ArtReview January & February 2025 by ArtReview

Clearing things up since 1949

Future Greats

PROGRAM: JANUARY – MARCH 2025

CARLOS JACANAMIJOY

GWEN O'NEIL

Paris, Turenne January 11 – March 1, 2025

New York, Tribeca January 17 – March 1, 2025

SERGE POLIAKOFF

JEAN MIOTTE

Paris, Matignon January 11 – March 1, 2025

Shanghai January 10 – March 15, 2025

JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET

TIA-THUY NGUYEN

ALY HELYER

Monaco December 10, 2024 – March 1, 2025

—

Brussels January 16 – March 1, 2025

GROUP SHOW AUTODIDACT London January 16 – February 22, 2025

GROUP SHOW VISAGES Gstaad February 13 – March 16, 2025

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

Gwen O’Neil, Rubylove, 2024. Acrylic and acrylic stains on canvas 162.6 x 127.6 x 4.1 cm, 64 x 50 1/4 x 1 5/8 in / © Gwen O’Neil Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech - Photo: Matthew Kroening

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

Solange Pessoa, Funduras, São Paulo, 2024

Mend e s Wood DM

ArtReview vol 77 no 1 January & February 2025

Right here, right now If you’re reading this then you’ve been deceived! By a technique called ‘marketing’. That’s right! You can trust ArtReview to tell it like it is. Except on its covers, where the marketing people tell it like you want it to be. ‘What’s this all about?’ ArtReview hears you asking. Marketing, like it told you. But also, the extent to which the ‘future’ promised on the cover is very much an expression of the present. Of the art that we are seeing now, not the art that is to come. Even though, at this time of the year, because there’s a tradition of assuming that not much has happened and the only thing that people have to do is to look forward to what’s to come, because somehow they couldn’t be engaging with the present, even if there are wildfires and manmade fires raging, people getting bombed, people freezing, people drowning, people starving, people made homeless… oh, yes… sorry. You didn’t come here for a list. Except you did! Ha, ha. A list of artists in whom you should invest your emotions or intellect or attention over the years to come. Or even, in some cases, your money. But ArtReview prefers not to think about that. That’s the true path to artistic greatness after all. Live a life of glory and splendour! Be a stranger to the spreadsheet! ArtReview knows btw. It knows it left an incomplete sentence back there. Something dangling. Well, you dangling. You’ve been waiting to know how it ends while you were pretending to read the last ten sentences. That’s also called marketing. That feeling that something’s a bit off and that you need to do something to make it right. Although some people might call it bad writing. But that’s because they are slaves to tradition and custom. Or something. But as ArtReview began to say, this Future Greats business isn’t really so much about looking forward as it is about looking around you. Seeing what’s there. Paying attention to what’s going on. Perhaps the marketing stuff makes it sound like something more than simply bearing witness to what’s happening.

Chaotic neutral

But on one level that’s all it really is. Which is to say – by way of the kind of preachy tone that editorials (which is what this is, in case it wasn’t obvious) are supposed to have – that really what all this Future Greats business amounts to is paying attention. Which on some fundamental level is also what looking at art is about. And probably making it too, but ArtReview wouldn’t know about that. Just like it doesn’t know about creating artworld horoscopes or almanacs. It leaves all that to its friends at Artnet (‘Why These 8 Artists Could Make it Big in 2025’, ‘9 Must-See Museum Exhibitions in 2025’, ‘5 Rising Curators to Keep Your Eye on in 2025’, ‘5 Emerging Performance Art Stars to Know in 2025’, ‘5 Old Master Exhibitions Set to Make a Splash in 2025’ – blimey!) and its geomancer (Master Chang Jue – ‘an experienced professional who has been practicing Fengshui for 16 years!’). It’s really about what people are noticing now, but magazines like this one dazzle you by pretending that they know something you don’t (that’s the traditional rationale for the existence of these types of publications, after all), when in actual fact, if you’ve been walking around with your eyes open, you’ll have noticed the same things that it does. The main advantage it has is the ability to crowdsource its ‘knowledge’, while branding that knowledge in such a way that it looks like ArtReview did it all. This is a traditional mode of oppression (linked of course to a heavy dose of erasure and denial), and more precisely, of the colonial type. But then ArtReview was born in the uk, so what do you expect? In any case, if you read most of the art press or gallery handouts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that art today is really all about establishing and then perpetuating your ‘brand’. Actually, people out there in the real world keep telling ArtReview that that’s what life is all about these days. ArtReview, of course, transcended such trivialities and petty attachments to the self some time ago. That’s its artistic ‘practice’. Being in the moment. Ommmmmmmmm… ArtReview

True neutral

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Cargo Ships (February 1, 2024 7:53 am), 2024, pigment print mounted on Dibond, 60 × 80", image, paper, and mount © Richard Misrach

CARGO

Richard Misrach

New York pacegallery.com

Art Observed

The Interview Anh Trần by Martin Herbert 22

page 22 Anh Trần, Untitled, 2023–24, 0il and acrylic on canvas, 264 × 188 × 3 cm. Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

Art Featured

Future Greats Léonard Pongo, selected by Roger Ballen Aineki Traverso, selected by Karen Lamassonne Alexey Shlyk, selected by David Claerbout Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, selected by Justine Kurland Yan Jiacheng, selected by Lai Fei Kathryn Garcia, selected by Dean Sameshima Tiyan Baker, selected by Adeline Chia Tshepiso Mazibuko, selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa Marina Woisky, selected by Oliver Basciano Samuel Hindolo, selected by Martin Herbert 32

Khaled Jarrar by Stephanie Bailey 62 The Robot & the Arts by Lawrence Alloway; annotated by ArtReview 67

page 38 Alexey Shlyk, Day and Night, 2023, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, mounted on Dibond, 60 × 80 cm. Courtesy the artist

LOUISIANA 11.10.24-27.4.25

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

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 76 Philippe Parreno, by Martin Herbert Raven Chacon, by Greta Rainbow Mark Leckey, by Jenny Wu Bjarne Melgaard with Bjørn Kristian Hilberg, by Matthew Rana Justin Fitzpatrick, by Declan Long Prospect 6, by Allison K. Young Michael Asher, by Mira Dayal weaving is human: Isabella Ducrot… and the textile collections of the Museum of Civilizations, by Ana Vukadin Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960–1991, by Emily McDermott Sammy Baloji, by Alexander Harding Dorothea Rockburne, by Ella Nixon Bangkok Art Biennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, by J.J. Charlesworth Evelyn Taocheng Wang, by Mia Stern Louise Giovanelli, by Eliza Goodpasture Rindon Johnson, by Yuwen Jiang Gili Tal, by Alexander Leissle Lucas Simões, by Oliver Basciano Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, by Chantal McStay Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, by Cat Kron manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today, by Hammad Nasar

The Invention of British Art, by Bendor Grosvenor, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Legend of Kamui, by Shirato Sanpei, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The Princess of 72nd Street, by Elaine Kraf, reviewed by Mark Rappolt A Woman I Once Knew, by Rosalind Fox Solomon, reviewed by Fi Churchman India: A Linguistic Civilization, by G.N. Devy, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Gilbert & George and the Communists, by James Birch, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth

page 92 Julio Le Parc, Double Mirror, 1966. © Atelier Le Parc. Courtesy the artist

from the archives 110

ISLAMIC ARTS SECOND BIENNALE EDITION JANUARY 25 - MAY 25, 2025 Under the theme

LED BY ARTISTIC DIRECTORS

Julian Raby | Amin Jaffer | Abdul Rahman Azzam and Muhannad Shono as Curator of Contemporary Art

KNOW MORE

WESTERN HAJJ TERMINAL

King Abdulaziz International Airport، Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Handcrafted in the English Countryside

Art Observed

have been made, 21

Photo: Chi Phan

ArtReview

The Interview by Martin Herbert

Anh Trần

“I don’t really, completely, believe in this expressive individualism. I understand how it starts, but I don’t totally agree with it”

Born in Bến Tre, Vietnam, Anh Trần studied painting in Auckland and Amsterdam, and now lives in Berlin. Following breakout showings in 2022’s Biennial of Painting at Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Deurle (curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Oscar Murillo), and the 58th Carnegie International, she has had solo shows at Amsterdam’s Fons Welters, Berlin’s Société and Paris’s Fitzpatrick Gallery. Trần’s tumultuous canvases outwardly speak the language of expressive abstraction: she makes big, often multipart works full of colliding, kinetic gestures in a variety of paint media – oil, acrylic, Flashe vinyl, spray. Perhaps appropriately, given her peripatetic history, her compositions never quite feel located in one place, or one kind of

place: they’re rich in intimations of physical space, rivers and vistas, while also being acts of improvisatory, intuitive markmaking that telegraph stormy mental worlds; they contain elements that suggest letterforms, but defer outright articulation. Nevertheless, that resistance to stability is pointed and personal in its own way: at 2024’s Art Basel Parcours, for example, Trần exhibited two paintings, avowedly keyed to Renaissance gold and Byzantine blue, in the choir of the St Clara Church: she titled this showing every water has the right place to be, a theme that, an accompanying text neatly suggested, ‘elicits notions of fluidity, mutability, and the search for a sense of belonging – a commonality shared by Trần’s

January & February 2025

painting practice and the rituals surrounding religious experience’. The first time I met Trần, for a studio visit in Berlin’s Charlottenburg in 2023, we discussed the dynamics and flows of her paintings awhile and then she said that the act of painting in a style rooted in Abstract Expressionism was for her, a Vietnamese woman, a kind of performance. I was intrigued by that, and we agreed to talk again, this time on the record. Here, as well as unpacking those performative aspects, she speaks about the points where abstraction meets the real world; painting as an act of empathetic reaching-out and of maintaining space for unknowing; the importance or otherwise of identity; and her shamanistic family tree.

Quite Bad artreview The titles of your paintings often suggest a sense of wanting, yearning. Some include the word ‘rescue’, several are about the sky as a place of possibility. They seem to point towards a desire to connect, or to get somewhere. One thing that stresses out many art viewers is an abstract painting called Untitled, a refusal to hint at the painting’s content or meaning; conversely, you seem to want to offer a few clues. anh trần I keep a notebook of titles, and they’re mainly in English. I want them to have melody, to be poetic, and the titles of my exhibitions also represent the different ‘chapters’ I work with. I used Searching the Sky for Dreams as a title for a long time, changing the subtitle. I’m not interested in placing the human experience at the centre of the universe; it’s also about a connection between the human body and everything else around it. I believe that’s how we can connect to each other. Related to that, it’s also not my ultimate goal to make a single, very beautiful painting – I never think of it that way. It’s always a continuing process.

ar There’s a strong, almost productive sense of unfixedness and incompletion within the paintings themselves – they tend to suggest an event happening before your eyes, emerging or passing by, and the markmaking is varied and dynamic, as if in conversation with itself. The works sometimes look like a natural landscape while also feeling like interior, emotional landscape. And, formally, they’re somewhere between painting and drawing, mixing a liquid background and swaths of paint with lively line-making… at Right, that’s just how I work, I never do drawings first. And I compare it to making a videowork, with lots of screens and layers in one canvas. It seems like I’m recording something, even if that’s the landscape of my feelings, or the landscape outside the window, or what’s going on in the canvas itself, between marks and forms and colours. So, it’s a continuation of something that’s moving around, and moving from canvas to canvas. I can never work on just one painting – it always has to be at least two or three. I guess it’s also a reflection of the times, there’s so much we see, so much going on – on the internet or whatever – and I grew up with that, so it affects how I see pictures. If I focus on just one painting, it’s guaranteed to be quite bad.

Searching the sky for dreams (Secession), 2023, oil, acrylic and Flashe on linen, diptych, 245 × 184 × 3 cm (each). Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

ArtReview

On the Importance of (Not) Being Yourself ar Aside from these ideas of connection, which we’ll come back to, you’re working in a variant on a visual language – expressive abstraction – that was originally identified with Western men and with a twentiethcentury ideology of individualism and, mainly, masculinity. Meanwhile, you come from Vietnam, a country that was colonised by France, and you studied in another colonised country, New Zealand, and you’re a woman. Someone could say that on one level these paintings are ‘about’ who gets to articulate themselves through abstraction, and/or that, on another level, they’re a kind of reverse colonialism. at Yes, but those ideas came later. When I started painting, that wasn’t my original idea. I didn’t know what painting was like when I was in Vietnam – I never really saw contemporary Vietnamese art, let alone paintings. I started painting in New Zealand, and at the university, 12 or 13 years ago, there seemed to be a certain way of doing it. I learned this as a language – Western abstract painterly language – a separate language, besides the English language, and what I’m trying to do

above Why do storms move from west to east if the wind is coming from everywhere, 2023, oil, acrylic and Flashe on linen, 245 × 184 × 3 cm. Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin following pages every water has the right place to be, 2024 (installation view, Art Basel Parcours, St Clara Church, Basel). Courtesy Art Basel

January & February 2025

is to use it until I feel at ease with it, I guess. If I perform as a New Zealander, this is how it works. ar When we first met, you talked in terms of making paintings as a kind of a performance, which I thought was surprising and interesting, and in other interviews you’ve said that in a studio space you follow a set of manners as a ‘Pākehā [European] New Zealander’. at When I come to the studio it’s quite spiritual – I can’t paint in front of other people, so it’s difficult to share a studio [laughs]. It’s a place where I feel safe enough to be alone and have a lot of freedom to make the work I want. Outside the studio, I feel like a different person – a Vietnamese living overseas, I guess. I don’t have my painting at home, I’d rather not look at it outside the studio. But what you said before, of course it’s a fact that I’ve been moving to these [colonised] countries, but I don’t really hold onto it too much when I paint, because it would be quite depressing. ar Couldn’t it also be liberating in a way? It might suggest there’s continued life in this language, expressive abstraction, and that part of it maybe comes from different people working with it, bending it, bringing something of where they come from to it.

at Yes, that’s precisely what I want to say. In my head, in my imagination, maybe it’s utopian, but when we talk about this relationship between the usa and Vietnam, it’s like – what if there hadn’t been any war, but the relationship changed and the Vietnamese got to do these abstract paintings as well? But, of course, that is a very utopian idea, because Abstract Expressionism was used by the cia as anticommunist propaganda, and of course communism was very strong and present in Vietnam. So, I guess maybe what I mean is a resistance to this oppressive political agenda on both sides.

where I was born and grew up. It’s more in the north, where my mother comes from. Perhaps there is a relationship between this aspect where the shaman is changing form and who I am when I’m painting. It’s useful to think that that could be a possibility, that I’d not be caught up with my preexisting identities and wouldn’t have to make the paintings I feel like I’m supposed to make. I have to create another world. But I’m not completely someone else when I do that; it’s also part of me.

ar Another thing you’ve mentioned in the past, and this perhaps keys into the performative, shapeshifting aspect, is that your maternal grandmother was a shaman.

A Sense of Familiarity

at She’s passed away, but my mother talks about her all the time, and I did visit her a few times in my life. Again, it’s quite foreign to me, but somehow it’s in my blood. Shamanism seems to have become a trendy theme in recent years, in biennials, with artists of different nationalities referencing it, etc. But it’s also a very Indigenous Vietnamese practice, even before Buddhism, and not well known outside Vietnam, even in the south of the country,

Winning hearts and minds, 2024, oil, acrylic, Flashe and spraypaint on linen, 191 × 175 cm. Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

ArtReview

ar How important, then, is your biography in this work? at I don’t necessarily hope for the viewer, the audience, to connect who I am with the work when they’re looking at it. To go back to connection, to starting a conversation, if someone really cares about my identity, where I’m coming from, and that enables them to understand my work, why it is the way it is – then I hope for them to start thinking about their own identity, what their relationship to the painting is.

ar So even if identity concerns could be a way in and even a way out, it all has to come back to the wordless experience of standing in front of an abstract painting, navigating it. at That’s the radical idea. Painters in general, we want to do this. We want to make a very good abstract painting, but in the space where people can see it and be moved by it and have certain feelings without understanding what they’re looking at. That’s the beauty of painting. But in my case that’s not enough, I can’t just do that; I feel like it’s never enough just to do that. ar That would seem to lead us back to connectivity, between the human and everything else, and the sense of movement in your paintings: that they can suggest interior space and different kinds of physical, landscape space, and have fragments of language in them: different worlds joining up. at The simplest way I can explain the painting process is that I’m trying to make a relationship between figure and ground. I start with a background – I did a lot of watercolour at school and my oil paint is quite watery, fluid – and then comes the figure, quick gestures, more bold and darker colour, and the second thing I’m thinking

about is colour. I design the palette before I start the painting, and I tend to use blue a lot. Recently, when I had a project in a church for the Art Basel Parcours, I used a lot of gold, and the idea behind that was that gold is quite Christianity-related in Europe, quite Western, Renaissance gold, antique gold, and the blue lately was mainly a Byzantine blue – they used that a lot for churches. So it was to create a sense of familiarity or symbolism for the viewer, but the way I use those colours, it’s not constrained to a certain set of rules.

Big and Complicated ar This balance between the familiar and the unknown repeats on an iconographic level, I think. You use shapes that might be letterforms, and there’s a horizontal mark that recurs in your work, tending towards the centre of the canvas; it’s just a thick line, but it might be a horizon line, or a river. at It used to be the river, a mark I’ve been making since I came to Europe almost five years ago. But I think fundamentally it’s a way for me to pull back from these expressive, chaotic, very busy backgrounds – the mark just balances it

out and holds things together. But you’re right, I keep repeating it unconsciously, so it must mean something to me. It’s a landscape. Sometimes it’s a kind of text, depending on the context of the show. One other thing to say is that the paintings are quite large, in terms of their scale in relation to my body. And the larger they are, the more complex. When I look at the work, I can only see one section at a time rather than the whole picture. That’s very important for me, in the process of painting. It means I’m surprised all the time, when making, and I like the surprise. I guess in the end it’s because I don’t want to put too much of myself into the work, and maybe there comes the performance that we were talking about. ar Why don’t you want to put too much of yourself in the work? at Because I don’t really, completely, believe in this expressive individualism. I understand how it starts, but I don’t totally agree with it. It’s not my absolute belief. The paintings should be, again, a conversation, a bridge, between things and between people. It should be an interaction. The work is a medium; it’s not about me.

Abstract Painting (nz-usa) 1, 2023–24, oil and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 91 × 3 cm. Photo: Hans-Georg Gaul. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

January & February 2025

Future Greats

but now 31

Introduction ArtReview’s secondary school art teacher always insisted that art never changed. For him it was always about investigating the human condition. “What does it say about the human condition?” he would shriek when confronted with a lumpen, lopsided ceramic pot, before dashing it to the floor in a rage when the answer was a mumbled “errrrrr…” The art teacher was wrong of course. Everyone knows all art is not about the human condition alone. Indeed, most art today is just as likely to be about the nonhuman condition. That’s what’s called ‘progress’. Ha, ha, ha. Of course it isn’t. There’s no such thing. But now’s not the time to get into that. What’s more relevant is that the art teacher was also wrong about art never changing. It does. Why else would ArtReview have put out its eagerly anticipated Future Greats issue every year for the past 18 years? ok, some of the early ones have the vibe of a set of insider trading tips. And at other times, market forces seem to play second fiddle to ideological truth-telling. The message perhaps is that how we value art also changes, and those old Future Greats issues are testament to the prevailing winds of each particular year. Even if ArtReview likes to think of itself as existing far beyond the capriciousness of ‘fashion’ – it still wears the same semi-drape, double-breasted-style, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, wrinkle-resistant suit in which it was born in 1949. Even if its writers once tried to persuade it of the high fashionability, as the sun set on Empire, of a Madras shirt. (See this issue’s back page.) Although, as ArtReview said already, now’s not the time for that. Seriously though, thinking of those old school days, every once in a while ArtReview wishes it could stop time. Just suspend things for a moment, to be able to make a bit more sense of it all before time whooshes by. Sure, there’s almost eight decades’ worth of articles and reviews it can look back on, each one like an idea set in amber. But for each artist discussed in the bygone eras of ArtReview’s back pages there are the hundreds whose names aren’t mentioned, the artists who didn’t have a museum show or feature in such-and-such biennial. In an effort to partially shift this, ArtReview’s annual Future Greats issue asks artists, curators and writers to nominate someone who they feel is doing work that deserves more attention: artists to look out for in the years to come. It might be an artist who’s been foundational to a town’s scene but is unknown on the other side of the world; or they might’ve just left art school; or had only a few smaller exhibitions. Artists who we should begin to observe more closely, and return to in time. This year, for the first time, ArtReview wanted to focus its Future Greats a bit more closely, to consider artists working more in and around one medium, if that’s even possible. It felt appropriate to begin with stillness and displacement: what used to be called photography, or even lens-based media, and what we might now just call image-making, in whatever way this is mediated. We asked selectors to consider those who are shaping what it means to create an image now, whether Kathryn Garcia with her ritualistic geometric drawings (selected by Dean Sameshima), Tshepiso Mazibuko and her ghostly hometown portraits shot on expired analogue film stock (selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa) or Yan Jiacheng’s digitally stitched together images creating panoramic, communal portraits (selected by Lai Fei). There is photography, painting, video, sculpture and more: it’s apparent there’s no one medium that can define how artists are producing imagery now, and what the artists gathered here show us is that even if art stops time, time doesn’t stop art. ArtReview

ArtReview

Léonard Pongo selected by Roger Ballen 34 Aineki Traverso selected by Karen Lamassonne 36 Alexey Shlyk selected by David Claerbout 38 Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano selected by Justine Kurland 42 Yan Jiacheng selected by Lai Fei 44 Kathryn Garcia selected by Dean Sameshima 48 Tiyan Baker selected by Adeline Chia 50 Tshepiso Mazibuko selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa 52 Marina Woisky selected by Oliver Basciano 54 Samuel Hindolo selected by Martin Herbert 58

Léonard Pongo Léonard Pongo is a photographer and filmmaker working I first encountered Belgian-Congolese phoare not about offering answers or ‘the truth’ in Brussels and Kinshasa whose work incorporates but about evoking questions and creating a tographer Léonard Pongo’s series The Uncanny photography, moving image, textile and various printing space for reflection. What I find particularly (2023) through the Eiger Foundation’s Africa techniques. He is an associate researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and teaches at the Academy remarkable is how Pongo captures the tenPhotobook of the Year Awards submissions, of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Pongo’s work is currently on view for which I was a judge. What immediately sion between presence and absence, between at the Festival en Ville, Brussels, through 2 February, what is seen and what is felt. The figures in struck me was how the series embodies the and will be featured at the Festival du Jeu de Paume, Paris, his images often seem to be disappearing, concept of the ‘uncanny’ – that unsettling 7 February – 23 March, and the Afropolitan Festival, Brussels, 27 February – 2 March. as though caught between worlds – a visual space where the familiar becomes strange metaphor for the transient, ungraspable and the ordinary transforms into something Selected by Roger Ballen, photographer, Johannesburg mysterious. Pongo’s black-and-white photonature of identity and experience. graphs evoke this tension beautifully. His use of disorienting perspecPongo was born 1988 in Belgium and began his career as a docutives and long exposures creates images where figures dissolve, land- mentary photographer, and later expanded his approach to include scapes feel ungraspable and night and day blur into one another. snapshots and abstraction, creating a distinctive visual style. In The This dreamlike quality reflects not just his personal experience of the Uncanny, he steps away from the reductive frameworks often used Democratic Republic of Congo but also the larger complexities and to depict Congo and Africa – frameworks rooted in conflict or exoticontradictions of life in Africa. Immersing himself in the everyday, cism – and instead invites the viewer to experience the overwhelming Pongo reveals the spiritual, the surreal and the psychological under- vibrancy, contradictions and nuances of life in Congo. currents that shape the world around him. One such image is the photograph of cockroaches, whose stark The uncanny in Pongo’s work is further heightened by his rejec- and unsettling presence serves as a powerful metaphor for resilience tion of conventional storytelling. His untitled photographs resist and survival. These qualities are intrinsic not only to the creature categorisation and refuse to impose fixed narratives, mirroring the itself but also to the broader narrative of life in Congo. By focusing complexity of Congo itself – its layered history, cultural nuances and on a subject often dismissed or reviled, Pongo invites the viewer to fragmented realities. This lack of titles removes the viewer’s reliance find beauty and meaning in unexpected places – a theme that aligns on language, forcing a purely emotional and intuitive engagement deeply with my own artistic exploration of the uncanny. with the work. This open-endedness reflects the broader message Another striking image is the long-exposure photograph of a of The Uncanny: there are no definitive paths, only fragmented experi- figure dissolving into shadows, capturing the transient and elusive ences and subjective truths. nature of understanding. It speaks to Pongo’s disorientation during Pongo’s approach transforms photography from a medium of his journey through Congo, as well as the fluidity of identity and representation to one of introspection, asking viewers to confront memory. Taken together, these images challenge stereotypes and their assumptions about Congo, the African continent and the act simplistic narratives, offering instead a vision of Congo – and Africa of seeing itself. It is this ability to create a deeply immersive, multi- – steeped in nuance, complexity and humanity. By intertwining the layered experience that continues to resonate with my own artistic spiritual, the secular and the uncanny, his work not only reveals the exploration of the subconscious and the surreal, and with my belief in richness of Congo’s cultural and emotional landscape but also chalphotography’s power to provoke rather than explain. Pongo’s images lenges preconceived notions of what African photography should be.

