission for AlUla, greenlighting the third Desert X AlUla in February (despite ceo Amr AlMadani’s arrest on corruption charges in January). As chair of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, he is responsible for both the eponymous event and Jeddah’s Islamic Arts Biennale. The third edition of the former took place in February, with Ute Meta Bauer as curator, while the latter opens January 2025, Badr using diplomatic influence to secure loans from over 30 international institutions.

43 PAUL B. PRECIADO

Perrotin, who disclosed last year that he would be selling a 60 percent stake in his gallery business to a French investment company, has announced this year that he will open a new London space inside Claridge’s hotel. This will add to the multiple addresses he’s opened since founding the gallery in Paris in 1990, currently including Hong Kong (opened in 2012), New York (2013), Seoul (2016), Tokyo (2017), Shanghai (2019) and Los Angeles (2023). Where Perrotin won’t be having future shows however is Dubai: the secondary market space the gallerist opened in 2022 with dealers Tom-David Bastok and Dylan Lessel closed after their collaboration was dissolved in February (Bastok and Lessel will continue alone in the uae and with the five-storey space they and Perrotin ran in Paris). In keeping with Perrotin’s populist bent, however, the gallery collaborated with eBay to sell limited-edition objects and prints with the aim of making ‘art and fine objects accessible to everyone, regardless of their budget’, by the likes of gallery artists including Takashi Murakami, Daniel Arsham and jr.

44 PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO Funder Italian Last Year 58

Thinker Spanish Last Year 22 The philosopher and curator made his first foray into film with his experimental production Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), which gained wider theatrical releases throughout 2024. ‘A political work that wears its seriousness very lightly,’ wrote Sight and Sound, ‘and its lightness very seriously indeed.’ Preciado’s book Dysphoria Mundi, published in Spanish in 2023, will come out in an English translation in early 2025 (the hybrid essayistic outing was written during the covid-19 lockdown and considers dysphoria as a defining aspect of current life). But Preciado remains, as ever, the intellectual face for the instabilities of gender and biopolitics, and a world that’s in transition. Often cited by artists, Preciado’s work made its way into the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, where Sandra Gamarra took a sentence from a lecture by the thinker to accompany a work she had made: ‘trans body is to normative heterosexuality what Palestine is to the West: a colony whose extension and form is perpetuated only through violence’.

How do you extend your influence beyond one private foundation? Take charge of two. Last year Sandretto Re Rebaudengo was named president of Fondazione Arte crt, which supplies loans and new work to the Turin Civic Gallery (gam) and Castello di Rivoli, as well as site-specific commissions for ogr Torino, and has since doubled the foundation’s annual acquisitions budget to €1m. The patron, whose Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has amassed a collection of more than 1,500 artworks, has long had exhibition spaces in Turin and neighbouring Guarene, but in recent years she’s been expanding her reach: she’s turning a Venetian island into an art centre (set to open next year), and the Madrid wing of the Fondazione is now homing in on a permanent hq. Sandretto also sits on committees at New York’s moma, New Museum and ccs Bard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, London’s Tate Modern, Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum and Barcelona’s Fundación macba, among others. At her eponymous Turin foundation meanwhile, she gave solo shows to The Otolith Group, Stefanie Heinze and Bekhbaatar Enkhtur.

December 2024

46 MANTHIA DIAWARA

45 VINCENT WORMS Funder French Last Year 67

Thinker Malian-American Last Year 68 A key voice in Black cultural studies, Diawara has advanced his ideas through several arenas: memoir, magazine publishing, books on Black filmmaking, academia – he is professor of cinema studies at nyu, as well as director emeritus of its Institute of African Affairs – and his own films, which often consider how African traditions are pressured by global modernity. Screenings continued this year for ai: African Intelligence (2022), which hitches life and ritual in African fishing villages to the emergence of artificial intelligence, and ponders an Africanised relationship to algorithms; as well as Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023), which articulates the activist’s ideas on freedom, resistance, prison abolition and more. The Malian polymath put on another hat this year as a cocurator of Bamako Encounters, Africa’s most prominent biennial dedicated to photography. The 14th edition opened in November under the title Kuma (Bambara for ‘the word’), and features artists from across the continent whose work explores the interplay of image and language – a relation that Diawara has been mining for over three decades.

48 HAEGUE YANG

47 CANDICE HOPKINS

Artist Korean Last Year 71

Curator Carcross / Tagish First Nation / Canadian Last Year 46 ‘The reason that we can do the things we do and work across practices like food justice, land remediation, Indigenous language revitalization, critical writing, and contemporary art – all from Indigenous perspectives – is because we are not a museum. We chose not to inherit this model,’ stated the curator and educator upon accepting the Skowhegan Vanguard Award this October. Hopkins was speaking as executive director and chief curator at Forge Project, New York, which this year transitioned from a private foundation to a nonprofit, with an Indigenous steering council including artists Sky Hopinka and Jeffrey Gibson. While Forge holds its own collection, its programme is one led not by exhibitions but residencies, community days, discussion events and collaborative meals, shaping what an art institution can become from an Indigenous perspective. Meanwhile, Hopkins also secured a $175,000 grant for climate action from the Teiger Foundation, curated a show at the Nanaimo Art Gallery in her home territory of British Columbia and continued as Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at ccs Bard.

A collection of venetian blinds were at the centre of Yang’s recent solo exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. This staple object, used by the artist for nearly 20 years, framed a videowork in which she revisits the abandoned house that served as the venue for her first solo exhibition in South Korea in 2006. Featuring an installation formed from drying racks, origami pieces and light fixtures, that historic – and self-initiated – show set the tone for a career in which the architectural detritus of the everyday has been used to poetically reference art historical moments, political events or folk rituals. The Hayward exhibition garnered a one-star review in The Guardian but plenty of praise elsewhere: Yang’s fans are legion, demonstrated by the fact that the London exhibition wasn’t her only museum outing this year. She received a survey show, titled Flat Works, of collages, prints and paintings spanning two decades at the Arts Club of Chicago, and was included in the Lahore Biennale as well as group exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, and moma, New York, among others.

ArtReview

45 Photo: Chase Hall 46 Photo: Mohamed Almubarak 47 Photo: Thatcher Keats 48 Photo: Cheongjin Keem

What links a feminist group show in San Francisco and a patient management system for German dentists? That would be Worms, who funded both initiatives. The latter is one of many international startups backed by Worms via his Silicon Valley investment platform, Partech; his contemporary art foundation, Kadist, is just as globally focused. A Woman You Thought You Knew, which brought together works from the Kadist collection, was staged at the nonprofit’s gallery in San Francisco, while its Paris gallery boasted a programme that featured an evening of performances inspired by medieval French poetry, Manthia Diawara and Hoor Al Qasimi in conversation, and a group show of Ukrainian artists in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo. Partech Africa is the largest fund dedicated to African startups, and Kadist has been increasingly present on the continent. It supported the annual exhibition Dig Where You Stand, which this year took place in two cities in Benin (Cotonou and Ouidah), and in November staged a festival at Fondation H in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar.

49 MONIKA SPRÜTH & PHILOMENE MAGERS

50 ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY

Gallerists German Last Year 25

Thinker French-American new

49 Photo: Florian Thoss 50 Photo: Yonatan Vinitsky 51 Photo: Suzie Howell 52 Photo: Kevin Joseph / Gallery Dtale Archist

‘We want to be as precise as possible,’ Sprüth told The New York Times Style Magazine last December. ‘We don’t want to be the biggest supermarket of art.’ It is the consistency of the duo’s artistic vision that has made their gallery – with spaces in Berlin, London, New York and Los Angeles – so economically resilient and culturally iconic. Programming this past year was reflective of their commitment to conceptual work by women and tracing artistic lineages across generations: the legacy of cult artists from the Pictures Generation, which the gallery started representing in the 1980s, including Barbara Kruger (whose showing at the London space coincided with the Serpentine stop of a major touring retrospective) and new-media pioneer Gretchen Bender (presented in la), was echoed in the work of millennial artist Nora Turato (shown in la) and Cao Fei (who had major institutional shows in Munich, Savannah and Shanghai). In May the gallery snapped up Mire Lee ahead of the opening of her haunting Tate Turbine Hall commission.

51 MARC GLIMCHER

‘It’s not possible to decolonise the museum without decolonising the world,’ Azoulay has stated. The work of this writer, filmmaker and photography theorist has been broadly influential for 20 years, and her audience is spreading well beyond academia – unsurprising, given Azoulay’s focus on the imagery, archives and legacies of imperial thinking. The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), written in response to the circulation of images resulting from the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, called for viewership accountability amid ever-increasing circulation, and it has only become more relevant. Such a dynamic approach has more recently been applied to museum holdings in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) and films including Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), as well as in an exhibition of drawings (made from archival photos she wasn’t permitted to reproduce) this year in Bristol. Describing herself as ‘an Arab Jew and a Palestinian Jew of African origins’, the Brown University professor tackled her own family history this year in her book The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (2024).

