ArtReview January & February 2018 by ArtReview

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Scale 10 artists to look out for in 2018

Future Greats

Frontiers

NEW YORK Jason Martin 504 West 24th Street Channa Horwitz 138 Tenth Avenue LONDON Antonio Calderara Painting Infinity 67 Lisson Street Carmen Herrera 27 Bell Street

TOMMA ABTS ANNI ALBERS JOSEF ALBERS FRANCIS ALŸS MAMMA ANDERSSON LUCAS ARRUDA RUTH ASAWA MICHAËL BORREMANS CAROL BOVE R. CRUMB RAOUL DE KEYSER PHILIP-LORCA diCORCIA STAN DOUGLAS MARLENE DUMAS MARCEL DZAMA WILLIAM EGGLESTON DAN FLAVIN SUZAN FRECON ISA GENZKEN FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES DONALD JUDD ON KAWARA TOBA KHEDOORI JEFF KOONS YAYOI KUSAMA SHERRIE LEVINE KERRY JAMES MARSHALL GORDON MATTA-CLARK JOHN McCRACKEN GIORGIO MORANDI OSCAR MURILLO ALICE NEEL JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM CHRIS OFILI PALERMO RAYMOND PETTIBON SIGMAR POLKE NEO RAUCH AD REINHARDT JASON RHOADES BRIDGET RILEY THOMAS RUFF FRED SANDBACK JAN SCHOONHOVEN RICHARD SERRA JOSH SMITH AL TAYLOR DIANA THATER WOLFGANG TILLMANS LUC TUYMANS JAMES WELLING FRANZ WEST DOUG WHEELER

David Zwirner 25 Years

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS JORDAN WOLFSON ROSE WYLIE

JANUARY 13 – FEBRUARY 17, 2018

YUN HYONG-KEUN

NEW YORK

LISA YUSKAVAGE

Recent Paintings 2014 – 2017 19 January – 10 March 2018

David Zwirner London

Measure for Measure 14, 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 55 ½ × 55 ½ inches (141 × 141 cm).

Bridget Riley

Michaël Borremans

Fire from the Sun

Fire from the Sun, 2017. Oil on panel. 11 ½ × 9 7/8 inches (20 × 22.5 cm).

27 January – 10 March 2018

5–6/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong hk.davidzwirner.com

David Zwirner Hong Kong

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Mondes Flottants 14th Biennale de Lyon Lyon, France 20/09 2017 – 07/01 2018 A Transparent Leaf, Instead of the Mouth Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves Porto, Portugal 29/09 2017 – 07/01 2018

Runo Lagomarsino Paulo Nazareth PROSPECT.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University New Orleans, USA 18/11 2017 – 25/02 2018

Adriano Costa Sonia Gomes

São Paulo

Everyday Poetics Seattle Art Museum Seattle, USA 18/11 2017 – 17/01 2018

Iulia Nistor Nina Canell Paulo Monteiro 25/11 2017 – 31/01 2018

Brussels

Nina Canell

Patricia Leite 19/01 – 07/04 2018

Art & Space Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Bilbao, Spain 05/12 2017 – 15/04 2018

Manuel Raeder 19/01 – 10/03 2018

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66th Street, 2nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info @ mendeswooddm.com Image: Patricia Leite

Valie export

Body Configurations, 1972 – 1976 Curated By Caroline Bourgeois

Valie export, Verletzungen I, 1972 © Valie export / adagp paris, 2017

paris Marais January – feBruary 2018 ropaC.net

Anselm Kiefer fÜr AndreA emo

london PAris sAlZBUrG

PAris PAntin feBrUArY – mAY 2018 roPAc.net

ArtReview vol 70 no 1 January & February 2018

BZZZZzzzrttttttkcrk Time to get your hearts started again with ArtReview’s annual shock of the new. Those of you who are such electrojunkies that you can’t wait any longer can go straight to this year’s Future Greats on page 54. For those of you who are wondering what’s going on, Future Greats is ArtReview’s annual fandango in which some of the artists, curators and writers the magazine admires select people whose work will be inspiring, transforming, provoking or seducing art audiences over the coming 12 months. And in the case of at least one example among this year’s crop (clue: it’s the first one), the chosen artists might be providing the full fandango with castanets and tambourines too. In a way, the Future Greats bit is one-part reflection and one-part speculation: a reflection on the selectors’ highlights of past experience with artworks (perhaps even issues or ‘trends’, although ArtReview tends to put its foot down when it spies instances of the latter) and a projection of how those experiences will develop and continue to shine. Reflection – but also a call to action – is the name-of-the-game in the manifestos (see page 55) we asked a selection of artists to produce around the idea of ‘borders’ (in all their incarnations) both real and imagined. ArtReview

Out with the old

January & February 2018

ould walk I propose that we sh – Peter Liversidge

ArtReview

together.

