ArtReview February 2023 by ArtReview

Pondering the orb since 1949

Tomorrow’s artists today!

David Salle, Tree of Life Smile (detail), 2022 Oil and acrylic on linen. 177.8 x 127 cm © David Salle, ARS NY. Photo: John Berens, New York

This Time With Feeling

David Salle

Paris Marais January—February 2023

PERES PROJECTS BETH LETAIN

Jonas Wood Prints 2 541 West 24th Street New York

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ArtReview vol 75 no 1 February 2023

Rabbit holes So, ArtReview’s hanging at this art fair, even though it’s the holidays (that goes from Christmas to Thaipusam as far as ArtReview is concerned), because somehow the art, in the form of the fair, has sort of turned up where it is… What? No… it doesn’t matter where. Nice try though, but ArtReview’s not going to tell you in case any more of you art-fools start hanging around with your tents and your credit-card machines. So, back at the fair, which is next to a casino, which everyone’s finding simultaneously confusing and refreshingly honest, ArtReview’s standing there, glassy-eyed (so that it looks like it’s earnestly paying attention to something, when in fact its mind has drifted far, far away, to the land of nothing), this guy rocks up, looking a bit sweaty and nervous (we are in the Tropics, so the first part is allowed), and asks ‘What do you think?’ ArtReview takes a moment. It didn’t realise that thinking was required at this kind of event. Then it’s not sure that the guy is pointing at anything in particular. In fact, his arms are by his sides. Probably because he’s self-conscious about the damp sweat-patches that are doubtless under his arms. Maybe there is required thinking at the talks programmes that accompany these kinds of events. There’s a kind of inconsequential, speculative, thinking-out-loud going on there. Someone whanging on about social justice, equality or some such stuff to a bunch of people who don’t really care. At least not as much as they do about getting a booking at that restaurant or whether or not they really got a good deal on that Cambodian painting of

Directives

the site of a mass grave. (Looks innocent, turns out to be horrific: the perfect conversation starter.) The guy’s arms are flapping slightly now. And he’s turning his head this way and that, as if trying to catch out a potential stalker or assassin who might be lurking around. Then it dawns on ArtReview. It’s the fair director. Well… maybe because ArtReview spots his lanyard and photo id. And he’s trying to look busy and important (by talking to someone rather than hanging on his own) while nevertheless looking around to see if there are any people who are actually famous or important that he can latch onto. As a form of upgrade. Either that or he’s looking out for any homeless people who might have eluded the casino security and stumbled into the art fair because the casino guards assumed that they were wearing some sort of ‘artistic’ costume, who he might have to hose down and move along. ArtReview’s not sure it was a homeless person or a famous person that the director suddenly rushed off to greet – was it the hose or was it the unpleasantly moist handshake? All ArtReview does know is that if it had been as lucky as you and had a newsstandfresh copy of Future Greats in its hands, it might have had something to say in relation to the whole thinking question posed by the somewhat stale-smelling fair director. It does the thinking so you don’t have to bother. Or something like that… Ha ha! Only joking! You know ArtReview had a whale of a time at the art fair and saw many wonderful works of art that it will be sharing with you for at least the next 12 months (no need to overdose – it’s only February after all). And the talks programme was a cracker! So hard to forget… so hard to get in. Now that’s what being truly busy and important feels like! Happy Friday! Unless it’s some other day. In which case you’ll need to wait till Friday comes along. Right, ArtReview is off to kiss a baby and milk a rabbit. ArtReview

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Art Observed The Interview Olga Balema by Ross Simonini 20

Where Next for nfts? by Charlotte Kent 31

The Art of the Influencer by Rosanna McLaughlin 29

Iran’s Blood Protests by Shirin S. & Şahane B. 34

page 29 Instagram post by liverking, 17 August 2022

Future Greats

Renan Marcondes, by Ana Mazzei Ava Woo Kaufman, by Buck Ellison Mayank Austen Soofi, by Dayanita Singh Hyogen no Genba Chosadan, by Koki Tanaka Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, by Pierre Huyghe Esteban Jefferson, by Martin Herbert Sun Kuixing, by Lu Yang Sofya Shpurova, by Aaron Angell Mataio Austin Dean, by Larry Achiampong Eimear Walshe, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Tanis S’eiltin, by Wendy Red Star Ingrid Hora, by Bani Abidi Julieta Gil, by Casey Reas Ana María López Gómez, by Shen Xin Natasha Tontey, by Adeline Chia 40

page 68 Natasha Tontey, Garden Amidst the Flame (still), 2022, hd film, 27 min. Courtesy the artist

WW W.G A L E R IA H IL A R I OG A LGUE RA .C OM IN F O @ G ALE R I AH I LAR I O G A LGUER A .CO M

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 72 Theaster Gates, by Cassie Packard Kent Monkman, by Evan Moffitt Boris Mikhailov, by Tai Mitsuji Reinhard Mucha, by Martin Herbert Ken Kiff, by Tom Morton Ayo Akingbade, by Alexander Leissle Singapore Biennale 2022, by Adeline Chia Martine Syms, by Pierre d’Alancaisez Rammellzee: Gothic Futurism, by Claudia Ross Symbionts, by Rachel Tang Caleb Hahne Quintana, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Majd Abdel Hamid, by Digby Warde-Aldam Strange Clay, by Eloise Hendy Henry Taylor, by Terry R. Myers Luz Lizarazo, by Oliver Basciano Nashashibi/Skaer, by Susannah Thompson dyor, by J.J. Charlesworth the 1970s_____, by Pádraic E. Moore Nalini Malani, by Neha Kale Caragh Thuring, by J.J. Charlesworth When We See Us, by Matthew Blackman Okayama Art Summit 2022, by Mark Rappolt

The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Gourmand’s Egg, reviewed by Fi Churchman Climate: Our Right to Breathe, edited by Hiuwai Chu et al, reviewed by Adeline Chia Spike Lee: Director’s Inspiration, reviewed by David Terrien I Am An Artist (He Said), by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones Florence Nightingale: Mortality and Health Diagrams, edited by rj Andrews, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak general intelligence 110

page 83 Rammellzee, The Bans of Steel with the Naked Eye, 1985, mixed media, spraypaint, acrylic and metal on canvas, 206 × 306 × 59 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Olga Balema

“There is no ‘outside of language’ for me, there is always a lot of language going on in my head, even if it’s nonlinear or incoherent”

The work of Olga Balema offers a satisfying defiance. She maintains a fluid approach to every aspect of her art: titles, forms, expectations and materials, which are occasionally actual fluids. Most often you will find her work resting on the ground, slumped or flat, and settling into the architecture. Her recent show Formulas, at Croy Nielsen in Vienna, is a collection of tilelike works, placed on the floor, where they appear to have been broken, then reassembled into elegantly inelegant collage. Her work brain damage (2019) is an installation of sundry spindly threads, stretched at ankle level: a patternless and beguiling web. Another work, Motherfucker (2016), exhibited at

the Baltic Triennial in 2018, features sagging breasts affixed to crudely painted ripped maps. (Balema was born in Ukraine, in 1984, and moved to the United States while a teenager.) For me, Balema’s works have always been characterised by mystery, especially her ongoing series of clear acrylic sculptures. Almost entirely transparent, they rest quietly between the wall and floor, without any interest in announcing their form. Looked at from a certain angle, in a certain light, they would not appear to exist at all. This translucence is often accented by Balema’s modest installations and bare context. Many of her works are untitled, and in the past

February 2023

she has not been particularly vocal about her work, doing no interviews and making few written statements. But in line with her resistance to consistency, other work carries elaborate titles (eg, Manifestations of our own wickedness and future idiocy, 2017), and at times in the interview below she even responded loquaciously. Initially when I reached out to Balema about an interview, she turned me down. But eventually we began to speak: first over the phone, then in a series of email exchanges. During this time, she was busy, intermittently sick and installing multiple shows around the world. Our exchange occurred over three seasons.

A Process of No Process Ross Simonini You said you were late to our conversation last week because you were installing video chat software. Did you manage to avoid video during the pandemic? Olga Balema I had to install it on my phone, my computer doesn’t have the right headphone jack. But yes, I was not zooming much during the pandemic. RS Do you use your computer much for your art? OB Some email. I write on the computer. RS Your work Computer [2021], a vast floor collage, somehow led me to assume that you weren’t much of a computer person. OB I’m not anti, I just don’t really get excited for new technology and try to keep the same devices for as long as I can. I did use a computer to make that work, an old, kind of dirty computer. RS That title does a lot of work for the piece. Are you careful about titles? OB Yes. There were a lot of titles swirling around in my mind. And Computer seemed like a nice followup to brain damage. I usually come up with titles during the making of a piece, or after, which is why a lot of things are not titled. If I’m struggling too much, I just leave it untitled. I feel like if I do have a title, I want

it to add something to the piece. Computer added a sense of humour that maybe would have been lacking otherwise. RS What kind of writing are you doing on the computer? OB Lectures, job applications, grant applications, interviews, press releases. Descriptions of my work for myself and the public. Emails. RS You mentioned interviews. Have you done others? OB This is my first ‘real’ interview. But I have done some fake interviews with myself. There is also a conversation I once did with another artist. RS Do you read about art or artists? OB Yes, sporadically. Recently I read a Duchamp biography I found on the street in my neighbourhood. Since I’m not moving around as much, I’m trying to buy more books. Reading about other artists can be really inspiring, but it’s also a double-edged sword, because you can end up getting swept up in ideas that have nothing to do with you. Getting hijacked for a second. For example, I did a lecture on the artist Maria Nordman at Dia [Art Foundation, New York]. I was supposed to deliver it in April 2020, so I was doing my research for it in the month before that. Then the pandemic hit and I put it aside and did not think about it for another year. In the meantime I was working on Computer and I was noticing that I had some

ideas in my head about it, some concerns that even though related to my past work somehow sat weird. Thoughts about how the audience would almost be finishing the work by wearing it out through movement, that without the audience the work does not really exist. Which partially came from working with a public institution and becoming more aware of how the audience in a way bears a lot of responsibility for its longevity and continued existence. But also in combination with other aspects of the piece, like bringing the piece outside and frottaging the sidewalks in New York. Here I recognised echoes of Nordman’s ideas, especially once I took up preparing the lecture again. It was an instance of not intentionally taking someone else’s work as a reference point, but the idea operating in a deep background. RS Does social conversation feel laboured for you? OB I mean… I don’t think I would be described by most people as someone who loves to talk. RS You sound like someone who doesn’t think in language. OB I would say that, but when I observe myself, I realise there is no ‘outside of language’ for me, there is always a lot of language going on in my head, even if it’s nonlinear or incoherent. It shapes how I see. RS Do you think with your hands?

Computer, 2021, mixed media, 425 × 100 cm. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist; Bridget Donahue, New York; and Camden Art Centre, London

ArtReview

OB I think with everything: my hands, my brain, my eyes. I can’t say that I only think with one part of my body. A lot of the work happens through association or a kind of visual or textural rhyming in the studio. Physically making things does help in that process. I can’t say that I have a set process of how I do things. Sometimes I come up with something I want to do in my head, and then I try to do it and then it kind of doesn’t work out and I go from there. Or it does work out and then it’s there. Or I abandon it. So it’s a process of no process. RS Are you resistant to pinning down your process? OB I’m just trying to be honest. A lot also depends on circumstance and factors outside of my control, like the aesthetics of the places I am showing, shipping constraints, etc. RS Do you purposely avoid repetition? OB I used to. There was a lot I wanted to try, and I made this resolution that I would keep my practice very open, make each body of work different from the previous. I found a lot of pleasure and energy in not being consistent, or maybe in trying to figure out a consistency that was more of a feeling than a set of visual attributes. Also I thought it was important that the work was difficult and uncomfortable to absorb. So I really made an effort towards this. Now I am making an effort to stay in the same register a bit more.

RS And why do you want that? OB I think the shift has been gradual and more internal. I was becoming overwhelmed with the amount of work I was doing and exhausted from the adrenaline rush of constantly trying to do something different and letting too many ideas in. The work became more reduced and quieter because I hit a point at which I was mentally unable to do things like going into the metal workshop and facing the fumes and dust. Also, practically, in New York it’s a true feat to have access to production facilities, especially if you want to do the work yourself and can’t pay a lot of money. So I think it’s partially an adaptation to moving to a very expensive, visually stimulating, loud, crowded city and a response to a need to feel more grounded. That said, ‘same register’ doesn’t mean repetition. I’m still searching for things. It’s important for me that the work feels alive.

OB The works at Barbara Weiss were ones I made in 2019 and did not install. So I was engaging with the same body of work, rather than repeating. RS Do you often show older work? OB I do, and I find it very rewarding, especially when I have not seen something for a long time. It often informs my current work and helps me to understand new ideas I have. I would love to do a show of just older works and see how they all speak to each other and interrelate. RS Repetition seems to create what we call style. How do you define style? OB At its best iteration, it’s being able to work with your limitations. At its worst, it’s being contrived.

Mrs. Hippy

RS Have you felt much resistance to that kind of experimental approach?

RS Do you enjoy making your work?

OB No, not too much from the people I work with. I established this way of working early on as part of my practice, so I assume the people who would resist just did not approach me.

RS Do you prefer the work you made with enjoyment rather than work in struggle?

RS Your most recent work at Barbara Weiss in Berlin is working with the same materials and gestures as brain damage. What does that kind of recapitulation do for you?

OB Sometimes.

OB It depends on when you ask me. Maybe when I’m first showing it I prefer the work I made with enjoyment, because maybe I’m more confident in it. But with some distance it ends up not mattering.

brain damage, 2019 (installation view, Bridget Donahue, New York, 2019). Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

February 2023

ArtReview

February 2023

above Formula 15, 2022, foam, latex, 25 × 24 cm. Photo: Kunst-dokumentation.com. Courtesy the artist and Croy Nielsen, Vienna preceding pages Manifestations of our own wickedness and future idiocy, 2017, Rowlux paper, steel, photographs, 254 × 518 × 203 cm. Courtesy the artist; Bridget Donahue, New York; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles

ArtReview

RS While working, is there a feeling you find yourself returning to more often than others? OB One of my favourite feelings when I work is when I have had a new idea and am rushing to execute it in one way or another. It feels very urgent in a fun way. RS When you were young, did you know you’d be an artist? OB Maybe from the age of thirteen I wanted to be an artist. But before that we moved around a lot, and things were looser for me. I moved to the US when I was fourteen and decided to study art once I was in college. Or ‘decided’ is maybe too strong a word. I started creeping towards becoming an artist. I had some really great teachers, Lee Running and Isabel Barbuzza, who blew my mind with what sculpture could be and were generally very encouraging. RS What were you making at thirteen? OB Drawings of dolphins and celebrities. I used makeup like eyeshadow and lipstick for drawing, to be experimental. I also made collages with iridescent stickers in order to put them on a copy machine and see how the iridescence would be reproduced by the machine. It was exciting to see the different images I would get from the same image sources. RS Where were you before the US? OB I was born in Lviv, Ukraine, and we moved to Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1991. We stayed there

for a year and moved back to Lviv, lived there for two years and then moved to Leipzig in Germany. After that we spent some time again in Lviv before moving to Ames, Iowa, in the US. RS How did all these places affect you differently? OB I had the idea to reinvent myself each time I moved, but I always stayed the same, except for the usual changes one encounters when growing up. It wasn’t always easy to adjust to constant change. Some places were more hostile than others. When I lived in Leipzig I was the most unhappy, but I also developed my interest in being creative then. I had a lot of time to myself and I would try to learn how to play guitar and record myself singing. I also spent a lot of time at music stores, listening to CDs at listening stations. There was a store called Mrs. Hippy that my friends’ older friends shopped at. It smelled very strongly of patchouli and a lot of goths shopped there. I wasn’t really allowed to buy stuff there, but I loved to go and look. There were a lot of different subcultures around like goths, punks, ravers, also neo-Nazis. Some of my schoolmates were already going to the Love Parade in Berlin at the age of thirteen. When I moved to Iowa at fourteen the scene was very different. The kids were much more wholesome in general, less angsty and edgy, more into sports and watching movies. My most formative years were spent in Ukraine. It’s where I first thought, spoke, heard

and saw, learned how to exist and relate to people, I’m not sure how to encompass that experience, because it’s the most distant and also most present. The tragedy of the war has made this distance/presence most palpable. I am safe from physical violence, but to know what a place looks, feels, smells, sounds like and now it is being blown up sent me into a different corner of reality, one I was unable to imagine before. And even with that understanding I can’t begin to approximate the reality and distress my family and the Ukrainian people are experiencing in the face of the brutality and violence of the war. RS Do you consider your history and identity to be a significant part of your work? OB I think it shapes the why and the how, but maybe not what I make. By that I mean my history and identity are not the subject matter of my work. My work concerns itself more with formal explorations, materials that I encounter in my present, art-historical concerns, feelings, etc. But I think how things end up coming out or what I am interested in has to do with my history and identity. I would not believe myself if I said my work has nothing to do with my history. There is no escaping yourself. It comes through. Ross Simonini is a writer, painter, and composer. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Computer, 2021, mixed media, 425 × 100 cm. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist; Bridget Donahue, New York; and Camden Art Centre, London

February 2023

Madrid

International Contemporary Art Fair

22-26 Feb

2023 Recinto Ferial

ifema.es

He is undeniably in possession of an aesthetic gift. The Liver King’s bloody, camp, operatically extreme photos and videos contain shades of Paul McCarthy’s grotesque culinary performances, Matthew Barney’s physical workouts, the blood and guts of Hermann Nitsch’s gory rituals, and wwe. Watch him handing his wife, the Liver Queen, a bunch of raw hearts on skewers as a Mother’s Day gift. Watch his blonde sons gobbling raw liver in the swimming pool of the family’s Texas mansion, blood smeared across their lilywhite cheeks. Watch him place a vegan burger on a table and destroy it with a shotgun. Watch his personal chef introduce a dish of ceviche testicles and a meat Christmas tree with kidneys for baubles. Look at his preposterous body and wild beard, listen to him preach about following the primal lifestyle and getting back to the barbarians we once were. But the real reason we know that the Liver King is an artist is because many of his claims turn out to be rooted in fiction. “Yes, I’m on steroids,” he confessed in a YouTube video uploaded on 2 December. A few days prior, emails leaked by a personal trainer who goes by the name of Vigorous Steve revealed that the absurdly ripped Paleo influencer, who has racked up over five million followers on TikTok and Instagram in less than two years by supposedly living off a diet of raw meat and weightlifting (or, per his website, ‘championing the ancient path to a more robust life… guided by the principle of Ancestral Living’), was in fact injecting over us$11,000 in growth hormones per month. If you’ve seen the Liver King, this news is about as surprising as the Pope coming out as Catholic. The Liver King’s pumped body bears the telltale signs of steroid use: soft little breasts on top of his pectoral muscles and a textbook case of bubble gut, which has caused his eight-pack to protrude like he’s four months pregnant. Welcome to the meat-and-muscle carnival. Yet the Liver King’s steroid use shouldn’t overshadow his very contemporary genius. In recent history, extreme performance-art has found a new and profitable home on social media, where a capitalist avant-garde of influencers is thriving: individuals who commit to exaggerated personas and are willing to go to great lengths, personally and aesthetically, to gain vast amounts of money and followers – things that performance artists have historically found themselves unable to achieve. The Liver King is

Life Imitates Art Who needs performance artists, asks Rosanna McLaughlin, when lifestyle gurus like the Liver King are doing it ‘for real’?

Instagram post by liverking, 29 November 2022

February 2023

at the forefront of this influencer movement, turbo-charging the familiar tenets of endurance, experimentation, shock factor and audience participation in order to rack up views and hawk his brand of ‘ancestral supplements’, which includes bottles of ‘Beef Thyroid’ pills for over us$50 a pop. His antics make Marina Abramović’s efforts look like a walk in the park. Think sitting down all day in a gallery for a few months is hard work? How about shooting ’roids, surfing with chains around your neck and eating raw organs with your wife and kids? A notable feature of the capitalist avant-garde is the spectacularisation of identity, and specifically gender – a smart move for gaining attention during an era in which gender is one of the preeminent preoccupations. The Liver King takes the caveman larping, protein-chugging clusterfuck of contemporary masculinity and dials it up to the max. If you thought his admission of steroid use might hurt his image, think again: framing himself as a champion of beta males – a kind of Jordan Peterson in a Tarzan bodysuit – the Liver King shows himself to be the type of guy who would go to any lengths to provide them with an alpha role-model. It would be a stretch to say that capitalist avant-gardists actively comment on the conditions of contemporary identity. Instead, as narcissistic exhibitionists with a dedication to the grift, they exploit the anxieties and desires that haunt the contemporary psyche for money and attention – the snake-oil salespeople of our time. The Liver King taps into the status anxiety of the white man in a woke world, his corny products and caveman schtick aimed at profiting from panic over the erosion of patriarchal values and conservative gender roles, and from the body dysmorphia that has spread like wildfire among ‘gymcels’ far and wide. A grifter and a charlatan he may be, but the Liver King is a talented artist, able to transform fears and fetishes into cartoonesque proportions, and to expose the many contradictions at the heart of the caveman fantasy. His ‘ancestral’ persona is a masterpiece: an extraordinary, humorous and dark portrait of the confused and chaotic entity known as contemporary man. Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in London

ARTS TECHNOLOGIES

GABRIEL MASSAN THIRD WORLD: THE BOTTOM DIMENSION Launching Summer 2023 Join the community

Serpentine is delighted to have selected Tezos, the energy-efficient blockchain, for Artist Worlds 2023.