From the series The Uncanny (2023). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

selected by Roger Ballen

From the series The Uncanny, 2023. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Aineki Traverso

Apeiron, 2024, oil on wood, 41 × 51 cm

ArtReview

selected by Karen Lamassonne

Aineki and I were both working at a lighting high up on the ceiling, a drawing of a small eye Aineki Traverso is a painter based in Atlanta and a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta company in Atlanta, creating chandeliers and looked down at you, or a whole row of works Contemporary. She obtained her degree from Sarah the like, and while she is a lot younger than on paper will be hung on a wall, but appear Lawrence College in 2013 with a focus on film theory. me, we got along: we were both artists; she like a gallery frieze: there are eyes, parts of In 2024 Traverso received the Atlanta Artadia Award and the Edge Award from the Forward Art Foundation. She will had lived in Colombia as a young girl, as faces, nebulous atmospheres. She is prolific have a solo show at Wolfgang Gallery, Atlanta, in March. and creates work ranging from largescale to I had done; her mother was Argentinian, as is Selected by Karen Lamassonne, artist, Atlanta my father. We became close – she came to my very small formats. I am always looking forhouse, and when I visited hers I remember ward to what’s next in her world. She is getloving how her space smelled so beautifully of oil paint. She is now ting much-deserved recognition. very involved in the art scene here, and going to her open studios and I have a small work of hers here, pls chill (2019). It is a portrait of a exhibitions helped me to become more involved locally too. young woman, she has dark hair and a pale face; there is something I identified with her work because, like so much of mine, it is very cinematic, and very creepy, about her appearance. A hand appears about memories and personal photographs, moments from the past in the foreground, offering a smoke, while the other hand holds a red captured and reformulated in the present. She uses photographs flower. In the background the sky is blue, but framed by the dark from her archive – from her childhood and such – as the initial inspi- brown, ominous block of paint to the right of the canvas. I love the ration for a work, but then departs from those images, letting the creepiness of her work. Aineki, like me, has a background in film, and paint and image develop its own life. Her paintings are figurative, I think you can see that in the light and texture of her painting. It is and there is so much movement in them. There will often be botan- like she has frozen a moment, so for all their formal painterly qualiical elements that flow into the image, or bodies of water or sections ties, the work is also full of narrative, of possibility. Her work is full of landscape that merge into each other. I think we share a sense of of characters: there’s another early painting I have, la que fuma (2022), Latin American gothic, we both revel in the human body. In Aineki’s of a woman smoking and drinking, looking weathered. Well, I idenpaintings human parts appear and then disappear, there’s a sense tify with the woman in this painting of course, but there is something of mystery and mood that envelops me in the mysterious about her too, something Aineki The Middle Distance, 2024, layered scenes she conjures. is asking us to decipher, to participate in. painting and installation featuring oil on canvas tondo (244 cm diameter), warehouse, viewfinder At her exhibitions she installs some works in interesting places. In one exhibition, very Karen Lamassonne, as told to Oliver Basciano both images Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Alexey Shlyk david claerbout You moved from Belarus ten years ago. Here in Belgium, you’re a photographer, but you trained as a mathematician. Why did you move from mathematics to photography? alexey shlyk My grandfather was a famous Soviet biologist, my father is a mathematician, but from a young age I wanted to escape this very rational way of thinking and being. For me, back then, photography was black and white, darkroom photography. I started with a 35mm camera, doing reportage for magazines when I was fifteen years old. And I soon realised that I liked to construct images, so it was a decision to go into a studio and work with objects. The slow process of construction of an image and the joy of making a print from large film is incredible. Making a one-to-one scale image, it’s beautiful. dc Is there something that is a recurring theme, a motive in your work? as I always need to make things myself, so manual labour is an important part of the work for me – to construct objects which would exist only as a subject for the camera and the image, and would never be shown by themselves. When I moved to Belgium, I made the series The Appleseed Necklace (2016–18). That was a project about my memories of people making things, about doit-yourself culture. The series reconstructs my memories through photography; the images are based on events and things I’ve seen or heard in the past. dc The Potato Picker (2016) is one of those images that somehow stands out, though it’s not immediately clear why. as It’s one that highlights for me the ambiguity in photography. A classmate was sent to collect potatoes in the field, picking them up as the tractor digs them out. But it’s dusty, so the driver made him some goggles from a plastic bottle. Imagining standing in the field in the late summer all covered in dirt, in these ingenious glasses, I made this image in the studio, mimicking every part of it. But nothing in the image is what it is. The dirt is not dirt, the glasses are not glasses, the sky is not a sky. The person is still a person – however, he’s not redheaded. dc I wanted to ask you about being part of a diaspora. How important is that in work and in daily life? as I still have a foot in there, and I understand the mentality of people in Belarus,

Alexey Shlyk is a Belarusian photographer living and working in Antwerp. He graduated in Mathematics from the Belarus State University in 2008 before obtaining an ma in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, in 2018 and an ma in Research in Art and Design at Sint Lucas Antwerpen in 2019. He was a laureate of the Carte Blanche programme at Paris Photo in 2017 and won the Prijs Roger De Conynck in 2018. Selected by David Claerbout, artist, Antwerp

Russia, ex-Soviet people, but I’m also European. But that allows me to see the situation in general, I see this dystopian reality we now live in. It’s a time of war, just unimaginable. And I think it becomes a reason to make work, which is the opposite of what’s going on. So it’s utopian themes that interest me, to get away from this depressing reality. dc Your exhibition Backspace, in Antwerp in 2022, brought these themes together. as Yes, from 2017 to about two years ago I was collaborating with the artist Ben Van den Berghe on various projects. Together with Ben and architect York Bing Oh we developed a modular maquette system, one I still use now. Our interest was in the photographic space, and in making photographic installations. Largescale wallpaper and framed photographs on top create a layered temporality and confuse the viewer’s perception of reality. Within the exhibition, space, image and architectural reality start to blur. The Ukraine war had just started and I thought that, emotionally, I wouldn’t be able to do a show. But it turned out to be a personal way of dealing with the ongoing war. So in the main space of Backspace we created a very utopian, colourful space resembling an architectural model, and we put the war behind the wall: every ten minutes you could see a video projection there, if you crawled through a narrow opening into to the ‘backspace’ – found footage of Russian artillery firing over delicate birch trees that shiver in the light of the rockets. The work was a dialogue between the playful space dominated by architectural models in the foreground and the disturbing reality spilling inside with the flashes and sounds of the rocket launches. dc Utopian and dystopian are balanced then. Colour is one of the first things to stand out in your work because the image’s motive is elusive, meagre and diffuse. Your works are the opposite of anything that could be read as propagandistic.

ArtReview

as Colour has been super important in the more recent works. Day and Night (2023), with its multiple openings, deals with the perception of the space and depth within the image. It’s of course influenced a lot by Belgian surrealists. Although it looks rather naive, it is also an optical work, where the red markers shift your eyes across the space of the image, changing your focus. dc Political histories are more present in your most recent show, goo, but still in a very mediated way. That show included the photograph Mausoleum (2024). as goo reflects on the emotional state that propaganda in the media of Belarus and Russia was driving me into. Mausoleum is a heavily postproduced image, made from a 1.5m wide maquette of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow, out of which is pouring red wax. It has another title: ‘A lie told often enough, becomes the truth’. It’s a quote that is often attributed to Lenin, but this is also not true. There was some madness in that installation; people would walk into a messy image, that spread on the floor, covering all walls and crackling under your feet. I had a desire to make a space that was seductive but unpleasant to be in, that you would want to leave. I was trying to get through this feeling of disgust that I had of propaganda. dc You’re handling these political remnants of the Soviet Union, among others, but in a very indirect way. as I’m trying to do work that represents my emotional state, and for me it’s necessary work for myself to understand where I am, to overcome that situation. I want to express not the facts, not the information, but the feeling that I have, of how propaganda works for me; it’s attractive, but it’s all fake. dc That brings me to another issue that is very striking in the images that you make – a sort of ‘missed encounter’ with materiality. I would describe it as if you were looking for very concrete, touchable, tactile material, but you necessarily miss it. Starting from The Potato Picker through to this highly collaged Mausoleum, in which you cannot tell what size it is or what it wants to be. It’s made out of bits and pieces, a ruin somehow, as if you came from a war zone. You collect them together and you start again. as It’s my desire to see it in ruin, finally, to get rid of that history and to finally see all of that wax leaking out on the streets and just disappearing down the drain.

selected by David Claerbout

above The Potato Picker, 2016, 75 × 60 cm, from the series The Appleseed Necklace, 2016–18. Courtesy the artist following pages goo, 2024 (installation view, Futures Hub, Amsterdam). Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano

ArtReview

selected by Justine Kurland

While the term ‘future great’, with its impliwithout words or science, a source of origin Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano is an American visual artist and clinical psychoanalyst working between cations of art market speculation, the granbefore which there is nothing. Conversely, New York and Panama. She obtained her mfa in diosity of its narratives and the insistence Mozman Solano’s mother serves as a conduit photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple to history, embodying a diasporic experience that progress is synonymous with a good life, University, Philadelphia, in 1998. She is a Fulbright Fellow and received the John Simon Guggenheim unfolding in real time. Her mother dons might seem antithetical to Rachelle Anayansi Fellowship and the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund. Mozman Solano’s work, she is the artist I want colonial attire in Popular images portrayed popuHer work will be on view in The Rose, Center for lations either as undisciplined savages to u.s. interto think about here. Her work offers an alterPhotography at Woodstock, and in an exhibition at the native model, one that values connection ests and hegemony or as children who needed guidMuseo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panama City, in 2026. and healing, lends visibility to erased histoance (2024) and paints a mal de ojo (evil eye) on Selected by Justine Kurland, photographer, New York ries and suggests that the political, social her daughter’s naked back. This symbol of and personal traumas held in our bodies might be exorcised through protection, frequently found in Afro-Latino traditions, underscores rituals of gestural reenactment. Her photographic language – part the spiritual dimension of Mozman Solano’s work. Above the pair performance and staging, part collage, sometimes painting and hangs a print of Paul Gauguin’s The Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), moving image – expresses a hybrid consciousness shaped at once by depicting a naked girl sprawled across a bed in a pose that mirrors political, psychic and spiritual forces. It reverberates with an internal Mozman Solano’s. If Gauguin’s painting can be understood to be a kaleidoscopic rhythm, reframing the layered dimensions of diasporic signifier of the girl’s precarity and dire need for protection, we might selfhood, offering a meditation on identity, history and resistance. I imagine it was under his colonial gaze that she was most threatened. love her work because it shows me how expansive the photographic Similarly, Mozman Solano’s mother bestows the blessing of the mal medium can be, how it can reduce harm and honour the strange forms de ojo while simultaneously representing the very forces that taught our lives take once the link between the camera and its weaponised her daughter shame. As the first teacher, the mother plants the seeds of double consciousness in the hopes of her daughter’s assimilation position in traditional documentary approaches is severed. In her mixed-media series Venas Abiertas (2020–), Mozman Solano and chance at a better life. The rips in the seamless red paper backdrop maps her biography onto historical records, examining the enduring divide the scene and suggest a rupture between pre- and post-cololegacy of white supremacy, the fiction of eugenics, and the ongoing nialism, between culture and nature, between self and other, while racialised violence against the Latinx community that intensified opening a portal to what may lie beyond. under the Trump administration. The title translates as ‘Open Veins’, The photographs in the Venas Abiertas series connect to her film, a reference to Eduardo Galeano’s book on the imperialist exploi- All These Things I Carry With Me (2020), in which an actress plays the tation of Latin America. Each piece in Mozman Solano’s series is artist’s mother. She moves through constructed sets and delivers a series titled with quotations from her extensive research, borrowing from of vignetted monologues, compositions drawn from the interviews sources such as Salvador, Joan Didion’s 1983 book on the Salvadoran Mozman Solano conducted with her mother about her immigration Civil War; a speech presented at a eugenics conference held at the to the us, her everyday experiences of microaggressions and her life in American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921; and the States. The inheritance of her mother’s stories is compounded by Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). a colonial inheritance of representation defined by European stereoMozman Solano provides her viewer with a bibliography for further types, and explored in her film Opaque Mirror (2017). Her characreading on us intervention in Latin America and a framework for ters reenact Gauguin’s travels in Panama, satirising his Orientalist understanding how contemporary us policy maintains the exploi- and eroticised fantasy of Latin American ‘primitive’ life. Mozman tation and marginalisation of the region, with particular attention Solano’s painted collages (2016–24) reclaim Gauguin’s favoured subpaid to her mother’s native Panama. jects – largely Indigenous women and the natural world – reauthoring Mozman Solano’s mother is the pivotal them through her own feminist, psychoanacharacter throughout her work, connecting lytic and spiritual lens. Through these acts of facing page, top I am not going to tell you that (Mexicans) are the best people on the face of the earth, the artist to Panama as both a psychic and reverse appropriation, her series Venas Abiertas or that they will have made wonderful citizens..., political territory, to her ancestral throughcentres the figure of the mother, honours 2021, archival pigment print, 64 × 81 cm line and to a broader notion of the femia female imaginary and casts its own spells facing page, bottom We have to contend with an alien race, nine divine. Roland Barthes has written of protection, as though we might go back one with a different language, different customs, that it’s the artist’s job to play on the body in time and pull a blanket over the shoulders different moral standards and different diseases, 2020, archival pigment print, 64 × 81 cm of his mother. For Barthes, the mother is a of the naked girl in Paul Gauguin’s The Spirit phenomenological blank slate – a tabula rasa of the Dead Watching. both images Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Yan Jiacheng Yan Jiacheng is a photographer based in Guangzhou. According to the National Bureau of Statisis a prevailing sense of the collective and the He obtained a degree in Chinese Literature from Jinan tics of China, in December 2024 the average broader societal condition. University in 2016 and started producing works number of hours per week worked by emAt times these portraits take shape in in photography in 2018. In 2024 he was shortlisted for the very absence of the protagonists. In his ployees in Chinese companies was 48.9. Both the rps International Photography Exhibition and was on the longlist for the Aesthetica Art Prize. series The Corner Where the Cleaning Aunt Rests Yan Jiacheng and I are part of the workforce (2024–), he documents the inconspicuous contributing to this statistic. Though in Selected by Lai Fei, editor, ArtReview, Chinese edition corners, tucked away in the backrooms and Yan’s case, there is a distinct divide between his office job and his creative endeavours – working fulltime on the stairwells of residential and office buildings, where cleaning workers former finances the latter. It seems surprising to me at first how he find fleeting moments of rest. These makeshift resting spots, often manages to sustain a creative practice in the remaining hours of the furnished with discarded chairs and stools, symbolise the precarweek. And I wonder if becoming a professional artist could be some- ious presence and undervalued labour of the workers, the majority thing of an ideal for him; or to put it into Marx’s term, an unalien- of whom are women. Yan initiated this project to highlight the systemic neglect of the profession and to advocate for a more incluated praxis. However, Yan Jiacheng doesn’t care much for the artworld. He sive approach to workspace design – one that respects and addresses doesn’t think of himself as an artist, nor does he label himself as the needs of all, especially those relegated to the periphery. a photographer, even though he’s been avidly creating works of a What can letters carved into trees tell us about a group of workers photographic nature and sharing them online for some years. Yan has who once populated the area decades ago? The series Inscriptions in continuously worked at an office job in Guangzhou since graduating Jiushuikeng (2024) can be seen as a poignant collective portrait of these from university (with a degree in Chinese Literature) in 2016. His days workers’ emotional lives. In Jiushuikeng Village, a former electronics are centred around his company and rented home, and much time manufacturing district in Guangzhou, Yan finds traces of the area’s is spent observing and reexamining everyday scenes along the way. industrial past in the carvings of ‘I love you’, ‘bitter life’, ‘forget’, heart These day-to-day observations are key to his creativity, manifesting symbols and initials – etched into the trees that have for years stood in forms beyond straightforward documentary photography. There’s witness to the ebb and flow of workers and their yearnings. a modest, authentic quality to his pictures that, to me, has less to do The Second Child’s Second Child (2022–) is a rare series in which he with the technologies he uses and everything to do with his experi- sets out to photograph specific subjects in a staged setting. Since the ences and his sense of identity as an ordinary worker – among many – implementation of China’s one-child policy during the 1980s, many in Guangzhou. It’s no coincidence that workers – couriers, sanitation families took risks to have a second child, often hiding these chilworkers, taxi drivers et al – are a frequent focus in his photo stories. dren away in others’ homes, concealing their familial identities and In February 2020, as China grappled with the initial outbreak of preventing them from being caught by officials. In recent years, with covid-19 and implemented quarantine measures, Yan observed a the country’s labour force population declining, the government group of sanitation workers disinfecting the roadside railings on an gradually phased out the family planning policy and began encourotherwise empty street. At a time when the entire city seemed to be at a aging young families to have a second child. Among those who were standstill, Yan wondered, who were the ones keeping the city running? once the ‘second children’ of that era – those who were not allowed to Compelled to document this act of labour, he found that he couldn’t be born – many are now parents themselves and have given birth to capture all the workers in a single frame. Instead, he photographed their own second child. In the series, Yan portrays these individuals them individually and then seamlessly combined the images into one with their second children, positioned behind a translucent plastic digital composite. This resulting image is part of his group portrait sheet that gently conceals their identities, shedding light on their series This is a Long Story (2018–), which depicts couriers, commuters, struggles amid shifting policies. tourists and other citizens in the endless streams of urban life. Yan keeps a log of unfinished and unstarted projects, always Group portraiture is a favoured form. Yan tends to work in series, wishing for more time to devote to them. Perhaps one day, his day job capturing multitudes rather than isolated subjects. While ordinary will give way to a fulltime creative career. However, I hope he never human lives are central to his projects, he maintains an observational loses the acute perspective he currently possesses, or the unique distance from the individuals behind his lens. In his photos, personal freedom that comes with not making art for money, nor fitting neatly identities are often blurred or downplayed. What stands out instead into any box.

From the series Looking for a Female Figure in Group Photos, 2021

ArtReview

selected by Lai Fei

top From the series The Corner Where the Cleaning Aunt Rests, 2024–ongoing above From the series The Second Child’s Second Child, 2022–ongoing

January & February 2025

From the series This is a Long Story, 2018–ongoing all images Courtesy the artist

Kathryn Garcia

Kathryn Garcia is an la/Ibiza-based artist. Her multifaceted practice gives me the energy and spirit of Womanhouse, the 1972 installation/ performance space organised by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Though Kathy’s practice is centred on the feminine body, her drawings can defy classification and gender. They are figurative and abstract at the same time. The faces are obscured as their bodies stretch and show off parts that take us to realms that are unfamiliar and/or spiritual. In a time of so much societal and political anxiety across the globe, her work allows us to focus and recharge while getting lost in the symphony of colours and shapes that fade in and out of representation. Her pyramids, steel-frame sculptures that are sometimes displayed within the gallery and sometimes in nature, allow us to recharge, reorganise and heal. dean sameshima Tell me about your three bodies of work: drawing, performance and sculpture/ installation. kathryn garcia Everything started with drawing. I began the series that I’m currently working on in 2013. When I first started this

series, I referred to the drawings as megaliths. I wanted them to be large, towering embodiments of feminine energy. A few years later I ended up on the island of Menorca, where there are tons of megalithic sites associated with matrifocal cultures. To this day I feel that the drawings drew me to the Balearic Islands. Around the same time that I started the drawings I made a copper pyramid to meditate inside of. I was then asked to guide a meditation as part of a feminist performance exhibition using the pyramid, so I made a larger pyramid that could fit more people. After that I started to make smaller geometric objects that I placed out in nature to harness energy at places on the earth where ley lines meet – ‘energetic vortexes’. I started to take pictures to document the sculptures in situ and then I started to use my body as a way of interacting with the sculptures. At first I thought this was Kathryn Garcia is a multimedia artist working between Los Angeles and Ibiza. Her works have been exhibited internationally, with solo shows at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2018 and Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2020. Selected by Dean Sameshima, artist, Berlin

ArtReview

how I could show an audience the kind of mystical use-value of objects. I didn’t want to make lifeless objects. Then the performances evolved from documentation into filmmaking. ds Who or what are your top five influences? kg Marija Gimbutas, the archaeologist who studied Palaeolithic and Neolithic cultures that centred a female deity. Lygia Clark. Jack Smith. Ana Mendieta. Feminist/Queer theory. ds What’s next? Shows, body of work, new paintings, travel? kg I’m currently editing the footage that I shot in Sardinia into a film, and working on a suite of new drawings. I plan to explore Sardinia some more this summer and collect more footage. Also, I have sculptures in an exhibition at the Bunker Artspace in Florida. The title of the piece is ishtar (2020) after the goddess Ishtar, and the show happens to be in West Palm Beach, where a certain political figure lives. It’s a perfect example of using my work to anchor the energy of the Divine Feminine. The geography couldn’t be more poignant.

selected by Dean Sameshima

top Hypogea, 2019, coloured pencil on Stonehenge paper, 127 × 97 cm above The Feminine Divine, 2020 (installation view, Gavlak, Los Angeles). Photo: Ruben Diaz facing page She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes (still), 2023, single-channel video, 28 min all images Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Tiyan Baker