Tara Donovan Compositions 24 January – 9 March 2018

6 Burlington Gardens

LONDON

January 10 — February 17, 2018

ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS

Günther Förg , 1983 Foto ©Wilhelm Schürmann

Günther Förg February 1 - March 24, 2018 ALMINE RECH GALLERY LONDON

Marcius Galan Fernanda Gomes Paulo Roberto Leal Jac Leirner Mira Schendel Afinidades Eletivas organized with Olivier Renaud-Clement February 2 – March 3, 2018

POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

David Goldblatt, Shop assistant, Orlando West, 1972 , Silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper (Diabonded), 50 x 50cm

GOODMAN GALLERY CONGRATULATES

DAVID GOLDBLATT ON HIS RETROSPECTIVE AND

ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN ON THEIR SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS

www. g o o d m a n - g a l l e r y.co m

DAVID GOLDBLATT 21 February - 7 May 2018 ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN Divine Violence 21 February - 21 May 2018

Image Courtesy of Marguerite Humeau. Photograph: Julia Andreone

modernforms.org

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 29

Brian Belott Interview by Ross Simonini 44

Under the Paving Stones: Warsaw by Phoebe Blatton 37

Future Greats

Future Greats selected by Osei Bonsu, Jeremy Deller, Cécile B. Evans, Reem Fadda, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Venus Lau, Bernardo Mosqueira, Mark Rappolt, Sue Williamson, Nil Yalter 54

New Frontiers by Laura Grace Ford, Eva Grubinger, David Horvitz, Peter Liversidge, Sudarshan Shetty, Hank Willis Thomas 55

page 30 Janiva Ellis, The Okiest Doke, 2017, oil on canvas, 102 × 76 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York (included in the New Museum Triennial)

January & February 2018

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 104 Poor Art / Arte Povera: Italian Influences, British Responses and Gino de Dominicis, by Ben Eastham Abstract Hungary, by Mark Rappolt Folklore: A Controversy with Works from the Collections, by Martin Herbert Ali Kazma, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Preis der Nationalgalerie 2017, by Raimar Stange The Yellow Wallpaper, by Moritz Scheper Beth Laurin, by Stefanie Hessler Pressure / Imprint, by Kristian Vistrup Madsen Carola Bonfili, by Mike Watson Raša Todosijević, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Manifesto, by David Terrien Luciano Fabro, by Gabriel Coxhead Kati Heck, by J.J. Charlesworth Ad Minoliti, Aleksandra Domanović, DIS, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Vikky Alexander, Wang Newone, by Matthew McLean Simone Fattal, by Isabella Smith

Puppies Puppies, by Jonathan Griffin Laura Owens, by Cat Kron Lewis Stein, by Jeppe Ugelvig Gerard Byrne, by Wendy Vogel Prospect.4, by Sam Korman Books 126 The New Poverty, by Stephen Armstrong Out of Nothing, by Daniel Locke with David Blandy ARTIST / WORK / LISSON, edited by Ossian Ward Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley THE STRIP 130 A CURATOR WRITES 134

page 104 Ceal Floyer, Ladder, 2010, modified aluminium ladder, 279 × 38 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist, 303 Gallery, New York, Lisson Gallery, London & New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin

ArtReview

Art Previewed

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand 27

Previewed After a couple of years under wraps while the 90,000sqm distribution centre in the renovating – included in that the restoration candy-toned, product-dense Amazon (2016), the iconic empty shelving of Prada II (1997) of 66 pyramidal glass skylights, formerly faulty to semifictionalised scenarios such as Review and unusable, now allowing natural light into (2015), in which Angela Merkel and three former the building for the first time – the Hayward German chancellors sit before Barnett Newman’s Gallery is reopening for its 50th anniversary. huge Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51). The artist’s It’s doing so with a panorama of panoramas: 1 a first UK retrospective for Andreas Gursky. ‘zips’, Gursky has said, here represent shifts in German political eras – abstract-looking images, The Leipzig-born artist has spent four decades as his own practice increasingly advocates, still working towards what he calls ‘the encyclostand for something. (Paging his dealer Larry paedia of life’: visual evidence of the manmade Gagosian: an edition of Gursky’s oeuvre ought in photographs that are huge, hyperobjective, to be shot into space tout de suite, both as affirpanoptic and, in recent years, digitally adjusted. mation of human possibility and cry for help.) Some 60 works strong, Andreas Gursky will Somewhere up there, figuratively at least, take viewers around this benighted world in 2 is Sam Keogh, whose Kapton Cadaverine at Kerlin a day (or couple of hours): stock exchanges to music festivals, 99-cent stores to planted fields, involves a grimy spaceship interior adorned