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Gabriel Massan, Third World: The Bottom Dimension, 2022 [Video Game]. Featuring Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar & LYZZA. Image courtesy Gabriel Massan. Copyright Serpentine and Gabriel Massan.

Over the last year, the collision of art and nfts has been discussed largely in terms of sales and markets, especially given the ongoing decline in cryptocurrency values, but the more interesting conversations have been about the impact each has had on the other. Dialogues in the artworld that have wound through the last 60 years – on artist compensation, art criticism, contemporary aesthetics and how to contextualise them historically, institutional engagement with digital art, collective action, art centres and margins, and ecological concerns – have all been revisited in the context of this emergent technology. Blockchain technology values a decentralised and more equitable market practice, introducing a set of ideologies in keeping with many contemporary art concerns while also challenging certain practices. But as established artworld participants engaged with these issues, they introduced a discourse steeped in history and theory, to critique easy claims towards a better model proffered by some in the nft space. The collision, therefore, offered a critical lens on both. If the crypto and nft explosion of 2021 popularised the ideal of an intermediary-less, decentralised market for digital culture, the power of nft market players became evident in 2022. One of the most widely used marketplaces, Open Sea, banned two collections mimicking Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Meta Birkin collection at the end of 2021 for potential ip violations, and subsequent lawsuits foreshadowed ongoing regulation internationally. nfts – bits of code providing a unique id to a digital artefact such that it can be distinguished from other potentially duplicate versions – make possible the automation of resale payments, sales parameters and other unforeseen new features. In April 2020, led by former painter and generative artist Matt Kane, many crypto artists successfully established a 10 percent resale royalty at Super Rare that became standard across nft platforms, so there was a predictable outcry when Sudoswap launched in the summer of 2022 with no royalty framework, leading to a debate about platform and collector support of such payments. This fracturing of support for royalties has ramifications across the artworld as new businesses like Fairchain and Arcual seek to enable digital certificates and payment for secondary sales of physical works.

Crashed But Not Burned

Yes, the crypto bubble has burst, writes Charlotte Kent, but no, that doesn’t mean that nft culture no longer has anything ‘useful’ to contribute to art

top Jonas Lund, Invest in Jonas Lund, 2019 (installation view, Behind the Screen, 2019, kindl, Berlin) above Crypto image courtesy bybit (cc by 2.0)

February 2023

With the fall in cryptocurrency values, an exodus in trading cartoony collectibles left many wondering if nfts are finished. But the steady stream of projects and self-generated criticism reveals a new level of attention within the nft art scene. Two online magazines launched at the start of 2022, Outland and Right Click Save, led by former editors from established artworld magazines (Artnet’s Brian Droitcour at Outland and Flash Art’s Alex Estorick at Right Click Save), developing an intellectual discourse for these digital art projects that mainstream media have been unable to articulate. Critiquing projects by recognised artists as well as rising stars, they addressed the cultural and theoretical debates within the art and nft landscape. An iconography is slowly emerging that will likely guide how these digital artefacts fit into art’s discourse. In 2022 generative art became the ne plus ultra of digital art. Incorporating part of the cryptographic process in its creative code, generative art is seen as offering an artistic output native to blockchain, in contrast to so much work untethered to its contract on the blockchain; platforms like Art Blocks or Fxhash focus exclusively on this practice. One consequence of this has been the renewed interest in pioneer practitioners

of algorithmic computer art from the last 60 years, such as Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, Harold Cohen and Herbert Franke (who joined Twitter aged ninety-four, to be inundated by over 15,000 fans at his first message), who have become unexpected celebrities.

These artists have enjoyed museum and institutional exhibitions in the last year, providing a history of aesthetics and practices previously marginalised. Meanwhile, museums have shown scholarly interest about the possibility of nfts, with moma presenting salons and the newly rebranded Buffalo akg (formerly Albright-Knox Gallery) accessioning work from its Peer to Peer benefit auction. Commercial galleries have brought artists known for nfts into their roster, most notably when Pace launched a partnership with Art Blocks in June. The Tezos blockchain had lines winding beyond the booth for their talk series on nfts during this summer’s Art Basel, and nft-based online galleries like Feral File and Epoch are in their second year, critically lauded for the curated shows that rise above the jumble of platforms. Known artworld participants like Chris Lew, Dominique Lévy and Nato Thompson are involved with development studios – like Outland, Dminti or Artwrld (respectively) – to help artists into this new realm, frequently called Web3 for the way it seeks to disrupt the centralised black-box practices of Web2, the participatory internet exemplified by social media’s data extraction for corporate profit. In July Christie’s announced at its annual Art & Tech Summit, focused this year on blockchain, that it was launching a venture-capital fund to support art businesses engaging emergent technologies like blockchain. Institutional commitment is no longer in question. Distributed autonomous organisations (daos) emerged, espousing community through a decentralised and distributed voting mechanism enabled by tokens associated with the dao, though they often devolved into popularity cliques or investment corporations. Contributors associated with London-based gallery Furtherfield presented five years of research on daos as a mechanism for mutual support in the arts in Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (2022), a needed provocation for those on either side of blockchain’s hype or dismissal. The technology is spreading across industries but its disruption within art also means artists are thinking through its implications and

top Emily Xie, Memories of Qilin #50, 2022, nft. Collection Jeff Davis. Courtesy Buffalo akg above John Gerrard, Petro National #56 (China), 2022, nft. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Verso

ArtReview

providing visual case-studies that articulate its possibilities and problems; the artist Jonas Lund continues his Jonas Lund Token (jlt) dao (2018–), in which participants can vote on projects the artist would produce, thereby distributing control over his artistic practice; Unicorn dao is a collector community responding to the underrecognition of female-identifying and lgbtq+ artists in the nft space, much as occurs in the mainstream art market. Given its web-based network, nfts were perceived as levelling the market, but reports gave the lie to that assumption. The disparate pricing for female artists became an increasingly obvious problem, with projects like Unsigned (2022) working to raise awareness of unconscious bias in buying practices. The Global South remains painfully disregarded, with rare overlap to the North American and European scenes, despite the steady stream of nft conventions across these regions. Artist groups like Crypto Argentina or the accelerator Africa Here aim to increase interest and opportunities for artists whose sales have significant import for their native communities – no matter the market dips that fell the wealthy north. Lastly, the issue of the environmental impact of the most widely used blockchain, Ethereum, was put to rest through the Merge (when it transitioned in August from ‘proof of work’ to the far less carbon-intensive ‘proof of stake’). With the ecological effect of nfts now in check, the hypocrisy of the mainstream art-market ignoring its carbon impact becomes more evident. nfts will neither save the world nor destroy it, but the fractures in its market haven’t impeded what it reflects back about the contemporary artworld, revealing fixes needed in both. If, to date, we have witnessed a collision of values and practices, then increased involvement by major participants in both contemporary and crypto art with each other’s institutions and ideas suggests a conversation less focused on denigration or market potential in the year to come. A more creative conversation would be welcome on both sides. Charlotte Kent is a writer and academic specialising in visual culture

Why should I stop, why? Birds have gone to seek their blue way – Only Voice Remains (1966), Forough Farrokhzad (trans Sholeh Wolpé) “Once again I’m on the street with friends and all of a sudden there are no familiar faces. It all fades and I am just running towards whatever I think might save me. I scream and then I hide. There are fires and gunshots. I get shot with a paintball, which means the regime has a target on me, and the many layers of clothes that I have on are covered in paint. I try to take them off but there is no way I can do that. Then I wake up in bed, thousands of miles away from Iran, still shocked and I can’t breathe and I remember that I am not in danger. I am not on the streets in Iran chanting, and to know I am not there doesn’t make me feel any better. I call my friends, I go to work and I even go shopping, but I am not here, I am miles away.” Shirin S.

Seeing Red

Artists and activists Shirin S. & Şahane B. watch Iran’s blood protests in hope and horror

“I always do a morning meditation, and I try to be good and not check Instagram before I enter into this calm space. But the other day I couldn’t help myself – I checked and the first post I see is that Mohsen Shekari, an innocent twenty-three-year-old protester in Iran, thousands of miles away, was hanged to death by the Islamic Republic. The image of a body dangling, fighting for life, squirming in the air and then slowly going limp cuts through my mind. I put my phone down and enter into a meditative space, but the shadow of death hangs with me, haunting me all day. I finish my meditation and return to Instagram, and immediately a video of his mother wailing pain from the depths of her soul stops my scrolling. I sit in this space, not sure what to do. I move on with my day, confused and with a sadness that weighs me down.” Şahane B.

These days I experience a mix of emotions: hope, despair, fear, courage… but the strongest emotion I experience is rage. After witnessing the devastating letdown of the 2009 [Green Movement], I was consumed with despair for years. But this time, it is rage that drives me forward. A rage that has slowly dissolved within me to become fuel for taking action, whether virtually or out on the streets or in other ways. I’m invigorated to see that the fire that was dying under the cold ashes is burning brightly again and has become a force for change regardless of the outcome. All this to say, now is not the time for grief but a time for rage.

* As artists and activists in diaspora, we understand the consequences of what happens to artists and activists in Iran if they are caught. Visual art can break through the language barriers, broadcasting messages to a broader audience. In a world in which the individual artist is encouraged to sign their name and claim their work, some of the most powerful art coming out of today’s revolution in Iran is unsigned and anonymous.

Since the Second Iranian Revolution started on 16 September, following the killing of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa (Jina) Amini by the socalled morality police, artists in Iran have created protest art and shown it in public. These gestures support resistance to the brutal Islamic regime. In solidarity with the artists, we, the writers of this article, choose to remain anonymous as well. Sharing our experience with others involved, we know we are not the only ones. Instead, we hope to become part of the broader collective consciousness. As we learned recently, rappers Saman Yasin and Toomaj Salehi are both on death row for their involvement in the protests. Anonymity is a way to protect all of us. The most recent memorable act of dissent, known as the Green Movement, took place in 2009. It was centred on the desire for a recount, following that year’s presidential election; three million people turned out on the streets of Tehran hoping to reform the existing system. By 2010 the Islamic Republic had shut it down. What makes the current revolution different from that of 13 years ago is that there’s no wish for reform within the system. According to anonymous sources in Iran who we contacted for this story, protesters believe that the only option now is to overthrow the regime. People who are protesting today remember how they felt during the days of the Green Movement. As part of the ongoing ‘Diary of a Revolution’ posts on the account @from____iran, a person named Amir from Karaj wrote the following on 3 November 2022:

Still from a video of Islamic Azad University students in Tehran protesting the death of Mahsa Amini. Posted to Twitter by @Shayan86 on 22 October 2022

ArtReview

We diasporic Iranians find ourselves glued to social media and the news, following intensely

what is happening thousands of miles away. Despite the distance, the emotional impact feels unbearable. Shortly after the regime murdered Mahsa Amini, it attempted to shut down the internet. This is a technique it uses regularly as a way to suppress information and silence voices of dissent. This time it did not work. Gen Z found a way to bypass it – no one really knows how – and not only in terms of information but also in terms of live streams of protests, faces of the murdered and documentation of anonymous protest-art. All spread through social media. The people would not be silenced. The voices of dissent rose to the top. Bright-red blood is the first symbolic gesture that we noticed bleeding out through the internet. On 7 October, around three weeks after the regime murdered Mahsa Amini, the symbolic blood of protesters flooded Tehran’s fountains. In an act of resistance and public art, the water of fountains in Tehran was dyed red to symbolise the bloodshed of innocent people who continue to stand up to the unlawful regime in Iran. According to bbc Persian, the fountains were drained, likely by the unlawful regime, but the blood-red residue remained. Similar actions happened in Mashhad and Isfahan. Blood took on another symbolic gesture as students painted their hands red and covered the halls of the University of Tehran in handprints. Similarly, on a bridge over a highway in Isfahan, women hung a banner with red handprints and a map of Iran outlined with a woman’s hair. As they unfurled the banner, they chanted, “The next one is one of us”. Elsewhere, red handprints and bloodied nooses appeared on trees, and storefronts were covered in red paint. In Tehran, a sculpture of only arms and legs was tied around a street pole with the name ‘Siyasi Alley’. (In Farsi, siyasi means politics.) A photo of the artwork was posted on Twitter on 1 November, but this is not just the idea of being shackled to politics. The sculpture references a man named Khodanoor Lejei, who is part of the Baloch minority, one of the most oppressed communities in Iran. Lejei was from the southeastern city of Zahedan, an area that the Islamic Republic targets intensely following years of unrest. In an attempt to humiliate Lejei after he got into a fight with a Basij paramilitary force, the Islamic

Republic tortured and wounded him. When he was thirsty, they positioned a cup of water in front of him such that it was beyond his reach. They tied him to a public flagpole and published this photo of him. Instead of inciting fear, the photo inspired more protests and outrage against the regime. His photo became one of the symbols of the current revolution in Iran, uniting different minorities such as Kurds, Arabs, Baloch, Bahai, Jews, Christians, Lurs, Turks and many others. After his death in the ‘Bloody Friday’ protests in Zahedan, the picture went viral. After the symbolic sculpture was removed a few days later, someone came and covered the bottom of the street pole and the ground in red, which appeared in a new photo posted on 6 November. The red is not just the blood of the protesters – it also represents the desire to end the bloody regime for women, a desire for life and freedom. On the streets of Iran, handmade stencils of the faces of the girls, women, kids and men that the regime has murdered keep appearing. They are Nika Shahkarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh and Hadis Najafi. They are Ghazaleh Chelavi, who was shot by Revolutionary Guards while filming the protests; her last words were, “Don’t fear, don’t fear, we are together!” They are Minoo Majidi, sixty-two, and a mother of two, killed in Kermanshah by Revolutionary Guards. They are Nima Nouri, seventeen, killed at the memorial for Hadis Najafi. They are Mehrshad Shahidi, nineteen, a celebrity chef who was beaten to death a day before his twentieth birthday. There are many more. The list keeps growing; the stencils keep appearing. As hardline Iranian lawmakers urge the death penalty for many protesters, artists create figures of mullahs being hanged in response to the Islamic Republic’s brutal execution policies. Since news of some of the arrested protesters’ execution sentences has surfaced, the hangingmullah figures multiply. They hang from trees, and they hang from bridges, limp and dead and blowing in the wind. These public artworks portray the cruelty of what the Islamic Republic does to those who engage in antigovernment activities. Through this art, the Islamic Republic is now confronted with the image of it hanging itself. Posted to Twitter by @rrrrrrramin on 31 October 2022

February 2023

Shirin S. & Şahane B. are pseudonyms

Image courtesy of Brynley Odu Davies

Kemi Onabulé The Lunatics Opening

Saturday 11 February 3 - 6pm 11 February - 3 March 2023

Guts Gallery HQ Unit 2 Sidings House, 10 Andre Street, Hackney, London, E8 2AA Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm

FutureGreats

the earth 39

Introduction Welcome to the one issue of ArtReview in which the artists do all the work. What? Oh yes. Sure. What ArtReview means is that, of course, while they do ‘the work’ normally – the work as in the stuff that ArtReview critics write about – they don’t do all of the labour that goes into the magazine. The criticising bit. But for this issue they do. Most of it anyway. Or something like that. So welcome to Future Greats. But – hey – it’s also the time of year (the beginning of one – whether it’s a lunar or calendar version; ArtReview’s partial to the Gregorian, but that might be a result of conditioning and the language of publishing schedules) when one’s supposed to be looking to the future, what with having recently got rid of the past. Although obviously that’s just an illusion. Or a convention. The past never leaves us. Ever. Even once you’ve tossed last year’s calendar in the trash. And while ArtReview’s at it, perhaps the real point, besides the work and the looking forward, is that convention is, in a way, the one thing in which this issue is uninterested. At least that’s what ArtReview likes to think. In the interests of newness. Of futurology. Of progress. Whatever that is. So, yeah, for this issue ArtReview invited a bunch of artists and writers you’ve probably heard of to nominate artists that you likely haven’t heard of who are worthy of our (that’s ArtReview and you – we’re in this together) attention. But haven’t got it as yet. The attention, that is. It’s a list of artists who are inspiring other artists, or of work that will be setting agendas in the years to come. An invitation to pay attention to something you didn’t know you should be paying attention to. Even though paying attention is the duty of every art lover all of the time. Of course, there’s no way this Future Greats stuff is a science. There’s no formula for success (there’d be no need for ArtReview or any other magazine then, and where’s the fun in that?); but neither is it completely a gut feeling. At least ArtReview believes that if you ask people who are doing interesting things about interesting things, there’s a chance you might be speaking to their sphere of expertise. After all, the whole art business (not literally the business side of art, mind you, the art thing) is about a willingness to let yourself be engaged. To enter another person’s or nonperson’s way (gotta be careful these days) of thinking and being. To be taken someplace else. To dump your shit and wallow in someone else’s. So, in the pages that follow you’ll meet people who grow plants in their tear ducts. People who tip glasses of milk off staircases that double-up as hats. Two-headed hermaphrodites. Tigers hanging out on hook-up apps. Hedge-witch nostalgia. People who make things that you might never consciously describe as artworks, that might not even be artworks, but that cause you to dwell on the question of what an artwork might actually be. Or what you think it should be.

ArtReview

Renan Marcondes

selected by Ana Mazzei 42

Ava Woo Kaufman

selected by Buck Ellison 44

Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni 46

selected by Pierre Huyghe

Mayank Austen Soofi selected by Dayanita Singh 48 Hyogen no Genba Chosadan 49 Esteban Jefferson Sun Kuixing Sofya Shpurova Mataio Austin Dean Eimear Walshe Tanis S’eiltin

selected by Martin Herbert 50 selected by Lu Yang 52 selected by Aaron Angell 54 selected by Larry Achiampong 56

selected by Chris Fite-Wassilak 58 selected by Wendy Red Star 60

Ingrid Hora Julieta Gil

selected by Koki Tanaka

selected by Bani Abidi 62 selected by Casey Reas 64

Ana María Gómez López selected by Shen Xin 66 Natasha Tontey selected by Adeline Chia 68

Renan Marcondes

selected by Ana Mazzei

Leite derramado (detail), 2020, photographic series

ArtReview

Azul-Jardim, 2022, performance view with Rafael Carrion and Raul Rachou, 25th Cultura Inglesa Festival, São Paulo, 2022. Photo: Cac Bernardes

How is it possible to create an idea of presence that is invisible? Or that neatly in a kind of miniature museum. These beguiling actions see the is as close as possible to absence? Renan Marcondes produces long- body in a ritualised exchange between the public and the performer, term projects and series, each hovering in a zone somewhere between with minimal movement and a sense of what resides after the movethe visual and performing arts, that demonstrate an interest in the ment has ended. materiality of human bodies in a state of rest, passivity or powerlessIn Azul-Jardim (Blue Garden, 2022), Marcondes, in partnership with ness. This translates into situations in which bodies are affected or dancer Raul Rachou, takes inspiration from the film Blue (1993) by Derek constrained by sculptures built specifically to be worn; or in situa- Jarman to reflect on the different meanings of the colour blue in English tions in which the performer’s body has little or no agency, needing and Portuguese, with the aim of emptying the word of all meaning. In to be moved or stimulated by other bodies or forces. ‘I show images Jarman’s film the only visual phenomenon present is a monochrome where a body is expected and bodies where an image is expected,’ blue shot that lasts from beginning to end (79 minutes). In the perforthe Brazilian artist says. mance, a young dancer acts alongside Rachou, moving between the A certain passivity is a guiding element of the work, and the situ- personas of lover, of caregiver and of Rachou himself, albeit a manyations in which the artist places himself and years-younger version. The work revels in Renan Marcondes is a visual artist, performer the performers are usually pathetic, absurd paradox: blue (or ‘the blues’) signifies sadness; and researcher whose work addresses the genealogy of performance art. He is a founding member of in Azul-Jardim blue becomes synonymous and repetitive. In O maior museu do mundo (The contemporary dance group Pérfida Iguana and a PhD with joy (“everything blue, everybody naked”, Greatest Museum in the World, 2019) a body candidate investigating neoliberalism, performance and presence. “everything blue, Adam and Eve and parais lying down. The viewer observes as the Marcondes lives and works in São Paulo performer moves slowly and makes contact dise”, the dancer and Rachou sing). Ironically, Ana Mazzei is a sculpture and performance artist who lives and with a series of small, singular organic objects works in São Paulo. Her 2018 performance Ophelia, with Regina the end product of this monochrome perfor– a tooth, an eyelash, earwax – placing them mance is myriad meanings. Parra, was recently staged at the Americas Society, New York

February 2023

Ava Woo Kaufman

selected by Buck Ellison

Selvage, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy South Willard, Los Angeles