ArtReview

selected by Adeline Chia Tiyan Baker is a Malaysian Bidayǔh and Anglo-Australian We’ve all heard about putting yourself in artist wrote in a recent artwork statement. artist working with installation, photography, video someone else’s shoes to understand their ‘[These words and images] suggest that if we and sculpture. Currently living on the Awabakal point of view, but what about diving into learn to see the natural world in a slightly and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia, someone else’s mouth? In the video mouthdifferent way, we can access another way of her work centres around her Bidayǔh culture. In 2022 she was awarded the National Photography Prize breather (2023), Tiyan Baker enables just this, knowing and moving.’ by the Murray Art Museum in Albury. placing a tiny 360 camera in her mouth so But Baker is also clear-eyed about how Selected by Adeline Chia, reviews editor, ArtReview Asia that we see the world through a narrow Indigenous ways of life can be appropriated and exploited for capitalist consumption. opening between her teeth. Baker’s father is Australian Caucasian; her mother is from the The three-channel video installation Bamboo Paradise (2019) takes a critBidayǔh Indigenous community in Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, ical look at Southeast Asian ‘primitive lifestyle’ content on YouTube, and one of its native tongues, Bukar, is the subject of the film. The which fetishises and monetises fantasies of preindustrial technolowork explores how language can shape our consciousness and world- gies and lifestyles. The work focuses on a Cambodian channel called view, not just rationally but viscerally. As the video explores the hills, Survival Builder, which features elaborate structures in the jungle streams and forests of Baker’s ancestral lands, we hear Baker speak in (think bamboo villas, luxurious treehouses, swimming pools with garbled Bukar, her words mangled by the camera in her mouth. Later, slides, etc) purportedly built using traditional construction techas we visit a crocodile farm, a voiceover in a deeper register narrates niques. The work features footage from the channel and interviews the perspective of the crocodile, a creature that features heavily in with fans as well as the founder, who is revealed to be a man living in traditional Bidayǔh art and legend: “I remember swimming in the Siem Reap. He sources ideas for different structures on Pinterest and swamp with children from the village. Long ago I knew how to be a YouTube, and employs a group of villagers to construct them in the human,” it says. As Baker treks through the forest, the identity of the jungle, creating a disturbing content industry that is built on escapist speaker shifts again, to an unspecified entity that declares itself the fantasies of ‘rustic’ village life and ‘ancient’ Asian technologies. origin of language and knowledge: “I taught you the names of birds… In her more personal works, Baker explores her conflicted relafruit trees… things that live in the jungle. The reason you can see these tionship with her cultural heritage. Exploring her desire for connecthings is because you can name them.” tion with her ancestral roots and her feelings of alienation is the video This work generates a discomforting experience in which the Tarun (2020), which chronicles her time spent living in her mother’s viewer’s perspective is dominated by Baker’s cavernous pink palate, birthplace in Sarawak. Throughout the video she has earphones on white teeth and tongue. Like endoscopic images, the view is extraor- that play a tape of her mother recounting childhood experiences, dinarily intimate, poised somewhere between a medical exami- her subsequent marriage to a white man and moving to Australia. nation and a sexual encounter. Anchored in the corporeality of the We hear all these through Baker’s lips, as she apes the words like she mouth, mouthbreather places us in situ, highlighting the fact that we is following a foreign language learning-tape. All the while, Baker is produce language not just through the mind but complex interac- portrayed as a visitor: whether lazing around her relative’s rundown tions of tongue, lips, jaw and pharynx. Baker’s works often deal with house, swimming in a pond with village children or making a tradiIndigenous culture and heritage, and how these have been eroded, tional steamed-rice dish cooked in bamboo. The video captures the appropriated or transmuted in contemporary society. Here, she high- artist’s ambivalent feelings towards her cultural roots – striking a lights the rapidly declining use of her mother tongue due to the balance between a desire for connection and the inevitable diasporic competition of Malay and English, and the loss of the knowledge estrangement from a foreign landscape, language and culture. that Bukar contains, which includes an Indigenous cosmology that is Finally, Baker is aware of how the digital world can provide a refconnected to the wider nonhuman world of animals and spirits. uge for Indigenous people and their diasporas. The installation Based in Newcastle (or Mulubinba) in Australia, Baker works in Personal Computer: ramin ntaangan (2022–23) combines computer parts installation, photography, video and sculpture. Her works engage in and various other personal objects of cultural significance. We see a continuous unfolding dialogue with her ancestral culture and its a custom-made pc housed in a small structure resembling a tradiplace in contemporary life. On one level, she celebrates the landscapes tional Bidayǔh longhouse, a raised wooden house made to house and lifestyles embodied in Bukar, indirectly arguing for stronger pres- many families. There, a computer screen is playing a digital animaervation of Indigenous minority languages, which is an ongoing and tion of a crocodile on a spit, with a sword in its mouth. Nearby, uphill effort by minority groups in East Malaysia. nyatu’ maanǔn mungut another monitor screen is placed above a rock made of foam, bigabu (2021) comprises a series of autostereogram photographs, which displaying images of her family home. The work acknowledges how are 2d images with repeated patterns that hide an underlying 3d the virtual world has become a vital resource through which Baker remains connected to her heritage: through image. For example, embedded in a photograph of durian husks is the word nyatu, Internet searches, Facebook groups and famfacing page, top mouthbreather (still), 2023, digital video, 13 min 9 sec. Courtesy the artist which means ‘to collect fallen fruit’; in an ily WhatsApp chats. The universe that Baker facing page, bottom left Personal computer: ramin ntaangan, image of hanging plant-shoots is hidden has constructed here (out of a computer she 2022–23 (installation view, Primavera 2023, mca, the word mungut, which means ‘to pick only assembled herself and a minihouse she had Sydney). Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist the young buds’. ‘Bidayǔh language has hand-thatched) speaks of the rich possibilifacing page, bottom right nyatu’ (to collect fallen fruit), hundreds of terms for activities that speak to ties of how communities can build worlds to 2021, digital autostereogram print on cotton rag. a daily rhythm of moving through the jungle stay connected to their roots and each other – Photo: Brenton McGeachie. Courtesy the artist online and offline. and working intimately with plant life,’ the and Canberra Contemporary

January & February 2025

Tshepiso Mazibuko Tshepiso Mazibuko is a South African photographer viewpoint brings a nuanced perspective on Tshepiso Mazibuko is among the generation currently living in Johannesburg. She completed her studies of photographers born in post-1994 demomale-dominated spaces. in photography at the Market Photo Workshop in 2016. cratic South Africa who are compelling storyIn 2022 Tshepiso was invited to take part Mazibuko was a recipient of the Prince Claus Award in in the book project House of Story: Magnum tellers creating images with passion, integ2018, and in 2024 she received the Public Award at the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation and the Prix Archive (released 2024). The project was curity and tenderness. Her work delves into de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles. the experience of being ‘born free’, addressrated by Mark Sealy and invited four photogSelected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa, photographer, Johannesburg ing contemporary issues from an inwardraphers from the African continent to looking perspective that reflects a greater respond to the Magnum Photos archive on society. Tshepiso refuses to be confined to a single creative form; African histories. I had the privilege of working with curator and her blending of conceptual and documentary photography fosters editor Candice Jansen as mentors assisting the photographers in shaping their projects. The title of Tshepiso’s project was Awukho thought-provoking conversations about contemporary South Africa. I met Tshepiso in 2012 when I was a student; we studied together umdlalo ongena babukeli (There’s Always Someone Looking). This in the Of Soul and Joy programme, which introduced photog- intriguing title plays with the metaphor of looking and being looked raphy to high-school students in Thokoza, a township just south of at, which is a compelling concept in the context of photography in Johannesburg. There were perhaps 50 students who started in the general, but even more so when thinking about archives of images class, and as time passed the group pared down to four students; from the African continent. Historically, the subjects of these photographs were often the ones being observed. Tshepiso’s project was she was the only female learner remaining. Tshepiso always expressed a desire to be a journalist rather autobiographical and explored themes of time, memory and death. than a photographer. However, she possessed a natural talent for In the course of the project she experimented with expired film, photography. The first body of work that truly resonated with me created fading, ghostlike figures and abstractions, sometimes intenwas her Encounter series (2012–); it captured people in Thokoza in tionally altering the film to create visually interesting effects and their own homes, which feels like a direct continuation of the docu- sometimes allowing the effects to occur by accident. mentary lineage in South Africa. Her poetic eye is what makes the In recent years Tshepiso has found international recognition. Her series so powerful. It is an exploration of human connection, inti- series Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe (To Believe in Something That macy and vulnerability. Through her lens, Mazibuko captures Will Never Happen, 2017–18), which further captures the community the beauty of everyday encounters. Most of her subjects are male in Thokoza, was shown at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival figures who are depicted with dignity and tenderness. Her unique in 2024 and awarded the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award.

The hand, 2020–22, from the series Awukho umdlalo ongena babukeli. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa

nquthu kzn, 2023, from the series Awukho umdlalo ongena babukeli. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Marina Woisky

Animais no jardim, 2024, fleece, iron, print on fabric, resin and cement, 159 × 278 × 158 cm. Courtesy lupo, Milan

ArtReview

selected by Oliver Basciano

Marina Woisky is an artist based in São Paulo whose work The ostrich looks like it got flattened by a of hierarchical speciesism and interdepenstraddles the boundaries between photography, painting truck, its beak half open in exclamation and dence. Yet Woisky brings the work beyond and sculpture. Woisky obtained her bfa from the Instituto head folded flush to the murky pink body. mere polemic through her formal considerde Artes at São Paulo State University in 2021. Her ations: the concrete and bronze, fabric and Yet it remains standing, perched atop a pair exhibition Through the Garden Bars was on view at lupo, Milan, through 15 January. of three-dimensional bronze legs. The bird is print appear both harmonious and confronone of the sculptural zoo Animais e ornamentos tational (we see this affirmed in the more Selected by Oliver Basciano, editor-at-large, ArtReview (2024) Marina Woisky has on show in Mil graus abstract geology-inflected wall works of a [A thousand degrees], the 2024 edition of Panorama, the annual survey recent solo show at lupo in Milan). Each work demonstrates a strong of Brazilian art organised by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São dialogue with both classical sculpture, the culture of kitsch objet Paulo. The pancake appearance of its body comes from the fact this d’art beloved in São Paulo’s junkshops and the dematerialised screenis a digital image of a ostrich that, like the rest of Woisky’s beasts, based world. The ostrich gives us a lot to unpack. has been printed on textile, which has in turn has been stuffed with In her commentary on technology and mediation, Woisky is workwet – and now set – concrete. The result is a disconcerting interplay ing in a lineage of artists such as Briton Anthea Hamilton or Estonian between reproduction and reality, mediated image and tactile object. Katja Novitskova (the latter similarly partial to a horse jpeg), but in It’s an exchange played out in sculptures ranging from a cormorant to reality the sheer breadth of the Brazilian’s quotations – in imagery, a horse. The image of each is distorted by the resolution of the print, materially and socially – makes me want to draw a line between Woisky by the crinkles of the fabric, by the concrete filling; sculptural simu- and The Pictures Generation, especially when that twentieth-century lacra of the natural world. vogue of visual magpieing met the European high conceptualism The curators of Panorama, who have it tough with the broad- of Isa Genzken’s assemblages or Rosemarie Trockel’s grotesqueries. ness of the assignment, did a good job at picking out the issues pre- Woisky shares a discombobulating weirdness with those older artists, occupying artists from Amazonas to Rio Grande do Sul; but Woisky’s some cyborgian tendency to combine disparate materials. In Woisky’s sculptures felt odder than the rest, less prescribed work, however, we see that brought to Brazil, a to a particular thematic or politics, less easily slotcountry in which the natural world is integral above Avestruz, 2024, print on fabric, concrete, resin and bronze, 124 × 124 × 47 cm. ted into being about one subject or another. The to the national identity, but which today is as Photo: Ana Pigosso / Millan, São Paulo. work touches on ecology of course: the animals famous for its turbocharged social-media culCourtesy lupo, Milan do not appear particularly lively, the sculptures ture. The artist’s fauna lives in a context in following pages Animais e ornamentos, 2024 like deathmasks or mere husks of a menagerie, which the line between real space and platform (installation view, 38th Panorama aspects that might draw attention to humanspace is eroded; collapsing as the natural habitat da Arte Brasileira, São Paulo, 2024). Photo: Estúdio Em Obra / mam São Paulo made environmental destruction or to questions collapses; each beast a harbinger of doom.

January & February 2025

Samuel Hindolo

top Saïda (Two Scenes, One Predicament), 2024, oil on paper mounted on fabric, 123 × 153 cm above Slow Glass i, 2024, oil on paper mounted on fabric, 93 × 122 cm

ArtReview

selected by Martin Herbert Samuel Hindolo is an artist based between Berlin and A repeated motif in Samuel Hindolo’s 2023 present when in fact looming in the distance Brussels, working across painting, video and sculpture. exhibition of (mostly) paintings at Galerie is something else’. He obtained a ba in Studio Art from the University Buchholz in Berlin was a figure facing For the 2024 exhibition eurostar in New of Maryland in 2012 and an mfa from Bard College away: refusing, not unlike their maker, to York – split between Buchholz’s Upper East in 2021. He recently had a solo exhibition at 15 Orient and Galerie Buchholz in New York. be known. In nuque (Neck, 2023), a darkSide gallery and Tribeca space 15 Orient – skinned, ambiguously gendered, beanieHindolo referenced saïda makes off with Selected by Martin Herbert, associate editor, ArtReview hatted human, a bit mannequinlike, gazes the manneken pis, Alfred Machin’s 1913 short into a tunnel-shaped bit of architecture that other works clarified silent comedy about a leopard that escapes from a circus in Brussels, as the entrance to a subway, part of it seemingly bloodied. In thirty causes havoc and knocks down the eponymous statue, Belgium’s pieces of silver (2023), whose title refers to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, national symbol. Authority, implicit Africanness and toppled stata grey-skinned character peers rightward into a sylvan landscape at uary are in the mix – one drawing depicts the big cat smothering a posing man, while on the left is a ghostly insert of some obscure the pissing boy – pulling the film forward a century and more, albeit machinery or mechanism. This dynamic – veiled threat, vulnerable in scrambled fashion. In one scenario that recurs insistently as colbodies in space, occasional hints of racial violence, the human and the laged photocopy studies, drawings and the oil-on-paper saïda (two inhuman – is one that the Maryland-born, Bard College-educated, scenes, one predicament) (2024), the leopard is pursued on a veloBerlin- and Brussels-based Hindolo already confidently owns, four drome by police. There’s also a giant bottle of perfume in there, and years after graduation and four solo shows into his career. social-media postings by Buchholz when the show opened suggested Even characterising him as a figurative painter is tricky, since (as Hindolo’s press release didn’t) that perfume mattered here Hindolo paired the gauzily layered, tertiary-rich paintings and deli- because of its ephemerality, the artist specifically bending it to speak cate drawings in his Buchholz debut with – in the gallery’s adjacent of Empire: one collage displayed perfumes named for Napoleon project space – a collaboration with London-based artist Solomon and for Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of newly indeGarçon. This consisted of ominous c-prints of scuzzy rooms (one dirty pendent Senegal. wall featured the whiter silhouette of a recently removed crucifix; an Meanwhile, adding to this halfway-decodable poetics, abstract empty transparent bodysuit lay, phantasmal, on a flight of stairs) and canvases composed of wobbly layered grids referred in their titles a soundwork comprising ghostly knocking. Religion and the spirit to science-fiction writer Bob Shaw’s 1966 notion (in his short story world might thus begin to suggest themselves as supplementary ‘Light of Other Days’) of ‘slow glass’, through which light takes themes, but – as in the story of Jesus and Judas – what here seemed years to travel. In the context of eurostar, the notion of something to count more for Hindolo was the figuring of incoming, unpredict- happening slowly (and of things that fade like old perfume) might able turmoil, in a manner that speaks to a world on edge, holding be read a few ways: through the history of imperialism undone and its breath. His default is allusive, inhabitable suspense, constantly of postcolonialism’s evolution, but also through how that narrative’s dropping the viewer into an unclarified narrative. So far, Hindolo threads are themselves subject, here, to a delayed braiding-together, appears to have done no explicating interviews, and I’ve only found since Hindolo is not about to make his art easily consumable. Rather, a single, unofficial photograph of him. But he does write his own in an era of often issue-driven figurative painting that hits quickly handouts. In the one for this show, he grounded his practice infer- and expends itself, he builds unhurried, probing, effort-requiring entially in the present and near future: of peter, james and john scenarios and to an extent seems to be reinventing, show by show, sleeping (2023), a painting of Christ’s disciples drowsing while mili- himself and his work’s codifications. Both his art and his career accordtary figures move past them, he noted that ‘being adrift gives them ingly raise the same insistent question (and make this viewer, at least, the sense that they’re elsewhere in some prolonged retreat from the keen to know the answer): what happens next?

thirty pieces of silver, 2023, oil and collage on cardboard, 49 × 101 cm all images Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York

January & February 2025

Art Featured

I’m making 61

Khaled Jarrar’s Palestinian Plot

by Stephanie Bailey

The artist’s lifework is an ongoing confrontation with those who would deny his homeland’s existence 62

ArtReview

If there’s one thing that Khaled Jarrar knows how to make, it’s the The Associated Press that focused on the backlash his painting received news. In 2014 the artist made international headlines when Israeli in Palestine, fortifying a deadly, pinkwashed narrative that pitted security forces barred him from crossing into Jordan from the ‘liberal’, ‘queer-friendly’ Israel against the weaponised stereotype of West Bank to catch his flight to New York for the opening of Here a ‘conservative’, ‘homophobic’ Palestine (the latter narrative propaand Elsewhere, the New Museum’s survey of contemporary art from gated by The Guardian and Haaretz). the Arab world. The story highlighted the bureaucratic and infraIn the aftermath, Jarrar continued to pop up in the news cycle. structural matrix that Palestinians navigate in occupied Palestine, In 2016 The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times featured his project as documented in Jarrar’s 2012 film, Infiltrators, included in the New with mobile art-producers Culturunners: he pulled off an old piece Museum exhibition. Footage shows Palestinians finding ways to of a new section of the us–Mexico border wall and turned it into cross the Israeli separation wall that cuts across the West Bank, for a ladder-shaped sculpture that was installed in the Mexican city of reasons as quotidian as attending school. Jarrar himself is no stranger Juárez. In 2018 Artnet and Hyperallergic wrote about Blood for Sale, to these daily feats. When planning to attend an interview at the a public performance presented in conjunction with Jarrar’s exhiAmerican consulate in Jerusalem for his us visa application in 2014, bition at Open Source Gallery in New York, for which he stood on he learned that Israeli authorities had cancelled most permits due Wall Street for one business week selling ten-millilitre vials of his blood to draw attention to America’s military-industrial complex. to the ongoing war on Gaza, so he smuggled himself in. Things blew up again in 2015 – the year Jarrar accompanied Prices started at $19.48, the year of the Nakba, before following the a Palestinian family on their gruelling journey from Syria to Ger- stock price of America’s 15 largest defence contractors, including bae many, recorded in his remarkable 2022 documentary, Notes on Systems and Lockheed Martin; in the end, the artist says, proceeds Displacement – when the artist painted a giant rainbow flag on the went to a hospital in Gaza. West Bank separation wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint (Through Jarrar began researching Blood for Sale while developing I Am Good the Spectrum, 2015). Responding to rainbow profile overlays appear- at Shooting, Bad at Painting, a performance staged in the Arizona desert ing on Facebook after same-sex marriage was legalised in the us in May 2018 with moca Tucson. Making use of his military training, (the pride flag was also projected onto the White House that year), the artist created abstract paintings by firing an ar-15 assault rifle he felt compelled to highlight another oppressed group’s plight. at vials of paint positioned between two canvases angled towards ‘The apartheid wall, built in violation of international law, cuts each other. The work, which referenced the cia’s weaponisation of across our land and our water,’ Jarrar wrote in a July 2015 arti- Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War, extended a 2015 perforcle for The Electronic Intifada. ‘I wanted the mance staged by the artist in Geneva with Art above When Becoming Olive Tree, 2015–ongoing, world to see that our struggle still exists and Bärtschi & Cie, prompting media coverage photographic series. © and courtesy the artist I felt there could be no better place to have and an investigation by Swiss authorities. and The Cera Project, Lisbon that dialogue than on the concrete slabs of Video documentation of that 2015 iteration facing page The Soldier, 2009 (performance view, the most visible icon of our oppression.’ shows Jarrar introducing the performance Al Mahatta Gallery, Ramallah). Courtesy the artist Jarrar’s opinion piece reacted to coverage by in Arabic before grabbing his Glock, as if to and Wilde Gallery, Geneva & Basel

January & February 2025

challenge his European audience to resist the urge to see an Arab year, Palestine was granted a seat at the un General Assembly, marking holding a gun as a terrorist. (His first paintings-by-gunshot were a historic moment amid Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, despite created in 2014 for a show curated by Inês Valle at Galerie Polaris in an earlier veto by the us to grant it full un member status. That ongoing denial of Palestinian existence is mirrored in Jarrar’s latest Paris and Gallery One in Ramallah.) After something of a media lull, Jarrar rode the nft wave in 2021. project. After receiving his temporary green card following his relocaHe minted a token based on a jar of dirt picked up in a village near tion to America in 2023, he discovered that, in another act of erasure, Ramallah from which the illegal Halamish settlement could be seen: his place of birth was changed from Palestine to ‘unknown’. Jarrar has a response to the forced and illegal evictions of Palestinians from given that title to the olive oil he plans to auction in clay vessels created their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in collaboration with master potter João Lourenço, based on an ancient by settlers supported by the Israeli army. ‘Gazing at the landscape artefact attributed to the Philistines. that is shrinking daily by annexation, I chose to mark the hypocrisy of Recently presented in his show Land After Art at Forum Arte Braga, Israeli occupation and its unending spectrum of social, economic, and organised by the Cera Project and curated by Inês Valle, Jarrar’s ecological apartheid by nfting the soil,’ Jarrar told The Art Newspaper ‘unknown’ oil comes from olives he was finally able to harvest in 2022 at the time. The work’s title, ‘If I don’t steal your home someone else will from his land in the West Bank. He purchased the plot in 2016 with steal it’ (2021), quotes Jacob Fauci, an Israeli settler from New York, money he made selling sculptures of everyday objects – including who uttered those words to justify his occupation of the al-Kurd a football, Jerusalem bread and an olive tree trunk – cast from concrete chiselled off the Israeli separation wall. Utilising the infrafamily home in Sheikh Jarrah. Jarrar first captured the media’s attention in 2011, the year he grad- structure of his oppression and an industry that tends to fetishise it, uated from the International Academy of Art Palestine. He created Jarrar sold these forms easily within the art market, enabling the a ‘State of Palestine’ stamp, with a design featuring the blue-flecked artist to reclaim a piece of Palestine as his own. Palestine sunbird, and began offering Still, Jarrar’s Palestinian plot natu– rather daringly, given the trouble the rally tells a collective story. It honours stamp might raise with Israeli authorhis grandmother Shafiqa, who fled amid ities – to ink the passports of visitors to the Nakba, losing her family’s land in the West Bank. Part of the Live and Work the Jezreel Valley. As a boy, he helped her in Palestine project (2009–), the initiative harvest olives for other farmers, never was documented by cnn in 2011 ahead understanding why they couldn’t farm of a vote granting nonmember observertheir own field – a forced separation state status to Palestine at the United that continues to shape the Palestinian condition. Take Jarrar’s uncle, a farmer Nations, with Jarrar stating: “Nobody can with no access to his mother’s field, who deny our existence as Palestinians.” In 2020 Al Jazeera released a docuworked in construction in Israel before mentary on Jarrar’s State of Palestine he was employed to build the separation project, which has also incorporated the wall. ‘It’s important to understand how production of postage stamps, starting Palestinians are implicated, more and with a set created using the Deutsche less directly, in Israel’s settler colonial Post ag ‘individual stamp’ service for the enterprise,’ Jarrar wrote in The MacGuffin. 2012 Berlin Biennale, followed by those created with postal services ‘Like the Palestinians whose only way to make a living is to construct in Belgium, Norway, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. When Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, my uncle actively contributed his proposal to collaborate with the French postal office was rejected to the physical infrastructures that have imprisoned him.’ that same year, Jarrar decided to create his own stamps and sold them Jarrar himself is likewise implicated. Until January 2023 he was employed by the Palestinian Authority, the governing body in the for 75 cents with Galerie Polaris at the fiac art fair in Paris. The State of Palestine icon has since become an enduring symbol. West Bank, as a member of its security forces, which polices the It continues to circulate in different forms, most recently appearing Palestinian population. This background highlights the artist’s in the iconic music video director Farid Malki made for Palestinian- undeniably unique life story. Born in Jenin in 1976, he grew up to Jordanian singer Zeyne’s powerful track 7arrir 3aqlak / Asli Ana. It’s study interior design at the Palestine Polytechnic University, smugalso been printed on t-shirts, with or without Jarrar’s permission gling himself into Nazareth to work illegally as a carpenter after (he doesn’t mind), and reproduced on hand-painted fridge magnets, graduating in 1996. In December 1997 he joined the police force in with Jarrar’s consent, to sell to tourists. Jarrar sold those magnets search of secure employment before swiftly being recruited into the himself as part of a 2024 group exhibition at Timespan in Scotland, Presidential Guard, completing his training in June 1998 to serve as to raise funds for the nonprofit Disarming Design for Palestine. For Yasser Arafat’s bodyguard until the leader’s death in 2004. that show, he also produced Palestine Sunbird (2024), a lifesize bronze The artist continues to reflect on how these violent experiences sculpture of a sunbird, perched on a granite block commonly used have shaped him. During the First Intifada, at the age of eleven, he joined hopeful youths from across the for gravestones. Palestine Sunbird, 2024 Occupied Territories to hurl stones at heavily Palestine Sunbird is both monument and (installation view, We Move As A Murmuration, 2024, memorial. Much has changed for Palestine armed Israeli soldiers in a bid for freedom. Timespan, Helmsdale). Courtesy the artist and the artist, after all. In September last In 2002, amid the Second Intifada, he was and Wilde Gallery, Geneva & Basel