52 BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI

Gallerist American Last Year 20

Curator Indian Last Year 38

Speaking to The Korea Times during the opening of Correspondence: Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko at Pace’s Seoul branch, ceo Glimcher was in a philosophical mood. ‘Artists are creating something that’s purely of the spirit, but we’re hoping someone will actually spend money on it. And that’s because money is a symbol of reality, while art represents something beyond it. We’re essentially trying to exchange one for the other.’ To sell the spirit of 132 artists, collectives and artist estates, you need a lot of real estate. Following the establishment of its us home (two addresses in New York, where it is headquartered, and one in la), Pace expanded into Asia 16 years ago, first to Beijing (since closed) and then to Seoul and Hong Kong (it also has galleries in London and Geneva). This year it opened a Sou Fujimoto-designed space in Tokyo, giving a local home to Japan-based gallery artists Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Ufan and TeamLab. Pace Tokyo, however, used its new three-storey gallery to first show the paintings of Maysha Mohamedi, followed by those of Arlene Shechet.

Cofounder and president of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Krishnamachari had a lot of wrangling to do this year before he could announce artist Nikhil Chopra and Goa-based collective hh Art Spaces as the curatorial team for the next edition. The biennale, originally set to open in December 2024, was postponed by a year following a period of concern that it might be cancelled completely. This was due to a debt owed to the event’s waterfront venue since its first edition in 2012. These issues have now been resolved, with new private patrons coming to the rescue and a new chair (former director general of the National Museum in Delhi, Venu Vasudevan). This year the biennial, in partnership with Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, presented the inaugural New Dialogues: Contemporary Art From South Asia conference at London’s Southbank Centre. Meanwhile, Krishnamachari, who also makes art, can now put ‘gallerist’ on his cv: in October he opened a contemporary space inside the new Bangalore store of interior design studio Dtale, showing works by Astha Butail, Harisha Chennangod, Pooja Iranna and Prajakta Potnis.

December 2024

53 STEFANIE HESSLER

Curator Indian-Sri Lankan Last Year 94

Curator German Last Year 100 Two years into her tenure at the helm of New York’s Swiss Institute, Hessler continues to question and reinvent its role. Spora, her ongoing ‘environmental institutional critique’ programming, was augmented with an intervention by Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Raven Chacon, while the ambitious group show Energies, staged across the Swiss Institute’s three storeys as well as in other community locations throughout the East Village, garnered critical acclaim – a reviewer calling it ‘one of the boldest curatorial feats… in recent memory’. Tapping into the local history of a sweat-equity co-op (which powered through the 1973 oil crisis with its own wind turbine and went on to win a legal battle against energy giant Con Edison), the show mixed archival material with intergenerational artistic perspectives on the universal and urgent topic of energy to demonstrate the power of cooperation and community organisation in the face of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, across the pond, Hessler curated Art Basel’s outdoor Parcours section this past sumer, including work by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Joanna Piotrowska.

55 JOSH KLINE

Can an art exhibition take in a wetland walk? Or a conversation with a forest god? That’s the kind of expansionist vision Ginwala brings to curating. ‘Dense, multi-sensory, and rhizomatic, it speaks through entanglements and intersections’ – this was e-flux Criticism’s assessment of Colomboscope, the festival Ginwala has directed in Sri Lanka since 2019. With curators Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Hit Man Gurung and Sarker Protick, this year’s iteration took nature, ecofeminism and Indigeneity as its themes and soon spread beyond the gallery. It is, Ginwala said, a ‘perspective that rises beyond the geopolitical fragmentations that our part of the world faces’. Such an approach will likely be detected in the section she is curating at the Sharjah Biennial in February (she is one of a five-strong team of curators). Ginwala has said ‘the ancient stepwells in Indian Ocean littoral sites and water wells found in Sharjah’s historic households and courtyards’ will serve as her personal leitmotifs, ones ‘that avow ancestral memory, place-making, sonic remembrance and cross-generational convening amidst tides of annihilation’.

56 REEM FADDA Curator Palestinian

Artist American new After last year’s retrospective at the Whitney, New York, put Kline’s zeitgeist-tracking art firmly in the spotlight, it’s unsurprising that he’s been thinking about himself. Mid-Career Artist (2024) – the most Instagrammed element of his selfie-culture-critiquing New York show Social Media at Lisson, which he recently joined – expands the American artist’s roster of precarity-inhabiting human subjects rendered as hyperrealist sculptures and tucked, like trash, into clear plastic bags. In his current show at moca la, Kline laid out what we’re ignoring while staring at our phones: Climate Change (2018–) is a sculptural installation imagining a near-future dystopia following catastrophic sea-level rises. On-the-nose and technically neophiliac – from deepfakes to state-of-theart 3d-printing – Kline’s art is arguably the clearest and most unnerving artistic articulation of where we’re going as a species, and how human dignity is steadily lost in the process. An influence that is felt across the globe, too, with showings at the 8th Yokohama Triennale, the 24th Biennale of Sydney and Rome’s Aïshti Foundation.

Last Year 57

Fadda established her name through a series of nuanced biennials, including the 2009 Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah (curated with Charles Esche), and the Marrakech Biennale in 2016 (which brought the Moroccan modernists to an international audience). Of late she has carved out a niche shepherding the installation of largescale public works across the Gulf. In January, in her role as director of the Abu Dhabi Culture Programming and Cultural Foundation, she cocurated the inaugural Manar Abu Dhabi, 35 site-specific works spread along a 2.3km route, including light projections, sculptures, installations and performances by the likes of Carsten Höller, Mohammed Kazem, Shilpa Gupta and Team Lab. November, meanwhile, marked the opening of the first edition of the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, which Fadda also directs: the curator invited some 70 artists from the region and abroad – Farah Al Qasimi, Radhika Khimji and Sammy Baloji among them – to create site-specific installations and performances, bringing contemporary art to the streets of Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

ArtReview

53 Photo: Lila Barth 54 Photo: Victoria Tomaschko 55 Photo: Isabel Asha Penzlien. © Josh Kline. Courtesy Lisson Gallery 56 Courtesy Reem Fadda

54 NATASHA GINWALA

57 REFIK ANADOL

58 PRATEEK RAJA & PRIYANKA RAJA Gallerists Indian Last Year 62

Artist Turkish-American Last Year 60

57 Photo: Efsun Erkılıç 58 Photo: Upahar Biswas 59 Photo: Elias Hassos 60 Photo: Jai Monaghan. © Tate

As digital-art talking points have shifted from the nft boom and bust to more enduring questions around machine intelligence and big data, la-based Anadol’s fusion of ai-visualisation and architecture-scale immersion has circled the globe. From the 2022 installation Unsupervised at New York’s moma and his takeover of the digital skin of Las Vegas’s Sphere in 2023, Anadol’s studio has powered through 2024 with projects emphasising the artist’s interest in organic networks: solo shows at Kunsthal Rotterdam and London’s Serpentine Galleries offered visualisations generated from data on coral reef and rainforest flora and fauna, part of Anadol’s bigger ‘Large Nature Model’ initiative. Bringing together multiple environmental datasets, the model experiments with the possibility that ai might be trained to find insights in ecological rather than human-produced information, with iterations appearing at Google’s annual conference and the United Nations. And with artist and studio cofounder Efsun Erkılıç, Anadol has recently announced Dataland, a permanent museum and centre for ai arts, set to open in la next year.

When sibling collectors Varun and Nitasha Thapar were casting around for help inaugurating tri, their new private art foundation in Kolkata, husband and wife Prateek and Priyanka, founders of Experimenter gallery, were the obvious people to turn to. In 15 years the Rajas have not only built and established two galleries in the city and a third in Mumbai, but also an entire ecosystem, created through the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, which held its 14th edition this year; their online learning-orientated Experimenter Labs; Experimenter Books; an outpost exhibition programme that ‘inhabits disused, characterful spaces’; and the Generator Co-operative Art Production Fund, which offers small bursaries for art production. tri opened with solo shows by Experimenter artists Prabhakar Pachpute and Kallol Datta, while at the same time during Mumbai Gallery Weekend the Rajas staged exhibitions by Afrah Shafiq and Alexandra Bachzetsis, and camp’s monumental 2022 seven-channel installation Bombay Tilts Down could be seen in the open air down at the city’s docks. This autumn, Sohrab Hura opened his first us survey show at New York’s moma ps1.

59 HANS ULRICH OBRIST

60 MARIA BALSHAW

Curator Swiss Last Year 49

Museum Director British Last Year 45

‘An institution is a learning system’, Obrist told Forbes this year while discussing the ‘Year of ai’ at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Each commission or exhibition that had been programmed, the curator claimed, would feed into the institution’s long-term curatorial strategy. Among those artists whose work ‘Superbrain’ Obrist had harvested was Refik Anadol (with an exhibition that incorporated visual data of coral reefs and rainforests) and Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (who presented an ai-abetted choral installation). This wasn’t just about programming, though, Obrist later insisted to Art News: it was about working out a blueprint for survival. ‘Now ai is raising huge challenges for the economy of artists’, he stated, adding that the Serpentine shows were ‘focused on strategies for artists to assert their agency in a creative economy’. Meanwhile, the curator’s calendar of talks, panel appearances and book releases continued at the usual frenetic pace. Of the latter, new volumes of his conversations with Christo, Gustav Metzger and Norman Foster were published.

Tate, where Balshaw is director, feels, like museums globally, an increasingly fragile institution, its monolithic authority battered by culture wars and funding constraints (though Balshaw told The Guardian this year, ‘That’s a normal part of life as a museum director’). Where the former used to be the purview of rightwing commentators (The Telegraph’s recent frothing at the museum spending £21,000 ‘on discarded avocado trays’, namely Veronica Ryan’s Arrangement In Layers, Stacking Up Moments i–x, 2016–19, felt like a throwback), Balshaw now must keep an eye out for any controversy that might blow up around the perceived ethics of private funders and sponsors (she’s not averse to making the point herself, using her new book, Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, to criticise the British Museum for taking money from bp). Tate Modern had shows of work by Mike Kelley and Yoko Ono, while Zanele Muholi returned just three years after their major survey to show new works; Alvaro Barrington received the Tate Britain commission; and Sámi artist Outi Pieski showed at Tate St Ives. Tate Liverpool remained closed for a refurbishment.