Ava Woo Kaufman works in textiles, photography, printmaking and place within a long lineage of art production. It’s humble, also, painting. Meeting her when I was fifteen was one of my greatest bless- because Ava has over the past decade produced an incredible array ings: a cool older girl at my high school who looked with compas- of works. sion at my ‘radical’ photographs of my boyfriend in the bathtub. She Mercifully for Ava, my practice has evolved alongside our friendunderstood that we made things as teens as a way to survive. What ship. My weekly call to her studio in Point Reyes, California, is a highAva’s work reminds us of, though, is that people have always made light. I admire her commitment to craftsmanship and to creating works that stand on their own two feet, no press release needed. Ava things as a means of survival. Here is a text Ava wrote about her work for an exhibition at South never ‘forgets’ to make the work, even if recent weavings trace such Willard, in Los Angeles, 2022: ‘The work on view stems from a decade- complex histories as Young Brothers (the monopolistic shipping long practice of engaging with found textiles and materials. To put that company that controls almost every product sold on the Hawaiian into perspective: the undulating rock formaIslands) to the link between the Isleta Pueblo Ava Woo Kaufman, who lives and works tions found in Central Park are 500 million cross and dragonflies. Ava eschews any in Point Reyes, California, and New York, graduated from ucla Arts in 2008 and cofounded the company Buena years old; the Coast Miwok inhabited tamálparticularities of genre or framework. The Vista in 2012. She works in textiles, photography, chosen materials are from everywhere and húye (Point Reyes) for 10,000 years.’ printmaking and painting. In 2022 South Willard, Los Angeles, To put things in perspective. Here is a humnowhere, circulating aimlessly until applied mounted an exhibition of her work bleness from which all artists could learn, somewhere with tenderness and affecBuck Ellison is a conceptual photographer who lives tion. Like teenagers adrift until they begin especially us white boys. Not a cloying, false and works in Los Angeles. His work was included humility, but the gravity of knowing our making together. in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, New York

ArtReview

Selvage, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy South Willard, Los Angeles

Untitled (adder dragonfly), 2021, vintage Wamsutta Mill cotton textile, bamboo, gesso, gouache, 47 × 27 × 1 cm. Courtesy South Willard, Los Angeles

February 2023

Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni

selected by Pierre Huyghe

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni live and work in Paris. I first encountered Fabien and Raphaël’s exhibition. Reality becomes porous to fiction, Their work has been exhibited recently at Mona, Tasmania; work almost ten years ago when they were and thus prolongs the ‘live action’ idea that is the Liverpool Biennial; the Biennale de Lyon; just starting on a series titled The Unmanned present in all their film-performances. They the Okayama Art Summit; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; (2014–22) – a colossal body of episodic works and Casino Luxembourg. In 2022 they published Fabien Giraud call these unbounded environments ‘concrete that they have now completed. I was struck & Raphaël Siboni: The Unmanned, with Mousse Publishing fictions’, a term that echoes French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s characterisation by the sheer ambition of the project, the timePierre Huyghe is a multimedia systems artist based in New York who in 2022 launched a permanent installation at Kistefos of philosophy as the production of a ‘maybe’ scales through which they were thinking Museum sculpture park in Jevnaker, Norway and the alien perspectives from which they so radical that it is able to ‘transform our allowed us to look back at our present. subjectivities in the present’. Their films – even though they lure viewers into thinking that This material operativity of fiction is at the heart of their new they are watching the narratives of specific histories (of computation, project – The Feral, which is set on a hill in the middle of rural France. of capital, etc…) – are not about anything; they have no story to tell, no There, forests, streams and fields as well as humans will become the meaning to disclose. Rather, they offer an experience of the contin- support for the development of an inhuman intelligence over the gency of meaning, exposing the fragile and reassuring enclosures next 1,000 years. Each year, artists will be invited to contribute to its we build to separate ourselves from an indifferent and meaningless training by transforming the site and its inhabitants – thus always outside world. pushing further the limit of the project’s hypothesis: the more domesMore recently their work has taken another dimension; fictions ticated a synthetic intelligence gets, the more ‘feral’ we and our world are no longer only exhibited, but take place in the very space of the become in return.

The Everted Capital (Katabasis), 2022 (installation view, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’Art Contemporain). Photo: Thomas Lannes. © the artists

ArtReview

from top Stills from five episodes of The Unmanned, 2014–22, 1997 – The Brute Force, 2014, hd video, 26 min; 1922 – The Uncomputable, 2016, hd video, 26 min; 1542 – A Flood, 2018, hd video computed in real-time by generative adversarial and convolutional neural networks, 26 min; The Everted Capital (585 bce–2022), 2022, hd video and live camera. © the artists

February 2023

Mayank Austen Soofi selected by Dayanita Singh Mayank Austen Soofi is a writer, photojournalist and regular Mayank Austen Soofi has created a new form on But here is someone who is documenting and contributor to the Hindustan Times as well as the author Instagram under the handle thedelhiwalla, creating an archive of the city, and Soofi also of the book Nobody Can Love You More (2012) understands that in order to do that, one has combining photography and literature. He uses and the blog and books The Delhi Walla. An exhibition to go out every day and do the work and be literature to transform the image and equally of Soofi’s work, Somewhere in Delhi, with designer Anna Gerotto, was on show at various venues in Venice in 2016 committed to the subject over a long period use the image to nudge you towards another of time, days, weeks, months, years, even reading of the literature. On top of this, Soofi Dayanita Singh is a photographic artist who lives and works in Delhi. A recent solo exhibition, Sea of Files, decades. Soofi documents everything: from has really found a way of connecting an audiwas shown at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, in 2022 someone who might be selling bangles or ence to parts of Delhi that aren’t invisible, but perhaps ignored. He’s out every night, taking photos and documenting teddy bears, to a street recycler, to someone who’s at a funeral ground. everyday life. In the morning you’ll find stories on your Instagram He’s been documenting Delhi on Instagram for about four years now feed, which is a combination of the photograph and a caption that (his blog has been running much longer), creating this living archive might be directly related to the image, or it might include a quote from of the city – particularly Old Delhi, which is a world apart from writers like Marcel Proust, Arundhati Roy or Jane Austen. Sometimes posh South Delhi. The result is that he is introducing the people on the caption will be on a completely different tangent to what’s being the street to a new audience – one that’s not limited to the artworld, pictured, which adds depth to how we understand the falseness of but which is interested in Delhi as a place with many different comthe image. This way of finding a form on Instagram, his own kind munities. He pictures people who are overlooked, who are considered part of the lower-class, but day-after-day he tells their stories of language for the image-based app, is very exciting to me. At a certain point the genre of documentary photography went through image and text with dignity (where he can, he seems to try to from capturing rural scenes to cities, to being about the ‘friend include their names – whether they’re a chai seller or a tuktuk driver). circle’, and then eventually the home – its remit seemed to shrink. He’s a medium between these different worlds.

Instagram post by Mayank Austen Soofi, posting as thedelhiwalla, 2 January 2023

ArtReview

Hyogen no Genba Chosadan (Investigating Discrimination, Harassment, and Inequality in the Arts) selected by Koki Tanaka

Tokyo press conference at which idhia members (from left, Chiki Ogiue, Kanoko Tamura, Koji Fukada, Hikaru Morimoto and Nodoka Odawara) present the White Paper on Gender Balance, 24 August 2022

The artworld sucks. At the moment, both sociopolitical and market- balance survey in 2022, which led to the publications of detailed led forms of artmaking are moving towards a kind of populism, being reports. The group makes use of quantification, but here it is a tool led there by a numbers game. On the one hand, the performance of for change. Of the 1,449 respondents to the harassment survey (62 social justice in art is moving towards quantification through social percent were female), 82 percent reported being subjected to some media and crowdfunded participation, and on the other hand, the form of sexual harassment or power harassment. Just under 10 percent market is moving towards ever-greater quantification through pricing reported sexual assault. The gender-balance survey disclosed that and its own social media attention. Museums are similarly obsessed there are more men on the jury and among the winners of prizes for with attendance numbers and online ‘interaction’. In this sense, art literature, theatre and art, while a survey on the current state of art is pervaded by a numerical desire, and art practice, for the moment, schools showed that 73.5 percent of students are women, while just cannot resist such a wave of populist quantification. Art activism over 80 percent of professorships are men. In Japan, where the patriar(media performance) and nft (speculation), which are optimised for chal society remains very strong, the position of women is still fragile. This is even more pronounced in the creative field. this situation, appear to be polar opposites, but they are the same. But there is still hope. Even in Japan. The Hyogen no Genba The survey conducted by the collective indicates that the artworld Chosadan (Investigating Discrimination, in Japan has long been uneven. But the reality Current Members of Hyogen no Genba Chosadan (Investigating Harassment, and Inequality in the Arts, that this survey makes clear is a key for possible Discrimination, Harassment, and Inequality in the Arts) are idhia), a self-initiated collective of cultural future change. For Documenta 15, the slogan Yuko Okada, Nodoka Odawara, Emiko Kasahara, Nao Kimura, workers – including actors, filmmakers, Kyun Chome, Kanoko Tamura, Michiko Tsuda, Eri Terada, Niina was ‘Make friends, not art’. This is definitely translators and artists – was formed in 2020 Hashida, Kaya Hanasaki, Koji Fukada, Maya Masuda, Tomohiro not the time to be making just friends. What we Miyakawa, Aya Momose, Hikaru Morimoto and Haruka need is to renew the infrastructure of the artto improve Japan’s creative-labour environMoriyama. Their reports are available at hyogen-genba.com ment in art and culture in general, including world. Following institutional critique, I would Koki Tanaka is a performance, video and installation artist contemporary art and film. A harassment call what we need infrastructural critique. based in Tokyo whose work was included in the 2022 survey was conducted in 2021 and a gender idhia is just the beginning. Ghost 2565 performance triennial, Bangkok

February 2023

Esteban Jefferson

selected by Martin Herbert

Gratuite, 2019, oil on linen, 107 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Columns, New York

If Esteban Jefferson’s paintings appear unfinished, that’s because the subjects named, Jefferson discovered, and habitually ignored by visprocesses they address are unfinished. If they work to make people itors) are rescued from racialised erasure. While the white museand things seen, it’s because they weren’t seen before. The New York- umgoers around them – often attentive only to their smartphones born artist’s current show at his hometown’s 303 Gallery, for example, – are made to fade like spectres, the statues are attentively painted, titled May 25, 2020 in reference to the murder of George Floyd by a animated with strong and searching facial expressions to deliver a Minneapolis police officer, features canvases in which objects and loca- form of Black portraiture that restores the dead and diminished to life tions of subsequent protest – such as defaced colonial monuments – and dignity. In the videos that accompany his shows, Jefferson trades swim into vivid focus and colour out of a pale and misty surrounding his paintings’ composure and coiled anger for something more openly urban landscape. Jefferson’s earlier body of anxious: a short two-screen film component of Esteban Jefferson’s solo exhibition work, Petit Palais (2019–21), which gave him Petit Palais finds him training his video camera May 25, 2020 is currently on view at 303 Gallery, New York. a breakthrough show at White Columns in on the statues – while everyone else ignores His work has also been included in recent group exhibitions estamos bien: La Trienal (2021, 2019, the year he graduated from Columbia them – and rifling through a museum booklet, El Museo del Barrio, New York), Open Call (2021, The Shed, University’s mfa programme, also stratlooking in vain for names. Such works, like his New York) and Art on the Grid (2020, Public Art Fund, egised to create conditions of visibility, paintings, have a honed and urgent legibility New York), and was presented in Petit Palais, a solo albeit differently. In a fleet-footed decolonial that aligns with his art’s rhetorical drive: if you exhibition at White Columns, New York, in 2019. Jefferson lives and works in New York reversal, busts of Africans in the eponymous missed what’s going on here before, Jefferson Paris museum (sloppily attributed, with no suggests, you can’t miss it now. Martin Herbert is associate editor of ArtReview

ArtReview

November 11, 2020, 2022, oil and graphite on linen, 229 × 183 cm. Photo: Anna Morgowicz. Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

February 2023

Sun Kuixing

selected by Lu Yang

Sun Kuixing is based in Tokyo. Recent performances hanging midair without anyone apparently I really liked Sun Kuixing’s graduation work of her work include Swim Lanes #2, Tank Shanghai, 2021, using them, gives the audience the illusion NewHeart Rehearsal, which was presented at and Prophet #1, Goethe Institut Tokyo, 2020 that there really is a spiritual entity or a life Tokyo University of the Arts in 2022. This live Lu Yang is a digital artist based in Tokyo whose solo exhibition in a parallel universe in the world that the vr performance work combined virtual reality Vibratory Field, 2023, is currently on view at Kunsthalle Basel glasses represent. Whether you might define and gaming, with interactions between live performers and a videogame that the artist had created for the work. this as theatrical work or a game work, it is impossible to perfectly I was amazed at the sense of diverse layers and the natural use of multi- express the breakthrough of the piece: the reality and illusory, the media tools, a fractured universe created between the real-time perfor- drama in the play, the dream in the dream, the viewer and the object mance and the movements within the game. At points, rooms filled to being watched – all these boundaries are blurred. It’s a complex blurthe brim with mannequinlike figures can be seen in the game, with ring that seems to take place across Sun’s live event-works, whether the players needing to recite lines in German from East German play- linking of performers in Tokyo and at Tank Shanghai in Swim Lanes #2 wright Heiner Müller’s short, symbolic play about love, Herzstück (2021), collaborating live to create a surreal, mixed-media installation, (1983), in order to proceed in the game. The performers on the stage or delivering the performance-lecture Prophecy #1 (2020) at the Goetheand the spirits in virtual reality are both unfolding in front of the audi- Institut Tokyo, which linked medical and religious imagery in the ence, realising the possibility of two parallel worlds being presented wake of the pandemic. An exhilarating mix that I hope will have the together. In particular, the presence of vr glasses on their own, opportunity to be presented on more stages!

NewHeart Rehearsal, 2022 (performance views, including vr, gaming and live interaction, Tokyo University of the Arts, 2022)

ArtReview

NewHeart Rehearsal, 2022 (performance view, including vr, gaming and live interaction, Tokyo University of the Arts, 2022)

February 2023

Sofya Shpurova

selected by Aaron Angell

Friend of a friend, 2019, glazed stoneware, 31 × 10 × 15 cm. Courtesy Andy Keate and Troy Town, London

untitled, 2020, oil on cotton, 205 × 165 cm

ArtReview

Attachment issues, 2021, oil on linen, 142 × 160 cm

Britain is wyrd again, and the current outlook of a lot of graduate art in Troy Town, the London pottery I direct, producing sculpture that was this country seems soused in an agnostic, hedge-witch, woodsmoke- shown alongside largescale oil paintings for her first solo exhibition and-fungus nostalgia that shows no sign of abating. Often problem- (Low Human Activity, at the Holden Gallery in Manchester) later in 2019. atically faux-naïf at best and tendentiously anti-intellectual at worst, That exhibition was fantastic, and Sofya’s work is a thing of rare the produce has been of extremely mixed quality. But this aesthetic and cryptic beauty. Autobiographical but not annoying, ‘folk’ but not tendency has its stars and shining planets, and Sofya Shpurova is patronising, occult but understanding, sugary but aggressively incoamong the shiniest. herent. Oh, and she can really paint and produce surfaces in a way that I was introduced to Sofya’s work in 2019 at the Slade School of Fine feels alchemical and nuanced, which means that the 2d works merge Art ba degree show in London. The show was an astonishing riot of easily with her sculptural output in difficult materials like ceramic. pagan imagemaking, and it seemed perhaps that under the influence of Works such as The clay veined girl holds trembling skin (me as a retort) (2019) tutors like Alastair Mackinven all the paintare full of this real wholegrain vitality that Sofya Shpurova is a New York-based multidisciplinary ers there had gone mad and were now doing sings as much at scale as it does in her jewellike artist working in painting and ceramics. A graduate of London ucl Slade School of Fine Art in 2019, this sort of chthonic, fin-de-siècle history miniatures and works on paper. Sofya is one of Shpurova had a solo show of work at Holden Gallery painting, conjuring the spirit of Odilon those people who was clearly born to paint, in Manchester that same year and has been shown Redon and Louis Eilshemius, rather than born to make images and to live in them. If in group exhibitions more recently any painter of this century. Sofya’s gnarly, this country had any justice she would be comAaron Angel is a ceramics artist based in London deeply personal work stood out among missioned to paint the royals. And their dogs. whose work was included in the 2022 exhibition Strange Clay, much else I saw. She then came on residency at She’s really good at dogs. at the Hayward Gallery, London

February 2023

Mataio Austin Dean

selected by Larry Achiampong

Mataio Austin Dean’s work has been exhibited in and response’. The ‘call’ being the right (and The first time I came in contact with Mataio New Contemporaries (2021), and his writing has been responsibility) to question and interrogate Austin Dean’s art practice was at the Slade published in The Socialist Review and ucl’s history; or using, in his words, ‘Marxism as a School of Fine Art, London, in 2019 as a visitThe Poetry Shed. His singing features in Larry Achiampong’s ing lecturer. Understandably students don’t tool for emancipatory praxis’. film Wayfinder (2022) tend to have an approach that is quite as The ‘response’ is plural – in one guise, Larry Achiampong is an artist who lives and works figured out at ba level, however the humble Austin Dean uses draughtsmanship through in London and Essex yet relaxed confidence with which Austin detailed etchings and largescale drawings Dean spoke and presented (even performing vocally at one point, that uncannily blend visions of the past and present. In another he brings to life centuries-old folksongs and child ballads with a deep which I will get to) suggested otherwise. His work takes on varied methods and approaches – often rooted and warm voice that commands your silence and the attention of your in research and historical narrative, highlighting while re-examining ears. In current and future times of crisis and polarisation we will issues such as colonial histories and workers’ rights, sometimes inter- need holders and tellers of stories, both of realities known and those twined with his Guyanese heritage and familial stories. Where I find that are yet to be uncovered or imagined. Austin Dean’s work, both in a kinship with Austin Dean’s practice is in the embodiment of ‘call and outside of the art scene, will be needed in that future.

The Jumbee sugar cane and the Cutty Wren, 2021, performance with musical elements, singing and utterances, as part of an installation including an enlarged etching printed on Tyvek, etchings, drypoints, inkjet prints, Guyanese purpleheart and wamara woods, and hessian sacks. Performers: Mataio Austin Dean (left), Daniel S. Evans (right), Nick Granata. Photo: Brad Gilbert. Hessian sacks by Ula Taylor-Reilly

ArtReview

My Grandfather Carried the Sacks of Flour, 2020, lithograph on paper, approx 47 × 35 cm

The Jumbee sugar cane and the Cutty Wren, 2020, enlarged etching printed on Tyvek, two hessian sacks sewn with red nylon thread, dimensions variable

February 2023

Eimear Walshe

selected by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Land Cruiser, 2022, single-channel video, 23 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, single-channel video, 38 min. Courtesy the artist and Arts Council Collection / Bailiúchán an Chomhairle Ealaíon

Sex lorries, retired-racehorse boyfriends, overbearing tigers found mode, contemplating the legal and practical obstacles to having public, on hookup apps and roadside threesomes fill the stories that shape outdoor sex. This is accompanied by a history of Ireland’s nineteenthIrish artist Eimear Walshe’s surreal and razor-sharp writings, perfor- century Land League, which attempted to reform land distribution mances and videos. Such proclivities are raised to explore how every- away from large, private estates, told with stick puppets, snappy edits body’s touch and thrust are already tangled in a web of legal and and humorous asides, all the while with sounds of cars whizzing by historical threads; how, for example, a housing problem is an inti- constantly in the background, as if delivered while changing a tyre on macy problem. Or as Walshe puts it succinctly in their artist-talk- the side of a rural motorway. In their more recent video Land Cruiser cum-history-lecture video The Land Question (2020): “Anyway, look, the (2022), a cruising hookup in a park elicits a quick history lesson and way I see it, there’s one, and only one, land question: where the fuck then a drive to try and find somewhere indoors to get busy. After an encounter with the aforementioned tiger – who at first offers a bed, am I supposed to have sex!?” Walshe makes pointed use of Irish law and neglected aspects of the but then begins to demand proof of address, star sign and tax status island’s land history, with an eye on gender and body politics, to make – the pair head out on what turns into an existential roadtrip, eventuwork that picks at the impasse upon which colonialist and capitalist ally setting to sea. All of this is narrated using subtitles over imagery of desires have beached. Issues like Ireland’s current unaffordable rents motorways and fields, the landscape they attempt to occupy and ultiand housing prices are linked to questions of mately abandon. And maybe that, as a selfEimear Walshe is an artist and writer from Longford, national identity that arose from British rule. proclaimed ‘inheritor of the legacy of agrarian Ireland. Recent exhibitions of their work include And yet: Walshe does it with a levity, timing radicalism’, is Walshe’s broader, earnest queseva International, Limerick, 2020, Bodies of Knowledge, and deadpan delivery that is fucking hilartion: how, in this current world, do we create Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2019, and gretta with Roscommon Arts Centre, at King House Boyle, 2019 ious. In The Land Question Walshe narrates a landscape within which we can express our to camera in daytime-television-presenter desires, whatever they may be? Chris Fite-Wassilak is contributing editor of ArtReview

February 2023

Tanis S’eiltin

selected by Wendy Red Star

Tanis S’eiltin’s work has been included in the exhibitions Coast Tlingit. Devilfish bags are named after Rooted in Tlingit culture, Tanis S’eiltin grew Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art their shape, which includes four tentacles up in a family of artists. From her mother, at Museum of Arts and Design in New York, 2022; or tabs with tassels. Devilfish bag materials a master weaver, she learned the techniques In Red Ink at the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner for creating Chilkat robes and skin-sewing. often include wool, beads and yarn, with vari(wa), 2018; and Our Side, curated by Wendy Red Star, at the Missoula Art Museum (mo), in 2017 S’eiltin draws from Tlingit material culture to ations of beaded floral design adornment. Tlingit variations of devilfish bags included create wearable sculpture. Traditional Tlingit Wendy Red Star is an Apsáalooke (Crow) multimedia artist based in Portland (or) whose work was included in the family crests and abstract seaweed designs. forms are used as a foundation and as a crea2022 exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary tive influence for her works. The trade history of the devilfish bag is a fasciIndigenous Photography, Amon Carter Museum I had the pleasure of connecting with nating journey of cross-pollination between of American Art, Fort Worth indigenous nations. Working with this conS’eiltin in 2010 while compiling a blog of contemporary Native artist interviews for a class I was teaching at cept in mind, S’eiltin explores through Untitled an almost futuristic Portland State University – I then proceeded to curate S’eiltin’s work abstraction in the form of a dark long coat with a dramatic collar. in a few group exhibitions. Cultural references are honoured through the design of the garment, Her dress work Untitled (2017) is crafted from Merino wool felt, which gives acknowledgement to Tlingit kinship and customs. thread, metal grommets, snaps and freshwater pearls. Untitled takes S’eiltin’s practice fuses a brilliant and longstanding Tlingit inspiration from the devilfish (or octopus) bag that first appeared resilience through new and innovative materials while honouring around the 1800s and originated among the Cree and Métis Nations of cultural ties to history and tradition. She is a powerful Native woman Canada. This style of bag travelled to the Cree of the Northern Plains artist who is creating work about her lived experience while giving and eventually made its way through trade routes to the Northwest respect to the land and traditions of her ancestors and community.