ArtReview

State of Palestine Postage Stamp (The Netherlands), 2010, postage stamps published by tnt Express, Hoofddorp. Courtesy the artist and Wilde Gallery, Geneva & Basel

January & February 2025

shot during the siege of Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. “Later I businessmen to give Palestinians something to lose. “Because when replaced stones for a gun,” he tells me; “then I found art.” But while Palestinians have nothing to lose they are fearless fighters,” Jarrar art has been a vehicle for the artist’s clear-eyed resistance to Israel’s explains. “But give them loans and they can’t resist.” occupation, another thread in his practice embodies a more introspecAll the Wounds to Close, his 2023 show with Wilde Gallery in Geneva, tive confrontation with his past as a soldier, first for the Presidential confronts this condition with chainmail garments – a mask, beret, Guard, and then for the Palestinian Authority – a bridge between brassiere, gloves and socks – made from Israel’s ten-agorot coins, which revolutionary Palestine in the twentieth century and its subsequent Arafat highlighted in a 1990 un address, given the map of ‘Greater Israel’ he saw in its design. (Benjamin Netanyahu wielded a similar pacification post-Oslo, into the twenty-first century. First performed at Al Mahatta Gallery in Ramallah in 2009, the map at the un in September 2023.) The mask in particular points to year Jarrar left active duty to start a media department for the pa’s money’s control over mind and body, a cage in service of colonialism, security forces, The Soldier involved Jarrar standing like a statue in which circles back to Jarrar’s pa connection. Having pursued an interhis military uniform on a pedestal. Docile Soldier (2012), included national career as an artist while being employed by the pa, it has been in the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale, hard for Jarrar to shake off suspicions “Few Palestinians have the luxury of comprises photographic portraits of among some of his peers, whether in Jarrar’s subordinates, while the video the arts or in the security forces, leaving living in a bubble of ideological purity” him caught between nation and state. I. Soldier (2011) captures a brigade from above, the camera following their shadows. A later video, Perhaps Jarrar’s last ‘State of Palestine’ stamping action was an I Am a Woman (2018), depicts Jarrar screaming the work’s title in Arabic, attempt to transcend that capture. After two days of inking passa reference to verbal punishments meted out to Presidential Guard ports in Oslo for Runa Carlsen’s solo show at Fotogalleriet in 2012, recruits who want to quit. Jarrar’s performance confronts the patri- he went to the square where the Oslo City Hall is located, a stone’s archy that shaped him as a soldier and the power that conditioned throw from the Nobel Peace Center where Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin him as a result. As he points out, under occupation, “few Palestinians and Shimon Peres received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize following the have the luxury of living in a bubble of ideological purity”. 1993 Oslo Accords. These interim agreements, which paved the way The red beret Jarrar wears in his soldier works is indicative of that for the so-called two-state solution and the Palestinian Authority, impurity. The switch to green berets that occurred around the time led to a betrayal, Jarrar felt, allowing Israel to outsource the occupaof Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s reforms, Jarrar says, represents the tion to Palestinians like himself. So he placed his original stamp on security forces’ transformation, when a new generation of soldiers the ground and smashed it with a hammer. When I ask why he did were trained with Western input, and career politicians and officers this, he replies with a warning, if not a personal reminder: “There’s proliferated. Reflecting on the neoliberalisation of Palestinian state- nothing worse than when the oppressed becomes the oppressor.” ar craft, Jarrar recalls a photographer telling him about a meeting he documented, when Tony Blair apparently advised Palestinian Stephanie Bailey is a writer from Hong Kong

Land After Art, 2024 (installation view, Forum Arte Braga). Courtesy the artist and The Cera Project, Lisbon

ArtReview

Eternal Returns 2 This was Tomorrow

Lawrence Alloway was a regular contributor to Art News and Review (as it was then called) during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and one of its most forthright and acerbic writers. In a memorable exchange in the publication’s letters page, Alloway accused an individual who had dared to take issue with his ideas of a ‘low capacity for attention’, ‘dogmatism’, ‘writ[ing] with rigidity’ and wanting language to say the right things rather than to be used rightly. A British critic and curator, Alloway made his name as part of the London-based Independent Group (1952–55) of artists and architects, who sought to infiltrate high culture with ‘mass culture’ – or remove the distinction entirely. Alloway himself was fond of the term ‘mass popular culture’, which further emphasised what he thought was wrong with the exclusivity of high culture. He set up a position in opposition to some of the leading critics of his time, such as the American Clement Greenberg. By the 1960s Alloway was using the term Pop art, which has endured in art-historical lingo ever since. (Alloway would later claim to have originated the term in 1958 in an article in which he didn’t actually use those words.) Alloway, who had been assistant director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from 1955 to 1960, had by then moved to the us (inevitable, given how much he loved its mass culture), where he became a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, while continuing to work as a critic for titles such as The Nation and Artforum.

The text that follows is Alloway’s response to the groundbreaking exhibition This is Tomorrow at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which took place in August 1956, and which is widely credited with paving the way for the British Pop art movement. The artists and architects contributing to the exhibition (which included Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and Alison and Peter Smithson) were divided into 12 groups. Alloway himself was part of Group 12 (along with Geoffrey Holroyd and Toni del Renzio, the latter another contributor to Art News and Review); he had also written an essay for the exhibition catalogue. His article, then, might be considered somewhat incestuous, or at least not without its own vested interests. Nevertheless, in its privileging of American popular science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov as a source of philosophical wisdom over classical greats such as Plato (yawn) and its gentle evocations of the mass culture (as if what exactly that meant was self-evident, and which he would elsewhere claim to be ‘one of the most remarkable and characteristic achievements of industrial society’) is typical of the Alloway method at the time. In a sense, Alloway is the precursor of every highfalutin academic who deploys popular culture to shock their students and shatter the walls of academia’s ivory towers, to better engage audiences with the otherwise distant fields of theory and sociology. And ArtReview knows you’ve all met those types.

January & February 2025

The Robot & the Arts by Lawrence Alloway Annotated by ArtReview First published in Art News and Review, Vol viii No 16, Saturday, 1 September 1956

This is Tomorrow, 1956 (installation view, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London). Photo: Sam Lambert. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / riba Collections

ArtReview

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Kenneth and Mary Martin are members of the ‘Constructionist’ group of British artists, exhibited in This is Tomorrow. Having previously worked as designers, they were each key to the reemergence of abstraction in British art during the 1940s. Their work explored simple geometric forms subjected to repetition, progression and distortion

A robot made news by opening an exhibition on August 8: the robot, Robby (from the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet); the exhibition This is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The opening was a gimmick, of course, but a gimmick with resonance, with implications. [The implication here is that the presence of resonance and implications exculpates the gimmickry. That these two things make the gimmickry rise above and out of itself to become art. This sentiment is still current today, except we might frame things in less passive ways, where ‘resonance’ becomes ‘calling out’ or ‘an act of solidarity’, and ‘implications’ become ‘truths’. Art is, after all, one of the last sectors of society that clings onto such ideals. Art people are idiots.] Robby’s presence at This is Tomorrow pinpointed the problem: who makes the machine-age art, the fine artists or the popular artists [of course, most of the former like to think they are the latter. And perhaps vice versa], the constructivists or the mass illustrators and designers? Constructivism, using ‘modern materials’, ‘prefabricated units’, and so on, is supposed to be art for a technology. But the aura of traditional art (measure, craftsmanship) is so strong as to tone down the new elements. In This is Tomorrow, for example, the Martins’ elegant sixwalled structure looks like an ideal building from a Renaissance text on perspective. Robby, on the other hand, symbolises the machine age in its vivid, superstitious, and current forms. It is to the popular arts that one looks for symbols of this machine age in all but its most abstracted aspects. Visitors to This is Tomorrow can still see Robby on the side of the Group 2 exhibit, where stands the upper half of the large cut-out which Londoners will remember from the pedimented front of the London Pavilion during Forbidden Planet’s West End run. Robby, Kong-like, is carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, an incident which does not happen in the film, in which he is a correct, electronic Jeeves. But the difference between the poster and the movie makes the point that robots in the popular arts can be presented as either an integral part of the house of tomorrow or as an abductor of girls in torn dresses. The robot can symbolise bland acceptance of machines or fears of a violent sexual nature. [Forbidden Planet, from 1956, is often said to be loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Dr Morbius taking the place of the magician Prospero, and Robby the servant robot standing in for the two magical characters bound in servitude to Prospero – Ariel and Caliban.] Common to both extremes is the retention of the human image. At a time when many artists are looking for iconographies with which to express ‘the times’ with a high degree of accessibility, the popular arts have it [They still do – that’s why digital games are more popular than art exhibitions]. At the disposal of pulp-magazine artists, comic-book staff, film studios, their publicity departments, toy manufacturers, is a tool of amazing flexibility and strength. [Alloway is noting the ambiguous cultural symbol of the robot, which is more than a machine – simultaneously a passive ‘tool’ for humans and a form that threatens to take on its own agency. Today we might hesitate, given our age’s peculiar deference to nonhuman entities, to describe a robot as a ‘tool’, however honest that description might be. But maybe this reflects our own culture’s lower opinion of human agency, compared to that of Alloway’s.] The term robot was coined in 1920 by Karel Čapek. Its rapid worldwide acceptance showed that people were ready for it. But to the meaning of the new word clung certain old preconceptions. [Here Alloway is arguing, in the fashion of the Warburg school of art history he mentions later, that in fact, even apparently ‘new’ cultural expressions are deeply rooted in history. Which,

January & February 2025

As Alloway was writing this, the American John Whitney was making mechanical animations using a self-built analogue computer created from antiaircraft defence mechanisms (he would later be recognised as one of the pioneers of computer animation), but here the writer seems more concerned about robots as a subject or as a symbol of where art could be found in the new space age of the 1950s. Alloway, of course, is best known for his claims to have invented the term ‘Pop art’, and this text is another example of his looking for signs and symbols in popular media. Twelve years later, Whitney would be part of Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity show, at London’s ica, where robots made the art

Alloway didn’t know that one day I, Robot would be best remembered as a film starring manslapper Will Smith. When Alloway wrote this article, I, Robot was a collection of nine short stories by the American sciencefiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, which dictate that a robot may not harm a human being, must obey orders from a human unless it conflicts with the first law, and must protect itself as long as this action does not violate the first two laws, continue to find relevance in present-day discussions around robotics and artificial intelligence

in itself, might be said to draw on much older concepts from Indian religions, such as samsara.] Since a robot is ‘a mechanism contrived to do human or super-human tasks’ 1 technically minded critics have complained of the human semblance of most popular visualisations of robots. They want robots to look like air-conditioning units, waldos, tanks – anything but people. [Robby was actually designed by someone who designed washing machines, Robert Kinoshita.] In fact, however, the artists who design robots for science-fiction magazines, the main channel of visualisation for robots, prefer anthropomorphic robots. Even Isaac Asimov (formulator of the three basic laws of robotics: see I, Robot), keeps to metal men with head, arms, hands, torso, legs, feet, everything, in fact, except genitalia. Rococo manlike automatons (delicately sculptured figures containing clockwork for writing or playing the flute) and the late medieval fantasies of brass men, linger, despite all prejudices of the well-informed against the unspecialised human contour. [Such a desire, to humanise the technological exotic, still finds an outlet in hack android-artist Ai-Da; ‘her’ portrait of Alan Turing sold last November for $1 million; how’s that for a Turing test?] What is needed, next, is a study of the iconography of the robot to discover how it acquired its present capacity to symbolise, for a wide public, varied aspects of man in this machine age. Such an enquiry would bring up connections with the puppets of expressionist art, which probably influenced Čapek’s r.u.r., for the robot is familiarly used as a symbol of regimentation, of loss of ‘will’. Connections exist here with the soulless Frankenstein monster and its hostility to its creator. [One might note that today the same connections extend forward to ai.] The robot as helper (which includes as a sub-division the robot as a specialised tool), the robot as faceless numero, the robot as monster, are all aspects of the topic. [In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the connection between robots and the dehumanisation of workers became a preoccupation in sciencefiction, with robot underclasses forever threating rebellion; a theme that persists through to Blade Runner (1982), the key difference being that in our current culture, what distinguishes human from nonhuman has become less certain. We might add to Alloway’s list the robot as instigator of the

Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919, oil on canvas, 183 × 318 cm. Public domain

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Illustration of The Flutist, automaton designed by Jacques Vaucanson (1709–82), in Henry René d’Allemagne, Histoire des jouets, 1902. Public domain

Karel Čapek was a Czech writer. In the 1920 science-fiction play that introduced the term ‘robot’, r.u.r. (its title) stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Fernand Léger, Soldier with a Pipe, 1916, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Public domain

apocalypse; the robot as pocket Tamagotchi pet; and, in its main current inception, the robot as bemusing timewaster generating semisensical texts and mishappen surreal imagery.] In the fine-arts, connections can certainly be made between the idea of the mechanical man and Léger’s tubular figures and with Wyndham Lewis’s metallic cast. Here the simplification of anatomy to basic shapes is given a machine-age twist to make men look like automatons as in the World War I pictures of both artists. More lately Roberto Matta has used robots from popular sources as inhabitants of his pictures. [And even more lately: Hajime Sorayama’s sexy robot paintings, and so on. Perhaps what Alloway was unknowingly gesturing towards was not just robots in art, but robots as a future audience for the art.] It can be seen that the robot is a topic that cuts across the usual limits of the fine and the mass arts. This persistence of visual themes, across the lines of taste, is well known to scholars of the Warburg Institute, of course (example: an article on personifications of Charity that ended up with a magazine cover of Robert Donat with children climbing all over him). [It’s no longer, as the deepfake Donald Trump might tell you, purely visual themes, but existential ones as well. The programming and formulation of the robot, or intelligence, has become the art.] Perhaps, with gestures like Robby opening an exhibition of art and architecture, the needed shake-up of the old categories of the arts is advanced a little. [As the ai version of Holly Herndon’s voice singing Jolene, a song voicing the fear of being replaced, accompanies us into the gently glitching sunset, perhaps such a shakeup is still only just beginning.] ar 1 Martin Greenberg, editor: Travelers of Space from Adventures in Science Fiction Series (Gnome Press, New York, 1951)

January & February 2025

13/2–11/5/2025 GALERIE RUDOLFINUM MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI, EMMANUEL VAN DER AUWERA, BCAA SYSTEM, GILLIAN BRETT, DANIEL BURDA, JULIANA CERQUEIRA LEITE, JULIAN CHARRIÈRE, JOSHUA CITARELLA, CLUSTERDUCK, KATE CRAWFORD, STERLING CRISPIN, SIMON DENNY, ENORÊ, FRANTIŠEK FEKETE, MATHIAS GRAMOSO, TILMAN HORNIG, ANEŽKA HOROVÁ, VLADAN JOLER, DANIEL KELLER, ANDREA KHÔRA, JONNA KINA, OLIVER LARIC, EVA & FRANCO MATTES, JÜRGEN MAYER H., CARSTEN NICOLAI, TREVOR PAGLEN, MATTHIAS PLANITZER, JON RAFMAN, SEBASTIAN SCHMIEG, CHARLES STANKIEVECH, TROIKA, NICO VASCELLARI, DUŠAN ZAHORANSKÝ TECHNOLOGY PARTNER: SAMSUNG

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(Detail) Chigozie Obi, Cozy Comfort, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 137 × 106 cm. Courtesy C+N Gallery CANEPANERI & the Artist.

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Miao Ying, Technomancy at Polarized Rift (detail), 2023. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and Kiang Malingue

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Philippe Parreno Voices Haus der Kunst, Munich 13 December – 25 May Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions are often initially experienced as a destabilising encounter with otherness. So, at the risk of blowing that for anyone who hasn’t seen Voices – a version of which, to be fair, was shown earlier in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul – here’s what a first wander through is like. Haus der Kunst’s huge, darkened, neoclassical main space, flanked by smaller ones on either side and at the back, is dominated by an evolving film on a screen, El Almendral (2024), an updating stream of footage from an almond grove and surrounding landscape in Almería, Spain; almond trees tolerate drought, and this region is steadily undergoing desertification due to climate change. The smaller spaces offer a stop-start scenography of Parreno’s increasingly trademark light- and sound-based sculptures, mostly new, a few dating back years. Among them are a trio of bobbly glass sculptures, shaped like giant peanut shells and containing coloured lights, that slide up and down steel poles and cast rippling, austerely psychedelic patterns on the walls; a 5 × 5 grid of blinking globular heat lamps strung from the ceiling – heat being a leitmotif of the show – and suspended, intermittently rotating speakers that softly emit an aleatory soundscape of droning, muttering and chirring. The latter is part of an overall soundscape divided across the rooms, Voices (2024), which clones and sometimes completely abstracts speech by well-known German tv presenter Susanne Daubner. In each case, here, it feels like something is being transmitted in a language halfway alien, halfway familiar.

Continuing this theme is one of two films screened in rooms either side of the entrance, Anywhen (2016–24) – an earlier version of which featured in Parreno’s 2016 Turbine Hall presentation (which was ostensibly ‘controlled’ by a yeast culture), and which features one of those cuttlefish that communicate through their chromatophores’ shifting hues. The other film, La Quinta del Sordo (2021), sweeps over the surfaces of Goya’s fearful Black Paintings (c. 1819–23). You can’t always see these films; at intervals, the projection clicks off and the opaque screens they’re projected onto become shallow boxes containing flashing, probably epilepsy-inducing grids of creamy white lights. These changeovers, and the activities or pauses of the other sculptures, are influenced by two things: the shifting ambient temperature (which turns the heat lamps on and off), and the exhibition’s ‘Brain’, a computer near the back relaying spectral data from that Spanish landscape and translating it algorithmically into real-time decisions that conduct the show’s multipart son et lumière. This is the apparatus through which an anthropologically altered landscape ‘attempts’ to speak to us: as if to say, so Parreno suggested in a press conference, “what now, humans?” At times, your visit may be interrupted by one of several inquisitive performers: a woman in a face-covering straggly black wig, say, asking if you have an important question on your mind. I’ve previously enjoyed getting snarled up in works by Tino Sehgal – making a guest intervention entitled [untitled][for Philippe] (2024) here – but I was trying to see everything, and things

Voices, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist

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kept switching off, so I said no. (Sometimes these questioners do bendy, slo-mo dances responding to the moving sculptures; this and their gothy/witchy looks suggest Sehgal has been studying Anne Imhof.) The value of an offered conversation, though, wasn’t lost on me. Parreno’s show is a stack of volunteered empathic bridges: between humans and nature (landscape; the cephalopod who stares directly at us in Anywhen); between humans and technology that seems, at least at first, to have its own inscrutable agenda; and between humans and other humans. It’s as much about the potential frictional difficulty of those colloquies as about glimpses of their possibility. Churls may suggest that Parreno is mostly going over familiar formal territory here. A more onboard take – mine – is that he’s partly marking time, while incrementally progressing, in an artworld that’s only just catching up with him. His art doesn’t wish away increasingly sentient technologies or a radically altered climate, but uses them towards dethroning human agency, rerouting creativity itself. The specific innovations here – ventriloquising an entire landscape; enfolding Sehgal; tugging against stiff Nazi-era architecture via tech and unfixity – plus the use of generative art to establish a baseline tenor of wrongfooting uncertainty, turn out to be plenty. I walked away thinking, not for the first time after a Parreno show, that he’s among our most farsighted and generous makers; and that anyone who thinks art is out of ambition and ingenuity should head, forthwith, to Munich. Martin Herbert

Voices, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Raven Chacon Aviary American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York 26 September – 3 July In Washington Heights, a hilly neighbourhood in northern Manhattan far from the usual gallery districts, Raven Chacon’s soundscape Aviary (2024) fills a large, echoey Beaux-Arts room at the back of a campus of stately buildings known as the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In lieu of paintings on the walls and sculptures on the floor, sweet chirps, rippled shrieks and reedy whistles spout and reverberate from all directions in the spare, cold gallery. Aviary is one of the first site-specific artworks commissioned by the academy, a 126-year-old members’ society that had operated mainly as a dispenser of financial awards to artists, writers, architects and musicians until 2019, when it began programming for a wider audience. To make the work, Chacon, a Diné artist whose research-based practice focuses on Indigenous history, mined the Audubon Society’s online digital cache of field recordings for bird calls commonly heard in the northeastern United States, a region once inhabited by the Lenape

people. By sampling from these files, Chacon alludes to the fact that the 5.6 hectares on which Arts and Letters sits were purchased by the naturalist John James Audubon after he made it big on his illustrated book The Birds of America (1838). Over the course of the 37-minute composition, these bird calls mingle with seven impressions of extinct or endangered bird species that Chacon performed himself on instruments he crafted from found materials, which are on view in the gallery’s foyer. With a sink’s p-trap found in New York’s Hudson Valley, where the artist lives, and a cigarillo mouthpiece from outside Arts and Letters on Broadway and West 156th Street, Chacon recreated the croak of the great auk, extinct since the nineteenth century. Through the holes he drilled into the knob of a bedpost salvaged from the Hudson Valley, he cooed like a passenger pigeon, extinct since 1914. The point isn’t for listeners to detect the manmade sounds within the layered cacophony, were that even possible. Practically speaking, we cannot extricate the real from the artificial,

Aviary, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist

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nor can we bring birds back from the dead. Instead, Aviary invites us to consider the many sounds in relation to the academy’s architecture: the echo in the gallery lasts a long six seconds, the reverberations in the room offering us the sense of being haunted by history. Aviary isn’t so much an immersive experience as it is the laying bare of an impossible scenario: wedge-shaped cushions spaced out on the gallery floor invite visitors to settle in, look up at the frosted glass ceiling and imagine what it might have sounded like to lie on this ground if North America hadn’t lost more than a quarter of its avian population during the last 50 years. Here, Chacon offers what is at once a sanctuary and a space that generates productive discomfort and self-reflection: urbanites enter the gallery seeking refuge from the city’s hustle and bustle, only to be reminded of the havoc modern cities wrought upon those who stood in the way of their creation. Outside the iron gates of this oddly serene campus, we don’t hear any birds at all. Greta Rainbow