December 2024

62 MAMI KATAOKA

61 LIZA ESSERS

Museum Director Japanese Last Year 64

Founded in Johannesburg in 1966, and purchased by Essers in 2008, Goodman Gallery is a powerhouse of Africa’s art scene. Now with additional sites in Cape Town, London and, since last year, New York, it represents some of the continent’s biggest names, El Anatsui, Nicholas Hlobo and William Kentridge included. In March Essers supported a show of Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s photographs at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; while the Cape Town space held exhibitions for multimedia artists Mikhael Subotzky and Alfredo Jaar. The London gallery opened a survey of the late painter Atta Kwami, which moved to the New York space, complementing its inaugural full year of programming, featuring Misheck Masamvu, Zineb Sedira and Kapwani Kiwanga, among others. Meanwhile, visitors to the Cheetah Plains luxury safari lodge on the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve may have gone for the lions and leopards, but could stay for the art: in January it opened a private art gallery in partnership with Goodman Gallery, to the delight of its the wildlife-hungry holidaymakers.

When Documenta was looking to assemble a new finding committee for the artistic director of its 2027 edition – following the mass resignation of the previous panel in the continuing fallout over antisemitism allegations faced by the organisers of the 2022 exhibition – Kataoka will have been regarded as a safe pair of hands to approach. The director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, which this year finished celebrating its 20th anniversary with the group show Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living (with 34 artists including Tetsumi Kudo, Cecilia Vicuña and Ali Cherri) and exhibited a survey of the late Louise Bourgeois and Theaster Gates’s show Afro-Mingei (one installation imagined a hybrid of Black and Japanese cultures), has become the go-to for prize juries and committees internationally. This year she advised the curators of the Bangkok Art Biennale, which opened in October, and will soon select the winner of the Ars Fennica, Finland’s biggest art prize. Back in Japan, she stewards the National Center for Art Research and recently found the time to curate a commercial show at Okura Museum of Art as part of Art Week Tokyo.

63 LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON

64 GLENN D. LOWRY

Artist American new

Museum Director American Last Year 42

It has been 40 years since the multimedia artist started her magnum opus, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019, a work that foreshadowed much of art’s interest in the technological mediation of identity and in the hybridisation of personal and political trauma. The Electronic Diaries was the centrepiece of her exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf – which surveyed five decades of performance, photography, video, interactive net-based media and robotic art – and it featured in her moma, New York, film retrospective in June. At eightythree, Hershman Leeson is still innovating (bampfa paid tribute to her achievements as a ‘creative visionary’ exploring feminism and technology); the us exhibition also included her four-part ‘Cyborg Series’, including Cyborgian Rhapsody – Immortality (2023), written, performed and designed by an artificial intelligence chatbot, while the artist’s earlier New York show at Bridget Donahue featured Eternally Yours (2023), a sculpture that housed a refrigerated antiaging vaccine. ‘There’s no need to be afraid of these new tools,’ the techno-optimist artist assured Artnet.

Lowry became moma director in 1995, then a forty-year-old Islamic art scholar, and he will leave next year as someone who turned the role into something closer to that of a ceo. His tenure has seen the museum’s endowment increase to $1.7b, he has embarked on extensions that have doubled the exhibition spaces (the final stages of its $400m expansion and renovation led to a four-month closure of the institution this summer) and, in 2000, he brought ps1 into the moma stable. ‘I have not had a good night’s sleep in pretty close to 25 years,’ he joked. There remains an operation budget shortfall of $110m a year, and commercial revenues from retail and restaurants are stagnant. Lowry has also had to weather protests this year on the board’s connections to the fossil fuel industry and staff unrest over its silence on the Israel-Hamas war. Kicking off retirement, Lowry will embark on a lecture series at the Louvre in Paris, with an eye to publishing a book. “It’s the right moment to think about the future of the museum and I just thought, carpe diem,” Lowry told cnn. “I didn’t want to be the person who stayed too long.”

ArtReview

61 Courtesy Goodman Gallery 62 Photo: Ito Akinori 63 Photo: Henny Garfunkel. Courtesy Lynn Hershman Leeson, Altman Siegel and Bridget Donahue 64 Photo: Peter Ross. © Museum of Modern Art

Gallerist South African Last Year 39

66 CHRISTINE TOHMÉ

65 Photo: Julian Abraham “Togar” 66 Photo: Tanya Traboulsi 67 Photo: Julian Salinas Hugo Rittson-Thomas 68 Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

65 SOHRAB MOHEBBI Curator Iranian-American Last Year 83

Curator Lebanese reentry (68 in 2019)

The globalist outlook that has marked Mohebbi’s stewardship of New York’s Sculpture Center showed no sign of abating this year; nor did the Iranian-born curator appear obliged only to showcase ‘sculpture’. Early in the year, Mohebbi brought the moving-image strand of 2023’s Taipei Biennial to the us, featuring works by Li Yi-Fan, Jen Liu and Jumana Manna, among others (and in a neat extramural East–West flip, he curated the film programme of Art Week Tokyo in November). Meanwhile, the institution spotlighted all kinds of simultaneously forward-thinking and slantwise practice: from Bastien Gachet’s complex self-described ‘dramaturgy’ of faked and fabricated objects to Phoebe Collings-James’s abject ceramics. This summer saw artist and choreographer Alexa West use the art centre as a stage for constantly unfolding rehearsals, exploring the intersection of dance and sculpture. In a recent piece collecting ‘notes to self’ for Mousse, Mohebbi invoked the Caribbean notion of ‘mawonaj’, meaning to be pointedly difficult to pin down. At Sculpture Center, he’s walking the talk.

Ashkal Alwan, the Beirut-based cultural association founded by Tohmé in 1994, continues to be a driving force in advocating for artists in the region. Aside from generating a thriving local arts scene, Tohmé has become an expert at building networks across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond – an invaluable mission in a country struck by ongoing conflict. In addition to its exhibition programme (including a major show of Simone Fattal’s drawings in 2024) and free educational programmes for artists (workshops this year were led by the likes of Haig Aivazian, Marwa Arsanios and Joe Namy), the organisation ran a series of artist-film screenings at Beirut’s Sursock Museum. It was also one of the venues for ‘Why Germany’, an international lecture series reflecting on the recent crackdown on free speech in that country, for which it invited writer and academic Yasmeen Daher to consider the evolution of the Palestine solidarity movement. Tohmé’s skills as a cultural organiser are likely to have played a part in her recent appointment as director of the next Istanbul Biennial.

67 JAY JOPLING 68 AGNES DENES Gallerist British Last Year 56

Artist Hungarian-American Last Year 50

This year has been business as usual for the founder of White Cube, who focused on consolidating a growing empire following the opening of two new spaces, in Seoul and New York, last year (joining ones in London, Hong Kong and Paris). Aside from continued support for yba veterans (with whom Jopling made his name during the 1990s), including a muchlauded solo by Tracey Emin in London, the dealer represents some of the most sought-after artists working in the us, including Julie Mehretu and Theaster Gates (who presented in New York at the beginning of the year). The roster expanded on both ends to welcome twenty-eight-year-old painter Alia Ahmad and artist, curator and activist Howardena Pindell, now in her eighties. On the less shiny side of things, the gallery has faced criticism for sacking its team of invigilators (mostly artists and students) and replacing them with security guards – citing ‘a general trend across similar galleries that are moving away from visitor engagement to visitor management’. The London gallery closes out this year with a muchanticipated exhibition of over 30 key works by Jeff Wall.

‘Alone.’ This is how Denes says she felt as a pioneer of ecological art. In 1982 she created Wheatfield – A Confrontation, nearly an entire hectare of wheat planted and harvested on a plot of land in the shadow of New York’s Twin Towers: a work of Land art protesting capitalist greed and the degradation of the planet. The gesture was repeated this year both in a plot of land neighbouring Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, and on moveable pallets outside Art Basel, the confrontation of the art market and Denes’s protest deliciously uncomfortable. What the interest in these new iterations did demonstrate was how much, amid a worsening climate emergency, the artworld and its own increasing attention to the study of land, ecofeminism and the relationship between humanity and the environment, has caught up with Denes’s way of thinking. This year she had institutional shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (the city in which she was born), and Lunds Konsthall, in Sweden (where she grew up), and participated in nine major group shows. Denes, at ninety-three, refuses to slow down – her next project: how to create ‘vertical fields’.

December 2024

70 KIRAN NADAR Funder Indian reentry (99 in 2017)

Gallerists Mexican Last Year 80 During cdmx art week this February, the couple behind Kurimanzutto gallery saw their artists exhibiting or performing at five renowned institutions in Mexico City, including Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo, while Gabriel Orozco, whom Kuri first met when the gallerist was aged eleven, staged an exhibition at Kurimanzutto’s cavernous San Miguel Chapultepec address. It is not just the high profile at home that marks out the gallery, but the global network that its geographically-diverse artist roster has firmly infiltrated. Wilfredo Prieto represented Cuba at the Venice Biennale, while WangShui, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane and Ana Segovia were in the main show; Haegue Yang showed in London and Chicago; Minerva Cuevas exhibited at cc Foundation, Shanghai; and the gallery worked with peers Shibunkaku for a presentation at Art Collaborations Kyoto. Kurimanzutto’s satellite space in New York gives them clout there, too: this year, the Met installed specially commissioned architectural interventions by Nairy Baghramian and Petrit Halilaj, and in February the gallery announced the representation of the estate of the late New York icon John Giorno.