Steampunk Raven Flies to the North Star, 2017, Merino wool felt, metal grommets, glass cut beads, metal rivet, 46 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist

Some People of the Tide: Raven, Coho, Octopus, 2017, Merino wool felt, leather, metal grommets, glass bugle beads, 46 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Untitled, 2017, Merino wool felt, metal grommets, metal snaps, freshwater pearls, abalone shell, nylon strapping, 183 × 91 cm (diameter). Courtesy the artist

February 2023

Ingrid Hora

selected by Bani Abidi

Die Wende (detail), 2009 (installation view, Program, Berlin). Installation photo: Elsa Thorp

Ingrid Hora is a gleaner of certain kinds of stories. In particular those of local history, change and gossip. In 2010 Hora sought out a verein about groups of men or women who are hobbyists or semiprofes- of female swimmers in their seventies from former East Germany, sionals: singers, dancers, musicians, swimmers, gardeners, ping pong and over the period of getting to know them asked them to master a players, carpenters, people who get together regularly and develop choreographed swimming movement known as Die Wende, a term that certain skills. She gravitates towards these vereine (the German word refers to an underwater blackflip but is also the term commonly used for associations, clubs or societies) in places where she has been invited in Germany to refer to the process of change from socialism to democto work, but mostly in her native Italian South Tyrol and her adopted racy and capitalism. home, Berlin. Hora’s collaborators (along with their tools of trade) are her muses Hora, with a background in architecture and critical design theory, and interlocutors, as she lingers around their work, their conversafalls somewhere between a sculptor, theatre director and anthropol- tions and their plans. “At some point I introduce new objects and ogist. “The groups of people you work with are almost always old,” gestures that are conceptually important to me and see how they I tell her. “Yes,” she replies, “because the older ones have the best interest them, and they experiment with shifting their usual methods stories, their bodies inhabit their experiences. in the making of something new.” Eventually Ingrid Hora is based in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include They have negotiated collective learning and Hora’s sculptures, drawings, instructions and Bien (2019), at Galleria Doris Ghetta, Milan; work for so long.” her collaborators’ responses to these come the 2020 Biennale Gherdëina; and group show Empathisers together in highly poetic and absurd perforShe is interested in collectivity, but not (2020), at the Galleria Civica Bressanone mances, which through their participatory with a capital C. Her fascination lies in the dyBani Abidi is a photography and video artist and material references are almost always namics of intimate groups: often old friends based in Berlin whose solo exhibition The Song and companions who are also living archives excavations of fascinating local histories. took place at Experimenter, Kolkata, in 2022

ArtReview

Scheibenscheiden-Tosatonda (detail), 2017, performance view, Schlanders, Italy. © Transart

February 2023

Julieta Gil

selected by Casey Reas

Julieta Gil lives and works in Oregon. The Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City is protest. Julieta was able to capture the monuRecent exhibitions include Field Recordings (2022), a wide, open street full of speeding cars, ment as it was after the protest, to record the at Ditch Projects, Springfield, Oregon; and Revertir el Desgaste strolling pedestrians and dozens of monuevent before it was erased. She translated the (Reverse Wear, 2021) at Campeche, Mexico City ments. It’s also the location for recent and high-fidelity record she created into video Casey Reas is a digital artist and cofounder of digital exhibition ongoing protests against systemic violence and photographic prints, but in essence platform Feral File, who lives and works in Los Angeles. against women in Mexico. Julieta Gil started it’s a 3d file that can be downloaded from His work was included in the Buffalo akg online exhibition Peer to Peer, 2022 attending these protests in 2019 and they the artist’s website and shared to make this became the foundation for her extraordinary recent work. Her ambi- record public and accessible. tious digital project Nuestra Victoria (Our Victory, 2019–20) received Gil followed that up with works like the video Hombres Ilustres international attention when it was awarded the Lumen Prize (Illustrious Men, 2021), which pans along digitised scans of the 77 monuments along the Reforma that memorialise ‘the most in 2020. Nuestra Victoria takes many forms, but the core is a virtual sculp- outstanding’ figures in the history of Mexico – all men, and mostly ture created through photogrammetry, a technique for capturing all military figures. Pedestal para persona digna de ser recordada (Pedestal and merging volumetric, digital form with photography. During for a Person Worth Remembering, 2021) is the same size and shape the protests in 2019, the Victoria Alada monument was tagged with as the plaque on the pedestal of one of these sculptures, but without messages like ‘México feminicida’ (femicidal Mexico) and ‘Nunca más any names or historical inscriptions; instead it captures various tendrán la comodidad de nuestro silencio’ (You will never again have moments of painted and graffitied protest and archives it within wax. the comfort of our silence) and transformed with paint by protesters. Through all of this work, she asks, how can we restore justice rather The city responded by boarding up the sculpture to obscure the than monuments?

Pedestal para persona digna de ser recordada, 2021, beeswax, damar, pigments, stainless steel, 100 × 109 × 13 cm

ArtReview

Nuestra Victoria (detail), 2019–20, 3d digital archive

February 2023

Ana María Gómez López

selected by Shen Xin

Punctum v. 5 (detail), 2017–, durational self-experimentation project to create an artificial extracorporeal ciruit for channelling blood. Photo: Shen Xin

The link between demarcation – durational and spatial – and discern- corporeal blood circulation of Ana María’s own body using stainment is one of the lessons one learns when confronting our common less-steel needles and disposable plastic lines. The structures mirror vulnerabilities in recent and present moments. Ana María Gómez a knowingness of the circulation of blood within the body and López has long turned to self-experimentation as an artist, staging the potential for it to gather relations beyond to be part of a kind events in which insulation and commonality meet. of commons. The planting (and subsequent germination) of a Begonia In keeping with the knowledge that the work can also be further Semperflorens seed in one’s tear duct (which the artist performed extended, others can take the form of shared instructions and on herself in Inoculate, 2013–) has, through the acknowledgement of shared research. Indeed, more precisely, Ana María stages a process multiple forms of knowledge production, come to exist on the same of amending harm. Her works come across as reflections on survival plane of reality as the fact that seeds are frequently discovered in dogs’ mechanisms and processing from afar, relevant to many including eyes and that the chosen seed is itself hybrid in nature (it is the result myself, where it concerns families and homeland. By compromising of the cross-breeding of different species from the Americas). The the isolation of her own body she allows herself to defend, know and process of waiting for and facilitating the seed’s growth and even- love human vulnerabilities in both success and failure. tual sprouting involves the artist controlling and limiting her bodily Ana María is currently looking at human efforts in medical pracmovements to achieve the desired mix of sunlight, vision, space, tices, needle-exchange sites, veterinary hospitals and middens local movement and rest. The consequent removal of one’s own perspec- to the Netherlands’ (where she is currently based) real and deep time. tives and their basis within the conventional structures designed to Concerned with progressive public health and how biology in the live and conform to social norms is fundaWest took a specific shape – observing how it Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist, mentally a break from the anthropocentric comes into contact with the disappearance of researcher and educator living and working in Amsterdam world. In its place is the potential of multiple significant sites and the continuously large Shen Xin is a video and performance artist planes, mutually inclusive and affirmative. groups of people seeking care – Ana María based in Minneapolis whose solo exhibition proceeds to be taken on, by herself, as the Punctum (2017–) comprises various conས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) structions designed to facilitate the extrafirst patient. took place at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2022

ArtReview

Inoculate (detail), 2013–, durational self-experimentation project; pictured here: microscope photograph produced with Maurice Mikkers

Punctum v. 5, 2017– (installation view, To Mind Is To Care, 2020, v2_ Lab for Unstable Media, Rotterdam). Photo: Fenna de Jong

February 2023

Natasha Tontey selected by Adeline Chia Freaks and monsters populate the universe The films The Epoch of Mapalucene and Wa’anak Natasha Tontey is an artist and designer based in Yogyakarta. Her work has been included in Singapore Biennale 2022 of Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey: twoWitu Watu (both 2021) feature traditional practices such as warrior dances, violent headed hermaphrodites, fish-woman hybrids, Adeline Chia is reviews editor of ArtReview Asia initiation rituals for boys and the ‘charging’ teenage girls with shaved eyebrows and forked tongues, talking stones, self-organising cockroaches. Tontey of amulets with a stone. In The Epoch of Mapalucene Tontey animates is of Minahasan descent, an indigenous group of people from North a fearsome female warrior who dons the red ceremonial costume Sulawesi. Drawing on her ancestral culture, she creates joyous and typically worn by men, complete with skull necklace, feather headirreverent digital animations, performances and installations that are gear and sword. Tontey also creates ‘monstrosities’ that break down subversive on several levels. Firstly, animistic cosmologies are reimag- hierarchies between genders and the human and nonhuman, such ined as posthuman alternatives to the anthropomorphic modernity as the unforgettable conjoined creature in Epoch, which combines of the dominantly Muslim Indonesian state. Secondly, these origin the stone goddess Lumimuut and her son Toar. While the latter stories themselves get queered, countering the macho, quasi-military often overshadows his mother in local lore, in Tontey’s film, Toar is tendencies of contemporary Minahasan culture with more gender- permanently connected to her at the groin in an uncanny motherqueer and feminist interpretations of traditional myth. All this is son dyad. rendered in Tontey’s cheerful ‘more-is-more’ hypermedia patchwork In Garden Amidst the Flame (2022), her first live-action film, Tontey of various aesthetics: schlock videogame 3d animation techniques, crafts a more sustained narrative, following a group of Minahasan visual collage, cascading windows and computer-generated voice- teenage girls on a journey to explore their roots. They shave their overs. The effect is a psychedelic mashup of visual styles that echoes eyebrows to see ghosts, dress themselves in traditional warrior attire, Tontey’s inclusive vision of multibeing flourishing. dance in the moonlight and visit an ancestral burial ground. The Tontey’s work often juxtaposes real-life documentary footage of star of the film, for me, is a half-woman, half-fish deity. Her head is native rituals with original animation; the former showing expres- inspired by the coelacanth, a rare deep-sea fish that has remained sions of contemporary Minahasan culture, the latter presenting largely unchanged since the Palaeozoic era. Her body is that of a very mind-altering digital worlds of alternative origin myths and char- spicy lady dressed in a long flowery dress and fishnet stockings; she acters who reclaim feminist agency, deconstruct gender binaries and rides a motorbike and blows cigarette smoke to anoint the kids – she reassert the interdependence between the human and nonhuman. is emblematic of the joyousness and fearlessness of Tontey’s work.

Garden Amidst the Flame (still), 2022, hd film, 27 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Garden Amidst the Flame (still), 2022, hd film, 27 min. Courtesy the artist

The Order of Autophagia, 2021 (installation view, Kyoto Art Center 2021). Photo: Hana Sawada (Kyoto Experiment). Courtesy the artist

February 2023

March 23 - 25, 2023 artbasel.com/hong-kong

Art Reviewed

Is on fire 71

Theaster Gates Young Lords and Their Traces New Museum, New York 10 November – 5 February Theaster Gates is known for his ongoing efforts to transform vacant or decrepit buildings in Chicago’s underserved South Side into sites of cultural preservation and production; ‘Black people matter, Black spaces matter, and Black objects matter’ are the stated values of his nonprofit devoted to the task. These cardinal truths reverberate throughout the artist’s first American museum survey, titled in honour of the Puerto Rican Chicago street-gang-turnedsocial-action-organisation, active during the 1960s and 70s, that famously offered free food, healthcare and arts programming out of an occupied church in Harlem for 11 days in 1969. The exhibition spans three museum floors and two decades of Gates’s practice, gracefully foregrounding the social and spiritual lives

of objects (made, gifted, found, repurposed) and architectures as it underscores the value of the relationships and communities that animate them; this framework elucidates the extent to which Gates’s object-based works and socialpractice projects are energetically intertwined. On the top floor is St. Laurence Bell (2014–22), a large bronze bell recovered from a storied, predominantly Black parish church in Chicago that was demolished in 2014 due to financial woes. In a postmodern gesture, Gates places the object not only in a contemporary art museum but also in a small shed constructed from old pine planks salvaged from another New York arts institution, the Park Avenue Armory, where he held a retreat for Black artists in 2018. Nearby, A Heavenly Chord (2022) comprises a Hammond

Black Madonna, 2017, bronze and tar, 149 × 67 × 54 cm. Photo: Julian Salinas. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Basel

ArtReview

b3 organ hooked up to wall-mounted Leslie speakers, gear associated with Black church music and its evocations of Black spiritual and creative life. (That churches can be spaces of oppression and repression is neither explicitly acknowledged nor refuted.) Riffing on Donald Judd’s minimalist cubes, the row of boxy speakers imbue abstraction with social content – a theme also explored in Seven Songs for Black Chapel #1–7 (2022), Gates’s cycle of silvery abstract paintings made from industrial roofing material. On certain Saturdays, musician Shedrick Mitchell plays the organ, activating the sculpture with sound. Music is central to Gates’s practice. In 2008 the artist founded the experimental musical ensemble The Black Monks, whose

improvisatory sound draws on forms of Black vernacular music – blues, gospel, jazz – as well as Eastern monastic chants. The Black Monks feature in two videoworks on the middle floor: Billy Sings Amazing Grace (2013), a performance with soul singer Billy Forston, and A Clay Sermon (2021), in which musicians perform beside Gates’s still-damp clay creations in a studio formerly occupied by expressionist ceramicist Peter Voulkos, founder of the influential California Clay Movement. “In the beginning, there was clay,” intones Gates, a biblical pronouncement that alludes to his own artistic trajectory (Gates has a joint master’s degree in ceramics, urban planning and religious studies). The montage then intercuts footage of clay being extracted from the earth and shaped into vessels with that of Gates wandering the landscape and singing. Sound from the videos intermittently converges in the room between them, which is populated by about 40 sombre clay objects, ranging from

rounded vessels to studded totems to sentinellike figurines. Over half are titled a variant on Black Vessel for the Traces of Our Young Lords and Their Spirits (all 2022), paying homage to the radical organisation while engaging with the capacious connotations of the word ‘vessel’: a container used for ritual and sustenance; a mode of watery transport; a person chosen by God. The Young Lords are among several influences referenced in the survey; through frequent citation, Gates asserts that art doesn’t happen in a vacuum as he leverages his platform to amplify the people and discourses with which he is in dialogue. Cast iron shelving on the show’s bottom floor contains some 4,500 books belonging to Gates’s former colleague the Soviet cinema and literature scholar Robert Bird, who in his final years explored the relationship between Soviet communism and Black radical imagination. Nearby, Sweet Chariot (2012), a sagging tar kettle gifted to the artist

by his late father, memorialises Theaster Gates Sr’s work as a roofer as well as broader histories of labour. Marked by garnet walls and opulent carpeting, a room on the lower floor is transformed into a museum-withina-museum. Vitrines repurposed from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (an archaeological research centre devoted to the ancient Middle East) feature objects belonging to figures who Gates holds sacred, many of whom are recently deceased Black creative or cultural leaders. Among the precious relics are a paint-spattered boot worn by artist Sam Gilliam, a necklace owned by fashion designer Virgil Abloh and a small metal bell bestowed upon Gates by trailblazing writer-activist bell hooks. Given pride of place in the survey, these recontextualised remnants – memorials on a human scale – reimagine the contemporary art museum as a charged space for mourning, honouring and communing. Cassie Packard

Young Lords and Their Traces, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum, New York

February 2023

Kent Monkman Being Legendary Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto 8 October – 19 January In the beginning, there was Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. ‘When I fell to askîy – this planet you call Earth – my form shifted from pure matter to cloud, to rain sprinkled with cosmic dust, and love,’ the glamorous, stiletto-clad alter ego of Cree artist Kent Monkman recalls in a wall label accompanying We Are Made of Stardust (2022), the opening painting of this storybook exhibition. There she is, hovering above our little blue planet, attended by rainbow pterodactyls like the Madonna in a Tiepolo fresco. Across the following 34 paintings, crisply rendered in Monkman’s signature realism and hung on boldly coloured walls with singsong didactics, Miss Chief guides us through a Jurassic idyll where dinosaurs and tiny ancestral humans peacefully cohabitate. Geodes and dinosaur bones from the collection of the

Royal Ontario Museum (rom) are presented in vitrines like scientific evidence of this fairytale history. (The fossilised stiletto, Mesozoic maskisina, 2022, is Monkman’s own puckishly sculpted addition.) If this all seems a bit twee, it’s worth remembering that all good fairytales teach us core truths, like the proclamation, on the gallery wall, that Indigenous people ‘have always been here’. Monkman’s expansive vision of the planetary record allows our imagination to fill in the blindspots of archaeology, a discipline informed by settler colonialism. Colonial violence takes centre stage halfway through the show, where Miss Chief recounts the French, British and Canadian theft of Indigenous lands and the abduction of First Nations children who, for over a century, were sent to residential

I Come from pâkwan kîsik, the Hole in the Sky, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 91 × 69 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

schools and forcibly assimilated. In Study for the Sparrow (2021), a young girl in a cold white dormitory leans up to a window ledge towards a small bird – a symbol of the freedom that eludes her. It’s a work as beautiful as it is devastating, more unshakeable than any of the high-camp confections on display. In a particularly haunting gesture, Monkman has placed a case of moccasins from the rom collection opposite paintings of the same footwear attended by tiny grieving ancestors, invoking the people who left them behind. It’s an indictment of the violence of Western museum practices, staged from within the museum – part of a recent and long overdue trend in Canada to address institutional complicity in settler colonialism. Miss Chief knows there are other stories to tell, and she has better ways of telling them. Evan Moffitt

Boris Mikhailov Ukrainian Diary Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris 7 September – 15 January This Boris Mikhailov retrospective is set in motion by a series of accidents. A quotation on the wall, from the self-taught Ukrainian photographer, immediately foregrounds the possibility of chance. Mikhailov recalls how, as a young man, he ‘accidentally did something that would have been taboo for a professional photographer: [he] inadvertently threw a bunch of slides onto the bed, and two of them stuck together’. This lead to his Yesterday’s Sandwich series (1966–68), in which Mikhailov restaged his earlier mistake by superimposing photographs in provocatively surrealistic combinations: a naked man and woman tower over a stadium; a crowd stands astride a giant scrap of bread thrust at the sky; a sinuous snake sits atop a snowy cityscape. Produced at a time of limited access to real news reports within the Soviet Union, Mikhailov’s seemingly random juxtapositions were, in fact, highly motivated, transacting in an economy of hidden meaning,

wherein censored subjects – politics, religion, nudity – could find expression. In his Series of Four works (1980s), life and chance collide again. ‘I wanted to make contact prints but had no small-format paper, so I fitted four images onto the same sheet,’ Mikhailov explains. The photographs were taken in the suburbs of Kharkiv, and seem to push back against the very mnemonic operation of the camera by overwhelmingly focusing on forgettable scenes and capturing nonevents. On one sheet, four images take as their subject a piece of otherwise unremarkable urban architecture: a set of stairs embedded into a grassy bank. The nonsequential framing of the stairs frustrates both the eye and the mind here. Throughout this series, the forced adjacency of the images imports a similar tension into the works, as the visual play of angles disrupts the integrity of the reality contained within each of the compositions.