with collages and sculptures. During the opening-night performance that, in a sense, activates these, an astronaut (Keogh) will emerge from his cryopod after a couple of years of suspended animation and engages with the nested creations; the scenario flipping between exploratory reorientation on a rocketeer’s part and tour of an artist’s studio, the accumulations either artworks or attempts to repair the ship. (Audio from the performance, recorded, will float over the installation for the rest of the show.) Keogh, who’s Irish himself, is interested in ‘how surface and texture can transmit narrative’, as was written in a press text for a 2016 show that used drawings under a floor of plastic sheeting, fleshy sculptural lumps and, again, a performative element

1 Andreas Gursky, Amazon, 2016, inkjet print, 207 × 407 × 6 cm. © the artist/DACS. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

2 Sam Keogh, Kapton Cadaverine, 2017–18, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

January & February 2018

to loosely consider the death of Gianni Versace. each other. The works, we’re informed, ‘live off our reality. This may sound like what artists the contradictory energies of what is possible and do all the time; nevertheless, it’s gained urgency Looking back on Keogh’s earlier work – in 2012, what is imaginary’ – categories themselves that in an era of fake news, and the museum is being he was making lumpy multicoloured sculptures intended as a kind of ‘species’ – what’s clear programmatic about the subject, inviting are unfixed; they pull us back to childhood, and is a consistent commitment to art as processual: some 30 artists from 19 countries – the key childhood into adulthood. Gronemeyer’s works, murky at first but quick to get under the skin, whatever the form, it’s in a constant, unstable issue being a global one – including a clutch state of becoming and modulation from without. may be, as fellow painter Daniel Richter opined of Americans but also Claudia Martínez Garay It may be that with reality fluxing so violently in one interview about her work, ‘not zeitgeisty’, (Peru), Anupam Roy (India), Zhenya Machneva right now, metamorphosis is the new fixed. That’s but that doesn’t mean they don’t suit the times. (Russia) and Dalton Paula (Brazil). Unashamedly zeitgeisty and also in New During the 1960s, as an exponent of arte 3 the tenor one gets from Ellen Gronemeyer’s new paintings at Anton Kern. The Berlin-based 4 York, meanwhile, is the fourth New Museum 5 povera’s lesser-known painting wing, Giorgio Triennial, subtitled Songs for Sabotage. Nothing German painter, who’s developed an out-ofGriffa attenuated his medium to canvas, colour to do with records by Black Sabbath or the time style that’s cartoonish and sour – at once and brushstroke, laying the latter out thinly in Beastie Boys, the ‘sabotage’ here is rather mildewed in tone, grainy in texture and percoglowing abstract battalions on exposed stretches a mooted process (a ‘call for action’, as the instilating with detail, full of round-faced childof cloth. The result, somewhere between serialtution describes it) of engaging with media ism and expressive abstraction, is at once finished adults and animals – here hangs up six new both new and traditional in order to illumi– it’s on the wall – and not; something, again, canvases featuring adults, children and pets either contemplating or, indeed, merging into nate how they fabricate, rather than mirror, in process, unfolding in concert with one’s

3 Ellen Gronemeyer, frozen, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 32 × 24 cm. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

4 Claudia Martínez Garay, The Leftovers, 2016, mixed media, 370 × 470 cm. Photo: Arturo Kameya. Courtesy the artist and Ginsberg Galería, Lima

ArtReview

5 Giorgio Griffa, Canone aureo 458, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

7 Tara Donovan, Composition (Cards), 2017, styrene cards and glue, 57 × 57 × 10 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pace London

Scanning gaze. While increasingly folding in gnomic, codelike numbers, the Turinese artist, now eighty-one, has maintained his approach, and extraordinarily, as A Continuous Becoming affirms, it’s lost none of its punch or vibe of exploration. A work like 2012’s Canone Aureo 458, where a central row of digits divides an uppermost field of ultramarine and aquamarine floating commas from a lower scatter of lavenderand-orange pickup sticks, is as fresh and open as Griffa’s earliest experiments in this manner: lean, sunny, mysterious, familiar, new. Abstraction seems to be in fashion one year and out the next – last year out, probably back by now – but likely this doesn’t register 6 for Griffa, nor for Merrill Wagner. Also in her early eighties, she began fashioning geometric abstractions during the late 1960s and has long