Among the first major purchases in the collector and patron’s now 15,000-strong art collection were two works by M.F. Husain, bought together with her husband, Shiv Nadar, the billionaire founder of India’s hcl Technologies. The modernist painter became the subject of The Rooted Nomad, a retrospective and immersive experience combined, presented during this year’s Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, the Barbican in London was showing a wide range of her collection in The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, a survey of over 30 Indian artists making work during one of the country’s most turbulent periods. Back home in Delhi, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (which opened an outpost in Noida, southeast of the city) featured, inter alia, a critical dialogue between the work of Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed, a survey of photographer Raghu Rai and a centennial exhibition of modernist painter Mohan Samant. The institution is also gearing up to move to new David Adjaye-designed 100,000sqm premises in 2026 or 2027.

71 BASEL ABBAS & RUANNE ABOU-RAHME 72 HO TZU NYEN Artists Cypriot/American new

Artist Singaporean reentry (95 in 2019)

How to make art about Palestine that cuts through the noise and grief? The Ramallah-based pair have taken both Palestine and the wider turbulence of the Arab world as their subject matter for over a decade, establishing a practice that mixes politics with astute technical filmmaking, lyrical poetry and discombobulating soundtracks. Much-praised participation in last year’s Sharjah Biennial 15 (‘a striking installation’, thought Art in America, one that ‘transmitted memory of the dispossession of the Palestinian people in all its bitterness and melancholy’, said Artforum) has been followed in 2024 by solo exhibitions at the Reina Sofía, in Madrid; mit List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, ma (travelling to Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, in 2025); Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek; and Coleção Moraes-Barbosa in São Paulo. Visitors to the Venice Biennale had a chance to see their work at Fondazione In Between Art Film, while a European touring show is scheduled to open at Nottingham Contemporary next year. If the aim of their artmaking is to bear witness, then they are increasingly being given space to testify.

This has been a banner year for the Singaporean thinker-artist, whose midcareer survey travelled from Singapore Art Museum to Seoul’s Sonje Art Center to ccs Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, in New York (with a final stop at Mudam Luxembourg slated for 2025). Time & the Tiger offers insight into Ho’s two-decade career spent critically mining Southeast Asian identity and history through video, installation and performances. The show also marked the debut of T for Time, an ambitious investigation into the nature of time, which Ho says is ‘the true substance or material with which [he] work[s]’. Comprising animation clips shuffled by an algorithm, the video installation explores temporality through disciplines such as horology, geopolitics, physics, biology and philosophy, as well as more subjective experiences of time, such as through memory and ageing. Ho, whose work has been described by curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa as an ‘embodiment of a political ethos that challenges conventional hierarchies in our understanding of the past’, could also be seen at this year’s Whitney Biennial, or receiving €100,000 as a winner of the Chanel Next Prize 2024.

ArtReview

69 Courtesy Kurimanzutto 70 Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art 71 Courtesy Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme 72 Photo: Stefan Khoos. Courtesy a+ Singapore

69 JOSÉ KURI & MÓNICA MANZUTTO

73 AZU NWAGBOGU

74 LEGACY RUSSELL

Curator Nigerian Last Year 87

Curator American Last Year 98 Russell, director of New York nonprofit space The Kitchen, published Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us this year, a book that follows the internet-plus-identity model established by her 2020 debut Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. In Black Meme, Russell traces how, from the days of silent cinema to TikTok and gifs, the Black subject has been reduced to archetype, not least via the hyperviolent ‘viral’ imagery of slain figures such as Emmett Till or Philando Castile, while likening the distribution of souvenir postcards of public lynchings to the sharing of memes. Russell isn’t just commenting on visual culture; she has a mission to change it. She told Vanity Fair, ‘Many people would agree that the artworld is in a state of disarray… We’re seeing many failures and also through those failures many opportunities to change.’ This year, the curator’s group show on ‘black data’, Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art, organised by The Kitchen across various us venues, and a presentation at Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice by artist and poet Rhea Dillon helped further that cause.

76 GABI NGCOBO

75 EMILY JACIR

Curator South African new

Artist Palestinian new The artist and filmmaker has been running her own arts centre in Bethlehem since 2014, inviting an international range of artists (including Trevor Paglen, Jumana Manna and Rick Lowe) to make art and take part in talks and workshops. This year Adam Rouhana produced a series of photographs while working at the Ottoman-era building, while Chris Harding issued a publication based on biweekly meetings with Palestinian scholars and artists he held at the centre last year. ‘Dance, farming, sound, music, and rhythm are forms of poetry, resistance, and sustenance for us,’ Jacir told Artnet, all of which could be found in South West Bank: Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, a group show the artist organised during the Venice Biennale, featuring work by Jacir herself, Manna and Michael Rakowitz, among others, and countering the erasure of Palestinian culture by Israeli forces. Jacir, who had a Berlin talk cancelled last year following the Hamas attack on 7 October, told the Democracy Now! podcast that her work protests the “harassment, baseless smear campaigns, cancelling shows, cancelling talks” conducted against Palestinian artists.

The curator took over Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (fka Witte de With) in January, moving from the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, and her opening programme has brought a distinctly African musicality to Rotterdam: a group show titled Pickup Notes, designed to imbue ‘a sense of motion’ to exhibition-making, featured GhanaianRussian photographer Liz Johnson Artur, South African artist and researcher Zara Julius, and Pakistani painter Madiha Sikander; and a series of solo shows held under the banner First Double 1 & 2, the title taken from a song by South African musicians Madala Kunene, Baba Mokoena and Sibusiso Mndaweni. More than that, however, Ngcobo brings her distinct curatorial formula of decolonisation through self-organisation and collectivity to the institution, or as she puts it, ‘embracing improvisation as an ongoing conceptual approach’, honed as cofounder of Johannesburg-based groups Nothing Gets Organised and Center for Historical Reenactments, as well as a veteran of collectiveled biennials in Berlin and São Paulo.

ArtReview

73 Photo: Pardis Faqiri 74 Photo: Deirdre Lewis 76 Photo: Danielle Wallace

“I try to live and participate with minimal dissonance between my existence as a thinker and as a compassionate being trying to make sense of my survival in this world,” Nwagbogu told ArtReview this year of his mode of curating. This holistic approach is necessary when dealing with themes such as the slave trade, the figure of the Amazon and the Vodun religion, as the curator did for the first Benin Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (featuring the work of Chloé Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoumè). The founder and director of African Artists’ Foundation, the 16-year-old nonprofit arts organisation, and Lagos Photo Festival has been preoccupied with questions of survival: in 2020 the foundation was evicted from its base by its landlords, unfairly it claims, which has put its activities on hiatus. Meanwhile, a new iteration of Dig Where You Stand – From Coast to Coast, a roaming and evolving exhibition project about decolonisation, restitution and repatriation, which Nwagbogu initiated in 2022, landed this year in Benin.

77 ADRIAN CHENG 77 Courtesy Adrian Cheng 78 Courtesy Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation 79 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 80 Courtesy Delfina Foundation

78 DIANA CAMPBELL

Funder Hong Konger Last Year 43

Curator American Last Year 96 (with Nadia Samdani and Rajeeb Samdani)

On the face of it, this year marked a time of radical change for Cheng, who resigned as ceo of New World Development Co, the company set up by his grandfather. He remained in charge, however, of the k11 Art Foundation, which holds exhibitions in its various branded venues (tied to New World’s property portfolio) and arranges discussion forums – labelled ‘Salons’, this year in Seoul, London and Saudi Arabia – as well as artist residences. Also in 2024: the inaugural k11 Artist Prize, designed to support emerging Asian artists and spearheaded by the foundation’s International Council, featuring prominent collectors Sarah Arison and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and cultural strategist Alia Al-Senussi among its members. Cheng said his resignation permits him more time for public service, which includes chairing the Hong Kong government’s Mega Arts and Cultural Events Committee, responsible for providing incentives to major international events (such as Art Basel’s hk edition), and the various museum boards he attends, including New York’s moma ps1 and the Met, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and London’s Tate and Royal Academy of Arts.

79 MIUCCIA PRADA Funder Italian Last Year 72

Increasingly, the founding artistic director of the Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, established in 2011 by collectors Nadia Samdani and Rajeeb Samdani, is finding reasons to be outside Bangladesh. A regular on the talks and conference circuit (be it in Riyadh, for a panel on building institutions, or talking with Pakistani-us artist Shahzia Sikander in New York and veteran us painter Joan Semmel in Belgium), Campbell this year built on a cv that includes cocurating Desert X in 2023 and taking on the inaugural Bukhara Biennial. The Uzbekistan show won’t open until 2025, but Campbell hasn’t hung around in announcing some of the artists that will be present in the city of mosques: Recipes for Broken Hearts, which focuses on food and the theme of healing, and draws on the city’s history with the Silk Road, will include work by Delcy Morelos, Wael Shawky and Pakui Hardware, as well as by locals Aziza Azim, Gulnoza Irgasheva and Hassan Kurbanbaev. Next year will be busy, with the opening of the seventh edition of the Samdani Art Foundation’s Dhaka Art Summit, which the curator has directed since 2013.