But the more the exhibition continues, the less I am convinced by Mikhailov’s narration of these happy accidents. Over the course of more than 800 images and over 50 years of practice, we witness Mikhailov swing between a variety of photographic genres – documentary, idiomatic vernacular images, absurdist satire, historical fabulations – as he navigates the politically charged landscape of the Soviet Union and the aftermath of its dissolution. Throughout the exhibition, this stylistic disjuncture is progressively amplified, yet there is always a sense of control. And more than that, there is always the sense of a careful imagemaker at work – of a photographer playing with the trappings of naiveté. Did the aforementioned accidents really transpire in that manner? Maybe, maybe not. Mikhailov’s exhibition bursts with provocations that at times feel wonderfully deft and at others heavy-handed and crude. Never, however, does it feel quite accidental. Tai Mitsuji

From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1966–68. © the artist, vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, Paris

February 2023

Reinhard Mucha Der Mucha – An Initial Suspicion k20 / k21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf 3 September – 22 January To grow up in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as Reinhard Mucha did – he was born in 1950 in the city that now hosts this weighty two-venue retrospective – was to do so in a present tangled horrendously but silently with the past. Many Germans – teachers, politicians, judges – were former Nazis; still in place, too, were Holocaustenabling infrastructure like chemical industries and, crucially for numerous artworks that Mucha would come to make, the railway network. The ‘economic miracle’ or Wirtschaftswunder that began during the 1950s had rehabilitated those supposed qualities of ‘Germanness’ (rigid discipline and willing subordination, an obsession with precision and order) that Nazism had grotesquely fetishised. And nobody was talking about any of it, or about the war. In the face of this, though, Mucha’s art over the last four decades – from small, plangent arrangements of used footstools to a full-size Ferris wheel fashioned from metal ladders, office chairs and desks and fluorescent lights, lashed together with electrical cords – is not concerned with voicing the unsaid, or not quite. It asks how you make art about, or around, what can’t ever be come to terms with, even were it to be addressed; it wonders how form might intercede with the unspeakable. Take Documents i–iv (1992), which occupies one of 15 sizeable rooms devoted to Mucha at the k21 branch of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Its four highly similar parts assume his (relatively) signature form of a relief-cum-vitrine, several metres wide and hung on the wall. Each contains, decentred on the right, a wooden-framed grid of antique black-and-white photographs showing, it appears, members of a German workers’ council – representing the workforce to the bosses; one is circled and annotated ‘king’ – in 1975, and a glowing blank lightbox on the left. These elements are set, in turn, within a piece of precisely fitted-together engineering, alternating horizontal bands of steel and felt, and exalting detail (Mucha insists on slot-head screws). Meanwhile, each glass frontage is

subtly enamelled with tidy straight lines, their configuration changing from work to work like variations on a code. In one of the ‘documents’ the workers have vanished. That’s classic Mucha: making a statement of sorts, then reversing on it. For what, exactly, do we have here? An evocation of German industry and bureaucratic values, expressed in technically sympathetic facture (four pieces of industrial craftsmanship), structured partly around a beckoning white void, and taking a form that itself equivocates, landing somewhere between sculpture, 2d image and photographic archive. The longer you look, the more it slips through your fingers, by Mucha’s design. His designs, too, are subject to structural revision and augmentation when they’re re-exhibited – many of these works bear multiple dates – and accordingly resistant to being grasped. Waiting Room (1979–82), a kind of abstraction of a train-station interior, is a reconfigurable arrangement of freestanding metal sculptures that look a bit like unopenable filing cabinets, accompanied by a station sign (always a real German placename with six letters) and sometimes vintage furniture. The aesthetic template for this, as for much of Mucha’s work, is Minimalism, but of course it’s a version of the genre so pregnant with historical content that it violates Minimalism’s central tenets. In many works elsewhere, meanwhile, Mucha troubles fundamental definitions of what you’re looking at. A small work like Flak (1981) arranges various wooden items – a table, chairs, a wooden ladder – into the shape of an antiaircraft gun. What do we call this? A weapon, or German furniture, or a statement on the relationship between the two? The standout work at k20 (the Kunstsammlung’s other site), whose high-ceilinged segment is devoted primarily to Mucha’s larger works, is 1985’s two-part The Figure-Ground Problem in Baroque Architecture ( for you alone only the grave remains). This combines the aforementioned Ferris wheel – an ostentatious miracle of sculptural engineering – with a full-sized fairground ‘wall of death’ made, again, from

facing page, top Waiting Room (detail) [1997], [1986], 1979–82, multipart sculptural room installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Achim Kukulies. © muchaArchiv / vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Courtesy Reinhard Mucha and Sprüth Magers, Berlin

office furnishings. Both works are duckrabbits, hermeneutic escape-acts: you see tables and ladders and lights, then you see fairground attractions, and vice versa, in an endless circularity reflected in the sculptures’ shapes. And yet, for all this structural evasiveness, Mucha’s works are somehow extremely satisfying to witness. That he is by most accounts a very complicated man is borne out in his art’s own multifariousness of register. Despite the historical shadow that hangs over this entire show, and despite its scale’s potential to exhaust a viewer, the pleasure in manufacturing, the acres of warm, well-tooled vintage wood and the undying impishness of the artist’s insistence on corrupting Minimalism with autobiography all feel redemptive. Mucha can be darkly funny while he’s frustrating you. He exhibits his own exhibition advertisements as art; are they, then? He follows a ‘what you see is what you get’ ethos insofar as all his handiwork is visible – his vitrines usually allow you to look down their sides to see how he’s put their layers together, with grandpa-in-the-workshop care – but all you can grasp, finally, is how he’s made this oblique thing. And he can be playfully absurd, as in the highly covetable kinetic sculpture Straight / Edition 1991 (2004), in which model railway trains scoot round a three-storey track, into ‘tunnels’ made out of rusty industrial piping set into a three-storey glass-fronted cabinet, while a quartet of boomboxes on top of the latter broadcast American sports commentary. Mucha has been seriously unwell of late, and Der Mucha – An Initial Suspicion (the first part of whose name refers, with characteristic evasion, not to him but to a 1980s restaurant guide from Austria) is likely his crowning achievement. It establishes, for anyone who didn’t already know, that he’s one of his country’s most estimable living artists, one who recognised both the necessity and the impossibility of countenancing Germany’s modern past. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, sure. Mucha found a way – found, this show confirms, many ways – to speak and be silent at once. Martin Herbert

facing page, bottom Flak [1987] 1981, mixed media, 210 × 190 × 110 cm. Collection Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel. © muchaArchiv / vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022

ArtReview

February 2023

Ken Kiff Man, Bird and Tree Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate 20 November – 5 February Since his death in 2001, it has remained difficult to fix Ken Kiff’s place in the firmament of postwar British painting. A superlative colourist, who employed his pigments not as ornamentation but as the foundation of pictorial structure, he was also a beguiling visual storyteller, relating oddly affecting Jungian fables that appear to have emerged from his own private mythology. Like his lodestar Marc Chagall, Kiff had no use for angst, or macho painterly grandeur. Rather, as this welcome showcase demonstrates, he was an artist who above all essayed tenderness, nurturing the surfaces of his paintings into dreamy, almost psychedelically chromatic visions in which compassion was the whole of the law. Central to Kiff’s project was the ‘Little Man’, a recurring naked, baldheaded figure whom the

artist’s great champion, the late critic Norbert Lynton, described in a 1988 catalogue essay as ‘[Kiff] himself, a pilgrim making his way through the world’. In the painting Man and Island (1987), we see this diminutive dude stranded on a barren rock, both its sovereign and its sole, lonely resident, his pink, weirdly pliable body resembling a piece of bubblegum spat out by an uncaring god. He reappears in There was an immense laughing rat (1977), assailed by a smirking rodent as he flails and splutters in a choppy sea, and again in Man, Bird and Tree (1987), where he gingerly approaches the nest of a blue duck, perhaps to steal its eggs, all the while observed by an ineffably smiling sun and a great, unblinking eye on a purple stalk. Beset by forces beyond his control, not least

his own nagging drives, he is part Prometheus, part Job and wholly sympathetic. Kiff’s female figures are, by contrast, much more elemental: water nymphs, earth goddesses, flaming orange angels. Does this speak of reverence, or the limits of the artist’s imagination? Kiff was undoubtedly at his best when figuring men. Amazement (c. 1970s) depicts his little proxy caught in a moment of grinning, goggle-eyed rapture, although what’s triggered this (an external event, a sudden internal awakening?) is left to our imaginations. His expression is daft, yes, but also irresistibly infectious. This painting is, in its own way, miraculous: an image of masculine vulnerability suffused with carefree joy. Tom Morton

There was an immense laughing rat, 1977, acrylic on board, 53 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artist and Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate

ArtReview

Ayo Akingbade Show Me The World Mister Chisenhale Gallery, London 10 November – 5 February Projections of two new films by Ayo Akingbade are separated by a tall aluminium framework that traverses the space, decked in translucent polycarbonate planks with an indent where visitors sit. It’s fitting: Akingbade has built a body of work frequently concerned with people’s emotional and sociopolitical relation to tangible place, architecture, physical environment – often on her familiar territory of London, such as in Dear Babylon (2019) and Fire in My Belly (2021). This time we’re in Nigeria. The Fist (2022) observes a day in the life of a Guinness brewery in Ikeja. Workers arrive and loiter, pray and natter as they wait to check in; machines rumble into action as their operators unfussily saunter between tasks. Caught on seductive 35mm film, flecks of light shine off brown-glass bottles; in fixed-camera shots, hi-vis jackets pop against the metallic greys and puddled concrete floors of artificially lit spaces. Compositionally, we’re reminded of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s depictions

of labyrinthine industrial complexes or Andreas Gursky’s spatial metricality; workers are often framed by a lattice of pipes and conveyor belts, made small by scale and the percussive chugger of machinery. While synecdoche is a common trope in depictions of industrial labour, and increasingly a part of postcolonial analysis, The Fist is no modernist statement, content enough to observe the material facts and habits of work. Faluyi (2022) ostensibly shares little with The Fist, rendering Show Me The World Mister a kind of Janus-faced exhibition: ‘The World’ as two stories on double-sided paper, of steel in the former and, here, of sprawling natural landscapes. A teenage girl goes on a personal and spiritual journey after the passing of her father – exploring the corners of her village in the Idanre Hills, its bouldering mountains and strangers in nearby towns – told in 14 minutes, with frequent moments of sensitive, subjective

cinema: the tactility of an interaction with a spiritual guide; the texture and motion of her eating caught in slow motion and soft focus; her eyes squinting at a ray of light while receiving the tragic news – a blinding moment of transformation, or enlightenment. Faluyi later walks past a class of children singing a nursery rhyme of going to London; she pauses, curious, then we move on, reminded (but not so much as haunted) of looming former-colonial powers. As such, there’s a nagging feeling of narrative indeterminacy in these films. Both seem content to observe a knotty subject – say, capitalist labour conditions, or spirituality and tragedy as dialectical relatives – rather than pull at the entangled string. But then sensitivity and inconsequentiality also make Show Me The World Mister something more mutable: an attempt to simultaneously express the hard, industrial world alongside the languor and fluidity of the internal one. Alexander Leissle

Faluyi, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London

February 2023

Singapore Biennale Various venues, Singapore 16 October – 19 March On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform, businesses can hire gig workers to perform short, repetitive tasks for a few cents apiece. Many of these assignments, such as image recognition, are used to train machine-learning models, or ai, to better understand the world. Artist Aarti Sunder is interested in the intersection of analogue and digital realms, and the hidden manual-labour needed to achieve the ‘magic’ of smooth automation. In the video Ghost Cut: Some Clear Pixels Among Many Black Boxes (2021), she exposes the material conditions of workers on Mechanical Turk by asking them to film their homes or workspaces. We see grainy footage of basic amenities: table, office chair, cupboard, bare walls with exposed wiring. Playing in tandem, in a smaller, picture-inpicture window, is a fast-flowing, constantly morphing stream of images that is similar to the main footage, but not quite. Shots of a window, for example, are echoed by other

similar compositions of windows or television screens; an exposed black plug translates, unstably, to a dog, clothes and trash. A computer-whiz friend tells me that the images in the smaller window were probably generated by an image-analysis model that translates input pictures into similar output pictures. Rationally, I understand that it is a computational trick; but I can’t shake the feeling that I am watching a weird and cunning intelligence at work, a resourceful but imperfect mimicry of source data that flits between recognition and misrecognition. As to what ends that occurs, this ‘mind’ remains unreadable. The question of nonhuman and possibly inaccessible subjectivities hangs over this year’s Singapore Biennale, because we have been invited to think of the event as sentient. Instead of a theme, curators Binna Choi, Nida Ghouse, Ala Younis and June Yap have given the biennale a name: Natasha. The naming, they say on the

Ranu Mukherjee, Ensemble for Non-Linear Time (still), 2022, two-channel video, sound, 20 min. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

ArtReview

website, is to trigger new ways of relating to the world; but the more immediate suggestion to me is that the biennale has some degree of consciousness. Which isn’t as farfetched as that might sound if you move in panpsychic circles, which propose that all things have mindlike qualities. Even if you do not, it remains an interesting question: how would a biennale experience and act upon the world? And how would the world – and our responses to that event – change it? I was hoping the naming exercise would translate to a reimagination of the biennale’s format or purpose, but Natasha doesn’t quite rise to the occasion. Natasha remains highly conventional, from its process (commissioner selects curator; curator selects artists) down to its outcome (large centralised venue at the portside Tanjong Pagar Distripark; a smattering of works in several satellite locations). That doesn’t mean that the exhibition is not coherent, insightful or

even occasionally moving. There was no official theme, but it could have been some variation of a posthuman focus on multispecies, multibeing care and flourishing. Capturing the postpandemic mood, Natasha taps into the tender, humbled, exhausted-yet-hopeful feelings of a convalescent humankind recognising its frailty and the interconnectedness of all existence. The broad category of the nonhuman – dogs, trees, ghosts, water, the weather, ai – ‘express’ their individual agencies. Floods turn into snakelike forms (Die Flut (The Flood), 2022, Ali Yass), water dispensers speak (Names of Water, 2022, Donghwan Kam) and the markings on rocks tell stories (Tales in Stone: In Search of the Language of Primordial Paradise, 2022, Shin Beomsun). On the whole, though, it was business as usual. I considered the possibility that I was the problem; that is, that I was incapable of embracing the brief to break out of my habitual modes of perception. (All biennales have the potential to come alive – if only I could free my mind!) Perhaps. That said, I did participate – wholeheartedly, spontaneously, nontouristically. At Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Sensing Salon (2022) I experienced ‘fake therapy’

by pulling random cards that gave instructions on how to heal someone. (Note on card: ‘Enhance what is already happening’.) I salivated at Wu Mali’s documentary on the migrant cuisines of the port city of Cijin (Cijin’s Taste of Empires, 2022). Meanwhile, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s multimedia installation featuring a sculpture of her deceased rescue dog, which was crippled, utterly destroyed me (Some Unexpected Events Sometimes Bring Momentary Happiness, 2017). The sculpture of her pet, looking at footage of itself jumping and loping in a broken dance around the legs of its owner, spoke movingly about the potential for kinship between species and our shared mortality. All these responses, arguably, are part and parcel of the multisensorial experience of any decently diverse biennale. The issue is to do with Natasha’s brief – she asks audiences to see, feel and think differently without doing anything radically different herself. Perhaps it would be more realistic to expect that change will come incrementally. Natasha has already taken an important step by losing the event’s typical Southeast Asian focus. This relieved her of the problematic burden of ‘representing’ the region and the imperialistic

overtones of a richer, more developed nation speaking on behalf of its neighbours. What next, then? Change and disruption seem to be the aspiration for this edition. I would encourage Natasha to pick up on these themes and to look within for inspiring archetypes to guide further action. Here I’m thinking of the half-woman, half-dish deity in Natasha Tontey’s mixedmedia installation Garden Amidst the Flame; Lacuna for Compassion (2022). The film, which explores the animist cosmologies of the Minahasan tribe, a stone-worshipping indigenous group from North Sulawesi, is a chaotic mashup of folk beliefs, marine ecology, girlpower activism and fantasy. In the film a group of teenage girls from a war dance troupe go on a magical journey. This hybrid goddess roars onto the scene on a motorbike, blowing cigarette smoke to bless the itinerants. Her form is inspired by the coelacanth, a rare deep-sea fish that has been around since prehistoric times, and which has recently been spotted in Indonesian waters; her spicy attitude, from her flowing white hair to fishnet stockings, is freewheeling and fearless. I don’t think she does things by halves. Adeline Chia

Donghwan Kam, Fermentation Houses, 2021–23 (installation view). Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

February 2023

Martine Syms The African Desperate Feature film on general release For all its dramatic potential, the art school has never been the subject of a blockbuster. Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 Art School Confidential, in which the star student painter’s career and love prospects were hampered by a string of campus murders, was a flop. It turns out nobody wants to watch an adolescent solving crimes on canvas. In Martine Syms’s art-school-insider satire The African Desperate (2022), which follows the mfa artist Palace Bryant’s (Diamond Stingly) graduation day, clichés such as ‘the work’ or dramatic jeopardy are long gone. Palace’s final exhibition consists of an upturned bucket and a piece of Himalayan rock salt and looks more like the work of an overzealous set designer than an artist. She barely bothers to defend her work to the panel of examiners, only halfheartedly invoking her race – and confusing the African ‘diaspora’ with ‘desperation’ – for something to say. But this is a 100-percentpass-rate industry, so nobody corrects her, and Palace’s professors laud her with inconsequential citations from en-vogue Black thinkers

(Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant). If this seems like an anticlimax, it’s because the prior three years on the idyllic Hudson Valley, New York, campus probably weren’t much either. Before Palace can escape this purgatory of surplus creativity, performative theorising and lazy personal relationships to return to the ‘real life’ of caring for her ailing mother, she has to get through the tedious formality of the graduation party. This unfolds as one might expect: there’s bad music, drink, drugs – someone mentions Anna Tsing’s artworld bestseller The Mushroom at the End of the World (2021) as an excuse for a psilocybin drop – and an inconclusive sexual plot that doesn’t even manage a handjob in the parking lot. Everybody is trying so hard to look like they’re not trying that they nearly succeed. But even as she sports her best ‘I would prefer not to’ grimace, Palace insists that she’s the star of the show even though she’s above it. Nobody disagrees, presumably because they all feel like this too. If Syms’s art school and its cast of characters appear ‘cringe’, it’s not only because they are

The African Desperate (still), 2022. © the artist. Courtesy Dominica, Inc.

ArtReview

astutely observed (Syms studied at Bard, also in the Hudson Valley) but because we secretly already know that art school is where the cultural credit line of liberal capitalism comes to a dead end. There’s a pleasure in watching a bunch of thirty-somethings trying to reckon with this, on the off-chance that they find a workaround. We know that this is unlikely: Palace might have a New York solo show lined up, but she has yet to produce any of the culture that would make the artworld – the ‘world’, even – bearable for her, or indeed for us. If she doesn’t, all the narcissism, detachment and aimlessness of American Millennialism will have been for nothing. But frustratingly, the same qualities sometimes make for exceptionally good art. Syms knows this and turns them into aesthetic matter to create a heartfelt portrait of her peers. The film is no advert for art-school student-loan debt, but if Syms can do this at the fringes of the gallery and cinema, it would be unfair not to root for Palace too. Pierre d’Alancaisez

Rammellzee Gothic Futurism Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles 5 November – 14 January It’s tempting to label Rammellzee’s artwork as science fiction. But Rammellzee, whose birthname remains unknown to even his closest friends, might have disagreed with the term ‘fiction’. The artist, who died in 2010, created his own universe, one meant to subvert power structures through iconoclastic writing and futuristic narrative. Renowned in Manhattan’s 1980s downtown scene, Rammellzee called his esoteric cosmology ‘Gothic Futurism’, a term that aptly evokes his diverse influences: medieval scribes, hip-hop, comic books. Despite cult and institutional success, his acceptance into the commercial artworld is overdue; this is Rammellzee’s solo debut with a major American gallery. From his earliest graffiti on New York City’s A train to his later alphabet-based sculptures, this immersive exhibition honours Rammellzee’s investigations of language, power and fantasy. The paintings on view challenge conventional methods of written communication.