Mark Leckey 3 Songs from the Liver Gladstone Gallery, New York 21 November – 15 February Apart from a few spotlights and the glow of the videos, this solo exhibition by Mark Leckey is submerged in darkness, evoking the black box experience of cinemas and concert venues. The exhibition is an audiovisual spectacle that loops roughly every 20 minutes. Each of its three movements comprises a video accompanied by dramatic sound that fills Gladstone’s groundfloor gallery, which is, for this show, reduced by a partition wall to around half its usual size. The lighting, sound and architectural intervention operate theatrically: shrouded, confined and surrounded by screens, visitors are yoked into following a series of associative leaps from viral online content to Leckey’s digital fabulations with rapt attention. To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021) is the exposition. In this video, which plays on two screens making up the opposing ends of a structure resembling a bus stop, a young man runs headfirst into the side of a shelter like the one reproduced in the gallery, crashing through the glass. The seconds-long video – culled, according to the exhibition materials, from a viral video repository – is interspersed with slow-motion cgi renderings of the moment

of impact and loops for nine minutes. On the wall opposite the installation hang six oak panels gilded like Byzantine icons, two of which – Spidey with Spidey-Self and Spidey at the Windows (both 2024) – contain images of the vigilante. The rest depict views of a rocky landscape devoid of human figures, save for a blocky avatar tumbling in the sky of Found a Way to Fly Out the Map (2024). By association, the man in the video comes to resemble an airborne superhuman – albeit an antisocial one whose stunt betrays a destructive impulse towards the urban environment, a desire to disrupt the status quo of civil society. Riffing off these implications, Carry Me Into The Wilderness (2022), a vertical video embedded in the partition wall that begins as To the Old World ends, blends phone footage taken in Alexandra Park, London, with a virtual desert landscape. Here, Leckey can be heard giving a keyed-up account of encountering the sublime in nature. His speech is musicalised and accompanied by subtitles, which read, ‘O man…/ I just walk out into the wilderness / and I just well up / I just fill up… O Jesus / O God’. The dissonance between the vocative expression one

reads – ‘O God’ – and the secular colloquialism one hears – “Oh god” – encapsulates the exhibition’s sense of humour, the presence of which makes one uncertain if the speaker’s elation is fully sincere. Leckey seems committed to the bit in the third movement, Mercy I Cry City (2024). Here again, the tone of the audio and visuals is grandiose. The partition, punctured with small windows, separates viewers from a projection on the gallery’s (real) back wall, which pans over a city rendered in a hand-drawn style of animation and bright comic book colours. Amid towers and battlements, a brown cross sits atop a blue dome in the city centre. Whether 3 Songs from the Liver represents a religious turn for Leckey is ambiguous, thanks to the humour that hedges the exhibition’s sincerity. Regardless, one gleans from the evocations of virtual, fictional, premodern and preindustrial settings a set of blueprints for escaping a parochial, looping present. The best course of action, however, seems encrypted in Leckey’s cheeky juxtapositions of dumb stunts and life-altering epiphanies. The key to deciphering these ‘songs’ may be to take them all completely seriously. Jenny Wu

To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (still), 2021, two-channel 9:16 video installation, aluminium, steel, 7.1 surround sound, 8 min 39 sec (loop), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Bjarne Melgaard with Bjørn Kristian Hilberg Abuse Is the Beauty of the Working Class vi, vii, Oslo 25 October – 15 December Since the 2013 launch of Liquid Cosmetics, a limited edition of ‘sex kits’ (poppers, lube, condoms, washcloth) made in collaboration with the American label Eckhaus Latta, Bjarne Melgaard has dallied with fashion, even launching his own clothing line in 2015. The fifty-seven-year-old Norwegian artist has worked with a number of designer labels (including, most recently, Holzweiler), and in October debuted the scent I Am Your Dog, an attempt to reproduce the smell of his pet dog, at Dover Street Market in Paris. With this first presentation at vi, vii gallery, Melgaard is flirting further with perfume. Staged as an artworld launch for The End, Melgaard’s new fragrance line in collaboration with Bjørn Kristian Hilberg, founder of Norwegian perfumier Malbrum, Abuse Is the Beauty of the Working Class has a working scent laboratory as its centrepiece, complete with beakers full of swirling amber liquid, percolators, filling machines and bottled chemicals. Viewers encounter etched marble and limestone slabs on which rest rows of bottles containing three fragrances, Joey, Speedball and Stabfrenzy Forever, while a fourth fragrance, Crispo, is in development onsite over the course of the show. Another improvised scent, the result of smashing phials of essence on the gallery floor, fills the bijoux storefront with its

suffocating floral bouquet. Projected on a nearby wall, a brand ‘trailer’ comprising animation and found footage blending money shots, nuclear tests and pop audio wheels in Melgaard’s usual abrasive preoccupations. If his previous forays into fashion were love/ hate affairs intent on subverting industry codes by intensifying their animating contradictions (as in his 2017 collection Suprem(e), a cross between independent publisher Semiotext(e) and streetwear brand Supreme), Melgaard’s approach to fragrance feels rather more reverent. Crispo, named after the late gallerist Andrew Crispo – who was implicated in the 1985 murder of a Norwegian fashion student – is a hammering of patchouli and violets. Somewhat more subdued is Joey, an homage to gay porn star Joey Stefano, a recurring figure in Melgaard’s work, who died of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-six. Here, the notes are much sweeter – what, to my untrained nose, seems like the overwhelmingly funereal scent of lilies or perhaps something like bubblegum. While the titles suggest Melgaard’s continued attraction to the transgressive and extreme, what emerges here is something more tenuous. His olfactory experiments are framed by dozens of ink drawings depicting cartoonish figures being devoured by monsters – many doodled

Abuse Is the Beauty of the Working Class, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Ethan Floro. Courtesy the artists and vi, vii, Oslo

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on legal documents from the artist’s recent highly publicised court case – and an installation featuring hyper-trendy mannequins and tombstonelike paintings characteristically strewn with ephemera, beauty products, broken perfume bottles, antipsychotic medication and stuffed animals used to treat children with schizophrenia. The perfumes are thus linked to social relations of the kind whereby an artist can, for instance, sign away the rights to their life’s work while drunk, as Melgaard did in 2020. As luxury goods, they have a whiff of desperation about them; but as expressions of the class antagonisms alluded to in the show’s title, they are more ambivalent, suggesting degrees of resistance and self-exploitation. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Melgaard, with his visual-arts career on the brink, is diversifying his brand (he also recently launched Untitled, a trademark wine and vodka). Yet possible bankruptcy and sobriety have not blunted his work, which remains as jagged and irrepressible as ever. They have, however, amplified its pathos and, most palpably, its tragic tone. The artist’s brilliance here is to show us that the tragedy is not his alone. More than a marketing ploy, this presentation signals the ubiquity of the abuses – legal, financial, emotional – that gave it form. Matthew Rana

Justin Fitzpatrick A Musical Instrument Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 25 October – 23 November Puzzled by the ghostly faces and fragmented bodies in Justin Fitzpatrick’s paintings – figures merged with musical instruments, held within constraining structures – I’m reminded of a moment in Iggy Pop’s 1982 memoir, I Need More. For the Godfather of Punk, life as a performer had required ‘constant exposure to amplifiers and electric guitars’, and the persistent ‘electric hum’ of stage and studio, he believed, had left him with ‘altered body chemistry’. Enduring, even enjoying, these invasive sonic conditions, Iggy chose to explore their physiological effects ‘as if I were a scientist experimenting on myself, like Dr. Jekyll’. The eight gothic-surrealistic works included in the Dublin-born Fitzpatrick’s A Musical Instrument share something of this fascination with testing and transformation, shaping an imaginative space of minds and bodies ‘altered’ under music’s heady influence. Fitzpatrick’s pictures – aesthetically out-of-time, echoing art deco ornamentation, Arts and Crafts patterning, 1960s psychedelia, with hints of H.R. Giger’s biomechanical visions – conjure ornate, eerie scenarios suggestive of the body’s sensory porosity and sound’s penetrating intensity. Human forms are positioned and partitioned beneath assertive grids or enmeshed within decorative latticing. Caged, haunted, their bodies pinned down or opened up – in compositions

sometimes overlaid with strips of musical notation – the characters look to be, in several cases, unusually disposed musicians: played by, instead of playing, their melodies. Fitzpatrick casts them not as autonomous artistic agents but as acquiescent, adaptable instruments of overwhelming, almost supernatural forces. Informing the eldritch atmosphere of this fantasy world is the 1860 poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning from which the exhibition takes its title. Published a year before the poet’s death (perhaps aptly, in relation to Fitzpatrick’s themes, she struggled with severe spinal pain throughout her life, taking laudanum from the age of fifteen), ‘A Musical Instrument’ recounts the Greek god Pan fashioning a flute from a river reed: an act framed as an arrogant, wounding assault on nature. Fitzpatrick takes this mythic vignette as a trigger for ambiguous reflections on creativity and destruction, using his highly cultivated style to contemplate deep tensions of aesthetic experience – whether the passionate searching and romanticised suffering of artistic lives, or the concurrence of pain and pleasure at art’s transgressive limits. In Aeolian harp suspension bridge (all works 2024), the fingers of a colossal godlike musician pluck at vast structural cables: a powerful being, rivet-studded into the architectural form, apparently bound to its fate, constrained

by this labour of unearthly artistic creation. A nunlike presence within the gloomy interior setting of The Glass Armonica (Dying at my music) grips a clear goblet, adorned with curling strands. The figure’s form is fading away, as if the music from the device she holds transforms space around it and alters the body chemistry of those who play it. (Identified in the title, the object is an unusual handheld version of a bizarre eighteenth-century invention, said to have driven its most devoted performers to insanity.) Perhaps what initially bemuses one most about Fitzpatrick’s paintings is also what successfully distinguishes them: the combination of the sinister and the serene, the synthesis of dark subjects with touches of extreme tenderness. (Poster for a Musical (The Prostate Piano), featuring an androgynous figure lounging across the titular instrument, is among the most erotically forthright examples here of the latter tendency.) Up close, there is an exquisite softness to the velvety oil-painted surfaces of each piece. Underlying Fitzpatrick’s esoteric historical references and sometimes portentous subjects, we find an insistently expressed sensitivity. Through an art of poised, posthuman melodrama – where bodies divide, dissolve, become undone – he invites us to immerse ourselves in the complexity and polysemy of human feelings. Declan Long

Poster for a Musical (The Prostate Piano), 2024, oil on linen, oak frame, 143 × 113 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

January & February 2025

Prospect 6 The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home Various venues, New Orleans 2 November – 2 February To truly fathom Ashley Teamer’s mixed-media collages Claiborne: The Next Millennia and Claiborne at the Epoch (both 2024), you need to view them up close and askew. The artist cuts, stitches and reassembles fish-eye photographs of New Orleans’s jubilant ‘second line’ processions into swirling visual sensoria. In these dizzying images, crowds of revellers weave through fractured glimpses of magnolia leaves, concrete columns and sidewalks. The collages reflect the vitality of their eponymous avenue as well as the infrastructural scar that plagues it: New Orleans’s Claiborne, a primary thoroughfare and gathering place in the Tremé (America’s oldest Black neighbourhood) lies beneath a hulking interstate bridge that has, for decades, blighted the area. These two works,

on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, form part of a multivenue triptych: Teamer’s sculpture Tambourine Cypress (2024) is sited in a narrow community park in the Tremé, wedged between the highway and its access roads. A twisting steel cypress tree topped with tambourines and wind chimes, its melodic pealing symphonises with the traffic noise of Claiborne and the sneaker-squeals of basketball players, to produce an intimate sonic portrait of a resilient neighbourhood. This kind of ambitious site-specificity represents the best of what a citywide exhibition such as Prospect New Orleans can offer, activating our sense of place so we may experience it anew. This sixth edition frames New Orleans as both gift and lesson to the rest

Ashley Teamer, Tambourine Cypress, 2024 (installation view, Lemann Park & Playground, Prospect 6). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy the artist and Prospect New Orleans

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of the world. Works by 51 artists occupy over 20 venues, spanning the entire Crescent City. At one geographic extreme, we traverse the levees at The Batture to see installations such as Andrea Carlson’s Trade Canoe for Earthdivers to Come (2024), a vessel helmed by painted birds that pays homage to Indigenous trade routes and ecological knowledge – appropriately sited at a waterfront park where freight ships can be seen gliding downriver. At the other, we must cross parish lines to view 12 installations in the behemoth Ford Motor Plant in Arabi, where the air stings of molasses wafting from the nearby Domino Sugar Refinery; there, in Jeannette Ehlers’s Hoist and the Unseen: Journeys Through Tempests in Times of Hunger (2024), long synthetic braids are thrashed

by a wooden pulley wheel. The sculpture evokes the movement of goods through port cities like Copenhagen and New Orleans, while acknowledging the unpaid Black labour that has long bolstered Western economies. Elsewhere, artworks are nestled into music venues, parks, railroad yards and, of course, a few museums. Prospect 6 is not easy to navigate. But neither is New Orleans, which makes the present edition feel refreshingly attuned to the city’s meandering and improvisational cadence. Recurring ‘-ennial’ exhibitions often struggle to convey their relevance to local audiences, as curators and artists ‘parachute’ in from elsewhere. Indeed, Prospect’s commitment to New Orleans’s arts community has been inconsistent since its founding, nearly two decades ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s therefore noteworthy that coartistic directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson are not newcomers to the scene:

Lash was a curator at New Orleans Museum of Art and Patterson exhibited in Prospect 3. While inviting reflection on colonial histories and ecological crises, Lash and Patterson lean into etymological connections between the titular ‘harbinger’ (a foreboding omen) and ‘harbour’ (a port that provides a protective shelter). Undertones of loss and resilience are palpable across several projects: Stephanie Syjuco’s public murals build on archival records of Saint Malo, a once-thriving fishing village founded in the eighteenth century by Filipino immigrants in coastal Louisiana, later destroyed by a hurricane, in 1915. At Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club, L. Kasimu Harris exhibits photographs from his Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges series (2018–), which documents divey hangouts that have been hubs of Black cultural life for decades, many now threatened by gentrification. Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s film Amongst the Disquiet (2024) stages a multigenerational dialogue on diaspora

and belonging among members of a Vietnamese American family that includes both political and climate refugees. And Hannah Chalew’s sprawling sculptural installation Orphan Well Gamma Garden (2024), at the Contemporary Arts Center, conjoins scavenged pipes, live plants and single-use plastics into a dystopian, posthuman landscape. Perhaps the lesson that New Orleans imparts can thus be found in the second line’s coalescence of hope and grief, or scar-as-suture, as Teamer’s triptych suggests. At Ford Motor Plant, Prospect veteran Mel Chin shows Pool of Light, Work in Progress (2024), a sculpture-in-progress whose completion was interrupted by the impact of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, where his studio is located. A cascading chandelier formed of salvaged office chairs, the piece honours the unsung labour of wage workers. Yet in its current form, like New Orleans itself, it also serves as a beacon of resilience in the midst of sublime forces beyond our control. Allison K. Young

Mel Chin, Pool of Light (detail, work in progress), 2024 (installation view, Ford Motor Plant, Prospect 6). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy the artist and Prospect New Orleans

January & February 2025

Michael Asher Artists Space, New York 22 November – 8 February Fifty years after Michael Asher’s landmark exhibition at Claire Copley Gallery, for which he removed the back wall of the space to foreground the work of the gallerist at her desk, Artists Space has mounted a survey of the conceptualist’s work. Asher’s site-specific and durational projects, dating from the late 1960s to early 2010s and central to the canonical understanding of ‘institutional critique’, have not been recreated for this occasion. There are no removals or extensions of significant architectural features to emphasise otherwise unapparent activities; no labyrinth of drywall studs in the positions of all temporary walls previously installed in the space; no enactment of an unconventional commercial arrangement between the late artist and a presenting institution. Instead, the items on view – many postcards, posters, plans, publications and prints – draw attention to the almost administrative and discreet aspects of Asher’s practice, as though the curators had removed a figurative wall behind his post-studio practice to show us his ‘desk’. What we find (and learn from an accompanying publication) is how Asher frequently shapeshifted into other kinds of workers: graphic designer, art handler, landscaper, advertiser, sign painter, social worker, development officer, catalogue printer,

engineer… anything but artist, maker of important objects. Archive photographs show that, invited to an exhibition at Occidental College in California in 1986, Asher chose to work with an existing papermaking class to produce just the paper on which the expected catalogue (also on view) would be printed. Nearby, issues of Art in America and New Art Examiner are open on the advertisements Asher designed in 1999 for Cal Arts, where he’d taught for nearly 30 years: one features a large block of running text listing the names and websites of prominent art schools, with Cal Arts merely bolded. In a smaller gallery, a boxed set and unfolded copies of maps set out Asher’s 2003 contribution to an outdoor exhibition in a rural German town: there, he obtained technical maps of local power, water and gas supply lines not visible in the landscape, asked the foundation’s staff to create a ‘key’ that located the exhibition within those networks and reproduced the documents as a publication. Asher’s efforts deflect the expectations of the inviting art institution, curator or collector while referring us to the larger systems of advertising, infrastructure and exchange that art is entangled with. These gestures, labelled institutional critique, occasionally received pushback in their time: Asher’s 1999 catalogue

of works deaccessioned between 1929 and 1998 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a project that would still be timely if executed today) was produced for an exhibition at moma but printed with a last-minute disclaimer and sidelined to a rack on the end of a museum bench. But more than that push-and-pull with institutions, this survey operates as an inquiry into the artist’s work, his labour: these are tests of how far Asher could step outside of the studio, expand or exit the frame, while still participating as an artist in a given project. It’s hard to visit this survey without thinking some version of an oft-repeated contemporary question: what happened to institutional critique? While the word ‘critique’ now appears in plenty of exhibition texts and artist statements, how artists do this (and what we say their work will do) has certainly shifted. Meanwhile the original movement has itself been institutionalised. So although Asher himself resisted that label, in revisiting his work I expected to see an enticing model or reassertion of that practice many of us seem to miss – something biting and difficult. Yet what I found was a practice that was ultimately more strange and deadpan, as evasive as it was invasive. Perhaps that was the power of Asher’s version of institutional critique, and what might still push it forward today. Mira Dayal

Postcard distributed as a component of Michael Asher’s project for Intentie en Rationele Vorm, 1987, Vrij Genootschap Voor de Beeldende Kunst, Mol. Photo: Carter Seddon. Courtesy Artists Space, New York, and the Michael Asher Foundation, Los Angeles

ArtReview

weaving is human: Isabella Ducrot… and the textile collections of the Museum of Civilizations Museo delle Civiltà, Rome 1 August – 16 February Isabella Ducrot and the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome are both experiencing a renaissance. Although known in her native Italy since the 1990s, the nonagenarian Rome-based artist has only recently gained international fame, in part due to the artworld’s attempts to redress gender inequalities, and the ensuing reevaluation of women artists. Despite working for over four decades – shifting seamlessly between abstraction and figuration in her paintings, drawings, collages and fabric works – Ducrot has only just had her first international solo museum show, at the Consortium, Dijon, this summer. Meanwhile, since 2022, the encyclopaedic Museo delle Civiltà, which holds over two million artefacts and documents, has embarked on an ambitious decolonisation programme, collaborating with contemporary artists, thinkers and writers to recontextualise the collection’s often fraught history. In weaving is human… Ducrot and the museum’s curators have collaborated to offer a meditation on fabric, charting a history of textiles from prehistory to modern times, juxtaposing works from the collection with Ducrot’s own works made from the rare fabrics she has collected. Ducrot, writing in her book The Checkered Cloth (2019), thinks the invention of weaving deserves special attention: dating back to the Neolithic era, it was ‘not the result of a defensive gesture, nor a violent

action, but of a moment of reflection, a project which envisaged something absolutely new, based on calculations and formulas’. Ducrot’s works form the fulcrum of the show, taking over the central atrium of the Museo’s cavernous buildings, pinned onto bright yellow display panels hung from the ceiling or suspended directly into the space. Turbante (2015), a gorgeously colourful monumental work on paper, takes centre stage: its 11-metre-long silk turban, glued to an equally long roll of paper that, unravelling from the ceiling onto a low platform below, is painted in a vertical chevron pattern with pigments the colours of a sunset sky. Ducrot’s works find formal echoes in the items from the museum’s collection: Abito con cornice gialla (Dress with Yellow Border, 2023), a long-sleeved kimono-style chequered dress stitched onto a large rectangle of fabric, finds affinities with the exquisite nineteenth-century silk Japanese Katabira woven with golden thread, or the simple woman’s cotton dress from the Lima culture (200–650 ce), woven in a pattern of checks and bands. Ducrot’s almost mystical reverence for weaving – she has often spoken of the space between weft and warp as being animated by a mysterious energy – is explored in a handful of her works, including the Bende Sacre series

(Sacred Bandages, 2012–18), which float in the space’s four corners. These simple Tibetan scarves, used as votive offerings in Buddhist monasteries, are displayed on paper, their gridlike woven pattern transformed into solemn abstract art, their fragile forms presented as if they were sacred relics. Ducrot has painted a frame directly onto each work in the series, as though highlighting its new status as artwork. Her ethereal Arazzo Rilke (2020), pinned to a panel, is evocative of a meditation or prayer, its small, repetitive cursive words written in ink across the fabric crowned by tiny, gold-colour flowers and terracotta pigment. In front of it, in a glass cabinet, is the intricately decorated white linen Tılsımlı Gömlek (Talismanic Shirt, Ottoman, 1650). Covered in minute Arabic calligraphy, this talismanic shirt was intended to protect its owner from harm. These vastly different textiles from the collection range in material, intricacy and purpose, but all speak invariably of a shared and ongoing history: of spinning, colouring, weaving; of the cultures that created it, but also of trade, travel and colonisation. One of the most astonishing pieces on display is a fragment of Bronze Age fabric. The edges are frayed, so we can see the individual pieces of thread that someone, millennia ago, wove. Ana Vukadin

Isabella Ducrot, Arazzo Rilke, 2020 (installation view). Photo: Giorgio Benni. Courtesy Museo delle Civiltà, Rome

January & February 2025

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960–1991 Mudam, Luxembourg 20 September – 2 February One of the first works encountered in Radical Software is Hanne Darboven’s notational drawing series Ein Jahrhundert-abc (1970–71). The 19 panels, each with 42 pieces of paper containing interconnected U-shaped markings, present one of Darboven’s methods for visualising time – but, while pointedly conceptualist, here the piece is also an example of artists working computationally, albeit without machines. On the floor in the same room is a long green narrow, elliptically shaped wooden sculpture from Isa Genzken’s Ellipsoid series (Grau-grünes offenes Ellipsoid, 1977), pointing to Minimalism, while the plotter print of its source, a computergenerated drawing (Untitled, c. 1976–77), hangs nearby. This intersectional approach to the theme of ‘women, art and computing’ sets the tone for this sprawling show, which convenes works by over 50 artists and scientists from 14 countries throughout the titular timeframe: from the first uses of mainframe and minicomputers as tools for artmaking to the year the World Wide Web became publicly accessible. Set within a period also marked by second wave feminism, and in an effort, the exhibition text says, to ‘counter conventional narratives on art and technology’, it features women artists exclusively. Organised thematically, the exhibition is presented across two rooms, and the works mentioned above fall into the rubrics of ‘Zeros and Ones’ and ‘Hardware’. Further standouts here include Ruth Leavitt’s, Inge Borchardt’s and Vera Molnár’s digital experimentations in generating abstract drawings and 3d shapes. Other artists, meanwhile, took an early interest in the computer’s ability to work with language. Evidently generative poetry isn’t new: in 1967 Fluxus artist Alison Knowles used a Siemens 4004 mainframe to create

computer-generated poems that can still be written by the same machine today (The House of Dust). Agnes Denes also used the computer to make concrete poetry from Shakespeare and Wittgenstein: she programmed Hamlet (1623) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) into a computer and had it remove all connectives, articles and prepositions from the former while replacing all instances of ‘pain’ with ‘pleasure’ in the latter (Hamlet Fragmented – Wittgenstein’s “Pain”, 1971). The second room’s three further themes focus primarily on moving-image and multimedia works. ‘Software’ harks back via textiles to the computer’s roots in the Jacquard loom: Beryl Korot’s installation Text and Commentary (1976–77) reveals the programming inherent to loom weaving alongside its similarities to video as a new form of encoding and transmitting information. A five-channel video depicts the artist working at a loom, five drawings visualise the patterns of the weave, six pictographic notations aim to illustrate the process of editing the video and four woven textiles hang from the ceiling at the centre of the installation. Nearby is a reproduction of Charlotte Johannesson’s lost tapestry I’m no angel (1972–73), a socio-critical conflation of consumerism and pop culture with magical thinking and religion: the left side features a pixelated Mickey Mouse standing beneath a pistol shooting out the titular phrase; on the right, a contemplative angel emerges, like a genie, from a lamp. Johannesson’s tapestry leads towards ‘Home Computing’, which delves into the mass production and new commercial availability of computers. Included here are Dara Birnbaum’s now-iconic Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang (1980) – splicing ads for Wang Industries (at the time a major computer maker) with scenes from tv’s Kojak – as well

facing page, top Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang (still), 1980, video, colour, sound, 3 min. © and courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York

as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s video Ada en ada (1989), which visualises and uses the ada programming language (developed by the us Department of Defense and named after pioneering nineteenth-century programmer Ada Lovelace) to retell parts of the historical figure’s biography. The final section, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (a line from Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’), surveys artists’ early visions of a cyborg future: valie export’s photomontages of female bodies and angular architecture hang adjacent to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s X-Ray Woman (1966), a drawing and painting of a woman with gears and other mechanical parts for organs, and Rebecca Allen’s Swimmer (1981), the first ever computer animation of the female body. Radical Software offers an excellent overview of the women artists working with the nascent technology of the time, and offers insights into how computers and artists working with them came up concurrently with other movements – like Conceptualism, Minimalism, Concrete art, performance and video art – writing computing, from its inception onward, back into art history. Yet by framing the show in relation to secondwave feminism, I couldn’t help but think this intersectional approach might have been helpful to apply in that regard too. These women did not work in a gendered vacuum, and not all of them identified with feminism. Many worked collaboratively with men, and while it is undoubtedly important to highlight these female artists’ work, so too is recognising the greater context, including understanding their perspectives in relation to those of their male peers. Showing or discussing only one side of a binary isn’t necessarily the most useful delineation, particularly for a canon still being written. Emily McDermott

facing page, bottom Monique Nahas, Cubes, 1973, painted punchcards, wood, 30 × 30 × 30 cm (each). Courtesy zkm – Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

ArtReview

January & February 2025

Sammy Baloji Goldsmiths cca, London 4 October – 12 January A disquieting terrarium dominates the Tank Space at Goldsmiths cca. …and to those North Sea waves whispering sunken stories (ii) (2021) features an eerie structure, its glass panels fogged with condensation produced by its enclosed ecosystem of African plants. Water seeps onto the polished concrete floor from its metal seams. The terrarium’s strange crystalline shape is inspired by both Wardian cases – devices once used to transport plants by sea – and uranium ore, a material mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (drc). Accompanying the structure is an audio recording of Albert Kudjabo, a Congolese soldier captured during the First World War and studied by German Army ethnographers, rhythmically drumming and singing. These elements coalesce in a discordant cacophony of sensation, the terrarium’s imposing materiality contrasting with the fragility of the audio, creating a palpable sense of dislocation in the space – between plants severed from their habitat and a recording obtained under duress. Through this powerful juxtaposition, Congolese photographer and artist Sammy Baloji foregrounds with striking clarity themes of extraction and displacement, and the lasting impacts of the drc’s grim history under Belgian colonial rule,

motifs that recur to varying levels through the other works on show. Downstairs, Tales of the Copper Cross Garden Episode i (2017) is a moving image work appraising a metal foundry’s process, as it melts copper and spins it into wire. The choreography of workers carrying out various stages of production is overlayed intermittently with writings by Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, reflecting on his early education by colonial missionaries and, later, on his entering the Catholic seminary. The dissonant bold typeface Baloji uses for these visual interruptions is softened by various overdubs of choral music, briefly silencing the mechanic factory sounds, in an action that heavily insinuates the Catholic Church’s complicity in colonial exploitation. Yet the clarity of the work falters, as it feels contingent on familiarity with Mudimbe’s texts to grasp the works’ wider implications, while the accompanying wall vinyl depicting singing choirboys acts as a more overt signpost, acknowledging potential gaps in our understanding and hurrying you to the desired conclusion. Upstairs, Aequare. The Future that Never Was (2023) achieves a greater impact. The film contrasts colonial era propaganda with contemporary footage of the Yangambi rainforest.