80 AARON CEZAR Curator American Last Year 86

The doyenne of the eponymous fashion brand, whose revenues hit €4.7b in 2023 (and whose sales were up 93 percent by the middle of 2024), has put succession plans in place (her eldest son, Lorenzo Bertelli, is now majority shareholder), stating that clothes and luxury goods presently occupy only ‘one third’ of her life. As the former member of the Italian Communist Party told Vogue this year, family takes up another third, while the rest of her time is devoted to ‘culture and the Fondazione’. The Venice-and-Milan-based private institution is no trinket (with Tokyo and Shanghai project spaces), and Prada is very hands-on, telling Vogue how she struggled to find a curator who would fully embrace her vision of a future show on feminism. She did, however, get the likes of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler to curate Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025, a Marx-tinged show on tech and power that closed in January; while Meriem Bennani installed a solo exhibition in Milan, Christoph Büchel in Venice, Michaël Borremans in China and Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin in Japan.

What unites Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Azerbaijan? All the countries had artists representing them at the Venice Biennale who have passed through London’s very own United Nations, the Delfina Foundation. More alumni of the exhibition and residency programmes – directed by Cezar for the past 17 years – including the likes of Manauara Clandestina, Dana Awartani, Lydia Ourahmane, Ali Cherri, Larissa Sansour and Ahmet Öğüt, could be found in the Biennale’s main show and collateral events. This year, Cezar could also be seen across the world, from a talks programme in India to a gin brand launch during Hong Kong’s Art Week: not only is he scouting for talent, but also on the lookout for £7m, the amount needed to secure the institution’s future since the death of its patron and founder, Delfina Entrecanales, in 2022. Meanwhile in London, two shows: a five-artist exhibition curated by Dominican artist Yina Jiménez Suriel and solo exhibitions for Indian artist Soumya Sankar Bose and Myanmar artist Moe Satt.

December 2024

82 NICHOLAS GALANIN

81 BLAXTARLINES Artist Collective Ghanaian Last Year 84

Artist Lingít / Unangax̂ / American Last Year 91

83 ALIA SWASTIKA

Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge (2024), the suspended installation that was also the title of Galanin’s solo show at Baltimore Museum of Art this September, features 60 porcelain daggers that mimic the traditional tools of the Lingít tribe and are patterned with Russian ceramic designs (Galanin is Lingít and Unangax̂; the latter’s Aleutian Islands are divided between us and Russian state control). Weaponry is a fitting motif for the artist: he has been uncompromising in his fight against the misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture and the collective amnesia towards the colonial crimes of the past. Such anger was unflinchingly disclosed in the red neon text work Galanin made for his exhibition, Interference Patterns, at site Santa Fe in January, which read, over a grid of doormats, ‘I’ve Composed a New National Anthem: Take a Knee and Scream Until You Can’t Breathe’. The howl is being heard. Galanin was also included in a dozen group shows this year, including the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial and the Toronto Biennial, and in April he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

84 NOAH HOROWITZ

Curator Indonesian new

Art Fair Director American Last Year 51

For more than a decade, the Jakarta-based curator, researcher and activist has worked to promote and elevate Indonesian artists via the organisation and championing of local grassroots initiatives and across international platforms. As director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation since 2018, she has developed an ‘action-based method’ that seeks to rewrite a more decentralised and inclusive art history, as well as ‘creating stronger connections and solidarities among artists, curators, and art activists’ in a region where support for the arts is very limited. In keeping with her collaborative approach to building artistic networks, it was announced last year that Swastika would cocurate Sharjah Biennial 16 (titled to carry and due to open in February 2025) alongside Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz and Megan Tamati-Quennell, with whom she will bring together a selection of artists responding to issues of collectivity, movement, belonging and intergenerational kinship. This year Swastika also sat on the international jury for the Venice Biennale.

With some persistent jitters around the health of the art market, Art Basel ceo Horowitz admitted a ‘period of recalibration’ was now in place. Dealers told Ocula that sales at Art Basel Hong Kong were just ‘okay’, while visitor numbers were ‘thin’, and exhibitors also had to negotiate the new censorious national security law introduced by the territory’s legislators (Art Basel has signed a new three-year partnership with Hong Kong’s tourist board; the fair also has a partnership with Art Week Tokyo, possibly indicating a hedging of their Asian presence). At the Swiss edition of the fair, however, there was a ‘sigh of relief’ after day one. This art fair model remains a gallery’s safest route to sales: 195 dealers, an increase of 27 percent from last year, signed up to take part in Art Basel Paris, now established in the newly renovated Grand Palais. Offsetting the growing nervousness, the Miami edition has offered smaller, cheaper booths for the first time, to increase the fair’s accessibility for participating galleries.

ArtReview

81 Courtesy blaxtarlines 82 Photo: Raven’s Tale Studio. Courtesy Nicholas Galanin and Peter Blum Gallery 83 Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation 84 Photo: Noé Cotter. Courtesy Art Basel

This group of teachers, artists and curators may be based at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, but their objectives bypass pedagogy. Fostering critical discussions within the art scene in Ghana, while building international connections, this amorphous collective acts as an exhibition platform and support network, modelling a form of headless institution. Beyond its Kumasi project space are exchange programmes with art schools in Germany, and residency swaps in Denmark and Uganda. Historical survey Ghana 1957: Art After Independence was cocurated by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh in Accra, while the group collaborated with Berlin’s savvy Contemporary in shaping part of its Transitions project. Members often swap seamlessly between the roles of artist and curator, such as Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, who cocurated a two-part exhibition at Gallery 1957’s London and Accra spaces, then took part in the Busan Biennale, and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, who organised Elolo Bosoka’s show at Accra’s Museum of Science and Technology, and whose work is currently on display in the photography biennial Bamako Encounters.

85 ATSUKO NINAGAWA

86 RAPHAEL FONSECA

Gallerist Japanese Last Year 93

Curator Brazilian Last Year 88

85 Photo: Katsuhiro Saiki. Courtesy Take Ninagawa 86 Photo: Justin Solomon 87 Photo: Jhony Aguiar. Courtesy Dalton Paula 88 Photo: Didier Plowy. © Centre Pompidou

Ninagawa was one of a number of dealers who set up shop during the 2000s as Japan was coming out of its ‘lost decade’ of economic decline: not an easy moment to start selling art. Yet her gallery, Take Ninagawa, thrived and now represents the likes of Shinro Ohtake and Aki Sasamoto from Japan, and Wang Bing, Danh Vo and Ken Okiishi from abroad. In October she opened an exhibition of work by Ryoko Aoki, ready for Art Week Tokyo, the fourth edition of the annual citywide festival pioneered by Ninagawa herself. Now staged in collaboration with Art Basel (Ninagawa sits on the fair’s selection committee for its Basel edition), the event draws an international crowd and is eager to establish a new hub in Asia to rival Seoul and away from the censorship present in Hong Kong and mainland China. Over 50 galleries and museums across the city took part in the event, which included a selling show at Okura Museum of Art curated by Mami Kataoka, and awt Video, a series of moving image works programmed by Sohrab Mohebbi that screened at smbc East Tower.

The 14th Bienal do Mercosul, which Fonseca is curating, has been rescheduled for next March–June due to the devastating floods that hit the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul earlier this year, affecting several exhibition venues. The postponement provided some unexpected respite from a very busy year. In October Fonseca opened Fullgás at ccbb Rio de Janeiro, a survey of visual art in Brazil during the 1980s featuring approximately 300 works by over 200 artists. Fonseca was also touring Frieze London in October, as part of a purchasing committee for Tate, while acting as a curatorial adviser to the Prospect 6 triennial in New Orleans, which opened in November. Fonseca is now gearing up for Counterpublic in 2026, the citywide exhibition in St Louis that has appointed him as part of a five-strong curatorial committee. Fonseca has a day job, too. As curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at Denver Art Museum, he opened an exhibition in April of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s fantasy-inflected paintings and drawings.

88 LAURENT LE BON

87 DALTON PAULA Artist Brazilian new

Museum Director French reentry (99 in 2008)

When Paula won the $100,000 Chanel Next Prize this year, the painter spoke of his plans to spend the money on ‘a forest-school… guided by ancestral knowledge, so that young artists and researchers can continue developing their work’. Such a proclamation reinforced the artist’s ongoing commitment to educational initiatives and community building: in 2019 he won a Marcantonio Vilaça Award, the most prominent art prize in Brazil, and used the cash reward to establish Sertão Negro, a cultural centre located near to his studio in Goiânia. In addition to hosting community events, the centre offers monthlong residencies to national and international artists, whose first week is spent in one of two local quilombos – settlements originally established by escaped enslaved people. Aside from featuring in a group show in June at Mariane Ibrahim in Mexico City, Paula was a major presence in Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale exhibition, which included works from his Full-Body Portraits series (2023–24) – 16 paintings depicting historical figures of African descent who were involved in antislavery movements in Brazil.