It’s hard to say if Tara Donovan’s work 7 engaged with different supports and the creais abstract or not; or if that matters, really. tive potential of their material irregularities. On a macro scale the Flushing-born artist’s Lately there’s been a minirevival for her 1970s works tend to be biomorphic and engulfing, vertical-stripe works, made by painting over on the micro they’re laboriously constructed tape that was later removed and meticulously – ‘which sometimes involves an extremely transferred to Plexiglas; during the 80s, she tedious process’, as her Wiki unsentimentally made voluminous paintings on stone, slate has it – from worldly items such as toothpicks, and steel that grew geometries around preStyrofoam cups, paper plates, tarpaper, nylon existing blemishes and colours, and spoke to fibre, etc. Concerned, as she said recently, with constant natural elements: sky, desert, ocean. ‘how the aesthetic potential of an aggregated Recently she’s favoured salvaged steel and linen, material can be activated in ways that play with culled inspiration from the negative spaces perceptual capacities’, she’s also consistently in scraps of cut metal and bent her composing maintained a drawing practice, though her towards, again, the natural: flowers, landscapes, new Compositions (2017) series are only superfideep night skies, trees. The result, melding cially part of it. Certainly they’re approximately modernist abstraction and a plainspoken 2D, being made of layered styrene cards, walllove of nature, is an industrial romanticism mounted and framed. The results are shimdetached from linear time in the best way.

January & February 2018

8 Ahmet Öğüt, Information Power to the People, 2017, bronze sculpture. © the artist. Courtesy Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

9 Danh Vo, She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene, 2009, mixed media, 97 × 55 cm. Photo: Jean-Daniel Pellen . Courtesy Collection Chantal Crousel, Paris

mering abstractions that from a distance look like diverse graphs, close-up look like hard work and somewhere in between suggest cold mass production made consolingly charmed. In 2010 Ahmet Öğüt auctioned a self8 portrait on canvas that was also designed for interaction: titled Punch This Painting, it was sold under the condition that it might be ‘punched by whoever feels like punching it every time it is exhibited’. Since then the Turkish artist has only gotten more confrontational, and less interested in the niceties of art. In 2012’s Let it be known to all persons here gathered, for the Liverpool Biennial, he had a rider on horseback, dressed as a postman, travel from Manchester to the host city, carrying a supposedly royal letter and stopping in towns along the way, not to advertise the biennale but to point

up how such events don’t reach a wider public. Another side of Öğüt’s practice finds ways in which, conversely, it might yet do so, from The Silent University – a workshop-driven ‘knowledge exchange platform’ for refugees, also established in 2012 – to public sculpture. While Others Attack (2016) was a sequence of six bronze sculptures memorialising the moments when protesters during worldwide historical protests were attacked by police dogs (not shown), and another bronze shows up in No Protest Lost, his current survey in Copenhagen, commemorating hacktivist American Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while under federal indictment in 2013, aged twenty-six. 9 A few short years ago, the title of Danh Vo’s 15-year survey at the Guggenheim, Take My Breath Away, might have scanned as light 80s

ArtReview

nostalgia for Top Gun soundtrack fans. Fastforward to now, though, and it chimes sombrely with #icantbreathe and activism against racial violence. All of this feels indivisible from the Vietnam-born, Berlin-based Danish artist’s consideration of power structures, colonialism, capitalism and authorship, which tends to be anchored in the twists of his biography. Capsuling Vo’s diverse practice, the show incorporates early works such as Vo Rosaco Rasmussen (2003–05), wherein the artist married and divorced friends in order to accumulate further surnames, forming a patchwork polyglot history; later pieces considering the effects of US policy in Southeast Asia, such as thank-you notes from Henry Kissinger and the chandelier that hung above the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War; and, very probably,

GERHARD RICHTER Gelbgrün (Yellow-Green), 1982

Contemporary Art Evening Auction London 7 March 2018

Viewing 3 – 7 March 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5744 ALEX.BRANCZIK@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYART © GERHARD RICHTER, 2018

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an element of Vo’s signature work We the People (2010–12), 30 tons of copper sheets converted into a 1:1 model of the Statue of Liberty divided into 300 discrete sections, never again to be united. In 1919 Abel Gance made J’Accuse, a film about the First World War in which the war-dead rise from their graves. In 1938, as the Second World War loomed on the horizon, the French director remade it, the central figure a scientist dedicated to realising a device that’d stop war forever (which, to his horror, is misused). The remake featured disfigured war veterans, playing the risen dead, as part of its aim at staving 11 off the collective amnesia that in part permits catastrophic events to recur. And here we are again. At the Power Plant, in his show The Field 10 of Emotions, Kader Attia channels Gance:

in J’Accuse (I Accuse) (2016) he screens the later film for an array of elevated wooden busts based on the mangled men, silent witnesses to historical forgetfulness, and men who were traumatised twice: first by the war itself, then by how society reacted to their deformations. Alongside this, Attia is showing a new, untitled-at-the-timeof-writing film based on conversations with ‘various academics from the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, history and art history’ that analyses Canada’s repressed history of colonisation and slavery, the psychic wounds it has left, and how they impact the present. When, in 2009, Saâdane Afif won the Marcel Duchamp Prize, you couldn’t help but suspect a connection to a project he’d begun the year before, in which the French artist collects and

archives every publication that uses a photo of Duchamp’s urinal. Placing another figure, or figures, in front of him is standard practice for Afif, who’s historically refused to appear in public. At Wiels, in his solo show Paroles, two core projects intertwine, each again displacing the artist: one in which, since 2004, he’s been getting people to write song lyrics inspired by his work, and a music studio where you’re invited to have a jam session, albeit under supervision and using the lyrics from Afif’s songbook (also titled Paroles). No musical skills? Develop some by listening to Black Chords (2006), an installation of automated electrical guitars playing a series of chords. Somewhere, meanwhile, Afif is sitting with his feet up, flipping through a magazine. Martin Herbert

10 Kader Attia, J’accuse, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin & Cologne 11 Saâdane Afif, Power Chords, 2006 (installation view). Photo: Jérôme Schlomoff. Courtesy Wiels, Brussels

1 Andreas Gursky Hayward Gallery, London 25 January – 22 April

5 Giorgio Griffa Camden Arts Centre, London 26 January – 8 April

8 Ahmet Öğüt Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen through 18 February

2 Sam Keogh Kerlin, Dublin 27 January – 10 March

6 Merrill Wagner Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf 19 January – 10 March

9 Danh Vo Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 9 February – 9 May

3 Ellen Gronemeyer Anton Kern, New York through 24 February

7 Tara Donovan Pace, London 24 January – 9 March

10 Kader Attia The Power Plant, Toronto 27 January – 13 May 11 Saâdane Afif Wiels, Brussels 1 February – 22 April

4 New Museum Triennial New Museum, New York 13 February – 27 April

ArtReview

Always Trust The Artist 25 January - 17 March 2018

GELATIN MARCEL DZAMA ADRIAN GHENIE KATI HECK EDWARD LIPSKI JONATHAN MEESE RYAN MOSLEY AARON VAN ERP TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ANTWERP

CONDO CHEYENNE JULIEN

ARCADIA

MISSA

The Sunday Painter/Arcadia Missa: Hosting Stereo and Dawid Radziszewski for Condo London, Jan-Feb 2018

Under the Paving Stones

Warsaw’s surfaces scratched by Phoebe Blatton

Of mice and men A wet Sunday morning in September: the annual Warsaw Gallery Weekend’s ‘VIPs’ (myself included) are gathered for brunch inside the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at Królikarnia – ‘The Rabbit House’ – a rather cute name for this Palladian palace, which, like much of ‘historic’ Warsaw, has been razed and rebuilt several times over. Many in the crowd are in need of rebuilding, hungover from last night’s lavish party in celebration of the weekend’s exhibitions and events, organised by 27 participating commercial galleries. It’s a tribute to proud Polish hospitality that the endless alcohol of the night before seems to feature just as heavily the morning after. More than anything, however, I find myself wishing I’d picked up a bread roll and coffee on the way. Artist Katarzyna Krakowiak, casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, looks very much part of the crowd but assumes an almost noble air as she takes up a position before a tall window, looking out upon parkland first created during the seventeenth century to host rabbit hunts; her performance is about to take place, as part of the museum’s current group exhibition Half-truth: Works by Central and Eastern European Contemporary Artists from Art Collection Telekom. She holds one hand behind her back, and in the other a diamond ring, which she raises to the windowpane. She walks, dragging the diamond across successive windows with an amplified, teeth-jarring screech as she proceeds through the museum’s elegant rooms. I am reminded of the adage ‘if these walls could talk’, although in this case the building seems to scream. We follow Krakowiak in an uncomfortable cluster, trying not to knock into Piotr Łakomy’s sculptures, which evoke a spacesuit’s limbs or torso, or the trenchant Rosetta (2009) sculptures by Ioana Nemes. Afterward I peer at the line scored in the glass, this faint scar the only vestige of a sonically monumental gesture, as impassive waiters hover with trays of champagne.