…and to those North Sea waves whispering sunken stories (ii), 2021 (installation view). Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Goldsmiths cca, London

ArtReview

Through adept cutting between present and past, the film questions if colonial histories can ever be left behind – showing that contemporary environmental workers still inhabit the same buildings installed by such regimes. Similarly, in Still Kongo i-v (2024), aerial archive photographs of the Congolese rainforest – taken to survey the land for further potential exploitation – are housed in afzelia wood frames intricately carved with concentric squares or dotted with pushpins. Severed from their archival context, the photographs achieve an almost painterly quality: their rigid, hatched tonalities resemble abstract compositions. The duality between the work’s inherent aesthetic appeal and what the images depict – material extraction visible in patches of dense forest removed, the scars of colonial exploitation forever etched into the landscape – echoes the disquiet of the installation work. Such densely research-based art requires a delicate balance to maintain critical clarity without veering into overly opaque theorisation. Baloji achieves this in many of the works on show here, though the remaining ambiguities are perhaps the price paid when grappling with histories as complex and layered as these. Alexander Harding

Dorothea Rockburne The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Understood It Bernheim, London 21 November – 25 January Procedure and geometry characterise the work of American artist Dorothea Rockburne. Sometimes, the processes of creation are tangible on the surface, such as her experiments with chemicals to create the wrinkled finish of Tropical Tan (1967), a multipanelled steel screen that leans against the exhibition’s opening wall. At other times, process dictates how the works occupy space. For the installation Domain of the Variable (y), (z) (1972/2018/2024), rolled-up paper has been unfurled from the ceiling, left to curl and settle in a roll. But most often, process is contained within the telltale traces of production, as in the multiplanar and overlapping folded-vellum works of the late-1970s and early 80s. Geometry infuses these folded works. One can imagine the nonagenarian Rockburne sitting down to make calculations and then transforming numbers into precise line using ruler and compass. This fusion of mathematics and art reflects her interdisciplinary training at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied during the early 1950s. There she was taught by the German mathematician Max Dehn (1878–1952), a figure who inspired Rockburne to discover maths in nature: organising principles, drawn from probability theory and set theory, underpin her abstract works. These theories manifest as neither prescriptive nor limiting. The resultant works dance

across the gallery spaces, illustrative of potential freedom born from order. Geometrical configurations on the second floor – such as Egyptian Painting: Sepa (1980) and Copal viii (1979) – appear to float on the wall, as if caught by the wind. Monochromatic quadrilaterals and triangles unfold on ragboard and linen canvases. Their rhythmic elegance speaks to Rockburne’s Black Mountain encounter with dance, attending the classes of Merce Cunningham (1919– 2009), and those of composer John Cage (1912–92), both pioneers of creative methods based on indeterminacy. Rockburne translates this kinetic language and captures it in static form without losing the sense of unfolding movement. In Golden Section Painting: Rectangle/Square (1974), the rectangle is tilted, and the square is split diagonally into identical triangles: one white, one brown. Pencil lines and folds illuminate the overall organisational tension to suggest alternative, dormant shapes. Despite these potentials, the settled-upon rhythm feels correct, while mathematical harmony is underpinned by the Golden Section of the title. Restrained tones contribute to this serenity, but as the exhibition progresses it becomes clear that structure is the overriding interest. Vibrant colours pop out of the wall, quite literally in the three-dimensional Les Pensées

de Pascal (1987–88). Comprising a series of painted linen panels arranged vertically against an indigo wall, the work rises from the floor as a fiery orange jagged shape, above which rests a watery blue triangle set further back and overlapped by a tilted rectangle. Theatrical, arresting, it demands attention as part of the gallery architecture. While the demarcated sections resonate with hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s, the various angles and transparent painterly effect also recall stained-glass windows. Interior Perspective, Discordant Harmony (1985) comprises painted slats of colour on layered canvases. Diagonal lines fill a square, overlapping a diamond panel to its right. Acidic green meets raspberry pink in this composed combination, overseen by a moody blue fragment that peeks overhead. Something deeper seeps from such structure: spiritual or scientific (or both)? The fourth floor focuses on Rockburne’s more recent, astronomically inspired works. Brash colours resemble tie-dye conglomerations on white paper, occasionally embellished with silver paint, but here, as in the series of works Magellanic Magnification i–iii (1994–98), her geometries appear within fields of pigment that suggest a more cosmic context. If Rockburne’s earlier works glow with their own inner orders, these later works seem to want to position them within the largest order of all. Ella Nixon

Golden Section Painting: Rectangle/Square, 1974, linen, gesso, glue, varnish, coloured pencil, 160 × 205 cm. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 Nurture Gaia Various venues, Bangkok 24 October – 25 February Sprinkled through the fourth Bangkok Art Biennale (bab) are works that animate its title and theme in intriguing ways. The roving lifeforces of Lisa Reihana’s video Groundloop (2022), for instance, sit neatly with the curatorial statement’s invocation of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis: the Indigenous peoples of Oceania, dressed in futuristic costumes inspired by the wood-stick charts of the Marshall Islands, sparsely populate self-regulating lands linked by an unbroken Pacific Ocean corridor, through which ancestral spirits and forms of wisdom journey. Also gently prodding us to think anew about our position and agency within the narrow band of earth and atmosphere that supports life – the ‘critical zone’ central to the political ecology of philosopher Bruno Latour, who is also invoked – is the uncanny lyricism of Rob Crosse’s Wood for the Trees (2023), which juxtaposes footage and audio from contrasting habitats: an old-growth forest and an lgbtq+ housing project in Berlin. And David Shongo and Filip Van Dingenen’s Suskewiet Visions (2022) – an attempt to document, using wooden tally sticks and a willing public, the singing of male finches in Southwest Flanders – is yet another community-oriented offering that seems,

obliquely, to argue for greater environmental awareness, or action, at the local level. After digesting these works (and the references to Greek mythology, nature’s defilement and Mother Earth), an unsuspecting visitor might reasonably hope, or surmise, that the organisers of this corporate-funded, citywide event have been proactive when it comes to planetary care: that efforts to make bab part of the climate solution, rather than the problem, have been put in place on the ground. No such luck. Nurture Gaia is a business-as-usual biennale in which the glamour of the global overrides the lure of the local, and where opening week was timed to coincide with the launch of One Bangkok, a vast, gridlock-exacerbating mixeduse development built by the sponsor’s sister company. Permanent sculptures in its central square – Tony Cragg’s It is, it isn’t (2023–04, 35 tons of gleaming stainless steel that calls to mind towering rock-formations and the liquidmetal effects of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991), and Anish Kapoor’s s-Curve (a glorified fairground mirror, 2006) – are bab artworks overshadowed by the highrise setting. Around them, on led screens, a Nurture Gaia video promo alternates with ads for the new ‘Heart of Bangkok’ and its onslaught of

high-end shops and restaurants. While ‘sustainability’ is a One Bangkok buzzword, the only things being nurtured here, seemingly, are corporate art collections, consumerist appetites and bottom lines. A glance at the sponsor ThaiBev’s Sustainability Report 2023 spells out the kind of nurturing that bab itself, with its 240-plus artworks by 76 artists, is really interested in: ‘ThaiBev is committed to elevating Thailand’s contemporary art scene to international parity and creating economic stimulation,’ it states. The natural inference to make, in light of this edition’s mutterings about humanity’s ‘lack of respect’ for Gaia and quoting of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres (‘surging temperatures demand a surge in action’) is that bab’s backers have reasoned that these cultural benefits offset Nurture Gaia’s environmental footprint (which, ironically, given ThaiBev’s net-zero greenhouse-gas targets, as well as the biennale’s theme, is glossed over). And exploring the 11 venues, you may well conclude they’re onto something: bab is certainly contributing to the common (albeit human-centred) good. It’s popular appeal is most plainly apparent at the bacc, where visitors lured by the promise

Choi Jeong Hwa, Breathing, 2018–24, waterproof fabric and motor, dimensions variable. Photo: Central World. © the artist. Courtesy Bangkok Art Biennale

ArtReview

of striking portraits or selfies soon find their mental faculties (and photo skills) being tested by quieter, more opaque works, from researchled projects to endurance art. After heading up to the top floor to snap Choi Jeong Hwa’s giant inflatable fruit and veg (a big hit), they eventually slink off to glance at Yanawit Kunchaethong’s moving material-led reflection on the industrialisation of his father’s rural land in Thailand’s Phetchaburi province. Not far from his organic prints and repeating concrete verse (spelled in wood dust across the floor) sit the remnants of Moe Satt’s performance, for which the political exile spent hours in a crouched position while passersby scrawled hopeful messages about war-torn Myanmar on a t-shirt stretched over his head, and Adel Abdessemed’s 19-second loop of a Charolais bull pacing back and forth in the artist’s studio. Most of the show is as meandering as this brief sketch suggests. To the extent that it quickly becomes clear that the exhibition’s curatorial team (artistic director Apinan Poshyananda alongside Brian Curtin, Pojai Akratanakul, Akiko Miki and Paramaporn Sirikulchayanont) have pulled into its orbit almost every subject under the sun, not just works of an ecologically minded nature. Amid this hotchpotch, Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) – a video critique of ‘the universalist ambition to represent the totality of the world’, as the wall text puts it – comes off like a 13-minute distillation of, or commentary upon,

the show at large. Both enlist dissimilar practices and mediums, and both toss references to mythology and science about with abandon. All of which makes those patches where things do gel more rewarding. Amid the Italianate-style architecture of the National Gallery of Thailand, works by a mainly Southeast Asian cohort benefit from the spacious rooms and unfussy curating: Lêna Bùi’s chromatic ink-and-watercolour-on-silk paintings, for example, which hover between depicting the elements and abstraction, seem to commune on a deep formal and spiritual level with Supawich Weesapen’s blazing, rusty orange landscape and starscape paintings. Cole Lu’s site-specific intervention amid the polished wood and Buddhist novice manuals of the library at Wat Bowon temple – two wooden gateways depicting, through expressive pyrography, scenes related to the cycle of birth and death – is a reminder that the bab is at its best when it leans into its locations (The Engineers, 2024). In Bangkok’s old town, we also find the local heritage lens that Poshyananda has used in past exhibitions being dusted off. As with 2012’s Thai Transience, works by Thai artists (predominantly) at the National Museum Bangkok – another new venue – are placed alongside ancient artefacts. In one instance, Dusadee Huntrakul’s bronze hands, outré pottery, ceramic seashells and pencil drawings of ufo sightings, as well as sketches by his son,

are arranged in vitrines alongside animal fossils, bone fragments, a stone torso, prehistoric Ban Chiang bracelets and Khmer lingams (A Verse for Nights, 2024). The role of the hand in shaping tools, stories and all human history cannot be overstated, he playfully suggests. A collaboration with the country’s Fine Arts Department, this mixing of the classical and the contemporary provokes a new set of questions and quibbles – some of the other seven dialogues feel forced (among these the pairing of Joseph Beuys drawings and sculptures with Dvaravati earthenware), while Nurture Gaia’s rhetorical privileging of Greek mythology seems counterintuitive in light of this imposing showcase of the Thai equivalent (including an accordion manuscript gruesomely depicting the Tribhumi, or Three Worlds, of Theravada Buddhist cosmology). Yet this move is also, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgement that the wider format could, in terms of how Thai and Southeast Asian artworks are presented, benefit from a shakeup. Or nurturing. In this respect, a 2014 warning by art scholar Astri Wright (given in the paper ‘The Arc of My Field is a Rainbow with an Expanding Twist and All Kinds of Creatures Dancing’) about a looming crisis for the region’s art historians (Poshyananda among them) resonates with much of the show: ‘The danger as far as I can see is that the local will disappear in a mishmash of global perspectives where once again the European(-derived) ones remain dominant.’ Max Crosbie-Jones

Lêna Bùi, Circulations 9, 2021, ink and watercolour painting on silk and archival paper, 38 × 53 × 7 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy Bangkok Art Biennale

January & February 2025

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet Tate Modern, London 28 November – 1 June Many visitors to Electric Dreams will have no recollection of society, or art, before the internet; before global content platforms, the mediating of opinion by social media algorithms and the virtualisation of physical experiences by vr. Others, like this writer, can recall the appearance of home computers, David Hockney experimenting with a Quantel Paintbox on tv and a first email account at art school. Either way, the recent wave of art-andscience and computer-art survey shows touches some cultural nerve: not just in serving up millennial retro-fascination for outdated tech and yesteryear culture, but reinterpreting this art as the precursor and harbinger of our current moment, in which technology and the network seem conclusively to have taken over. There’s something to be said for reading history backwards like this. What were once discrete movements and moments – Op art, Kinetic art, Computer art, environments,

happenings, video art and what used to be called ‘intermedia’ – Electric Dreams assembles as a four-decade runup to the digital explosion of the late 1990s. What comes through most is the complicated, contradicted enthusiasms among artists for two major themes – technology as a utopian enabler of human communication, and technologically produced art as a generator of new aesthetic experience, liberating art from the chains of its archaic forms and genres. It’s fair to say that many of these artists were ahead of their time in their thinking, even if, where the show picks up in the 1950s, the technology was clunky. It opens with archival photographs of Atsuko Tanaka wearing her extraordinary Electric Dress (1956, reconstructed 1999), a robe made of tangled flex alight with dozens of incandescent coloured lightbulbs and tubelights, which Tanaka made while a member of the Japanese Gutai group.

Produced as Japan’s postwar reconstruction gathered pace, and drawing out Gutai’s almost spiritual attachment to ideas of abstraction, matter and energy, the dress (or at least its documentation) hangs here as if anticipating every cyborg fantasy to come, not least in the hallucinatory biomechanoid sci-fi that Japan would produce by the 1980s. Not far away is work by Op and Kinetic artists who emerged in Europe at the same time as Gutai, notably the West German Zero group. Here are those handbuilt machines made of motors, lights, Fresnel glass and other products of modern manufacture, made by artists who, from Europe to Asia to Latin America, shared similar visions of art as a dynamic noncontemplative experience, tuned to the new technological society. A standout here is Otto Piene’s installation Light Room (Jena) (2005/2017), a reprise of his 1959 Archaic Light Ballet; a disorienting choreography of shifting patterns of bright dots

Kiyoji Otsuji, Tanaka Atsuko, Electric Dress, 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956, gelatin silver print on paper, 21 × 32 cm. © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library. Courtesy Yokota Tokyo

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wheeling across the dark walls, projected from rudimentary lightboxes on the floor. A cosmic spectacle generated from little more than punctured hardboard and 60-watt bulbs, Piene’s room presaged the increasingly delusional futurism of the light-and-motion art that would grip the 1960s. Although that spectacularism slipped out of favour in art during the 1970s and 80s, it’s not hard to see it resurrected with a cultural vengeance in the form of ‘immersive art experiences’. If the Op and Kinetic bubble popped along with the radical optimism of media-theorist Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a global village and the stalled revolutions of May 1968, the arrival of accessible computing during the 1970s spurred a new generation of artists to try to get the machines to make work, triggering a wave of plotter-drawn art, epitomised by Vera Molnár’s austere grids of increasingly disordered concentric squares (Transformations 1–21, 1976). Abstract painter Harold Cohen, for his part, spent his later years teaching his aaron program to draw. The peculiarly organic, floating coloured blobs on the huge canvas of aaron #1 Drawing (1979) suggest something of the lasting paradox of

trying to make machines ‘see’ like humans, and how, post-Google DeepDream, machine vision relates to artificial intelligence. Where Electric Dreams starts to move into the era of a more recognisably contemporary digital culture, though, the stakes seem to be lower, as the technology becomes more capable and at once more banal. By the 1980s artists were advocating visual technologies that would eventually outrun them; Rebecca Allen’s cgi animation of a dancer’s movements (Steps, 1982) is elegant, but, along with her iconic albumcover graphics and animation for the band Kraftwerk, there’s a downbeat intimation here; that visual artists would soon have to confront the corporate juggernauts of the mtv media-era, and decide whether to take on visual technology as an adversary or an enabler. As the 1990s arrive, we find ourselves in the meditative, aloof, codspiritual darkness of Tatsuo Miyajima’s led installations, his patterns of illuminated counters quietly winking through numbers 1 to 9 (Lattice B, 1990) – art no longer heralding the revolutionary fusion of aesthetics, technology and society, but rather offering a refuge from a culture in which aesthetic technology had become a form

of power and control. (It’s worth noting a number of odd curatorial omissions: no led ticker works by Jenny Holzer; the absence of Gustav Metzger’s trippy 1965 Liquid Crystal Environment; and nothing by the influential British artist-apostle of cybernetics Roy Ascott). But the 1990s nevertheless produced artists hacking the ascendant digital culture, playing its absurdities back on itself; Suzanne Treister’s Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92), photographs shown on Sony monitors, apparently cobbled together on her Amiga 1000, ape the lurid, 16-bit aesthetic of choose-your-own-adventure videogames. Above a pixelated landscape of a rutted path leading to a tree on the horizon, with an odd pink snakelike form running across it, is the question ‘Are You Dreaming?’ Another, a glitchy scene of what looks like a world of strange underwater corals, has a banner wondering, ‘Would you recognise a virtual paradise?’ They’re questions as pertinent today as in 1992, even if – in the era of ar headsets, ai-generated art, drone swarms and the global panopticons and echo chambers of Big Tech – we’re in still less of a position to know what the answers might be. J.J. Charlesworth

Suzanne Treister, Fictional Videogame Stills / Would You Recognise A Virtual Paradise?, 1991–92, photograph, 51 × 41 cm. Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, and ppow, New York

January & February 2025

Evelyn Taocheng Wang Patternmaster Carlos/Ishikawa 21 November – 21 December Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Pulling Pushing Dragging (all works 2024), a diptych painted on silk, features a calligraphed extract from Octavia Butler’s 1976 novel, Patternmaster: ‘No one actually killed mutes, but certain of the outsiders and women made a grotesque game of coming as close to killing them as they could’, the quote begins, prefacing a story of control and violence. A painting of two women – at once seamstresses and puppet masters – holding mutilated creatures and organs on the end of multicoloured threads completes the work. Throughout the exhibition, a game of call and response between text and image takes place on canvas and invites us to reflect on interpretation and the power that lies in controlling meaning. The Diagram series displays swatches of graded colours, recorded to distinguish different mixes of paint and their connotations. ‘White means… Frans Hals painting, facial powder…’, we are told. ‘Water means… Chinese ink-wash painting, tea…’ The absurdity of Wang’s statements, which create false equations between technique and meaning, questions the objectivity with which Western art-history informs our knowledge. The inclusion of national and regional categories within these word associations highlights how cultural differences

between East and West become engrained in these taxonomies. Continuing to build on art-historical references, three works in paint and pencil on canvas are, their titles or annotations indicate, imitations of Agnes Martin. Yet each abstract composition is disturbed by symbolic eruptions. One work features a winged lion holding a mirror, Wang’s interpretation of a creature from Butler’s novel. Across the room, in Teray’s End, a princess frog, genderbending the fairytale cliché, emerges from the background. These visual and textual quotations, a mix of literary and historical references, provide splattered data-points that bait us into attempting to discern the works’ meaning. But pandering to the viewer’s desire to analyse, Wang breadcrumbs interpretations that seem only to lead us back to our own knowledge and biases. ‘If the viewer of this brush work links this content to idea of feminist, lgbtq… or sexual subject interpretation, it only means that this viewer herself/himself wants to become it and is his/her opinion’, claims the text on Pulling Pushing Dragging. The fallacious logic emphasised by the awkwardness of second-language English playfully claims to distance Wang from her role as maker-of-meaning. Simultaneously, several

Teray’s Empty World, Raw Chicken Legs (detail), 2024, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 × 2 cm. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

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notes harbour content warnings parodying legal disclaimers – ‘this silk painting contains violent depiction of image of dismemberment’, for example – pointing to a more brutal aspect of the works. Most of the paintings contain a kaleidoscopic gore of animal flesh and surgically threaded genitals. What seem like mushrooms rendered in a classical Chinese style turn out, on closer inspection, to be dismembered penises strewn across the canvases. Such double takes subvert stereotypes around the artist’s identity as a Chinese woman and remind us that, despite what the warnings may lead us to believe, Wang remains fully in control of the narrative she depicts: one about the seamless violence of cultural hegemony. Teray’s Empty World, Raw Chicken Legs leaves us with a final trick. The absurd and beautiful painting of a plate of raw chicken set against an abstract background is complete with stage instructions at the top of the canvas and, rising from the bottom edge, a pair of hands – our own? – poised as if about to clap. ‘Oh wow, let’s applaud in front of this raw chiken-legs!’ reads the artist’s text. As we read the script in our minds, we become the unwitting actors of her play. It makes us wonder: who is really pulling the strings here? Mia Stern

Louise Giovanelli A Song of Ascents Hepworth Wakefield 23 September – 21 April Louise Giovanelli’s huge paintings of curtains dominate this exhibition, filling the space with lifesize, or even larger-than-life, sparkling and electric-coloured drapes. Looking at them on their own, I was reminded of school auditoriums, old theatres and kitsch Victoriana. But the other works in the show point to a more specific reading: they show women drinking, kissing, gasping, shaking their hair under bright lights and, in one case, being covered in pig’s blood. Taken together, they evoke the seedybut-glittering mood of drinks, drugs, dancing and the euphoria they fuel. Giovanelli’s oil paintings pulse with a neon luminosity that comes both from her palette and her painstaking paint handling. Some of her smaller works, like The Painting’s Landlady (2024), a closeup of a glowing face seen through a glass of something strong, have a speckled, pointillist impasto. Her canvases of giant drapes are different, their surfaces mimicking the matt softness of velvet with careful layers of paint. The hair paintings feel similar: canvases filled with a soft, complex texture that is entirely out of context: not even the back of a head, just hair.