Rammellzee’s transgressive storytelling began with his usage of ‘Wildstyle’ lettering, an intricate, popular form of graffiti, the origins of which he associated with historical accounts of Gothic monks who developed a writing so unintelligible that their rulers could no longer read it. The canvases demonstrate similar strategies: Letter Z (1984) depicts a curlicue neon letter that only vaguely resembles its Roman counterpart. In Untitled (Headboard) (1985), swirls of bright spraypaint cover a background of collaged newsprint, rendering the original text mostly illegible. Here Rammellzee’s abstracted writing supersedes dominant forms of typography. Sculptures and costumes extend Rammellzee’s principles into otherworldly characters, ones fighting in a mythic war for linguistic dominance. In his 1980s series ‘Letter Racers’, converted skateboards, each meant to represent an alphabetical symbol, become fighter jets. Suspended on wire overhead,

Medium Letter Racer Set (1988) features swordlike attachments and undone plastic buckles. The Gasholeer (ca. 1987–98) is a lifesize figure armed with a neon axe, its body made out of chains and scrap metal. Scattered across multiple rooms, these pieces turn the gallery into a stage for Rammellzee’s interdimensional, anti-establishment narrative. Rammellzee poses a challenge to commercial galleries; his artwork is not easily understood within dominant trends. During his lifetime, Rammellzee resisted comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat or Sun Ra, claiming he had more in common with ancient European monks than Afrofuturist artists. Opposed to any preexisting lineage, Rammellzee dictates his own terms; at Jeffrey Deitch, the artist asserts himself as a singular craftsman dedicated to the subversive possibilities of language. Absent a suitable canon, Rammellzee has successfully created his own. Claudia Ross

Welder, 1994–2001, headpiece and costume (found objects, paint and resin with garment elements), dimensions variable. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the Estate of Rammellzee and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

February 2023

Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere mit List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge 21 October – 26 February Brooding, stacked ingots of compacted soil, transmogrified by Claire Pentecost into an alternative form of currency, emit the slight scent of cocoa and camphor into a gallery space flecked with light from a beeswax-covered window. As part of her proposition for a different kind of value system, newly imagined banknotes depict not dead presidents but worms, bacteria and star intellectuals of contemporary ecology – Donna Haraway, for example – and her canine companion. Beginning with Pentecost’s soil-erg (2012) and continuing as a thread through the works in the group exhibition Symbionts, a contemporary eco-art discourse emerges along with the outlines of a recognisable aesthetic typology, one that sets out to recognise the critical partnerships and kinships between humans

and nonhumans, and the labour of those often made invisible by biopolitical regimes (for example, human agricultural labourers and honeybees), and offers aesthetic propositions for a more ecologically minded future. Revelations continue with Crystal Z. Campbell’s mixed-media installation Friends of Friends (Six Degrees of Separation) (2013–14), in which backlit bacteria slide ‘portraits’ of HeLA cells – the oldest human cell line still used in biological research today – appear to memorialise the biological legacy of Henrietta Lacks and her nonconsensual contribution to medical science, following the extraction of her cervical tissue containing these cells in 1951. Indeed, several of the artists’ interest in methods of museological display help to surface other kinds of invisible labour and human–nonhuman relationships:

Candice Lin’s urine-nourished lion’s mane mushrooms are made with help of the gallery staff’s own urine, and Jenna Sutela’s sheets of Plexiglas containing luminescent labyrinths of slime mould hang in the dark, waiting to be activated by the illumination of flashlights, which are provided for the viewer. In the darkness of the room adjacent to the main gallery, viewers are beckoned towards two videoworks by a melancholic chorus of howling wolves. Their cries are set to a score composed by White Mountain Apache composer Laura Ortman, which accompanies Wolf Nation (2018), Alan Michelson’s nature-cam-esque excerpt of purple pixelated, pacing wolves. Michelson’s video acknowledges kinships between the red wolf and the Lenape Munsee people (also known as the Wolf Clan), highlighting histories of species

Gilberto Esparza, Plantas autofotosinthéticas (Autophotosynthetic Plants), 2013–14, polycarbonate, silicon, stainless steel, graphite, electronic circuits, local wastewater, natural pond water with microalgae and microorganisms, plants, shrimp, fish, sound, 400 × 400 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

eradication and the violent displacement of people perpetrated by colonists – the nature-cam style of video recalling modes of surveillance. In the video on the parallel wall, biologist-turnedartist Špela Petrič looms silently over a bed of germinating cress, its growth inhibited in the places touched by her monolithic shadow. We are told that the effects of her prolonged vegetal encounter have changed her own physicality, as standing so long has led to fluid loss in her spinal discs; evidence that relationships between species are not always of mutual benefit, but mutual harm as well. These excavations and revelations about our present conditions offer ecological speculations for more symbiotic futures. For example, Miriam Simun’s Interspecies Robot Sex (2022) presents a documentary-style inquiry into two divergent pollination biotechnologies, developed in the event of an absence of living bees: hand pollination and robotic bee substitutes. Though bleak, the image of hand-pollinators donning bee costumes while karaoke-style lyrics roll and

the backing track to a Chinese love song swells in the background signals something uncanny, humorous and even touching about the joy of our most wholesome desires to cosplay as the nonhuman in the wake of our most extractive demands on a world scarred by ecological disaster. Symbionts’s survey of ‘bio-art’ since the early 2000s – a meander through biomorphic masses, vegetal growths and corporeal secretions, under a seemingly unified biological or ecological vernacular aesthetics – presents a question about its proclaimed turn away from artistic authorial control. While the skin of the exhibition is permeated by meditations on the role of nonhuman collaborators (spiders, fish, wolves, fungi and gut bacteria are credited or acknowledged to varying degrees throughout), these engagements ask a bigger question: to what degree do these nonhuman collaborators bear the burden of being symbols of human ideals about our relationships with them? The live fish and plants, for example, in Gilberto Esparza’s magnificent closed-loop bioremediation system, Plantas

autofotosinthéticas (2013–14), is uncritically suspended, literally and figuratively, in the space of the art object. In the exhibition, this question presses most in moments of ambivalence or refusal. In the adjacent gallery, we are warned of an encounter with Pierre Huyghe’s spiders while a sweet feline musk from Pamela Rosenkranz’s She Has No Mouth (2017) hangs diffuse in the air. The humble daddy longlegs, for whom visitors are invited to search throughout the room, were encouraged to build webs in the corners by being temporarily isolated by exhibition staff. Once they were set free, some spiders stayed and some left the building entirely, presumably to find a food source. Uncontained by the gallery, the spiders’ departure reminds us that while we ought to further reflect on our ideas of symbiosis (and symbionts), including how these ideas might become but new iterations of romantic ideals about nature, these crucial relationships between lifeforms exist, ultimately, outside of our control. Rachel M. Tang

Candice Lin, Memory (Study #2), 2016, distilled communal piss from people hosting the work, glass jar, lion’s mane mushrooms in substrate, plastic, brass sprayer. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

February 2023

Caleb Hahne Quintana aurora Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 5 November – 17 December Aurora is the main eastern exurb of Denver and the third largest municipality in Colorado. It’s where subdivisions and big-box stores gradually give way to the ruralness of the Great Plains. Major employers include defence contractors, a us Air Force base and Amazon. Ten years ago it was the site of one of the more deadly mass shootings. It’s a very American place. For Caleb Hahne Quintana, who grew up there but now lives and works in Brooklyn, it’s mostly a memory, and that is what his paintings are largely about: intimate moments, many of friends and family members, as remembered by the artist and composed as pictures that exceed their mundaneness. Because Aurora is a ‘western’ locale, it is an inheritor of its region’s natural beauty, despite real estate developers’ best efforts at taming and erasing it. As such, ‘landscape’ is prevalent here,

particularly in Hahne Quintana’s use of colour, even though the focus of many of the artist’s paintings are figures. The American West, as often depicted, is dusty and bleached, or else Technicolored, an artefact of Hollywood’s purchase on our imaginations. In contrast, Hahne Quintana uses rich and deep blues, oranges, yellows and browns to invoke, rather than represent, his home state’s atmospherics – at least as these are called to the artist’s mind. This is autofiction in pictorial guise. Hahne Quintana’s pictures are not ‘realist’ in the representational sense, nor are they exactly figurative, as if trying to elude easy paraphrase. Almost every one is ‘of’ something quickly identifiable and describable: a person, a glass of water, a tree. Yet in each the details have been simmered away, though not enough to reduce the images to the merely graphic

Talons Reach, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas, 76 × 102 cm. Photo: Mason Kuehler. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

ArtReview

or symbolic. The effect remains idiosyncratic, not systemic. Canvases such as Talons Reach (2022), which at first glance shows the silhouette of a figure floating in a pool, their head and torso just breaking the water line, with a lit cigarette between their lips, might best be thought of as conjuring those experiences one had, most often as a teenager, when strong feelings of closeness, of presentness, created a shutter-click moment of aesthetic dissociation, producing an image in memory. It’s what we grasp at when we talk about the subtle traumas of our loves, families or friendships, those scenes-plus-feelings from our pasts that can only ever be reconstructed but are no less real for that. It’s a case of nostalgia, but one absent a storyline, like the American West itself, once we’ve grown up and moved away. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Majd Abdel Hamid 800 Meters and a Corridor gb Agency, Paris 15 October – 19 November Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid adopted his signature medium – cotton thread woven through pillowcases, gauze, scraps of fabric, handkerchiefs and even kitchen utensils – after becoming interested in the parallels between twentieth-century abstraction and the nonfigurative traditions of Islamic art. Besides any cultural symbolism, the laborious process of creating his embroideries brings a performative, durational quality to the works. That they are small, portable and (according to the artist himself) even machine-washable has proved ever more suitable to the unpredictable conditions in which he operates. In this exhibition he showcases two new series of embroideries created in response to the huge fertiliser store explosion that devastated his adopted hometown of Beirut in the summer

of 2020. 800 meters (all works 2022) is titled in recognition of the length of surgical thread required to stitch up wounds on the day of the tragedy. While in hospital, Hamid – himself injured – was struck by the solidarity displayed by his fellow patients: in Beirut, long divided along sectarian and political lines, it had taken an undiscriminating tragedy to bring solidarity to the city. Thread thus became both a literal and figurative cord that bound its denizens together. Here, 800 meters takes the form of workbooks full of notes, punctured with coils of surgical thread wound to resemble calligraphy, as well as delicate embroideries spaced around the gallery walls: typical of these is 800 metres (how long was the thread) v, in which the coloured thread on white background is worked to the point where it resembles scar tissue.

The series Corridor takes a similar approach. This body of work began with Hamid asking Beirut friends to draw diagrams of their apartments, denoting the space in which they felt safest; the risk of flying debris meant that these tended to be windowless corridors, a fact reflected in the tapestries Hamid based on their testimonies. The architectural outlines of the properties are stitched onto mottled indigo fabric, the presumed ‘safe spaces’ embroidered with dense, coloured thread, again evoking the texture of scarred flesh. In Palestinian tradition, widows dye garments blue, then wash them until the last trace of colour disappears, at which point the grieving cycle ends. Hamid alludes to this in Corridor: the backgrounds, lightly spotted with paler blue or white, suggest that the process of healing is far from complete. Digby Warde-Aldam

Corridor, Research ii, 2022, cotton thread on fabric, 42 × 43 cm. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist and gb Agency, Paris

February 2023

Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art Hayward Gallery, London 26 October – 8 January A slab of pink stands on a shimmering gold base, its surface iced with globules of a glossy blue substance the colour of bubblegum and the look of buttercream. Nearby is a collection of smaller forms, all also brightly daubed like cakey stalagmites. One green mound is covered with blobs of red and gold that at first resemble fruit seeds, then acne spots or mould spores. Round the corner, a squid sprawls in an oily slick of ink, just feet away from a fragrant hill of vegetation punctuated by hybrid creatures: a child with a horse’s head; a girl emerging from a tree. Aside from the vegetation, all these forms are created from clay. They, and 20 other ceramic sculptures, clusters and displays, are the strange objects making up Strange Clay, an exhibition

exploring this most plastic and contradictory of mediums. As a survey of the strange, it is unsurprising the exhibition often dwells on the uncanny and fantastical. Clay’s strangeness is innate – a primordial material that issues from the earth’s gooey innards, but which is transformed through fire into the most delicate of vessels. Or as this exhibition makes clear, into deathly sea creatures, pale bundles of guts, hands, ears and lips. Clay is both domestic and organic; mineral deposit, mealtime and myth. Perhaps this is why many of the exhibits seem to be still ‘in the making’: Salvatore Arancio’s iridescent pillars erupt from dark, volcanic bases; David Zink Yi’s squid discharges

Lindsey Mendick, Till Death Do Us Part (detail), 2022, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Hayward Gallery, London

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its ink. Opening the exhibition, Jonathan Baldock’s Facecrime (2019) encapsulates this state of transformation with an exemplary playfulness: teetering totemlike towers of ceramic cylinders sprout ears and push out tongues and hands; drooping balloons of coloured glass sag from protuberances, like condoms attached to leaking pipes. The piece feels all in motion and in-between states; both ritualistic and abject. This seems true of Leilah Babirye’s work too. Persecuted for her queerness in Uganda, before being granted asylum in the us, Babirye’s hand-moulded, masklike ceramic heads are each crowned with New York street detritus – bike tyres and chains, nails and metal tubes – and given

a Buganda clan name, creating, in Babirye’s words, ‘a new queer clan’. What is commonly cast off is reclaimed and elevated; raw materials cooked into splendour. Revelling in the abject and unruly is taken to a carnivalesque extreme in Lindsey Mendick’s Till Death Do Us Part (2022), in which domestic scenes are invaded with ceramic vermin. Cockroaches swarm over a porcelain replica of 1990s relationship self-help book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and set up a boxing match on a copy of OK! magazine, headbutting on David and Victoria Beckham’s faces. Ceramic – that domestic material – is made strange in order to make cohabitation the realm of epic conflict. Here be not tea sets, but monsters. Yet while the exhibition ostensibly celebrates the contemporary breakdown between high art and craft – the last decade having witnessed ceramics being reclaimed as queer

and subversive in much the same manner textiles have been – there still seems to be a degree of equivocation about the medium. Or more precisely, a desire to focus on clay’s material properties, rather than contemporary ceramics’ position in a commercial art culture that values artworks as luxury products. What is undeniable is that the artworld is in the throes of a flirtatious fascination with clay. When Tate Liverpool presented an exhibition exploring ceramics in twentieth-century art in 2004, it was titled A Secret History of Clay. In the years since, however, the secret has got out, and the work of leading ceramic artists such as Ai Weiwei, Lucie Rie, Magdalene Odundo, Takuro Kuwata and Theaster Gates has been exhibited internationally to great acclaim. Indeed, in London alone, Strange Clay follows last year’s Clay Sermon, Gates’s multivenue exhibition of clay works at the Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Galleries and the Victoria & Albert

Museum. As the title suggests, Gates’s project spun on an appreciation for the material’s spiritual dimensions, yet it was also intimately involved with the significance of ceramics in global trade and colonial expansion. Clay stood as a material with entangled connections to wealth and the market. Strange Clay, on the other hand, seems exemplary of much of contemporary art’s ‘new materialism’, in that it dwells on matter’s dynamic nature, and how this connects to mysticism and myth, but avoids issues of value, consumption and trade. As a celebration of clay’s strangeness and plasticity, the Hayward’s exhibition is a fantastic aesthetic trip. Yet as an intervention in the ongoing broader dialogue between art and craft, what it does not do is reckon with contemporary ceramics’ complex relationship to labour, luxury and commerce – the truly slippery stuff with which the artworld seems to find it difficult to get to grips. Eloise Hendy

Installation view of works by Leilah Babirye in Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Hayward Gallery, London

February 2023

Henry Taylor B Side Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 6 November – 30 April I don’t need all of my fingers to count the number of working figurative painters who push past the pastiche that dominates today. With more than 150 works in painting, drawing and sculpture spanning more than 30 years, Henry Taylor’s first retrospective is comprehensive but not exhausting, emphatic and empathetic, and the paintings emerge as the stars. Mindful of Taylor’s status, especially in la, as a quintessential artist’s artist, I could give him my index finger because he really is that good of a painter to be my number one. But his work merits instead a particularly joyful middle finger, as it embodies an optimistic ‘fuck you’ to great swathes of representational and abstract painting throughout history (a history he very clearly knows well, and made explicit here with references to the likes of Picasso, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat) without annihilating ways forward for his work. He’s the whole hand, wielding brushes to point and provoke, not to mention, when the thumb is added, to grasp things with purpose and conviction. In other words his painting hands are also fists. That the show opened in la while Alex Katz’s paintings reactivate the Guggenheim in New York and Bob Thompson’s give a gone-toosoon history lesson at the Hammer provides

a contemporaneous framework for perceiving Taylor’s work in relation to a broader understanding of the New York School that never was as restrictively abstract as we’re often left to believe. Jumping into the middle of Taylor’s chronology with one of the best paintings in the show, Haitian working (washing my window) not begging (2015), I find it spectacular the extent to which the picture conveys the productive and poignant activity of its moment through a windshield while anchoring the entire composition with a Clyfford Still-worthy lineup of brown, blue and red-orange positioned in the bottom half of the right side of the canvas. It may not seem like much to some, but for me the side-byside manifestation of the representation of the worker’s arm with the abstraction of the other colours-as-shapes is masterful in its quiet yet potent disruption of both categories. Taylor does these types of things often in his work, and each time they reinforce rather than distract from what Willem de Kooning would have called the ‘tiny’ content. It could be that de Kooning was privileged to be able to consider content as tiny, as a glimpse, for example, of something on the street that goes away just as quickly as it is seen. Taylor’s paintings demand that we understand that those glimpses are often outrageously huge.

Many of them never go away even if a painting is never painted. The title of the times thay aint a changing, fast enough! (2017) shouts the pain of its representational subject – the 2016 police killing of Philando Castile by Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez – as the tragic exterior/interior gap of a violent split-second is somehow made both poisonous and respectful by the colours Taylor uses while repicturing the scene of the killing and building the painting itself as bodily material as much as pictorial evidence. Taylor sees with conviction and, I would argue just as much, wonder, and over the decades of his work he has expanded the reach of not only what the breadth of New York School painting gave us in terms of both abstraction and figuration, but also its reach beyond painting, even beyond art. It’s true that I’ve ignored the few sculptural works also presented in this survey. While I understand their inclusion (who wants to see a painting-only painting show these days?), to my eye almost all of them stay too close to the traditions of, in particular, the twentiethcentury assemblage art that emerged from the junkyards overflowing from the American Dream that was dumped in Southern California. Taylor’s paintings, however, are for then and now, as well as what’s next. Terry R. Myers

the times thay aint a changing, fast enough!, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. Photo: Cooper Dodds. © the artist. Collection Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Haitian Working (washing my window) not begging, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 152 × 183 cm.Pinault Collection. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

February 2023

Luz Lizarazo Cicatrices Museo La Tertulia, Cali 14 July – 29 November Reaching from gallery floor to ceiling, Universo (2021) is a cosmos-bound column of sewn-together mosquito nets. Through the sheer material, embroidered with images of flora, including trees that, like Jack’s beanstalk, stretch way beyond their natural height, we see a small garden of real, living potted plants at the base. Universo is the most recent in this multiroom survey of recent works (Lizarazo’s first institutional outing, despite a career several decades old), which together takes the visitor through the Colombian artist’s interests in nature, mythology and the female body, and how these three subjects intersect. Despite the grand gestures, of which Universo is typical, it becomes apparent that Lizarazo is a more innovative imagemaker than sculptor. Estómago (Stomach, 2005), a red knotted textile net containing a nest of coiled fabric tubes, is reminiscent of an Ernesto Neto sculpture, more abject than the art of her Brazilian peer, but nonetheless not quite disgusting enough; while Piel (Skin, 2017), a series

of women’s brown tights conjoined to stretch across every centimetre of one gallery’s wallspace, nods to Eva Hesse’s use of pantyhose, but doesn’t really progress that feminist and surrealist lineage further. Far more engrossing is the sheer oddity of Lizarazo’s pictorial works, which have little in the way of precedents in mainstream art history. Alucinaciones (Hallucinations, 2018) features dozens of black-and-white linocut prints made on satin fabric, in which women merge with flora and fauna, becoming hybrid entities inseparable from the landscape in which they sit or stand. In one, a nude woman rides a giant bird, her braided ponytail planting itself among the grass below. In others, faces merge with trees and plants flourish from between a woman’s legs. This weirdness isn’t surrealist-weird, but the strangeness (to this viewer) of non-Western cosmologies. Mundo Intermedio (Intermediate World, 2019) is a series of paintings on fabric that take imagery from various precolonial Colombian mythology: in Nascimento

Recuerdo de Infancia, 2021, oil on fabric, 240 × 191 cm. Courtesy the artist and Museo La Tertulia, Cali

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(Birth, 2019) a giant snake circles a naked woman. She projects a huge gush of light from her vulva, illuminating stars and planets that presumably have been propelled from the same source. There might be a legitimate question, given the references to indigenous mythos, cited in the accompanying wall texts, as to why the woman depicted is pale skinned, but in painting the woman in her own image, Lizarazo presents the scenes not as anthropological studies, but as a self-portrait in which her womanhood is inextricably linked with all life, seemingly, from the beginning of time. Sex and conception as the Big Bang is also the theme of Recuerdo de Infancia (Childhood Memory, 2021), one of dozens more paintings on fabric, in which a naked woman stands over a prone naked man, a giant rose bearing down on his vulnerable body, while in the background other naked figures are shown in yogic poses. Here, at least, the origins of the world never looked so fun. Oliver Basciano

Nashashibi / Skaer Chimera Cooper Gallery, Dundee 30 September – 19 December Since 2005 Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have made films collaboratively alongside their work as solo artists. Our Magnolia (2009) takes Paul Nash’s wartime painting Flight of the Magnolia (1944) as a departure point (fragments of the Nash painting are used as stills in the film), continuing the artists’ interest in art-historical quotation as a framing device. But where Nash’s painting invokes a surreal vision of Britain’s invasion by parachutes flowering, magnolialike, over the skies, Nashashibi/Skaer cast former prime minister Margaret Thatcher as ‘our magnolia’ at another key historical moment: a warmongering politician-in-pearls working with the us to initiate the first Gulf War (and remembered by the artists as a key player in the oil politics that resulted in the Iraq War under Tony Blair). In its use of found imagery, including footage of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in 2003, in which thousands of artefacts and works of art were stolen, and photographs of Thatcher herself, Our Magnolia at first appears formally and tonally distinct from the other two films in the

exhibition, Lamb (2019) and Bear (2021), whose closeup ethological gaze centres exclusively on ewes and lambs. Companion pieces, the two later films were shot in a lambing shed on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. In contrast to Our Magnolia, they seem to reassert a nature–culture dichotomy in depicting the cyclical nature of life, but the exhibition’s title, with its reference to the monstrous hybrid creatures of Greek mythology and its related definition as something illusory or dreamlike, encourages the viewer to read all three films (as British scholar Roger Cardinal writes of Paul Nash’s work in a text found in the exhibition’s reading area) as ‘brimful of poetic suggestion’ moving ‘towards a register that appears to outstrip, even to annul the idiom of the commonplace and the readily understood’. Lamb and Bear approach this shift, unanchored as they are from specific historical events. Where Lamb, filmed prior to pandemic lockdowns, is almost straight documentary (save for the Samuel Palmer-esque golden hue of sunlight on sheep and the sound of music and

human voice), Bear, filmed during lockdown, is silent and uncanny, something closer to a cine-poem. Nashashibi has described her work as being ‘a filter for looking at things’, through which ‘an activity can change from being banal to something strange, fantastical, miraculous’. Through Nashashibi/Skaer’s filter, the pregnant, panting ewes and unsteady, newly born lambs begin to take on an altogether more chimeric quality through the addition of ink on film and digital drawings. With these glitching, glancing, momentary overlays, the flock are transformed into altogether less bucolic, more mythic beasts on the brink of metamorphosis. With Our Magnolia, the possessive pronoun and the return to the motif of Nash’s blossoming parachute suggest that this is more a meditation on the artists’ memories of their formative years than a straight critique of Thatcher’s legacy. The newer works may signal a move away from the collage / documentary approach or implied political content of Our Magnolia, but poetic suggestion runs through all three. Susannah Thompson