top Katarzyna Krakowiak’s glass-scoring performance, part of group show Half-truth at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture above Inside Edward Krasiński’s former studio-apartment, now known as the Avant-Garde Institute

below Warsaw flat of the author’s uncle

I began my weekend in Warsaw with a fixture of the city’s art establishment: the studio-apartment of Edward Krasiński (1925–2004), preserved by the Foksal Gallery Foundation as the Avant-Garde Institute, which he shared with (from 1970) and subsequently inherited from the pioneering painter of the 1920s and 1930s avant-garde, Henryk ˙ Stazewski (1894–1988). Krasiński’s tenure comprises many playful conceptual interventions that occupy every surface, nook and cranny in a slow process of entropy (a friend on entering immediately knocks into a branch stuck between the parquet floor tiles, and is told the branch would’ve remained uprooted if he hadn’t been able to ‘replant’ it). Faded ersatz mice are frozen mid-scurry across surfaces, and most famously, Krasiński’s continuous line of blue sticky tape bisects everything in its path at the height of 130cm. With a touch of Polish histrionics, my friend (an art historian) notes melancholically that the tape has disintegrated in places since his last visit some years ago.

January & February 2018

The crazy and the dead The apartment is part of a typically postwar Warsawian block, similar to my uncle’s nearby home, in the heart of the former Jewish Ghetto, where I stay when I visit: concrete with panes of reinforced glass; corridors haunted by listless pot plants. I climb to the exposed roof terrace, the wind and sound of traffic in my ears, to witness The Prayer and the City. Naked Chartres (2017), a simplified, monochrome diagram of the labyrinth on the marble floor at Chartres Cathedral, reversed and cut precisely in half at the edge of the terrace. Its maker, Tokyo-born Koji Kamoji, has been resident in Poland since 1959. The mesmerising graphic line and suggestion of its other half, lost to the city below, triggers a perverse urge to approach the brink. The sensation is apt when contemplating rebellions fought and lost in these streets: the uprising of the city’s remaining Jews in 1943, ending in full-scale deportation, and the Polish resistance to German occupation, put down in 1944. These events, still fervent, sacred acts of heroism in the Polish psyche, are commonly invoked by disparate political factions, not least today’s governing rightwing nationalist ‘Law and Justice’ (PiS) party. Kamoji’s intent seems less political, more spiritually rooted. An artist statement confirms that this is a prayer to the city’s tragic history. The formal starkness does not immediately move me to such contemplation (rather, I am thinking about Kamoji, who has lived through some enormous sociopolitical changes in Poland, and his status as one of the few POC artists exhibited during Warsaw Gallery Weekend). Perhaps I am also still too much under the spell of the well-seasoned enchantment inside. Again, I think of my uncle, whose own eccentric top-floor dwelling, stuffed with junk and newspaper collages, reflects a long career in poetry, alcohol and observing Poland’s ‘schizophrenia’ (as he calls it). He used to attend Krasiński’s salons. When I ask him about those days, he answers with a dismissive wave, and in a low bleat tells me, “Everyone was crazy, but now they’re dead”.

above Koji Kamoji’s The Prayer and the City. Naked Chartres, 2017, installed on the Avant-Garde Institute’s rooftop below Warsaw flyposting, including a ‘Reparationen machen frei’ poster

below Corridor in the tower block housing the Avant-Garde Institute

Exiting the Avant-Garde Institute, I notice a wall of posters, variously advertising a Warsaw Uprising commemorative picnic, a Jewish cultural festival and a reggae concert. One poster in particular is disturbingly eye-catching. Printed across an expanse of grey is a version of the infamous ironwork sign that cynically greeted the victims of Auschwitz, except here ‘Arbeit macht frei’ is replaced by ‘Reparationen machen frei’. A rightwing television station is responsible for the poster, demanding Germany pay reparations for the Second World War; a view popularly held across Poland. Of course, this is the capital, which like most capital cities tends to be more liberal, but also the heart of power. Huge antigovernment protests have taken place in Warsaw, most notably the ‘black protests’ against punitive laws forbidding abortion. Scrawled in felt-tip beneath the poster’s tasteless parody is the response of a passerby, offended by the appropriation: ‘This is how nationalism ends’. I consider the posters, peeling and plastered over each other, vying for terrestrial attention, against what I have just experienced high above. They make a succinct visual that says as much about Poland’s fractured psyche in 2017 as most of the art I will encounter. I followed my visit to Krasiński’s studio with an evening of events at POLIN, Warsaw’s museum of Polish Jewish history. First is the premiere of Israeli artist Yael Vishnizki Levi’s short film Intimacy (2017), a shadow play set in a prison and based on a meeting between the artist’s grand-

ArtReview

straight down the middle to form a portico, pill packets are used as wall insulation. It reflects a current trend I have noticed in Warsaw, from Hanna Rechowicz’s decorated wooden scenes of exotic fauna at BWA Warszawa, ˙ to Monika Drozyńska’s subversive serwetki (embroidered linens, a staple of traditional Polish homes) at Biuro Wystaw: a resurgence of assemblage, conceptualised folk traditions and dreck that I associate with the film Sanatorium pod klepsydra˛ (The Hourglass Sanatorium, 1973, directed by Wojciech Has) or the art of Władysław Hasior (1928–99). It is interesting that these methods were developed by artists during the 1960s and 70s, who were arguably still responding to the devastation of the Second World War, and that they should be in fashion once again.