Although the exhibition catalogue proffers a thematic narrative about drinking and club culture, especially during the 1980s and especially in British working men’s clubs, the magnetism of these works, to me, is in their lack of narrative. The curtains loom over the show in both size and allure, and the layered potential readings of these are many: the promise of spectacle offered by a drawn curtain, the invitation to perform, the mystery of what might be hidden, the drama of worship, the mixture of aristocratic and working-class visual language, the heritage of the Renaissance and its obsession with drapery. That array of readings, which can stand alone or overlap, all leave the viewer with a sense of the works’ opacity. Stoa (2024), the biggest painting in the show, is a vivid green curtain that seems to leap off the wall, with highlights in electric red. It occupies a space between specificity and generality that invites transcendence over the mundane – but towards what, exactly, is left open. Like icons or other religious images, the space these curtains both create and hide feels familiar but special, human but not quite

earthly, legible but not fully knowable. It sits on the line between the profound and the banal: unlike the grimy, characterful clubs and pubs it is inspired by, this painting, like all those in the exhibition, is pristine. There is a tension between their cold veneer and the hot allure of mystery they evoke that makes them intoxicating – like celebrities, or classical sculpture. Giovanelli says she is an atheist, but her work is about the human need for worship or ‘glimmers of elevation’, as she put it in an interview with curator Marie-Charlotte Carrier in the exhibition catalogue. ‘A Song of Ascents’ refers to Psalm 130, also known as ‘De Profundis’ – and additionally the title of a famous letter by Oscar Wilde to a former lover in which he reflects on faith, and the lack of it. The desire for something to worship, for a place to direct our obsessions or queries, is deeply human. The void that has opened in the postmodern West leaves many floundering for that kind of intangible, vasterthan-us solace. Giovanelli sees that absence, and while her works don’t really fill it, they are about the depth of our yearning for something that could. Eliza Goodpasture

Soothsay, 2023, oil on paper, 63 × 45 × 3 cm (framed). Photo: Tom Carter. © dacs, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Private Collection, London

January & February 2025

Rindon Johnson Best Synthetic Answer Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 20 September – 6 April Spread out across three floors, American artist Rindon Johnson’s exhibition is a reflection on time and space. Best Synthetic Answer, which features a series of newly commissioned works, centres around a project to cross the Pacific Ocean from his hometown, San Francisco, to Shanghai. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the earth’s surface. To carry out this enterprise (which riffs on colonial-era seafaring), one would need a 12-metre boat, three experienced crew members and one-and-a-half months of time to spare – provided you travel at full speed all the way. At least this is what the artist was told by a sailing expert when they discussed his project. Their recorded conversation provides the introduction to this exhibition, which, in turn, serves as a launchpad for an attempt to wade through the Pacific’s fraught history. Stretching across the top floor of the multistorey museum is Language is a virus or Between Immerwahr and me… (all but one work 2024), a rectangular oceanic map made of Tiffany stained glass that turns what is in fact a mezzanine into a full floor. Coloured in aquatic hues and patterns that echo watery ripples, the map is patchy, like sections of a Google Earth map that have been photographed at different times then joined into a whole. Viewed from above, it hovers at the centre of the floor like a prop in a military command room, inviting one to survey the expanse of the ocean and ponder the challenge and ambition of traversing it. The exhibition title references the way in which large language models such as Chatgpt generate answers based on information fed into their databases. This process means that the resulting responses only mirror (more or less) what’s being asked. For Johnson, whose works often explore how language both captures and evades truth, what’s at stake in the exhibition is a series of questions that invite us to consider how both the Pacific Ocean and human identities are entangled in complex geopolitical enterprises: ‘How does a Black American, raised on the edge of the Pacific, move through the ocean to reach Shanghai?’ ‘…[O]n what levels am I also responsible for this destruction [of land and people]?’ Initially conceived as a sailing journey to be carried out in real life, the project was ultimately

realised (for safety reasons as much as anything else, we are led to believe) via a rendered, silhouetted avatar of Johnson-as-swimmer, who traverses the Pacific in real time (seven months: the duration of the exhibition). One floor down from the Tiffany glass, Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing… is presented on an led screen mounted across an entire wall. Its full title, all 584 words, lists the gps coordinates of landmasses on Avatar Johnson’s route, which follows America’s imperial reach (…Hawaii, 19.8968°n, 155.5828°w, Johnston Atoll, 16.7290°n, 169.5346°w…). In a corner of the screen a diagram indicates Avatar Johnson’s current location, although, in the main image, the ocean itself remains nondescript, punctuated only by plastic rubbish that occasionally drifts across the screen. As the figure repeats a clumsy, glitchy breaststroke, it exudes a Sisyphean sense of futility, only strengthened by its dogged perseverance. Sunlight leaking through the translucent Tiffany glass immerses the space in a deep, sentimental blue. While the video might not really help chart the Pacific Ocean, it does function as a map of sorts for the exhibition. Locations along the avatar’s swim route serve as indexes for seven video-essays in the next room. When I visited he was leaving Midway for Tahiti, in French Polynesia, and on view was Best Synthetic Answer #5…, which explores the United States’s exploitation of ‘guano islands’, designated in the 1856 Guano Islands Act as uninhabited islands containing guano deposits that us citizens were allowed to occupy (among the closest to Avatar Johnson at this point in his journey might have been Johnston Atoll, the coincidence of an almost-shared name itself telling of how white Anglo-Saxon folks were able to claim bodies and lands). At a time when synthetic fertilisers had not yet been invented, guano was collected in large amounts to be used on American farmland, often nurturing the crops and wealth produced by enslaved African Americans. Entangled in this story are tales of the extractivist reaping of natural resources, racist management of land and labour, and the censorship, followed by appropriation, of cultural traditions for the benefit of capitalist exploitation (contemporaneous with the development of guanorelated occupations, the Hawaiian Indigenous

tradition of surfing was first banned, then turned into a tourist industry). We’re reminded how the ambition embodied in a maritime atlas brought more trauma than triumph. The exhibition concludes with a slideshow of photographs from the artist’s personal archive (Dark blue of the water…), in which images of Johnson family vacations in Hawaii are projected onto a wall in a darkened space. Here, there’s a personal relationship to the ocean, one that is filled with domestic joy, empowerment as a consuming tourist and pride in these proofs of his working-class family’s upward mobility, which, as the artist acknowledges in the exhibition text, is itself predicated upon America’s colonial exploits. Outside the windows of the Rockbund’s foyers, one can see the Huangpu River, which flows into the River Yangtze, which connects China’s inlands with the Bohai Sea in the Western Pacific. The institution, too, has its own relationship with the seascape. Occupying the art deco building of the former Royal Asiatic Society (originally the Shanghai Literary and Scientific Society, founded by American missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman), it sits on a strip of shore known as ‘the Bund’ – a term borrowed from Hindi via Britain’s colonial maritime trade route. Shanghai, too, was subjected to the transformations brought by the International Settlement after the First Opium War – originally a fishing village, it became a metropolitan haven only after being concessioned as a treaty port in 1942. It now has over 125 docks and numerous businesses hyping investments in Southeast Asia and Africa, following the Chinese government’s 2013 Belt and Road initiative, the maritime route of which stretches from Hanoi and Jakarta to Colombo and Nairobi. Since the 2018 China–us trade war and the pandemic years during which Shanghai suffered one of the world’s harshest lockdowns, it has been harder for China’s general public to imagine an identity for themselves outside of China’s land mass. Johnson’s ‘long march’ through the Pacific to Shanghai, then, provides an alternative, realigning the institution and the city with bigger geopolitical networks. Yuwen Jiang

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January & February 2025

Gili Tal The Cascades Plus Cabinet, London 28 November – 25 January Above head-height on the wall of London’s Cabinet gallery, a painting by the artist Gili Tal seems familiar. Its regular chequerboard of pinks, greys, washed reds and browns evoke abstract painter Stanley Whitney’s colour fields, or a Valentine’s Day colour-scheme chart – but if you squint, it’s probably a big red London bus. Check the gallery handout. Buses (Diffuse Glow) (2024). Bingo. The idea running through Tal’s The Cascades Plus at Cabinet is to extract and abstract aspects of urban environments – here most visibly London itself – in order to see them anew. Nine inkjet prints in the 2020 series Windows (Rainscreen Wash), each in varying shades of blue with rainlike cascading dashes, are evenly arranged throughout Cabinet’s irregular decagon exhibition space like false panes. Printed identically onto each is the Shutterstock photography company watermark. Nice gag. Three granite bollards dot the space, with that bland uniformity shared by both public redevelopment projects and Minecraft blocks. Look around them, and the floor is speckled

with penny-size pieces of cutout paper. On these you can variously make tiny images of a smartphone screen, a block of flats or a sweet wrapper. This artwork as detritus gathers along the walls of the gallery as if leaf-blown into a corner, kicked along by the public’s feet or scattered by the gust from, say, a passing bus. It’s not the first time Tal has projected the more arbitrary elements of urban life onto the rarified gallery space: photographs of its shops, benches, clocks and odd corners each printed onto office vertical roller blinds appeared in Civic Virtues at Cabinet in 2018, while architectural photographs stretched over large standing whiteboards featured throughout Mastering the Nikon d750 at Zürich’s eth Hönggerberg in 2019. All through these, Tal jabs at the value – and valuation – of an artwork. (Comparisons to Peter Fischli & David Weiss are not unwarranted.) So Tal’s show is playful and quintessentially cool, yet this ephemerality and lightness of touch conceals more sombre implications. Tal’s recent focus is on the contemporary aesthetics

The Cascades Plus, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

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of city planning, architectural gentrification and newbuild design – known for being cheap, quick, mass-producible and replicable by private leaseholders. Oliver Corino’s introduction to the show, too, likens the appearance of the nine Rainscreen Wash prints to ‘the aluminium cladding styles of numerous contemporary facades’, often deployed as a superficial mask to ‘ugly’ or now-unseemly buildings. In extracting this masking object, Tal pulls the techniques of such architecture into the private gallery, replicating its creeping, flattening influence on urban life. It’s a deft feat of associative mapping. Yet we still feel something that is missing, omitted – the fundamental political stakes of any city: people, whose lives are shaped by the physical structures Tal renders a ghost town. In fact, desertion is perhaps the exhibition’s hallmark: the shrapnel prints littered, rubble, literal ‘throwaway’ works; unmovable granite slabs; nine stock images, still watermarked and ‘unbought’. If this is how we must view our metropolis, then maybe it’s time to catch the next bus. Alexander Leissle

Lucas Simões you text nothing like you look Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, São Paulo 9 November – 2 February André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto championed how ideas and images intermingle within a single subject, coexisting or curdling as they are processed through the eyes and into the brain – so it is apt that its centenary is being marked in the grand reception room of São Paulo’s largest public library, itself a great repository of literary images. Here, Lucas Simões has revisited a series of works he made between 2018 and 2021: (mostly) tall and upright sculptural assemblages of industrial materials, the majority presented on plinths. Though not explicitly figurative, they have a strangely anthropomorphic feel to them, their ‘personalities’ heightened by a series of literary quotes (two per sculpture, the lines quoted forming the extended titles of each work) newly engraved on the works, or included on metal floor plaques nearby. In this way, it is as if they have become avatars of authors ranging from Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath to Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz; a small army of references amalgamating like books on a shelf, or as influences on a reader. One work features a metre-high circular chimney of sheet metal, on top of which are

placed two cast-plaster discs, separated by silicone balls. Above these is a metal cog that serves as the base for a stack of ceramic dessert plates, the resulting tower of objects enclosed by a tall bell jar. The edge of one plaster element bears a line from Paz’s poem ‘Trowbridge Street’ (c. 1969–75), in the original Spanish: ‘El futuro es un poco de agua en tus ojos’ (‘The future is a drop of water in your eyes’). Etched around the base of the steel chimney is a second line, from the Portuguese poet Al Berto: ‘O mar subiu o [sic] degrau das manhãs idosas’ (‘The sea rose to the step of the elderly mornings’). Connected by intimations of time and the proximity of water, these quotes live together in the sculpture, a portrait, perhaps, of their influence on Simões. A second work, a sort of clouded-glass lighthouse beacon mounted on a concrete block, features lines of obsession by the Briton Sylvia Plath and the Argentine Alejandra Pizarnik (‘No day is safe from news of you’, from the former’s 1962 poem ‘The Rival’). Simões brings influences from beyond literature too: an oval concrete sculpture, with a coppergilded Barbara Hepworth-ish hole, balancing on a steel block, contains lines on time by American

Broadway composer Lorenz Hart and the Brazilian writer Raduan Nassar; Björk and Italian novelist Cesare Pavese find their work featured on black steel-framed sculpture, the titular lyric from the Icelandic singer’s History of Touches (2015) etched on a curled reel of metal that extends from the base. If the exhibition reads as love letters to the authors and musicians who have inspired Simões, they also become something of a self-portrait, an exquisite corpse of literary references. The artist’s viewer receives the lines authored by these famous names but mediated by Simões, linking the disparate writers as he has done, connections of the kind we all make whenever we read a book or listen to a piece of music. Simões’s ongoing inspiration has been the urban realm, born of walking Brazil’s metropolises – a world of concrete and industrial metals – while maintaining a latent sensuality. It is that sensing – the sense where the subject meets the world around it, the exchange that lay at the heart of Breton’s project too, that is heightened in this elegant, cerebral exhibition. Oliver Basciano

Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city, 2019, carbon steel, galvanised steel, polyurethane paint, paper and golden leaf, 130 × 38 × 38 cm. Photo: Bruno Leão. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2025

Vital Signs: Artists and the Body Museum of Modern Art, New York 3 November – 22 February In their collaborative drawing game exquisite corpse, the Surrealists produced sprawling absurdist figures in jump-cut segments. While the game’s originators sought to, in the words of André Breton, ‘fully release the mind’s metaphorical activity’, Vital Signs spotlights artists who expanded on the abstract strategies of Surrealism to represent the complexities of bodily experience, particularly those othered by gender, sexual identity and race. Spanning the early twentieth century to the 2010s, with a focus on the late 1960s to early 90s, the exhibition highlights major figures of the early feminist art movement. It features, for instance, the stretched pantyhose of Senga Nengudi’s sculpture and performance series r.s.v.p. (1977), two Judy Chicago vaginal car-hood designs (1965/2011), Ana Mendieta’s painted work Untitled (Amategram) (c. 1982) and Mary Kelly’s notorious Post-Partum Document (1973–79), among others. It also brings attention to lesser-known ‘outsider’ artists, such as Forrest Bess, a painter of spare abstract images based on visions of spiritual and physical transformation, and Ted Joans, organiser of the correspondence drawing project Long Distance (1976–2005).

In 1975 Joans ‘got the idea of creating the longest exquisite corpse ever’, according to historian Robin D.G. Kelley, a friend of the beatnik painter and filmmaker. Joans brought together over 130 contributors including jazz musicians, Beat poets and other avant-garde artists to make a rollicking exquisite corpse that spans nearly 30 years and more than 11 metres of perforated computer paper. Displayed in a long vitrine next to a pile of packaging used to ship the project around the world, the sinuous Long Distance contains fantastical faces, limbs, bits of text and extended shapes that suggest the free thinking that connects Joans’s chosen artists, which included leaders of the Black Arts Movement and other countercultural groups. Some works in Vital Signs abstract the body – breaking it down, changing its shape, colour and other properties – in order to map the construction of identity and posit alternative paths. Claude Cahun’s m.r.m (Sex) (c. 1929–30) appropriates the style of the cadavre exquis in a photocollage that slices and manipulates images of the artist, intercutting masculine and feminine poses to create fluid figures that appear as both ‘victim’ and ‘executioner’ of these binaries per the work’s inscription. In Rosemary Mayer’s

Galla Placidia (1973), recently acquired by moma and displayed here for the first time, cheap fabrics hand-dyed by the artist drape from a hanging bentwood armature to create a billowing form at once fleshy and architectural, amplifying the body’s materiality at monumental scale. With the exhibition’s big-tent approach comes the challenge of how to organise such a wide swath of material. The show is at its best when, rather than trying to unify various makers under broad headings – like ‘Mirrors’ or ‘Spectrums’ – it embraces the polyphony of the cut-up. One particularly strong and tightly arranged grouping of works on paper consists of an expressive visage punctuated by antennalike curls by the Southern folk artist Minnie Evans (Untitled, c. 1944), the Chicago Imagist Christina Ramberg’s fragmented, obscured and bound female figures (Untitled, c. 1968), a face covered by a high-relief sculpted hand by Marisol (Drawing with Sculptured Hand, 1960) and Jasper Johns’s encaustic teeth marks on canvas (Painting Bitten by a Man, 1961). Expertly wielding humble, tactile materials, these works maintain a disquieting power decades later – showing what it’s like to have a body and, perhaps, how to bite back. Chantal McStay

Claude Cahun, m.r.m (Sex), c. 1929–30, gelatin silver print, 15 × 10 cm. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar / moma, New York. © Estate of the artist. Courtesy moma, New York

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Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film lacma, Los Angeles 24 November – 13 July Since the film industry drives Los Angeles, one might expect this show – of over 150 pieces of art, design, commercial film and software demonstrating the impact that digital manipulation tools have had on culture over the past 40 years – to force-feed its audience a sizzle-reel of cgi’s greatest hits. While digitally enhanced commercial film does feature in Digital Witness, in the form of looped clips on hanging screens threaded through the exhibition, its inclusion doesn’t seem to pander to the main sponsor (Adobe), the audience or a lacma board member in ‘the industry’. Nevertheless, the logic behind what did make the cut here is often unclear. Why, for example, is a clip of Life of Pi’s wonky animated tiger (2012) on loop and not one from the more technically significant Avatar (2009) or 1995’s groundbreaking Toy Story? The show’s subject poses considerable challenges: not only are moving images notorious stumbling blocks for exhibition design – generally necessitating lots of curtains and floating walls – but the technology itself is both uniquely specialised and so rapidly evolving that decades-apart experts speak, quite literally, different languages. The museum has valiantly attempted to address the former. Wall-mounted flatscreens display video art, pedestals dignify

40-year-old desktops and Casey Kauffmann’s It’s Over Bitch (2022), an installation comprising a pyramid of stacked televisions, holds court in a corner of the gallery; no works are siloed behind black drop-cloths. Although there are few didactics to explain what we’re seeing, luckily many works speak for themselves, among them a framed, gridded compilation of Pen & Pixel’s 1990s rap and hip-hop album covers. While the Houston-based graphic firm has closed, its irreverent mashup clip-art style involving drop shadows, drastically foreshortened limbs, distortions of image and text, and cut-and-pasted iconography – image manipulations ubiquitous enough to have their own shortcuts in Adobe Photoshop – remains synonymous with the aesthetic of gangsta rap. On the cover of Str-8 Doin Tha Fool (1997), the rapper 2-Def offers champagne to a miniature woman in a diorama-size bedroom; on the cover of 400 Degreez (1998), the rapper Juvenile rains fire onto a blazing city. By revealing the parodic impulses in rap, Pen & Pixel’s album art made a mockery of the threat conservative pundits of the day ascribed to the musical genre. Judging by the range of desktop models on pedestals, the field itself was significantly wider in the 1980s than today’s Apple-dominated

market. While Apple’s 1984 Macintosh, which marketed its MacPaint and MacWrite software to ‘nontechnical’ consumers, opened the door for digital artists and designers, it initially faced competition from the Commodore Amiga. Among Amiga users were piraters belonging to an anticapitalist subculture dubbed the demoscene, whose values ran counter to software companies’ vision of commercial dominance. What began as an illegal distribution ring for Amiga 500 gaming software evolved during the early 1990s into a network for sharing coders’ own work in computer graphics, often accompanied by original house and techno compositions. At lacma, this code-cracker community’s freeware animations, featuring bouncing spheres, dancing silhouettes and other rudimentary shapes, loop on an Amiga 500. While Pen & Pixel’s subversion derived from their ironic clip-art style, demoscene coders were typically selfserious, their animations intended to show off their prowess at manipulating extant software, their subversion at the level of distribution rather than design. Yet whether it’s the aesthetic of early-1990s rave and warehouse party culture or mid/late-90s hip hop, the look of ‘the digital’ is instantly legible, proving how far and wide these innovations have travelled. Cat Kron

manual (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), Natural, 1988, from the series After Nature, 1988, dye coupler print, 75 × 101 cm. © the artists. Courtesy Moody Gallery, Houston

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manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today National Museum of Qatar, Doha 1 November – 31 January Manzar is an Urdu and Arabic word meaning perspective, view or landscape, but it is a sonorous recitation in Farsi that beckons us to the recessed entrance of this exhibition. The sound is part of Ali Kazim’s The Conference of Birds (2019), an interpretation of Farid-ud-Din Attar’s twelfth-century metaphorical voyage of self-discovery. In the context of a national survey exhibition, Kazim’s exquisitely rendered depiction of a flock of birds in various stages of flight suggests the search for a unified national vision. The work’s juxtaposition with Zones of Dreams (1996) – Salima Hashmi’s sensitively painted monumental map of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – however, opens up alternative readings of migration and displacement associated with the 1947 Partition of the Britishruled India and the creation of Pakistan. In an inadvertent continuation of the avian theme, Pakistan, created as a home for South Asia’s linguistically and ethnically diverse Muslims, was initially realised with two wings separated by the vast expanse of India in between. This geographically unlikely arrangement collapsed with the bloody 1971 liberation war, in which the Bengali language movement played a critical part, after which East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

Kazim’s and Hashmi’s works are selective interruptions to a broadly chronological 80-year survey of Pakistan’s art and architecture. This vast exhibition features more than 200 works by over 60 artists and 15 architects, arranged in 13 sections in the National Museum’s gallery spaces, with additional works dotted around the museum’s courtyard. The whole locates us in time and place, presenting broad movements in visual expression (including calligraphy, contemporary miniature, vernacular pop), and revealing the conceptual debates and sociopolitical fissures with which they are entangled. manzar’s displays are punctuated by carefully assembled vitrines of archival material – from radio broadcasts and newspaper clippings to photographs, publications and ephemera from exhibitions as well as social marches – to offer a contextual foundation to audiences for whom the names, objects and history may all be unfamiliar. The exhibition breaks new ground in putting forward one of the first instances of Pakistan’s architectural history being shown alongside its betterrehearsed art history. Anchored in primary research, and buttressed by plans, models and insightful interviews, manzar reveals the competing

Habib Fida Ali, Shell House, Karachi, Main Elevation, 1978, ink, pencil and watercolour on paper, 41 × 92 cm. Courtesy the architect

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demands of ‘heritage’, ‘regionalism’, ‘development’ and ‘environment’ that have shaped architectural thinking in building the nation over the last eight decades. Nayyar Ali Dada, Habib Fida Ali, Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Arif Hasan and Yasmeen Lari present a culturally sensitive, polyvocal riposte to an earlier generation of international modernist architects (among them Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Louis Kahn and Richard Neutra) commissioned to shape cities and civic buildings across a newly created Pakistan. A specially commissioned series of bamboo, mud and plaster structures in the courtyard offers a 1:1 encounter with Yasmeen Lari’s groundbreaking architecture ‘for and by the poor’. Lari’s zero-carbon shelters for those impacted by Pakistan’s devastating earthquakes and floods have won her international architecture prizes and were also featured in the 2024 Lahore Biennale. Here, their organic minimalism presents a productive contrast to the steel and glass of Doha’s skyscape, and formally extends the handmade, ludic challenge of Rasheed Araeen’s wooden lattice-structures (such as 4rS, 1970–2016; shown in the ‘New Languages’ section of the exhibition) to the industrial austerity of capital ‘M’ Minimalism.