‘If we don’t take immediate measures, the building will collapse: There are pieces of metal falling off of it every day,’ the president of Centre Pompidou told The New York Times ahead of the Paris museum’s closure for a five-year, €262m refurbishment in 2025. The French government will cover the cost of this technical work, but Le Bon needs to find a further €207m from sponsors. Le Bon and his predecessor’s primary strategy has been an aggressive franchise model, in which international cities pay to use the Pompidou name for five years (renewable) and have access to its 120,000-strong collection and expertise: Málaga took up the offer in 2015 (its ten-year contract was renewed this year), and Shanghai followed in 2019 (secured through 2028), while Brussels and Seoul outposts are due to open next year. The future of Pompidou New Jersey remains up in the air, however: the us state previously pulled out of the deal, but a new funding plan has put it back on the table – for now. While closed for renovation, Centre Pompidou plans to disperse its collection and expertise across France’s network of museums.

December 2024

89 Photo: Damir Žižić 90 Photo : Estúdio em Obra 91 From left: Olele Mulela Mabamba, Irène Kanga, Huguette Kilembi, Jérémie Mabiala, Jean Kawata, Mbuku Kimpala, Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama. © catpc, 2020 92 Photo: Heather Henriksen

89 WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM / WHW

90 THIAGO DE PAULA SOUZA

Curators Croatian reentry (89 in 2021)

Curator Brazilian new

Following the city’s reassessment of what kind of place Kunsthalle Wien should be, the three members of whw directing the institution (Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović) found themselves without a contract renewal in June (Ana Dević is the fourth member). City Hall’s disapproval apparently related to an exhibition programme that lacked tourist-friendly crowd-pleasers (2024 shows included solos for tech-focused sculptor Aleksandra Domanović and experimental filmmaker Diego Marcon), as well as poor visitor numbers (though whw’s tenure coincided with the pandemic). The termination of whw’s employment caused one member of the institution’s board to quit; meanwhile, the trio left a valedictory postscript in the form of a 62m mural by Nora Turato reading, ‘Aaaaaaaa…!!!!!!’ – the first of an annual public artwork commission established during whw’s time in office. They won’t be dwelling on the past, though: whw’s departure gives them more time to prepare for the 2027 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster. Their appointment as the first female curators of the exhibition was announced in August.

With its wide remit, Panorama, an annual survey of Brazilian art, is a tricky gig, yet Souza, Germano Dushá and Ariana Nuala curated a cohesive show (this year at mac usp, in São Paulo) in which notions of identity mixed with ecological thinking, without ever being too literal in the politics. It’s a subtlety that attracted Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung to tap Souza for his curatorial team for the 2025 Bienal de São Paulo, and that was on display in Some May Work as Symbols at London’s Raven Row, cocurated with Pablo Lafuente, which studied the overlapping of Afro-Brazilian heritage and geometric abstraction in Brazil during the mid-twentieth century. Topography of Memory, a largescale installation by Sallisa Rosa that Souza curated for Audemars Piguet Contemporary during Art Basel Miami travelled to Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and he worked with curator Matheus Morani on For Another Ecology at Solar dos Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro, featuring the likes of Julien Creuzet and Rose Afefé to address environmental racism. Souza sits on the artistic advisory committee of Angola’s nesr Art Foundation too.

92 CHRISTOPHER K. HO

91 CERCLE D’ART DES TRAVAILLEURS DE PLANTATION CONGOLAISE Artist Collective Congolese new

Curator Hong Konger Last Year 75

Through their attempts to direct the artworld’s economies back to a site that once supported colonial wealth – the plantation lands around the village of Lusanga, previously owned by multinational Unilever, where the collective catpc is based – the group’s members (currently at 20) are reaching beyond artistic symbolism to pursue practical, real-world change. Maintaining their work as plantation labourers, the artists have used revenues resulting from sales of their palm oil and cocoa sculptures to buy up and restore plantation land around Lusanga. In 2017 catpc built a ‘white cube’ art gallery on land they had reclaimed, which this year was connected by livestream to the group’s standout exhibition at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (worked on with Renzo Martens, a longtime collaborator, and Hicham Khalidi). With a major exhibition at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, opening this December, following appearances at the Diriyah Biennale and Paris Internationale, catpc’s short-circuiting of the global artworld’s power relations takes institutional critique one step further.

Asia Art Archive has continued to expand its repository of materials on recent art being produced in Asia, under the leadership of Ho, who has been in the post since 2021. Its continued engagement with the writing of regional art histories has further cemented the status of the Hong Kong-based nonprofit as the leading resource for Asian art scholars. aaa launched new collections on independent art spaces in Taiwan, as well as the Siu King Chung Archive, which features materials about Hong Kong art and the development of self-organised art practices in particular, from the 1980s to the 2000s. It also opened two researchintensive exhibitions. Another Day in Hong Kong included interviews with over a hundred individuals from Hong Kong’s art community about their recollections of 19 October 1996 (this was identified as being the median day out of all the dates in aaa’s hk-based records). Countering Time, which opened in September, presents new works by Merve Ünsal, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim and Lee Weng Choy, who speculate on the immeasurability of time.

December 2024

94 ARIEL EMANUEL & SIMON FOX

93 SAKIYA

Art Fair Directors American / British Last Year 54

Founded in 2016 by architect Sahar Qawasmi and artist Nida Sinnokrot, Sakiya started out as a nomadic enterprise and has since become permanently located on a natural and historic site within the Ein Qiniya hills outside of Ramallah. The site was gifted to them by a family from Jerusalem, and the pair have spent the last few years renovating and rewilding this land. Self-dubbed ‘a progressive academy’ that’s dedicated to agricultural research, Sakiya integrates local agrarian knowledge with ecological processes and contemporary art. The organisation’s activities include food production, exhibitions and conferences, as well as residencies and workshops enriched by a network of artists, writers, ecologists and craftspeople, both from the region and abroad. Sakiya’s force lies in the educational model it has created that roots pedagogy within the landscape, cultivating knowledge exchange and strategies of subsistence that seem all the more radical and necessary in the face of genocide and environmental collapse.Its ultimate goal is to challenge ‘the demographic divide that characterizes cultural production and consumption in Palestine’.

‘Frieze is just like an extremely important week for the city.’ So drooled one socialite to Vanity Fair ahead of Frieze Los Angeles. Frieze, under ceo Fox, is adept at making an art fair feel like an event, and this year added to its us footprint not only by moving the West Coast edition to Santa Monica Airport but by hosting the recently acquired Expo Chicago and the Armory Show in New York. ‘The economics of art fairs are challenging,’ Fox told the same reporter in March. Referring to Emanuel’s Endeavor, Frieze’s parent company, he added, ‘We are taken very seriously by Ari and the team’. A month is a long time in business. A few weeks later Endeavor was taken private (after equity fund Silver Lake bought the $13b of stock it didn’t already own), and the group is now considering selling the art fair in a pessimistic market: just ‘moderate sales’ were reported at the third edition of Frieze Seoul, though the London original was deemed more successful, helped by the sale of a number of works to several uk institutional collections (aided by Endeavor-funded partnerships with the fair) including the Contemporary Art Society, Tate and the Arts Council.

96 HYUN-SOOK LEE

95 VICTOR PINCHUK Funder Ukrainian reentry (85 in 2014)

Gallerist Korean Last Year 92

Established by Pinchuk’s art foundation in Kyiv, the $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize is not surprisingly one of the most lucrative awards in the world. The issuing of the seventh edition this year was notably delayed, not once but twice, due to Russia’s invasion. In October, however, the winner was finally announced: Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman, chosen from a shortlist of 21 by a big-name jury that included Cecilia Alemani and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Pinchuk, who Donald Trump once called ‘a very, very special man’ (and who hired Kellyanne Conway, an official in the 45th president’s administration, as his lobbyist this year), bankrolled a vast exhibition during the Venice Biennale titled From Ukraine: Dare to Dream, in which artists ranging from Shilpa Gupta to Nikita Kadan to Otobong Nkanga reflected on what the curators described as ‘an ongoing power struggle’, while ‘storms and climate change ravage lands far and wide’ and ‘political extremes are seizing their growing momentum’. For Pinchuk, then, art undoubtedly has geopolitical purchase.

By spearheading the international positioning of a group of Kukje Gallery’s artists, including Ha Chong-Hyun, Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, Lee turned the Dansaekhwa movement into an art historical period that could be digested by foreign audiences. Lee’s approach, which has focused on organising prominent international exhibitions, including collateral shows at the Venice Biennale, made their name – as well as her own. Now that Seoul has become a major node in the art market, Lee, whose gallery was founded in 1982 and represents approximately 50 artists, including Haegue Yang and the newly signed eighty-nine-year-old sculptor Kim Yun Shin (featured in this year’s Venice Biennale), is more ambivalent about how helpful artworld hype can be. ‘I think we should not be “too excited” about the Korean art scene being globally recognized, becoming another art hub in Asia… Both galleries and artists should stay on their toes,’ she warned The Korea Herald. Now a family affair, with Lee’s children involved, Kukje is no doubt in it for the long haul.