And the chicks…

above Detail of Honorata Martin’s Wikiup, 2017, on view at Zachȩta National Gallery of Art as part of the exhibition for Deutsche Bank’s Spojrzenia award

father and Poland’s former leader Władysław Gomułka. As the film ends, the audience is summoned by the sound of a woman singing in the unmistakably plaintive tones of a Jewish song. Outside the auditorium, chairs are arranged in front of a table with microphones, water glasses, a selection of books; a seemingly typical setup for a panel discussion. There’s no dimming of the lights or anything to suggest a spectacle, but what follows is possibly an hour (it is always a good sign when you lose track of time) of transportive song, delivered by the three talented performers of the Urban Research Theater’s Judaica project. Lyrics range from traditional stories to excerpts from the team’s research into Jewish identity across the globe. The performers gradually interact with the books, furniture and space, and members of the audience spontaneously join in when they know the songs. I left POLIN and walked back alone through the former ghetto, full of the reverberations of this embodied excavation and sharing of knowledge.

As I exit past a flagpole sculpture by Axelrad, I think of the word ‘Pole’ in English, sometimes uttered with an angry, othering inference when talking about Polish migrants in Britain: ‘we’re sick of Poles taking our jobs!’ Since my Polish dad encouraged me to apply for dual nationality (his paranoia proving correct after the British referendum to leave the European Union), I am now a Londoner who is officially a ‘Pole’ too. Though I don’t feel it strongly in Warsaw, Poland’s hyper-Catholic, nationalist atmosphere is hostile to anyone outside heteronormativity, let alone

Turn right At Zachȩta National Gallery of Art, the emboldened rise of white supremacy reverberates in a new film by Ewa Axelrad, who is nominated alongside Przemek Branas, Agata Kus, Honorata Martin and Łukasz Surowiec for the biannual Spojrzenia (Views), the Deutsche Bank Award for Polish artists under the age of thirty-six. Exposing, perhaps, the true self-perception beneath the alt-right’s seemingly conventional white polo-shirt uniform, Axelrad works with more recognisable tribal accoutrements, such as flagpoles and armour. Shtamah #1 (2017) (the word originates in the German stamm, meaning ‘tribe’) draws on anthropologist Ludwik Stomma’s research into what Axelrad quotes in the exhibition text as ‘brotherhood in arms, athletic love, contempt for the “other”, the uniform in place of mawkish conscience’. The film begins with an image of a pale, waxy body vest, penetrated by flagpoles that smoothly extend into the infinite. I feel the film’s thunderous, hand-drummed beat in my chest as a woman’s hand appears, gently feeling and blending in with the surface of the ‘flesh’. The camera zooms in on her finger as it proceeds to gouge a hole through the vest, working with a determination that is at once violent and erotic. Following this, Honorata Martin’s ramshackle hut Wikiup (2017), meticulously created using the entire contents of her grandmother’s apartment, has a calming but wistful effect. An old carved chair is sliced

ArtReview

above Warsaw from the rooftops below Warsaw from the street

Call for entries Entry by digital submission only Submission deadline 14 February 2018 roy.ac/submit

Art Made Now

Summer Exhibition 2018

an ‘indigenous’ racial profile, but it has not always been so. Therefore, I was touched by the exhibition I is another at Arton Foundation, which pairs the androgynous self-portraits of openly gay artist Krzysztof Niemczyk (1938–94) with the film Flesh To White To Black To Flesh (1968) by the better-known (outside Poland, at least) American artist Bruce Nauman. In both cases, the artists use makeup to reveal a deeper truth. Kraków-based Niemczyk was variously called a genius (by no less than Cricot 2 Theatre founder Tadeusz Kantor), Situationist, avant-gardist and madman, but he evades categorisation. The range of his output, from photographs of a heavily made-up Niemczyk through to his kitsch cubist paintings testify to this difficulty, not least a drawing made when he was fourteen years old of his courtesan alter-ego. She was to rise again in the epic, posthumously published novel The Courtesan and the Chicks (1965–68), a radical, ribald satire of Poland during the 1960s. Nauman’s film is positioned ‘centre-stage’ in this exhibition. The seats facing the screen are encircled by a black curtain. Another curtain hangs behind this one, creating a narrow, concentric passage where Niemczyk’s portraits are (almost furtively) displayed. It has the provocative effect of relegating Niemczyk to the aisles, a space he has often inhabited. Would it not have been interesting to reverse the expectation? Perhaps he is happier behind the curtains, waiting to pounce.