Two of Lari’s structures host Karachi LaJamia’s playful pedagogic installation Hamare Siyal Rishte (Our Watery Relations, 2021–24) and Noorjehan Bilgrami’s newly commissioned textile installation, Nir Kahani – Indigo Story (2024). This braiding together of artistic and architectural strands is a welcome exception in the exhibition, where the two disciplines maintain a respectful distance, like strangers in a lift. This is puzzling when a number of contemporary artists including Bani Abidi, Noor Ali Chagani, Seema Nusrat and Rashid Rana have experimented with myriad forms that straddle the two. While the architectural history is innovative and propositional, the art strand in manzar builds on a number of influential exhibitions and publications in Pakistan and abroad. It assembles the work of Pakistan’s modernist pioneers, including Zubeida Agha, Shakir Ali, Sadequain and Anwar Jalal Shemza; internationally renowned contemporary artists of Pakistani heritage, including Hamra Abbas, Huma Bhabha, Aisha Khalid, Imran Qureshi, Shahzia Sikander and Salman Toor; and a generation of influential artists, writers and teachers who bridge the two, including Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Lala Rukh. The visual dialogue between Sadequain’s jagged cactus-inspired shapes (for example, in Resurrection, 1963) and Akhlaq’s exploration of the grid as an arrangement of space and form in paintings (View from the Tropic of Illegitimate Reality, 1975–78),

sculpture (a striking arrangement of 15 polishedsteel pyramids, Untitled, c. 1975) and public monuments is a particular highlight. Another highpoint is Mariah Lookman’s mesmerising film commission Behrupiya (Mimic, 2024). The moving image – all orange tints, scratches and dark shadows – is the damaged remains of a documentary on Sadequain handed to the artist in 2016 in an 8mm-film tin. In an act of material and cultural repair, Lookman has collaborated with the novelist H.M. Naqvi to step into the gaps of the archive with a scripted conversation between the missing subject, Sadequain (through his verse), and the writings of his foremost critic, the late Akbar Naqvi. Zarina is among a handful of non-Pakistani artists included in the exhibition in order to acknowledge their impact on art practices and institutions within the country. Her extraordinary prints (including Dividing Line, 2001) are shown alongside David Alesworth’s Lawrence Gardens (Bagh-e-Jinnah) (2014) – a colourful antique Kashan carpet bearing an embroidered line-map of colonial-era Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens, which itself was modelled on London’s Kew Gardens. These works, of contrasting scales and aesthetic registers, are among the exhibition’s most fruitful juxtapositions, acting as palimpsests of private memories and public histories. manzar contains many brilliant individual flourishes as it puts forward an art history attentive to the social and institutional contexts

in which it is embedded. But this art history is also a somewhat eccentric one. Many artists are represented by works of uneven quality, perhaps the result of an overreliance on a small number of collections; while an understandable desire to give prominence to works in the collection of Qatar’s Art Mill Museum (currently projected to open in 2030) means space is not always used to the works’ best advantage. Several largescale works by Aisha Khalid, Imran Qureshi, Khadim Ali and Rashid Rana jostle for attention for instance. And while three rooms are allocated to a new commission by Omer Wasim, entire artforms important in Pakistan’s art ecology (ceramics and printmaking) are excluded; as are far too many art-historically significant artists, including Ijaz ul Hassan, Khalid Iqbal, Bashir Mirza, Mussarat Mirza, Nagori and Jamil Naqsh. manzar has, however, set a stage on which new perspectives might emerge. Ensconced within the umbrella of Qatar Museum’s wider programme (manzar opened alongside exhibitions exploring the work of French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and a retrospective of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly), it will undoubtedly introduce new audiences to the vital art and architecture of Pakistan – not least the nearly 300,000 Pakistani residents of Qatar; a number approaching the population of Qatari citizens and one set to grow following the announcement of intergovernmental labour initiatives earlier this year. Hammad Nasar

Zarina, Dividing Line, 2001, woodcut on handmade Indian paper mounted on paper, 65 × 5o cm. Photo: Lamay Photo. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Books The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor Elliot & Thompson, £40 (hardcover) Art historian Bendor Grosvenor’s The Invention of British Art is a lively, engaging and erudite retelling of the history of British art shadowed by a problem it can never quite resolve: what is it about British art that can be said to be particularly ‘British’? As histories of art in Britain are being energetically rewritten by those keen to ‘decolonise’ the art-historical canon, and when the idea of nationalism and national identity is treated with suspicion, it seems like a precarious project to make a positive case for the Britishness of art in Britain. The Invention of British Art is sensitive to these troubles, but circles cautiously around them. ‘I should stress’, Grosvenor writes somewhat apologetically, ‘that I am not interested in the Britishness of British art in any nationalistic way, or whether it is ever… “world beating”.’ As it turns out, Grosvenor’s British art takes a very long time to go from being defined ‘not only as art made in Britain, but by the British themselves’. The Invention’s (very) long view is one of art shaped by invasion, migration and exchange – Grosvenor’s British art stretches back to prehistoric culture, through the Roman Empire, Anglo-Saxon Britain and the Viking incursions to the Norman Conquest, through

the Reformation and finally to the eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century art of Hogarth, Reynolds and Turner. For the large part of this, Britishness (let alone ‘Englishness’) isn’t a thing – instead Grosvenor’s light-touch scholarship traces a history in which artmaking (including architecture) is the product of the aristocracy’s continual importation of artistic talent from Europe, in particular the Netherlands, so that an ‘indigenous’ form of artistry never really gains traction. There are ironic call-backs to the uk’s contemporary predicament: exploring how the Renaissance developed in Britain, Grosvenor notes the social tensions that emerged as Netherlandish artists settled in London, leading resentful English artisans to riot against the foreigners come to take their jobs. That the ruling elites – Grosvenor calls them the ‘commissioning classes’ – sought out talent from abroad is only one part of Grosvenor’s explanation of the delayed emergence of an authentically ‘British’ art. The Black Death might have put a crimp on things, but the greatest impediment, he argues, is the Protestant Reformation’s hatred of imagemaking and suspicion of anything Catholic, and then the chaos of the English Revolution.

This is not a new critique, but Grosvenor deftly traces how social dynamics only begin to change in the eighteenth century when religious conflict is sidelined, and the aristocracy’s commissioning power is challenged by an emerging middle class – and technology, as painters find a popular market for mass-produced engravings, freeing artists from their old patrons. Grosvenor’s truly ‘British’ art, finally, is found in landscape painting, through which a new, bourgeois public discovers a sublimated religious thinking that finds ‘God is in Nature’, manifest in the genre that takes shape around Wright of Derby, Constable and, eventually, Turner. But, oddly, just as British art is finally invented, it’s over. Grosvenor’s insightful discussion of Turner’s art, culminating in his extraordinary 1835 The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, concludes that, with this painting, ‘[Turner] was inventing modern art’. ‘Modern art’ would come to be seen as ‘foreign’ all over again. That’s where The Invention’s story falls silent. What Grosvenor eventually misses is that British culture’s ‘insularism’ – its islander mentality – wasn’t down to its ruling elites resenting ‘foreignness’, but rather the disruptive power of the‘new’, beyond their control. J.J. Charlesworth

The Legend of Kamui: Volume One by Shirato Sanpei, translated by Richard Rubinger and Noriko Rubinger Drawn and Quarterly, $39.95 (softcover) Billed as ‘the last great manga epic’ (that had not yet been translated into English), this is the first of a projected series of ten 600-page volumes, collecting Shirato Sanpei’s most famous manga. Set in seventeenth-century Japan, The Legend of Kamui was originally published as a monthly serial between 1964 and 1971 in cult alt-manga anthology Garo. It chronicles the various (and largely unpleasant) ways in which the feudal system and class hierarchies of the time (during the early part of the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603–1868) allowed a tiny group of samurai to control a much larger group of farmers, while simultaneously preventing either group from living their dreams. Kamui, our notional hero,

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is a puckish, kawaii-type child martial artist from the bottom of the social pile, the outcast class, who you could easily imagine reincarnated as a plush toy. Almost everything else in this tale, however, is rendered in a more gritty, and adult, down-to-earth style. As his narrative web – of which Kamui is a part rather than the centre – slowly spins out through every level of this stratified society, Shirato constantly reminds us, not least in prose codas to each chapter, that the past is not a foreign country and that many of the prejudices that are ostensibly described as belonging to the age of sword-wielding maniacs and happy-golucky peasants remain present in society today. (And in nature, too, via a tangential story about

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a lone wolf who had been expelled from the pack because of the colour of his fur.) Between the faster-paced episodes of more-or-less violent oppression (hangings, disembowelments, dactylectomy, infanticide), and the interrupted romances, shattered dreams and systematic subjugation, Shirato weaves in sidebar microlectures on historical materialism and the laws and customs of the time, such as the feudal agricultural calendar and taxation system. But, however much Shirato’s on a Marxist mission to educate, it’s never long before the cut and thrust (literally) of this feudal soap-opera recommences. It’s that combination that truly makes this riveting tale worthy of epic status. Nirmala Devi

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The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf ‘It’s too bad the society is so intolerant of changes in personality,’ bemoans Ellen, the narrator of American writer and artist Elaine Kraf’s fourth and final work of fiction (only now, bizarrely, being published in the uk, 46 years after its original us publication and 12 years after the author’s death). Ellen of New York City, it turns out, has two. The other emerges at periods of what the pair term ‘radiance’: increasingly frequent psychotic episodes, during which Ellen becomes the titular princess, Esmeralda, sometimes developing an aversion to clothing, appearing naked or seminaked in public, at other times wearing homemade Indian or Arabic garb (a sari made out of a bedsheet; the Arabian dress out of layers of cheap scarves), sleeps with strangers and strange men, performs a variety of dances and generally dazzles the residents (her ‘subjects’) of West 72nd Street with her innate divinity. When she’s not having an episode, Ellen, a portrait painter who is secretly dissatisfied with the lack of honesty in her work, has militant views on marriage and fidelity (real or imagined unfaithfulness is an unforgivable crime; married men should have their status tattooed upon their groins) and is constantly worried about her own diminutive stature and the threats to her prospective love life posed by tall blonde Nordictype women. Who are what Ellen believes that all the men in her life really want. Some of them have told her so. Those men, it goes without saying, are at best weak and unreliable, at worst shockingly cruel and manipulative. Her former lover banned her from laughing, singing and talking; while they were dating,

Penguin, £9.99 (softcover)

his therapist (who has persuaded his patient that all his flaws lie outside himself) made the narrator sign a document stating he has no responsibility for her welfare and then proceeded to prescribe her experimental brainchemotherapy drugs (for the benefit of the lover). The husband of her college mate (the latter obsessively paints purple plums) seems determined to have sex with Ellen in spite (or because) of his impotence. Needless to say, the men pursue their happiness; Ellen does not pursue her own. Esmeralda, on the other hand, has such an excess of happiness that she needs to spread it around. Or, inside the ‘spiritual and sweet Princess Esmeralda’, the latter informs us, ‘there also lived Ellen with great anger, a sense of the world of material necessity, economics, politics and growth… always looking for a man suitable to be her husband’. What makes this extraordinary and sometimes shocking book particularly intriguing, however, is not the revelation that the narrator has two personalities, but rather that one is presented as the direct consequence of the other; neither is irrational in its own terms and both are narrated in the same tone of straightforward confessional, laced with a heady draught of authorial humour (for example, our height-conscious narrator believes that Dr Clufftrain, the therapist, always carries a hacksaw on his person in order to adapt doorways to match his excessive tallness, while a relationship with a urologist breaks down over urinalysis). Ironically, in the case of a narrator who

openly confesses to being unreliable (she’s prone to blackouts, advocates her rules as absolute before breaking them, has nights when she believes herself transported to an exotic orient while never actually leaving the street), her twin personalities seem to allow this particular self-portrait to be more honest. On the one hand Ellen paints black backgrounds around the heads in her portraits, so that people can be distinguished from their backgrounds; on the other, Esmeralda fully immerses herself in the social background of West 72nd Street, confident that she will always be seen (‘I suspect I look like a saint in ecstasy’). Ellen conforms to a society that seems engineered to supress women’s subjectivity and personality; Esmeralda rebels against precisely the same. Although she does find that society always eventually punishes her for her lack of compliance. With medication and institutionalisation. ‘I was no longer in the habit of laughing,’ Ellen remarks in the wake of one postradiance incarceration, ‘the reflex was gone. That can happen to tears or laughing or anything with the proper drugs or conditions.’ Radiance on the other hand, despite the obvious dangers of waking up in the bedrooms of unknown strangers with no recollection of how you got there, sometimes covered in bruises, ‘is like a glorious holiday’. While Kraf would later describe this novel as ‘a farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies’, we should be thankful that it also preserves some of those dreams and fantasies today. Mark Rappolt

A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon Mack, £55 (softcover)

It begins with a black-and-white photograph of a naked, perky-breasted mannequin, seen through the window of an otherwise empty shop. The silhouetted reflection of American photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon appears like a dark aura around the plastic woman. A Woman I Once Knew is an autobiographical sequence of journallike entries alongside self-portraits (mostly black-and-white, a few in colour). Solomon’s early experiences as daughter and wife, noted in sparse, unsentimental language, intersperse photos that

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depict Solomon in her late thirties, when she left her husband to pursue a career in photography, and which continue to document her ageing body for the next 50 years. She writes about her extensive travels and her relationships with other people; sometimes she leaves them, sometimes they leave her. Mostly she pictures herself alone. Either in full body self-portraits (clothed or naked) or in closeup shots of thinning skin, bunions, scars, broken nails, sagging breasts. Occasionally these are funny, like visual jokes: in one photo she stands

ArtReview

topless behind a plinth on which a tv screen sits at waist-height, wearing a Virgin Mary headscarf fashioned out of a beanie and shawl; behind her are skeletons dressed in formal attire and stacked on shelves as though interred in a mausoleum – a skull is turned towards the viewer, grinning. Often the photos and notes offer more questions than answers. We get to know Solomon’s body intimately, while learning only what she is willing to give us about who she is. ‘Expect to be the outsider,’ she reassures herself. ‘Embrace it.’ Fi Churchman

India: A Linguistic Civilization by G.N. Devy Aleph Book Company, Rs 599 (hardcover) The history of India, a nation whose present geographical expanse, it’s worth remembering, is of recent vintage, can be told in innumerable ways: from the stories of its wars and rulers, to a study of its material culture, to the views of its ordinary citizens, to an analysis of specific events and sociopolitical movements. One cannot ignore too the constant, revisionist tampering with that history in order to make the past better align with the present. But while this is the preferred discourse for India’s current national leadership, literary critic and language activist G.N. Devy takes a radically different approach. In his latest book, he constructs the country’s history by examining how language ‘impacted India’s epistemic architecture’. This is a challenging task, not least because scholars don’t know what languages existed in the pre-Vedic and or pre-Indus Valley Civilisation era (though there’s no doubt that there were hundreds). Moreover, the exact number and nature of languages that are spoken in India is still something of a mystery, one that’s only exacerbated by the fact that the last complete linguistic survey was undertaken between 1894 and 1928, decades before India’s independence. Devy headed the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (2010–13), which sought to provide an independent overview of living languages. It ended up reporting 780, with the caveat that

it may have missed some 70 others. Thus, one can assume then that there are about 850 living languages in the country, or about 12 percent of the estimated 7,000 languages of the world. Repeatedly emphasising that the preservation of the nation’s languages is a founding principal, enshrined in the Indian Constitution, Devy explains how the lack of exactitude in official language data is strategic, driven by political agenda. The obfuscation of census data (languages with less than 10,000 speakers are simply clumped into ‘others’) and unscientific, arbitrary bureaucratic decisions (surveys do not cover tribal areas) are designed to create a hierarchy of languages – for example, placing those with scripts above those without – where none should exist. Under the heading ‘Hindi’ in the language data of the 2011 Census (the last General Census conducted in India), ‘there are nearly fifty other languages’, Devy writes. These include languages like Bhojpuri, spoken by more than 50 million people (mainly in the Bhojpur-Purvanchal region), and others (numbering several hundred thousand speakers), some of which are mutually unintelligible with Hindi. The final inflated number, 520 million, is used to cast Hindi as the national language and to impose it across the country while creating policies that are detrimental to the development of other tongues.

In a section on memory and oral traditions, Devy reminds the reader that in the country’s literary past, ‘most of the linguistic creativity has been in the oral tradition’, and that the artificial privileging of written over the oral was the result of British colonialism. And yet it went on to influence how postindependence India’s state boundaries were drawn up, and continues to drive education policies today. Consequently, he argues that ‘decolonisation of Indian aesthetics and Indian linguistics, without an obscurantist turning back entirely to the past, is the larger task at hand for the contemporary Indian intellectual’. Indeed, the book packs in multiple trains of thought: from those proposed by European thinkers on memory and knowledge, later used by colonisers to disregard Indian traditions of memory, to fascinating case studies of languages used by nomadic communities and tribes, to imagining the shape of language in our digital future. Devy’s is certainly an unusual and interesting approach to history writing, but this cramming of thoughts, and the assumption in several places that the reader is already knowledgeable about India’s complicated sociolinguistic histories, can be a deterrent to the general reader. One cannot help but wonder how much more easily accessible the book would have been if topics were presented at a slower pace, and engaged with in a little more depth. Deepa Bhasthi

Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch

Birch’s 2022 Bacon in Moscow told the story of the author’s pivotal role in organising an unprecedented retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gilbert & George and the Communists is its sequel; by 1989, Birch, still a struggling young London gallerist, finds that his success brokering the Bacon exhibition prompts the odd couple of British contemporary artists to take him on to do the same for them. From the booze-soaked hedonism of 80s Soho to the booze-soaked stoicism of the last days of Soviet Russia, and then on to post-Tiananmen Square Communist China, it is a vivid, entertaining memoir of clashing cultures; from London’s gay and subcultural scene, through the catty and manipulative upper echelons of the British art establishment, to the corrupt, disintegrating

Cheerio, £19.99 (hardcover)

Russian diplomatic bureaucracy and the somewhat more efficient, if faceless, Chinese machine, Birch manages to steer the artists through to shows in Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai. Why would Western artists be so interested in showing in the heart of communism? There was of course Gilbert & George’s obsession with making an art ‘for the people’ (they bridle, ironically, at ‘Marxist’ British art critics, all the while provoking the ‘lefty’ art establishment with their performative conservatism and idolising of Margaret Thatcher), an interest that aligned with the West’s enthusiasm for Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. There was the love of money, of course, Birch recounting stories of art dealers looking for opportunities to get to the previously closed store of historical Russian

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art and artists; and there was the reputational arms race of Western art dealers seeking the prestige of having their artists shown on an international stage. But Gilbert & George… is really Birch’s love letter not just to the artists, their humour, charisma and fearless unconventionality, but also to an artworld culture built on friendships, entrepreneurialism and hedonism. The real villains of the book are the power-trippers and bureaucrats – the artists’ mirthless, manipulative London dealer Anthony d’Offay, and the condescending, meddlesome upper-class hierarchy of the British Council, offended that Birch is bypassing them. It’s a portrait of an artworld long gone, one perhaps a lot more fun (and hungover) than the one that came to replace it. J.J. Charlesworth

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Photo: Lewis Ronald

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On the cover Yan Jiacheng, from the series The Second Child’s Second Child, 2022–ongoing. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 61 and 75 are by Olga Ravn, trans Martin Aitken, The Employees, 2020

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from the archives Smart casual colonialism and selling your soul: in the summer of 1960, critic G.M. Butcher does some shopping and heads to Hanover Gallery, London, to have a look at a body of new work by sculptor Reg Butler

I must begin by saying that my afternoon in London was ‘one of a work of art is not unique? And if the edition is done by craftsmen, those days’, and everything that happened was calculated to arouse is it properly an ‘original’? Sir Kenneth Clark recently gave a masterly the spirit of cynicism. Those beautiful Madras shirts – ‘guaranteed to lecture at Oxford on the work of Rodin. There was no doubt in his fade’ – must be bought on the sole assurance that the famous shop mind that the intervention of other hands on so much of Rodin’s concerned would never sell anything that wasn’t perfect. When asked output – practically all of his marbles, often carved by Italian craftsif they didn’t – possibly – have a bit of laundered material, so that one men from bronze models, and horrifying percentage of his bronzes could see what kind of effect the fading produced, I was solemnly sometimes even made from the marbles – was aesthetically disastrous. assured, “We don’t, of course, do such things.” The sceptical reader is referred to Le Penseur in the Tate. With this behind me, I then spent several hours previewing the Like most of Rodin’s works, Butler’s are very ‘ideal’ figures. Not new Reg Butler exhibition. Everything was already very nearly in only are the forms fundamentally firm and youthful – there is none place, but the atmosphere was relaxed, and far from that almost of the realism associated with mottled flacidity – but there is little religious hush which seems so often to descend upon the better gal- essential concern with either impressionist or expressionist values. leries of London. Although I tried I take this to be so, despite the appeal to concentrate on the sculptures, in these figures must make on all those that impersonal and objective way committed to the investment valthat one imagines the critic ought ues of the ‘modern masters’. Which to do, I found my notes getting brings me back to my carping: Is inextricably jumbled up with the Butler a sculptor, or is he producing gossip and shop talk flowing on crafted decorations? From a lesser about me. As everyone knows that artist, their evident appeal would deserve much praise; from Butler Reg Butler’s stature among postwar they are suspiciously in the unenviBritish sculptors, is, by now, almost as secure as that of Henry Moore able postwar tradition of that master himself, I hope I will be forgiven of soul-selling, Bernard Buffet. for the generally carping nature of I have been shocked – I use the what follows. word deliberately – to visit three exButler imposes upon his bronzes hibitions in the past week, each of which has sold out. Dubuffet, a blackish patination. While I was in the gallery, he was occupied in Hitchens, Piper; these are all ‘big Courtesy Alamy Stock Photo names’, and I have no way of knowgiving a last-minute polish to some of the figures, with what I took to be an ordinary shoe brush. I could ing whether their works have been purchased as speculative investhardly help recalling those famous Gandhara sculptures, now in the ments or not. But now the same situation is promised for Butler’s Peshawar Museum, which owe their preservation to the officers of show. It is just not true that all the works of all these ‘names’ deserve the Guides at Mardan. Unfortunately, they also took the trouble to such success. In Butler’s case, these new works seem to me, on the try brightening up their collection by an occasional blacking and whole, to be without great new invention. They are, rather, extremely polishing. The result was completely to obscure the surface texture capable craft works turned out for sale. We all know that artists, with and finish. I don’t in the least claim that any such extreme result an exhibition in the offing, decide to turn out ‘half-a-dozen small follows upon Butler’s treatment of his figures – all beautiful young ones’ to round out the sales possibilities. This is not exactly immoral, ladies, by the way – but I do suggest that it is something worth but it is not creative art at its highest pitch, either. With all knowledge thinking about. The tendency, if one is to make out much of anything of how little my own view matters, I suspect that Butler’s very success at all, is for the highlights to accentuate themselves as more and is facing him with one of the crucial struggles of his life – if his artistic more light is required. The effectiveness of the surface textures also personality is not to repeat Picasso’s sad phrase: ‘Copier les autres c’est tends to diminish. nécessaire, mais se copier soi-même, quelle pitié.’ Every bronze in the present exhibition has ‘an edition of eight casts numbered and signed’. Does it really matter, aesthetically, that Originally published in Art News and Review, 18 June 1960

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