ArtReview

93 Courtesy Sakiya 94 Photo: Paul Smith/Endeavor. Courtesy Frieze (Emanuel); © Harry Mitchell. Courtesy Harry Mitchell and Frieze (Fox) 95 Photo: Sergey Illin and Alexander Pilyugin. © and courtesy the Pinchuk Art Centre, 2018 96 Photo: Jisup An. Courtesy Kukje Gallery

School Palestinian new

98 ARCHIE MOORE

97 Photo: Daniela Morales 98 Photo: Rhett Hammerton. Courtesy The Commercial 99 Courtesy Samdani Art Foundation 100 Photo: Kenny Li

97 MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ Curator Peruvian reentry (90 in 2021)

Artist Kamilaroi / Bigambul / Australian new

Working with Dominique Fontaine, López’s cocurated Toronto Biennial this year took the title Precarious Joys, and touched on, in the curators’ words, questions of ‘environmental justice’, ‘collective memory’, ‘feminist genealogies’, ‘weaving as spiritual listening’, ‘resistance and resilience’. If these are in keeping with current curatorial fashions, they have been López’s interests for a while, from his early days running Teorética in San José, Costa Rica, and as evergreen chief champion of Cecilia Vicuña. The Chilean artist was included in Toronto, marking the latest chapter in a relationship dating back to a 2019 retrospective López curated at the Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam, and which travelled to Mexico City, Madrid and Bogotá. Dreaming Water, a second survey of the artist’s work curated by López, opened this year at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, following stops at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, and malba, Buenos Aires. In April, López delivered the keynote lecture at the 2024 Curatorial Forum conference (organised by Independent Curators International), which focused on art and civic responsibility.

99 NADIA SAMDANI & RAJEEB SAMDANI

This year, Moore made kith and kin for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – and became the first Australian to win the Golden Lion award. Curated by Ellie Buttrose, Moore’s vast black-and-white installation took the form of a genealogical chart that wrapped around the walls and ceiling of the cavernous space, highlighting 65,000 years of human history and interconnectedness. In the centre of the pavilion was a raised tablelike platform, set above a dark pool of water, on top of which were placed 500 document-stacks largely consisting of partially redacted coroners’ inquests relating to Indigenous Australians who had died while held in police custody. Moore’s work combines the personal with the political, and this global art event in Italy was used by the artist to bring visibility to the violence and injustices perpetrated by carceral systems in his country, and around the world, that disproportionately target Indigenous people and people of colour. It was announced in August that kith and kin has been jointly acquired by Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern.

100 YAN DU Funder Chinese new

Funders Bangladeshi Last Year 96 (with Diana Campbell) The Samdanis’ Dhaka Art Summit (“a pop-up museum, a festival… a huge public platform,” as Nadia described it in a talk at Art Basel Hong Kong last year) always intended to bring the world to Bangladesh. “When we started… the Bangladeshi artworld was against us. There was an established market and the contemporary artists we were working with weren’t part of that,” industrialist Rajeeb told the same audience. Given the considerable number of local and international institutions now affiliating themselves with the Samdanis’ initiative, as well as visitor numbers reaching almost half a million for the sixth edition, in 2023, there is clearly more enthusiasm at this stage. The biennial summit may be skipping a year (the seventh edition will open in 2026), but such momentum has led the couple to envision Srihatta, the 40-hectare art centre and sculpture park they are building in Sylhet, scheduled to open in 2025. There are also various advisory and museum patrons’ committees to keep them busy, including Tate, Alserkal Avenue and Asia Society.

Not content with a 500-plus-work contemporary art collection, the Chinese-born, uk-based collector founded, in 2019, the Asymmetry Art Foundation, a platform to promote Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art. Its London headquarters has an impressively busy programme of workshops, mini-exhibitions, screenings and talks, and even librariansin-residence. Yan Du extends her advocacy through a series of public institutional partnerships in London, including a curatorial research fellowship at Chisenhale Gallery; a curatorial fellowship at the Whitechapel Gallery; a lecture series at the Courtauld Gallery; a phd scholarship at Goldsmiths; residencies at the Delfina Foundation; and, new this year, two curatorial positions at Tate Modern. Most recently Asymmetry has been expanding its international footprint, announcing a new curatorial fellowship in partnership with New York’s Sculpture Center. While during the opening of the Venice Biennale, it co-organised (with Asia Forum) A World of Many Worlds, a one-day symposium (on which ArtReview also partnered).

December 2024

THE 2024 POWER 100 1 Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi

34 Cecilia Vicuña

68 Agnes Denes

2 Rirkrit Tiravanija

35 Larry Gagosian

69 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

3 Saidiya Hartman

36 Yinka Shonibare

70 Kiran Nadar

4 Steve McQueen

37 Darren Walker

5 Forensic Architecture

38 David Zwirner

71 Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

6 Wael Shawky

39 Byung-Chul Han

7 Nan Goldin

40 Wu Tsang

8 Kerry James Marshall

41 Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud

9 Anna Kornbluh

42 Emmanuel Perrotin

10 John Akomfrah

43 Paul B. Preciado

11 Carrie Mae Weems

44 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

12 Achille Mbembe

45 Vincent Worms

13 Cao Fei

46 Manthia Diawara

14 Ibrahim Mahama

47 Candice Hopkins

15 Nicole Eisenman

48 Haegue Yang

16 Koyo Kouoh

49 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

17 Sammy Baloji

50 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

18 Hito Steyerl

51 Marc Glimcher

19 Mark Bradford

52 Bose Krishnamachari

20 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

53 Stefanie Hessler

21 Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani

54 Natasha Ginwala

22 Isaac Julien 23 Amy Sherald 24 Eugene Tan 25 Anna L. Tsing 26 Julie Mehretu 27 Fred Moten 28 Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth & Marc Payot 29 Maja Hoffmann 30 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong 31 Brook Andrew 32 Theaster Gates 33 Adriano Pedros

55 Josh Kline 56 Reem Fadda 57 Refik Anadol 58 Prateek Raja & Priyanka Raja 59 Hans Ulrich Obrist 60 Maria Balshaw 61 Liza Essers 62 Mami Kataoka 63 Lynn Hershman Leeson 64 Glenn D. Lowry 65 Sohrab Mohebbi 66 Christine Tohmé 67 Jay Jopling

72 Ho Tzu Nyen 73 Azu Nwagbogu 74 Legacy Russell 75 Emily Jacir 76 Gabi Ngcobo 77 Adrian Cheng 78 Diana Campbell 79 Miuccia Prada 80 Aaron Cezar 81 blaxtarlines 82 Nicholas Galanin 83 Alia Swastika 84 Noah Horowitz 85 Atsuko Ninagawa 86 Raphael Fonseca 87 Dalton Paula 88 Laurent Le Bon 89 What, How & for Whom / whw 90 Thiago de Paula Souza 91 Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise 92 Christopher K. Ho 93 Sakiya 94 Ariel Emanuel & Simon Fox 95 Victor Pinchuk 96 Hyun-Sook Lee 97 Miguel A. López 98 Archie Moore 99 Nadia Samdani & Rajeeb Samdani 100 Yan Du

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Power in Numbers

life 89

32 ARTISTS 3 COLLECTIVES 21 CURATORS 12 GALLERISTS 12 FUNDERS 9 THINKERS 8 MUSEUM DIRECTORS 2 ART FAIRS 1 SCHOOL

2 PRINCESSES 0 NONHUMANS 79 FEATURED ON THIS LIST BEFORE 1 MINISTER 37 WORK IN THE ‘GLOBAL SOUTH’ 10 PRIMARILY PAINT 20 MAKE FILMS OR VIDEOS 3 DON’T WORK IN THE FIELD OF ART 91

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Artist Project

do not read 95

JOSÈFA NTJAM Interview by Oliver Basciano

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist who works in sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Born in 1992 in Metz, France, she currently lives and works in Saint-Étienne, west of Lyon. Following music conservatory training at a specialist high school, Ntjam studied at ensa Bourges, which allowed her to spend a year taking political theory classes at Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop University. She then completed another master’s degree at ensapc, Cergy (known as a ‘laboratory for artistic practices’), from which she graduated in 2017. Given the artist’s varied education, it’s not surprising that she mines from a diverse range of sources. Touching on political history, art history, science, philosophy, ancestral cosmologies and music, her works imagine new and mind-bending worlds that are in the lineage of speculative fiction, fantasy comics or worldbuilding computer games. This has been a breakout year for Ntjam. Her participation in the lvmh Métiers d’Art residency resulted in a solo show at the private foundation in Paris, which opened in March. Une cosmogonie d’océans featured 12 sculptures informed by Central

and West African mythology – otherworldly, hybrid creatures that had been fabricated by artisans employed by the luxury goods conglomerate, more accustomed to making buckles, rivets and eyelets for the fashion industry. Another solo exhibition, at Fotografiska New York, Futuristic Ancestry Warping Matter and Space-time(s), included a multisensory video experience, biomorphic sculptures and photomontages printed on plexiglass and aluminium, with references ranging from the television series Battlestar Galactica (1978–79/2004–09) to the novels of Octavia E. Butler. For the Venice Biennale, las Foundation commissioned the artist’s most ambitious work to date: an epic film shown on a vast curved screen that combined computer and hand-drawn animation with photomontage and ai. The work is based on two creation stories in which the deep sea and outer space merge: the Dogon myth of Amma, the sky deity who made the stars, as well as Nommo, the ‘master of water’; and a Huaorani tale about a snake that eats the stars, which turn into the first waterways and marine life. Corresponding

ArtReview

with these components was an otherworldly soundtrack played from a series of sculptural listening booths shaped like jellyfish. Ntjam’s retelling of these myths involved layering 3d models of marine life with scans of Amma and Nommo statues (found in Western museum collections) and photographs of figures involved in colonial independence movements. Decolonial histories joined forces with a fantastical vision of the future. Ntjam has created the artist’s project pages for the 2024 Power 100, which feature throughout the issue. cover what are we praying for? p 40 Fish Tank Mythology p 48 lascard p 53 Elisabeth Djouka pp 56–57 bell hooks pp 64–65 fire next time pp 70–71 Dans l’étang pp 77 adama p 82 octomeute p 86 Nommo village market pp 97–98 The Deep