Bear (still), 2021, 16mm film transferred to hd. Courtesy the artists and Cooper Gallery, Dundee

February 2023

dyor Kunsthalle Zürich 8 October – 15 January It’s been some two years since public attention was yanked towards the phenomenon of nfts, turbocharged by the stratospheric auction sales of works by us media artist Beeple in late 2020 and early 2021. Those two years have seen the value of cryptocurrencies skyrocket, only to crash again, the get-rich hype-bubble of crypto bursting in 2022. Yet alongside this, the artistic and cultural interest in nft, blockchain and cryptocurrency have persisted, since the critical issues that lie at the heart of blockchain speculation – decentralisation, the control of digital assets by creators and the emergence of new forms of virtual art – haven’t gone away. dyor (from the injunction to ‘Do Your Own Research’, in crypto parlance), put together by digital curator and gallerist Nina Roehrs, makes for a lively and thoughtful review of this anarchic, generative and sometimes frenzied moment in the interplay between art, technology, pop culture and tech-utopianism. A tourde-force mix of informational display and visual entertainment, the show turns around two huge rotating wall-carousels (each of the eight twosided ‘walls’ hosting a different thematic display or grouping of artists, which visitors can revolve at their whim), a zany exhibition design that cleverly stages an artistic form that, after all, is mostly experienced on little screens and in the internet, and whose conceptual intricacies are often hard to fathom if you’re not a nerdishly committed insider. That insider aspect of the culture that spawned nft emerges as an important theme in dyor, since the show identifies two broadly distinct ‘scenes’ of art and artists, which have both become visible through the nft boom – on one side a culture of crypto enthusiasts whose references are in online culture, memes, street and graphic art, and on the other artists steeped in the history of digital and net art, while also involved in current tech developments such as ai. So although there are (thankfully) no Bored Apes on display, one enters the show via a cannabis-plant strewn ‘living room’ dedicated to perhaps one of the earliest examples of an internet meme becoming an nft: Pepe the Frog. The boss-eyed, fat-lipped amphibian spawned an online fan community of Pepe imagemakers during the mid-2010s who had already been

trading their images on Ebay before the cult of Pepe seized on the possibilities of digital ‘rarefication’ made possible by blockchain platforms. ‘Trading cards’, merch and reproductions of famous ‘rare Pepes’, both physical and digital, surround a beatifically smiling humansize plush Pepe reclining on a sofa – Mona Lisa Pepe, Satoshi Nakamoto Pepe, Homer Simpson Pepe… The convivial absurdity of Pepe (not withstanding his brief hijacking as a mascot of the us alt-right) highlights how much the nft boom has been rooted in online subcultures that have had little to do with the artworld’s more exclusive networks. Groups like the Dada Collective – represented on the turnstiles by a mass of user-produced images, printed up and collaged in a dizzy pileup that reaches out from the wall – bring visual artists together to cocreate drawings as ‘visual conversations’, in which artists reciprocate by imitating and developing each other’s stylistic interests. The stylistic range, from academic to self-taught, reminds the more austere artworld of a vast, quotidian culture of imagemaking among amateurs and enthusiasts that was always out there, but that networked culture has, in the last decade or so, magnified and accelerated to an unprecedented degree. It’s to its credit that dyor is open to the divergence between such cultural communities. Well-represented too are those artists who have forged reputations for their sophisticated, critical probing of blockchain politics of ownership and value, among them Rhea Myers’s art-contract Certificate of Inauthenticity (2020) and Sarah Friend’s Lifeforms (2021), whose cute coloured blobs ‘live’ in your nft wallet but have to be given away within 90 days or they ‘die’. Mario Klingemann’s Botto project (2018–) fuses ai generative art with an nft-driven aesthetic economy, where human users up-vote Botto’s images according to their collective likes, eventually minting the machine’s learned responses to their ‘taste’. The more practical flipside of these conceptual ruminations appears with those nft artists who collectively confront the terms of the virtual economy – such as generative artist Matt Kane’s 2020 campaign to ensure artists’ secondary sales royalties became standard

facing page dyor, 2022 (installation views). Photos: Julien Gremaud

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in nft transactions, a benefit even now still under threat by unscrupulous auction platforms. The border between these scenes is porous, of course; Matt Hall and John Watkinson’s 2017 CryptoPunks (all 10,000 of them) was widely feted by the exploding nft market, while critics recognised its framing of how artistic content could be built into the code itself. Elsewhere in the Kunsthalle, on a long partition wall, the critic, ex-dealer and anarchic Artnet columnist Kenny Schacter is represented by a wallpapering of article printouts and screengrabs (and a cgi avatar of a dancing Kenny), for his part in cheerleading what he saw as the positive disruption that the nft boom brought to the conventional artworld. Schacter’s provocation needled many in the established artworld (he’s built his reputation on being the ‘insider’s outsider’, after all), highlighting how the artworld’s usual gatekeeping had been upset by the incursion of a new set of artists and collectors previously ignored by the art market. dyor’s capacious take on the rollercoaster of 2021 and 2022 frames it as the peak of a decade of diverse experimentation with the potential of blockchain, and artists’ part in that speculation. Far from being a bubble burst, many of the issues raised by the blockchain debate – about digital culture, ownership, decentralisation and what we value as ‘art’ – won’t be going away soon. At the far end of the show is a vr-headset exhibition conceived by Manuel Rossner, which maps you into a version of the galleries you’re standing in, the show replaced by startling virtual ‘sculptures’ by Rossner (Spatial Painting, 2022, is a group of huge glossy blue columns apparently smashing their way through the gallery’s floor and ceiling, out into the street beyond) and, among others, Nancy Baker Cahill and Kim Asendorf (Asendorf’s glitching black-and-white monogrid 4b, 2021, flickers across a whole ‘wall’ of the Kunsthalle’s stairwell). This vr-isation of the art gallery is an ambiguous requiem for the physical artwork and the public space that gives it meaning. Ironically for all its attention to little flat digital rectangles, dyor ends up reaffirming the cultural value of having a place to meet, look and think ‘irl’. J.J. Charlesworth

February 2023

the 1970s: _____ Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts, Brussels 24 September – 18 December Featuring 30-plus artists and artist groups, the 1970s:_____ aims to chronologise and draw attention to the scope of film and video art that emerged in several Belgian cities (including Aalst, Antwerp, Brussels, Liège, Namur and Knokke) during a particularly frenetic decade, setting down an as-yet-unwritten history in consultation with the artists and filmmakers involved. A leitmotif in the show is how cultural production in the early part of the decade was dramatically transformed by the arrival of new recording devices, particularly video cameras. There is, accordingly, an archaeological quality distinguishing the exhibition: moving-image material originally produced on formats that were at

serious risk of deterioration and decay has been tracked down, digitised and resuscitated. Two widely available video-recording devices developed by Sony, the reel-to-reel Portapak (1967) and the cassette-based U-matic (1971), proved particularly important in this era and were used in many of the works included here. But this decade also saw more traditional film technologies (such as the Super-8 camera) being used in experimental ways. Bernard Queeckers’s Hexagon 2 (1976) consists of a Super-8 camera suspended on cables inside a geometric structure made from mirrors partially visible to the viewer; the camera spins at speed, filming its own blurred reflection. Rudimentary in concept

Jacques Lizène, Sculpture Interne, 1971/2022, closed circuit television with monitor

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and realisation, this work typifies the type of ‘structural’ work that emerged in Belgium during this ‘laboratory phase’, when it was sufficient merely to explore the technical capabilities of these machines, and by extension, the impact of this technology on human perception. Elsewhere, in the upstairs gallery, a reconstruction of Jacques Lizène’s 1971 installation Sculpture Interne sprawls across the floor. A camcorder and spotlight point to the rear of a vintage cube-shaped monitor, the back casing removed to reveal its innards, which are then shown in real time on the monitor’s screen via a live closed-circuit feedback loop. Sculpture Interne naturally evokes Nam June Paik’s mid-1960s

work, and the influence of the Korean artist – who was exhibiting widely in Europe in these years – is tangible throughout this show, both literally and more generally in terms of a subversive approach to hijacking technology. While recording devices were still novel at this time, tv was firmly established, and artists such as Lizène sought to liberate it from its use as an apparatus of ideological control and cultural hegemony. That tv could be a two-way mode of communication was central, too, to a four-day 1971 project initiated by Guy Jungblut and others at the Yellow Now gallery in Liège. Artists’ Proposals for a Closed-Circuit Television invited a constellation of artists to suggest ways of activating such a setup in the gallery. The contributions from European and American artists – Dan Graham, Christian Boltanski and Gina Pane among them – underscore the international reach of this project; that this

venture took place in a regional, postindustrial city in Wallonia is notable, too, given the region’s less prominent cultural and economic position compared to its wealthier Flemish counterpart, in what is a linguistically and (more recently) politically bifurcated nation. The revolutionary implications of audiovisual technology interested many artists at this time, particularly those of a Marxist or Situationist bent. Such ideological aspirations unified a swathe of artists working with audiovisual media and independent filmmakers opposed to mainstream culture. Entities such as the Montfaucon Research Center, a collective active in Brussels from the late 1960s to the early 70s, used film with the aim of fomenting change and altering sociopolitical mores. The centre was cofounded by Michel Bonnemaison and Joëlle de la Casinière, the latter notably prolific after the centre disbanded. De la Casinière is represented here

by Telecolor Inflammable (1977), a mantric, psychedelic, loosely narrated film that harnesses the trance-inducing powers of the flickering screen. There is a tension within much of the work here between a desire to embrace technology while also resisting its perniciously homogenising and standardising influences. If this decade-specific compendium shows us anything, it is how, in a relatively short period, technology once viewed as imbued with utopian potential can be assimilated and institutionalised, its insurgent and disruptive capacities entirely neutered. Inevitably, then, the 1970s:_____ feels elegiac and nostalgic, casting electronic light on one of the last gasps of a culture shaped by the social and ideological shifts of the previous decade: a scene built on self-organisation, informal underground networks and a shared belief in the potential of collaboration. Pádraic E. Moore

Exhibition documentation of work by Andrée Blavier for Artists’ Proposals for a Closed-Circuit Television, 1971, Yellow Now, Liège. Photo: Guy Jungblut

February 2023

Nalini Malani Gamepieces Art Gallery of South Australia – agsa, Adelaide 5 November – 22 January You almost sense them before you see them, as you make your way into the gallery. A pair of figures, wall drawings of half-human, halfmonsters, appear like tornadoes crashing through opposing walls. Nalini Malani first made her Mutant drawings in 1996, for the 2nd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. They were partly a response to the toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1984, which killed more than 20,000 people. At agsa these depictions of ecological disaster register as both epic and visceral. Half a million survivors suffered ailments including respiratory problems and blindness. One of the drawings, titled Mutant ii (1996), conceals the trace of a woman; a chalk outline like

a murder scene on a pavement. A ghost life that never was. Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi a year before Partition carved up the subcontinent. Her best work reveals the female body as a stage that enacts the theatre of history. It’s a thread that recurs across Gamepieces, which features over 30 works, most drawn from agsa’s own collection. This is the first time the gallery has devoted a solo exhibition to a South Asian artist; a radical move in a landscape of Australian art institutions that extols the ‘blockbuster’. Exhibitions dedicated to female-identifying artists are often described in the celebratory language of empowermentfeminism, but it’s still all-too-rare for a national institution to devote a major retrospective to a woman artist of colour. This despite the fact

Untitled ii, 1970/2018, digital print from photogram, 112 × 89 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

ArtReview

that nearly a third of Australia’s population is overseas-born, with India the fastest-growing migrant group behind the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Gamepieces unfolds in a series of darkened rooms in agsa’s lower-level gallery. To descend the staircase is to surrender to Can You Hear Me? (2018–20). This suite of 88 stop-motion animations, finger-drawn by the artist on her iPad, are blown up and projected across four walls. They respond to the death of an eight-year-old girl, murdered by eight men in Kashmir in 2018. Lines squiggle and squirm. They morph into faces. A girl jumps over her skipping rope. Text dissolves, the words of literary greats – James Baldwin, Milan Kundera and Rainer Maria Rilke – as disposable as a newsfeed. It is poignant within

an Australian context, because while conversations and awareness around gender-based violence have evolved since #MeToo, when a woman of colour is assaulted or killed she rarely dents the national imagination. One of the strengths of Gamepieces is the way it positions Malani as fiercely internationalist – aesthetically and politically. I’m transfixed by Dream Houses i (1969): the film alludes to Josef Albers’s colour theory and the Indian modernist architect Charles Correa. It conjures the city as a flickering grid of blue and red and green. There’s nothing novel about erasing the divide between the East and West. But in the context of Gamepieces, this framing is oddly powerful. It shows the viewer, who may be tempted to exonerate themselves from gender politics as it plays out in ‘developing countries’, that they are part of a single visual unconscious. Gamepieces imagines this as a swirling universe of images and references that we all draw on to make meaning. It exists without boundaries: geographical, physical, temporal.

A 2002 series of paintings, Stories Retold, gives voice to the forgotten women of Hindu mythology and subverts the morality stories contained in the Bhagavata Purana. In the text, the goddess Radha is Krishna’s older, married lover, but her erotic devotion is sanitised in contemporary India. In a painting from Stories Retold titled The Ecstasy of Radha, the goddess, rendered in lush oranges and reds, embodies a spectrum of sensual pleasure. She levitates, soars and floats, at ease in her own body. The work, which unfolds on Mylar using ‘reverse painting’ – a Byzantine technique embraced by Indian artists in the mid-nineteenth century – hints at the way myths inflect the everyday. It also invites the viewer to reflect on how their biases can shape different interpretations of the same story. Archetypes, like headlines, shape our reality. They haunt our subconscious, determine how we treat each other. Unity in Diversity, created in 2003, references the Gujarat riots between Hindus and Muslims

that erupted the year before. The installation occupies a gallery that resembles a middle-class Indian living room. On one wall hangs a series of paintings, done in Kalighat, a style conceived by painters in nineteenth-century Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), from the gallery’s collection. In one of these, Saraswati, the goddess of art and music, is depicted in delicate watercolour. The feminine ideal she embodies clashes with the sound of gunshots emanating from a videowork installed on another wall. In the titular series, Gamepieces (2003–20), projected silhouettes on spinning Mylar cylinders – a fish, a dragon, a girl – dance and glide through the space; in the background plays khyal, a form of Hindu classical music that stems from the Persian word for imagination. Malani’s work melds poetry with politics, brutality with moments of profound beauty. Here, she finds an equilibrium between opposing forces, a strange and shifting shadow-reality where we can dream the world again. Neha Kale

Gamepieces, 2003–20, four-channel video installation, sound, 12 min (loop), sync, synthetic polymer paint on six Mylar cylinders, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

February 2023

Caragh Thuring Hastings Contemporary 8 October – 12 March Caragh Thuring’s paintings are dizzying, layered experiences in which representation is always set up for a fall; paintings about painting, full of mischievous formal devices that constantly remind you that an image is a magician’s trick, ready to be found out. All those overserious, now-archaic modernist preoccupations – the frame of the canvas, the edge, illusion and flatness – get domesticated and deflated. One of the earliest works here, Palm Springs (2009), is a catalogue of motifs that Thuring has pursued with increasing sophistication ever since, a field of unprimed canvas, onto which basic forms flicker into representation: groups of irregularly shaped green patches become the foliage of a tree; a brick pattern becomes a wall; behind it, rectangles of thin white become a building; windows and louvre blinds float about, while towards the top a heavy scribble of dark blue brushwork hangs, almost becoming a raincloud. Yet Thuring’s self-conscious highlighting of painterly mechanics is never distanced or

cynical. These are images increasingly drenched in everyday life and things – fastfood, frankfurter sausages, trees, walls, windowsills, canal drawbridges, shipping cranes, cascades of cryptocurrency coins, tartan patterns, sportswomen, volcanoes, nuclear submarines. All these, however, engage in a kind of comedy about the fragility of their own self-evidence; the dark profile of the submarine that appears in The Silent Service (2016) is little more than a curved wedge of black, whose straight lower edge indicates only where the sea, implied by raw canvas, should be. Such emasculated grandeur is part of Thuring’s gender-tinged humour (of which David Gandy, 2014 – three male models made up of brick pattern, posing ridiculously in their white briefs – is the funniest). In August 1779 (2011), a volcano in eruption (Vesuvius, if you trust the date) is seen as if from behind a low wall of semitransparent hot-red brick shapes, itself inside a window frame; in the adjacent Eruzione del

August 1779, 2011, oil and matting agent on dyed linen, 183 × 244 cm. Photo: Richard Ive. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London & Naples

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(2019), another volcano puffs smoke dramatically in a grisaille landscape, but an overlaid grid of lines and cracks suggests that the painting really depicts an image itself painted onto a wall of old tiling. A sort of vertiginous collapse of time and place occurs, ‘there’ and ‘here’ further tangled because Thuring’s canvas is woven with a dark version of the image, tapestrylike, in the fabric itself. This virtuosic technique Thuring has developed – images of previous paintings woven into custom-made canvases, onto which she further paints – is an acute disruption of the old surface–image dichotomy that still haunts contemporary painting. But paradoxically, it makes for a more vivid attention to the kaleidoscope of visible life that eventually appears, vulnerable as it is. Thuring’s painting are objects in which the act of seeing becomes profoundly self-aware, since the life depicted comes into view just at the moment when what depicts it self-destructs. J.J. Charlesworth

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town 20 November – 3 September When We See Us is almost certainly the most ambitious exhibition curated at Zeitz mocaa to date. Its scope is vast, bringing together 156 artists from Africa and its diaspora, with over 200 works of art. Although the exhibition pamphlet wants to direct the viewer to themes like ‘Joy and Revelry’, ‘Triumph and Emancipation’ and ‘Repose’, the curating isn’t obviously didactic. The huge wealth of imagery covers a large range of styles, cultures, times, art movements and social experience. I was initially confused as to just how to approach the exhibition. I saw the security guard staring at one of the paintings, Eric Ndlovu’s Buffalo Bill Bar (1980). “Is that your favourite?” I asked. She nodded and explained that she liked

the fact that the people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Introducing herself, she then took me to another favourite. This time Tanzanian Sungi Mlengeya’s Constant iii (2019) of two youths, one draped in the other’s arms. The guard said she was drawn to it as much by its subject as its simplicity and lack of bright colour. We walked through the exhibition together and I asked her about George Pemba’s painting The Audience (1960), detailing a young Black couple in a cinema. She said that she “knew this image”. Pemba, like the guard, was from the Xhosaspeaking Eastern Cape and he documented much of its rich cultural life in painting and writing from the 1930s until the turn of the century. And one thing that the exhibition reveals is that Pemba was not alone. Figurative representation

has existed across many cultures and places. The fact that these practices have often been overlooked by a more global artworld seems precisely the point of the exhibition. But the blame is at least partly shared. Certainly South Africa, to put it mildly, is not a place where the public sphere gives much importance to culture – public museums are often in a state of collapse. But what When We See Us exposes is just how deep the cultural practices of Africa and its diaspora are. Zeitz, situated in its opulent v&a Waterfront district, was at least partly built for the Cape Town tourist. But fittingly, When We See Us can and does engage with a wider audience and reveals remarkable histories, practices and attitudes towards subjectivity. Matthew Blackman

Sungi Mlengeya, Constant iii, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 140 × 140 cm. Photo: Dillon Marsh. Courtesy Afriart Gallery, Kampala

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Okayama Art Summit 2022 Do We Dream Under the Same Sky Various venues, Okayama 30 September – 27 November When it was launched back in 2016, Okayama Art Summit’s usp was that it was ‘an experiment directed by internationally renowned artists’: British artist Liam Gillick for the inaugural edition; Frenchman Pierre Huyghe in 2019; and now Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. (That all three have, at various times, been tagged as members of a gang who came to prominence through producing ‘relational’ art may constitute an overarching theme for the project.) Select works from those two previous editions pepper the city: among them Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s readymade How to Work Better (2016), a ten-point list (do one thing at a time; know the problem; distinguish sense from nonsense; say it simple; etc) the duo appropriated from a sign on the wall of a ceramic factory in Thailand, enumerated here down the side of a tower block; and Lawrence Weiner’s text work blocks of / compressed graphite / set in such a manner / as to interfere / with the flow / of neutrons / from place / to place (2017, from the 2019 edition) that cascades down the facade of the bunkerlike Cinema Clair. You can take that as proof of either the project’s legacy or of the city’s submission to the language of art. Although as the evidence just cited indicates, that language is English.

Of course, after a decade of artist-led KochiMuziris biennales and last year’s Documenta (directed by art-collective ruangrupa) and Berlin Biennale (helmed by artist Kader Attia), that initial sp now seems a little less u, but the idea of the exhibition as a form of experiment, and the exhibition as a form of dialogue and forum for discussion (suggested by the somewhat curious ‘Summit’ branding), persists in a show featuring work by 27 artists and groups at ten sites physically compact (you can comfortably get around it on foot and in the space of a day) but intellectually expansive. Indeed, that Do We Dream Under the Same Sky follows in the tradition of what has come before is implied. After you’ve passed the Fischli & Weisses and the Weiners, the title of this year’s summit, also a work by Tiravanija, is, like the previous works, written into the fabric of the city (inscribed on the lawn, outside one of the triennial’s primary exhibition sites, the former Uchisange Elementary School). Although perhaps, in this case, the grass cutting indicates a concession to a certain amount of contingency and ephemerality. In his curatorial statement, Tiravanija frames the exhibition’s title, which hovers somewhere between a question and a proposition, as ‘an opening to an idea’. An idea that the

artist has been exploring in various ways (installations, books, etc) for the past several years. Here that idea crystallises in the suggestion that what’s on show represents something shared but potentially different, which you might argue is the basis on which most art, of any time and from any place, is founded. But the obvious is not always connected to the straightforward. While many of the artists on show here work in the West, the majority articulate concerns and concepts derived from elsewhere. Frequently as a result of personal or family migration or a diasporic heritage. So, beyond the usual curatorial babble, what does that mean? Over to the Orient Museum, where, among the Roman, Byzantine and Assyrian collections (which leaves you more than a little confused about what ‘Orient’ means here – west of Japan?; all the way east but skipping over North America? Or perhaps simply an unhelpful use of European terminology or museology?), sits Rasel Ahmed’s 18-minute, two-channel video Who Killed Taniya? (2020). On the face of it, the video simply records a group of drag queens applying costume, makeup and prosthetics (at an underground drag show in Dhaka, capital of the artist’s native Bangladesh). Ostensibly the theme of body image is one that finds echoes in Mari

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Katayama’s photographic self-portraits back at Uchisange. (Katayama is a double amputee.) But, just as with Katayama’s works, the text that unfolds alongside the imagery in Ahmed’s video explodes any idea of a simple reading: it evokes the nature, status and anxieties attached to being labelled a refugee. Following a short digression on joint attention theory, a certain amount of self-consciousness (‘is this a documentary or a makeup tutorial?’ the text asks at one point) questions what makes us different and what makes us belong, whether or not that last is objectively observable, the uncertain relations between truth and fantasy, and notions of authenticity. If you subsequently find out that the drag show’s lead performer was killed in an Al Qaeda attack two months after the film was shot (originally as part of a personal archive) and that the artist, at the time best known for founding Bangladesh’s first lgbtq magazine, was forced into exile after the magazine’s publisher was hacked to death (for which the nation’s home minister blamed his involvement with a ‘homosexual’ publication), the shockwaves ripple even further. Similarly, Vandy Rattana’s sublime The monologue Trilogy (2015–19), at Uchisange, comprises videos presenting a series of apparently straightforward rural scenes (jungle, fields, landscapes) that are complicated by contextualising monologues (in Khmer – English is not necessarily the dominant language in this exhibition, although there are subtitles here) that accompany them. In the first video, titled

monologue (2015), the field, in the middle of a jungle, turns out to be the probable, but not necessarily exact, site at which the artist’s sister’s (and grandmother’s) bodies were buried in a mass grave by the Khmer Rouge. The land itself bears no trace of this; just as, via his monologue, the artist is left to imagine (or dream about) the sister he never really knew; even though they were both, at different points, present under this same sky. It goes without saying that Tiravanija’s conceit neatly ties many of the elements of his exhibition together without feeling heavyhanded, such as to force one particular reading over another. A group ‘index’ show (within the bigger show) collects works by every participant in the art summit (generally unrelated to the work each is showing elsewhere) into a kind of discussion forum (or artistic director’s mixtape), but, curatorially, the show is tight rather than suffocating. In the toilet of a tiny downtown Italian joint, I stumbled across one of a series of pencil portraits of Tiravanja executed by Yutaka Sone (who, elsewhere, was performing a spoken-word poem with a Japanese drone band on top of a makeshiftlooking oil-drum stage designed with Tiravanija and made of marble) and donated to local restaurants in which the pair had dined. “Only available wallspace,” the owner explained apologetically, handing me a brochure for the art summit as I walked out. Indeed, if the remnants of previous editions of the summit suggest a focus on the West,

Tiravanija’s edition toys more evidently with the local. Not least through the inclusion of Shimabuku’s video Swan Goes to the Sea (2012/14), which features the artist taking one of the swan-shaped boats available to tourists and pleasure seekers at Okayama’s Asahikawa riverbank out for a longer trip. Shimabuku, whose mother is from Okayama and went to school at Uchisange (where his work is now installed), created the video having sailed the boats as a child, finding them still there when he returned 40 years later as an adult. The resulting video is at once ridiculous, liberating, cathartic and nostalgic. The more general mix of the playful and the innocent with the sombre and the disturbing is repeated next door to Tiravanija’s grasswriting back at the former school. Precious Okoyomon’s Touching My Lil Tail Till the Sun Notices Me (2022) features a wide-eyed, massively oversized, plush brown teddy bear, girlishly clad in translucent white underpants and a pink hairband, spreadeagled in a drained and dirty, weedcovered swimming pool, pink tongue poking out of its mouth and sightless eyes looking skywards. As if it had passed out in the middle of some form of schoolgirl cosplay. Next door to the bear is a rail featuring a selection of garments designed by Overcoat (a New York label founded by Japanese designer Ryuhei Oomaru), each of which is decorated with Tiravanija’s slogans ‘No More Reality’, ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day’, ‘Fear Eats the Soul’. Just in case you feel like getting in on the cosplay too. Mark Rappolt

Precious Okoyomon, Touching My Lil Tail Till the Sun Notices Me, 2022, plush synthetic fur, lace and cast resin, dimensions variable. Supported by rossogranada. Photo: Yasushi Ichikawa. Courtesy the artist. © 2022 Okayama Art Summit Executive Committee

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Books The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis Swift, £25 (hardcover) The star of Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel for 13 years is Bret. It’s set in Los Angeles, in the autumn of 1981, in his last year of a private high school and he’s in the middle of an early draft of Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less than Zero (actually published in 1985). Aside from that, his main preoccupations are sex (with girls and boys), drugs (sedatives, weed and cocaine), the social dynamics of his elite group of overprivileged high-school peers – quarterbacks, prom queens – and a predatory serial-killer dubbed ‘the Trawler’, about whom no one else (other than the police and occasionally the press) seems to care that much (although the narratives of the friends and the serial killer come together, in a way, at the book’s denouement). Throughout, Bret is trapped in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood like a fly in amber, but nevertheless moving from one to another in a manner that’s beyond his control. With parents who are seemingly on permanent vacation, and those of his friends similarly uninterested in the lives of their offspring (a result, variously, of business, divorce, drugs and their own sex drives), music (for those who remain unsatisfied by the author’s written analyses of his novel’s

soundtrack, or for those with nostalgic cravings, there’s an extensive Spotify playlist accompanying the book) and movies take their place as role models. Fans of Ellis’s work will see touches of Less than Zero and another early novel, American Psycho (1991), as well as the autofictional tendencies of later works such as Lunar Park (2005). Yet for all its nostalgic undertones, this book (ostensibly written by the fictional Bret of today looking back to his adolescence) is as much about the present as it is the past. ‘In a pre-digital world secrets were more easily kept; in fact secrets were the norm,’ the author interjects at one point (to explain why various aspects of the Trawler’s story weren’t connected at the time), and yet, one might also read the book as a story about how disembodied identities, masks and avatars long predated social media and metaverses. Much of Bret’s time is spent hiding his own identity (in particular his homosexuality), while trying, simultaneously, to find out who everyone else ‘really’ is behind the masks Bret assumes they also wear. Everyone, it seems, is using everyone else. Overall, it’s an exercise that frequently causes lapses in Bret’s mind at the border of

fiction and reality. (‘I stared at Susan’, Bret writes at one point, ‘and felt strangely distanced, as if I was floating above the kitchen, watching myself in a movie where I didn’t know the story, or who my character was’.) But that, he self-justifies, is merely the result of bearing the heavy burden of a young writer’s imagination. Not that we hear much about what young Bret is actually writing. But then again, we have real Bret’s bibliography for that. While the Trawler’s murders are shocking, graphic and bizarre, as one might expect given Ellis’s track record, the conceit of an older writer looking back allows him to treat love, sex and the crossovers between them with more eroticism (particularly in the case of homosexual encounters), tenderness and complexity than in previous works. Even though, all the while, fictional Bret is actively pursuing ‘numbness’ as a means of getting though life: ‘I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy’. That Bret never quite manages to live up to this ideal is perhaps what this surprisingly subtle novel (for all the cum, gore and theriocide) is really about. Mark Rappolt

The Gourmand’s Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes The Gourmand, Taschen, £40 (hardcover) Did you know Alfred Hitchcock was an ovophobe? The Gourmand’s Egg is full of such ‘fun’ facts and anecdotes, the best of which describe the more idiosyncratic sort of person – like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s cook Hélène, who, given no prior notice that Matisse would be staying for dinner, decided to snub the artist by refusing to cook him an omelette and instead served him fried eggs (‘It shows less respect, and he will understand,’ she said). The short texts that form the first half of this book are categorised into ‘genres’ – such as literature, psychology, cinema, art, history and medicine. Apparently raw eggs are good for hangovers because they contain ‘cysteine, an amino acid that steps in to help break down the beastly

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acetaldehyde’, which is the toxic headacheinducing chemical that ethanol is converted into – sort of useful if, like me, you’re unlucky enough not to have inherited the enzyme that breaks the stuff down. Still, I’m unlikely to be downing a pint of raw eggs anytime soon. Not that I’m an ovophobe. Far from it. Elsewhere the texts examine eggs in art (Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oilstick drawing Brown Eggs, 1981, made when the artist was transitioning from street to gallery art; Sarah Lucas’s Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, in which the artist sits laconically in an armchair sporting a pair of egg-tits), eggs in fashion (that time Björk wore a swan dress and laid eggs all over the red carpet at the Oscars) and the language of eggs

ArtReview

(diner slang that includes ‘drown the kids’ – boiled – and a ‘dead eye’ – poached). The second half of the book is dedicated to eggy recipes. Here I’m more suspicious; no one in their right mind would add beaten eggs directly into a wok full of fried rice unless they actually wanted a clumpy rubbery mess. Chances are, if you’re cooking at home, you’re unlikely to have a wok burner and therefore won’t be able to achieve the necessary heat to cook egg-fried rice that way. Trust me, cook the eggs first then add them to the rice after. (You can have that one for free.) Still, it’s a nice book to look at, and now I’ve got a few more… eggcellent… talking points for the next gallery dinner. Fi Churchman

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I Am An Artist (He Said) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, translated by Kong Rithdee National Gallery Singapore, sg$37.45 (softcover) At a 2017 exhibition by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai sign mounted on the gallery wall announced: ‘The artist is trying to return to being a writer’. New works – sculptures modelled on herself and her pet dogs and attesting to a decades-long fixation on mortality – suggested she was still an object-oriented artist, but behind the scenes, I was informed, the ‘return’ was well underway: a novel was being penned during the show’s duration. In 2020 extracts from that novel were juxtaposed with sculptures of dogs and a flower vase at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York. The insinuation being that, far from replacing artmaking, writing is – for her – a facet of it. This translation of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s mid-2000s columns for Thailand’s Matichon Weekly magazine deepens the mystique surrounding the playful, performative ‘return’ of her writing practice while also clarifying it. Both a rare social document and a reflexive self-examination, I Am An Artist (He Said) reveals that she has long been an accomplished writer – English readers just didn’t know it yet – and that the reclusive sixty-five-year-old’s artmaking and writing have long been causally intertwined. Albeit complexly so: ‘Artmaking is different from writing. I don’t think anybody can write on behalf of somebody else,’ she writes at one point. Art and literature form just one zone of animated discussion in this mischievous book:

a restless amalgam of gossipy art-scene recollections, prickly cultural criticism and experimental autofiction. Some of the artworld topics occupying the 29 chapters include postmodernism, macho artists, Thailand’s ‘Art for Life’ movement and art competitions, to name just a few. Although it quickly becomes clear that the overarching subject is the mercurial quality of what she calls her nai manut, or inner human – and the roving, self-sustaining, internalised nature of the many discussions driving it. Internationally, Rasdjarmrearnsook is perhaps best known for reading poetry or playing teacher in front of real cadavers in makeshift classrooms. As the book’s editors note, the dialogue in this infamous video series is, in fact, a dialogue with herself – a conceit that continues here but is complicated by how two Rasdjarmrearnsooks make their presence felt. From the title onwards, the book is a conversation between He and She, often bickering male and female versions of the artist. He holds court at some points; interrupts at others. ‘You, Artmakers, Are you Immune?’ opens with She recounting the digging of a hole in her garden with a view to eventually being buried alongside her dogs, ‘two of my dearest ladies, so we three could lie there together…’. He interjects: ‘Without me, this chapter would have been accompanied by a funereal drum.’

This queering of the female voice – a cipher, perhaps, for her experiences of a male-dominated literary and artistic sphere – is rarely as blunt or abrupt as that example might suggest (for the most, She and He seem indistinguishable). And somehow, I Am An Artist (He Said) manages to pack in passages of high-flown poeticism and lyricised emotions, and challenge us with feminist undertows and unsettled existential ambiguities (such as, did she really dig a shallow grave for her and her favourite dogs? Personally, I wouldn’t put it past her – the ongoing ‘exchange life-art’ project puthertosleepsaveusandours.com centres on her apparently genuine, but as-yet-unsuccessful, euthanasia applications), and still be endearing and funny: this is a sly, provocative book of considerable comedic, as well as academic, merits. Expertly hewn out of the original columns by translator Kong Rithdee – himself an acclaimed prose stylist – it is also the fullest insider account of the Thai art scene to date. Whether distilling the collective ripples of grief upon figurehead Montien Boonma’s death in 2000, dissecting Rirkrit Tiravanija’s pad thai cookups with snarky bemusement or describing the bureaucratic struggles and methodological gains of Thai artist-teachers, Rasdjarmrearnsook is a perceptive witness as well as a pioneer. Max Crosbie-Jones

Spike Lee: Director’s Inspiration Delmonico Books / dap, us$39.95 (hardcover) When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, the first artist to be included in its ‘Director’s Inspiration’ display was Spike Lee. This, in effect, is the catalogue for that show, and it delivers a portfolio of anecdotes, observations and enthusiasms via an extended interview with the director, testimonials by a tight selection of industry workers and the artists Isaac Julien and Martine Syms, and many pages of personal memorabilia borrowed from the walls and archives of Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule production company – the overall effect of which is a polished and affecting celebration of the young Brooklyn student filmmaker who has gone on to become a legend of American cinema. Many of the stories here will be familiar to fans of Spike Lee and his work: that he cast Rosie

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Perez, whose iconic four-minute Brooklynsidewalk dance sequence opens his 1989 film, Do the Right Thing (a screening of which the young lawyers Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama attended on their first date), after spotting her dancing atop a speaker at a club where he was celebrating his 31st birthday. That She’s Gotta Have It (1985), Lee’s singular portrait of female sexual agency in the figure of Nola Darling, was shot, guerrilla-style, in b/w over 12 days for $175,000 (you can see civilians passing in and out of shot, looking into the camera as it sweeps past). That his father, a jazz musician and composer, took responsibility for much of the music in Lee’s early films. That he cultivated important early relationships with figures such as Martin Scorsese. That he is a sports fanatic

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whose campaign for Nike featuring Michael Jordan he credits with giving his profile a huge early boost. That he has innovated without pause over the past 40-plus years, across 24 feature films and dozens of other film, tv, stage and music-video projects. And that throughout it all he has maintained an unwavering focus on the lives of Black Americans. It’s a lot for memorabilia – film posters, magazine covers, musical instruments, baseball jerseys, campaign posters, portraits of musicians and sports figures, props, ephemera – to carry, but as representations of the interests that have fed into and been transformed by their collector’s far-reaching cultural production, they’re a treasure trove. David Terrien

Climate: Our Right to Breathe Edited by Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez and Corina Oprea L’Internationale Online and K. Verlag, €29.50 (softcover) ‘The Global South cannot breathe,’ writes Françoise Vergès in the opening essay of this anthology of texts and artworks that address the uneven distribution of the impacts of climate change. Besides being suffocated by air pollution, marginalised communities – including people of colour, indigenous populations and the poor – can also be strangled figuratively and literally, subject to violence that manifests in events like the 2014 death of Eric Garner at the hands of an nypd officer, which, in turn, precipitated the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement. Vergès argues that both forms of breathlessness stem from an extractive and racialised capitalism. Climate justice and social justice are two sides of the same coin. Her essay sets the agenda for the book. In it, 25 writers, artists and activists trace how climate change interacts with long-standing systemic injustices, and suggest ways to resist these hegemonic forces. From academia, we have essays deconstructing the underlying cultural assumptions that played a part in driving climate change. Then there are direct accounts of dispossession and exploitation. An epic poem composed from interviews with 33 forest agents from the Amazonian city of Rio Branco – who are elected by indigenous communities to care for the land – sets out their experiences and hopeful vision for the future. Finally, there are

examples of solidarity and resistance, such as the activist Grupo Semillas (Seed Group) from Colombia, a grassroots organisation that supports indigenous and peasant groups in defending their rights to land and water. What can art institutions do for climate justice? Mônica Hoff’s essay pulls no punches: museums can make all manner of climate commitments and decolonisation drives, but these would simply be polite noises if the institution does not fundamentally unlearn its complicity with colonial power structures and epistemes. And to do this, it needs to get uncomfortable; apologise for wrongdoings; learn, not teach. Hoff’s text works more from a loose style combining elegant, aphoristic prose as well as unrelenting rhetorical questions that communicate the urgency and nearimpossibility of the task at hand. Artworks that offer models of what art can do in the fight for climate justice are included as case studies in critical essays or simply reproduced in the book’s pages. But there is a sense in which social and climate injustice remains simply a subject for these paintings. The more involved and transformative artworks are those that go beyond treating climate justice as a topic, to accepting it as a necessary historical condition that expands the parameters and processes of artmaking

– sometimes to the extent that the result looks very little like art at all. A classic example is the work of Forensic Architecture, the investigative agency whose research findings are exhibited in art galleries and used as evidence in courts. In this book, the group presents an analytical model for mapping the shapes and concentration of toxic clouds of teargas, as well as data visualisation methodologies to measure the adverse effects of smog caused by forest fires. Also blurring the categories of art and sociopolitical action are ‘neo-pastoral artist’ Fernando García-Dory’s Escuela de Pastores (Shepherd’s School) in the Cantabrian mountains in Spain that trains anybody – from young people to migrants – in the basics of sustainable shepherding, integral to the agroecological heritage of the area; as well as Marina Naprushkina’s Neue Nachbarschaft/ Moabit (New Neighbourhood/Moabit) project in Berlin, an informal association that runs cultural and educational programmes for migrant communities and refugees. Care, mutual aid and self-organisation are the guiding principles for these projects. Their hybridity suggests that a climate-informed art might be one that necessarily erodes conventional categories of art and the rest of life, and in themselves embody the sorts of cataclysmic, global creativity we need to navigate the climate emergency. Adeline Chia

Florence Nightingale: Mortality and Health Diagrams Edited by RJ Andrews Visionary Press, us$95 (hardcover) In her present incarnation as a historical celebrity, Florence Nightingale has been framed as ‘the founder of modern nursing’, who went from tabloid hero attending wounded soldiers in the Crimean War of the 1850s to a social activist fixated on reforming sanitation. Mortality and Health Diagrams situates Nightingale more particularly as an ‘accountant, as a manager, and as a systems thinker’, whose access to high society and adeptness with numbers and their transformation into persuasive diagrams helped save lives. Or certain lives. Part of a new series focusing on innovators of information graphics (released alongside books on Étienne-Jules Marey and Emma Willard), the book is primarily a documentary object: half of its 240 pages are faithful reproductions of two

reports on British Army mortality rates in the Crimean War that Nightingale helped produce in 1858 and 1859. Filled with compelling diagrams, their then-novel circular design made the grim information quickly understandable, acting as a ‘bulls-eye for our attention’. Widely circulated in newspapers, these were key to convincing the government and the general public that poor sanitation was a central and entirely avoidable factor contributing to soldiers’ high death-rates. The remaining half of the book is an extended essay by the editor, situating the immediate historical context of Nightingale’s Crimea work. Though what information graphics history means here seems to be focused on the political machinations of the upper-crust ministers, lords

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and doctors who helped enable her diagrams’ success, and not so much on the great unwashed who might eventually see the benefit of her work. The vibrancy of these graphics helped shape a nascent awareness of hygiene that would create a higher civilian life expectancy. This is portrayed as solely a domestic political and infrastructural issue; it is presented as almost incidental that Nightingale’s aim in creating these graphics was to make sure that Victoria’s army was better fed, fitter and better able to wage war around the globe. ‘Collecting and arranging’, the book testifies of its statistical heroine, ‘are creative acts’. So, too, is contextualisation, and these diagrams, as a turning point in colonial and hygienic history, deserve more. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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