December 2024

ArtReview

artreview Can you tell me about the cover image you made for this year’s Power 100 issue? It features a painting of the revolutionary Toussaint Louverture holding the Haitian constitution. josèfa ntjam When I am making photomontages, I mostly work with images of powerful Black people who fight against power, mostly colonial powers. Louverture is a powerful figure but this image also features him holding the Haitian constitution, a document that is itself about power. But contemporary art is about power too, and in this image you have the Bishop, praying, and maybe he could be an allegory for the belief in art, praying to the art God, but I want to make that god a monstrous god. The work is not specifically about Haiti of course, an island still today controlled by a colonial power, but about the nexus of revolutionary Black people. For me the work lies in giving new life to this picture, placing it within a new radical ecosystem, and for that I layer such images within an underwater ecosystem. So much of Black memory lies lost at the bottom of the ocean, specifically because of the slave trade and colonialism, that these watery worlds are a way of resurrecting that. It is a reference also to Drexciya, which was a Detroit techno group, who imagined in their music the underwater country of Drexciya, in which lived the unborn children of the enslaved African women who died crossing the ocean [thrown from the ships because they were pregnant]. So this is a thing also. ar Your project runs throughout the issue, and features other figures of Black resistance and revolt; people like Elisabeth Djouka, the Cameroonian independence fighter who was active during the mid-twentieth-century anti-colonial struggle and died earlier this year. jn My methodology of photomontage is really based on how I think, mapping a tentacular infrastructure, in which stories or people are interconnected by intertwined roots and membranes. At school the professors taught history in a fragmented way, but there are so many connections. The fact that you have Elisabeth Djouka coming from the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, who were being helped by the Communist Party in France, at the same time that the Black Panthers came to Algeria to take part in the fight for their independence. So you have these interconnections of Black diaspora that spread across the world. With these connections, and through multiplication of images into a single frame, I want to visualise an ecosystem. Photomontage allows me to fight a linear understanding of history, and through the layering of imagery

to create a network, a rhizomatic imagining of history. It is a geological process. ar Your family are from Cameroon and took part in the independence struggle too. jn Yes, I dig a lot of pictures out of archives, but for Cameroon it is often a struggle, because we don’t have a lot of documentation that survived from the time before Independence, before the 1960s. So I use a lot of family pictures to represent the struggle. To these I add material I’ve generated myself: a photograph I took of mould in a fishtank for example. I also have a microscope at home, so much of the source material stems from different plants I’ve studied under the microscope. ar In describing the worlds that you imagine through your work – especially swell of spæc(i)es – you’ve referenced Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, spaces that sit beyond society. Given that your project for ArtReview relates specifically to the Power 100, I’m imagining these images act as heterotopic visions of alternative power. jn Yes, for me it is a way of conjuring a different type of ecosystem, by looking inside other structures of being. I think we can learn a lot from plants, from quantum physics, from all these different disciplines. For example, when researching symbiosis in plants, I thought about how an algae coming into contact with the earth becomes a kind of a lichen, one that can live on earth and take in oxygen, through symbiosis with a mushroom. But this algae used to live on the bottom of the ocean. And you can say that maybe this kind of adaptation through symbiosis is something that human beings can apply to themselves also. Also in quantum physics and Heisenberg’s theory: the fact that you can’t calculate the speed and the location of a single particle at the same time, because if you calculate the speed, you will lose the position. If you calculate the position, you will lose the speed. You can never fix this single particle, it is always escaping, and I love the idea that it refuses these boundaries of science. That is something too we can take for our own ways of living. ar But what is it about space and the ocean that specifically attracts you? jn Actually, I think there are three different types of landscapes in the work. You have outer space, you have the bottom of the ocean, but also you have the cave. All those spaces are renegade landscapes, places in which I can situate all these people who resist against colonial power or a specific form of power, spaces in which they can both hide from that power but also regroup and create their own power. Space is also an important reference within Black culture, specifically

December 2024

coming from [the musician] Sun Ra. As he said at one point, as a Black person, I can’t live on this Earth. I need to go back to Saturn with my people. So this is my spaceship. Now we can start the journey to outer space. And in one way it’s sad – the fact that somehow we have to leave this earth to have a proper life as human beings. But I also love the fact that he projects not only himself but also an entire diaspora into creating an alternative world where things could be different. It is a manifestation of an alternative reality that can become real. Everything is a kind of weaving of all these references: I read books, a lot of comics, I’m playing videogames, all that stuff, seeing my friends, listening to music, a lot of music. So this is how I work. ar Tell me about your relationship with Afrofuturism, which relates to the Black(s) to the Future collective, in Paris, of which you were once a member. jn It is a term I’ve come to avoid slightly, as Afrofuturism has become a kind of label or a contemporary art aesthetic, whereas with Black(s) to the Future we considered Afrofuturism to be a practice of research, a methodology in connecting different dots. It was the foundation of the collective itself that, founded by my friend Mawena Yehouessi, featured artists, musicians, curators and researchers. We did things like workshops, helped stage shows, hosted a festival, but now it’s more a platform for research. We hope to make the archive public soon: projects in which we mapped out the sonic resonance of Afrofuturism from Detroit techno to figures like Ibaaku, a Senegalese musician who became a friend. ar Were you always into science? jn This summer I went back to my parents’ house in Paris and found a signed picture of the first Black astronaut [Guion Bluford]. I had asked my parents to go to this tech and science fair on the edge of Paris when I was seven or eight, and he was there. When I found this picture, I thought about how much he must have powered my imagination. Here was the beginning of all this fantasy, but it wasn’t science fiction, in fact, it was something real. A Black astronaut! ar Did it make you want to go to space? jn No, I wanted to be a submarine scientist! But that was not the path I took in high school – I don’t think I could be confined by something so specific. I loved the sciences, but music mostly, also literature. ar Well, you’ve basically made your own exploratory submarine with your work. jn Yes, I guess I did. ar

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December 2024

101

Looking back at the introduction to the original Power 100… The art/power AXIS constantly changes. [Shorthand for saying that the list needs to be published every year. Though it’s not instantly obvious what is meant by ‘the art/power axis’: whether or not it means the relationship of art to actual (in the world) power, or the axis of how power operates within the artworld. Keeping it open allows for the possibility of the former (optimism) and the reality of the latter (pragmatism), thus pleasing everyone. Which, when you’re about to issue a list like this – one that no one is going to agree on – is no mean feat.] Artists, patrons, dealers, directors, curators and collectors are always JOCKEYING for position [By deploying a horse-racing metaphor, the editor subtly suggests that there is in fact a competition for top spot on a list that until then did not exist. So no one knew that there was an official, judged top spot to be had. At the same time she displays her art-historical acumen, given that horses are traditionally associated with displays of power. One immediately thinks of Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 portrait of a triumphant Napoleon crossing the Alps, conquering a beast and the natural elements in the process. A true triumph of man. Or, perhaps a little less helpfully, but certainly much more of the moment, of Maurizio Cattelan’s series of dangling taxidermied horses, suspended impotently from the ceiling (Novecento, 1997, or The Ballad of Trotsky, 1996). It got worse

of course, when the Italian artist began siting the horses so that their heads disappeared into the walls, such that they functioned as trophies of the rear end rather than the head. That’s not what the editor was trying to conjure here though. At the time she wrote this, that was yet to come. She probably wanted us to think of Napoleon. At his moment of triumph; not his downfall], just as art movements shift and markets fluctuate. [These days we’d probably suggest that the movements change rather than shift, though the editor here is obviously trying to conjure the image of a digestive process as work as a canny metaphor for the process of constructing the Power list. Subtle, but effective.] It’s not entirely a question of wallet power [This is an era before digital transactions, Apple Pay and touch cards were ubiquitous, when people had to carry their cash with them in order to spend it]; IDEA POWER can also shake the artworld to its core. [Here the editor alludes to the popular idea of the time that the global artworld was divided into a core and peripheries. And that some bits of it were shaken more violently and more frequently than others. Today we like to think that the core is utterly dispersed and utterly everywhere, although the Power list from this year would suggest that this is still as much of a delusion as is thinking that there was ever a core in the first place.] Some choose to wield their power publicly, others very PRIVATELY. [The last involved being part of a specialist ‘club’ or a world before the MeToo movement.] This special supplement sponsored by leading art insurers axa Art [Whatever happened to them…], the first of an annual series [That early promise of constant change finds its apotheosis! ], freezes the international contemporary art scene at a KEY MOMENT in its evolution, albeit viewed through London-tinted lenses. Even our own panel of passionate and informed experts, including Godfrey Barker, Louisa Buck, David D’Arcy and Ossian Ward, found it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to agree on who should be where – or whether or not they should be on the list at all. [Still the case with today’s panel! Although they find it actually rather than virtually impossible. Even if they are meeting on Zoom.] Only one thing is certain; next year it all will have CHANGED. [It has in fact never ‘all changed’; for many years in fact it is the same power players shuffling position or not even that. Proof perhaps that it is in the nature of power to not behave as you wish it to. Or that the artworld is not the fastpaced environment that everyone makes it out to be. Or desires it to be. There’s little room for desire on the list today btw.] So the big question is, where are YOU? [ArtReview had a very small but very powerful readership in those days.] Flip the pages and find out. [What she said! ] Meredith Etherington-Smith, 2002 [& ArtReview, 2024]

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