above The author’s (invited) addition to Bernard Schröder’s Revelation-Revolution all photographs Courtesy the author

above Detail of Odile Bernard Schröder’s Revelation-Revolution installation at Pola Magnatyczne below A Krzysztof Niemczyk self-portrait in I is another, at Arton Foundation

I conclude my trip to Warsaw across the Vistula river in the leafy district of Saska Kȩpa, populated between the wars by outward-looking middle classes who built modernist villas and named streets after places around the world, and historically home to embassies and consulates. It retains this character. As coincidence has it, it is to Londyńska (London) street that I am headed to visit Pola Magnatyczne, a gallery whose identity is delineated by poised yet challenging curating. The sculptural installation Revelation-Revolution (2017) by Odile Bernard Schröder is staged as an aesthetic and thematic response to Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Raniszewski’s Destructive Culture (1977), an installation of the pair’s controversial action- and photography-based work, which I reviewed during last year’s Gallery Weekend (see ArtReview December 2016). In these works, created amid the most recent French presidential campaign, Bernard Schröder employs a range of photographic techniques, drawing on esoteric traditions and chemical happenstance to evoke the quasi-magical manipulations of a modern democracy. Still-lifes of hallucinogenic mandrakes are installed alongside distorted images of Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Images of demonstrations are rephotographed from screens, printed onto old-stock paper, then laid upon suspended steel surfaces that conjure Macbooks, or razor blades. The opaque luminescence of a wall-mounted steel panel changes colour and appears to warp around me as I approach it. A similar panel is accompanied by a large nail, offered as a primitive tool for visitors to carve the hackneyed political slogans of their respective countries across its surface. In an inevitably ugly scrawl, I scratch ‘Brexit means Brexit’. I remember Krakowiak’s equally vicious diamond, and think again of the faint scars left by tremendous gestures while champagne was quaffed. Phoebe Blatton is a writer based in Berlin

ArtReview

Giorgio Griffa A Continuous Becoming 26 January — 8 April 2018

Free admission Camden Arts Centre Arkwright Road London NW3 6DG camdenartscentre.org

Supported by the Giorgio Griffa Exhibition Circle With special thanks to Casey Kaplan, New York and the Italian Cultural Institute, London Giorgio Griffa, Canone Aureo 887 (detail), 2014. Photo: Jean Vong Courtesy Archivio Giorgio Griffa and Casey Kaplan, New York

Interview

Brian Belott by Ross Simonini

Park Nights: Brian Belott, with Billy Grant, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Matthew Thurber and Tyson Reeder (detail), 2016, performances. Photo: Yousef Eldin. Courtesy Serpentine Pavilion, London

ArtReview

“Someone collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia from the 1930s. That would be Dada”

Brian Belott. Photo: Chris Sanders. Courtesy Performa 17, New York

January & February 2018

In November, Brian Belott performed People Pie Pool, a massive ensemble work commissioned for Performa 17 in New York. The performance involved (in part) five comedians, a handful of basketball players, four academic lecturers, exercise instructors, an improv troupe, dancers, marching bands and an ‘orchestra’ that performed with can openers, golf balls and tissues. In this way, the event recalled a vaudevillesque variety show, alternating between old-fashioned knee-slapping fun and abstract stretches of tumbling, punishing absurdity. At one point in the evening, Belott staged a parody of an art auction in which paintings by major artists (Joe Bradley, Katherine Bernhardt, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Eddie Martinez, etc – all friends of Belott) were destroyed on stage and run through a paper shredder. Finally, each painting was stuffed into a single plastic pen to be gifted back to each artist. Belott narrated the ordeal with the kind of stuttering, pun-filled nonsense and slapstick humour that characterises many of his performances, including the preposterous ‘fashion show’ held at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2016. The auction, with its anarchic approach to the market, also recalled the stunt Belott used to raise funds for the event, in which he travelled to various museums in New York (the Whitney, the New Museum, etc) and sold his work for ‘arbitrary’ sums. Belott identifies his impulses as ‘Dada’ and seeks to invent a perfect mess of an experience, something like what Andy Kaufman achieved

for his famed show at Radio City Music Hall in 1979, in which he took the entire audience out for milk and cookies. To do so, Belott often works with a community of artists and friends in New York, including – full disclosure – this author. For People Pie Pool, I conducted a children’s choir while standing in the middle of the audience. I’ve also collaborated and exhibited with Brian, and once, at Performa 15, we (along with 30 other singers) surrounded a ridiculously long dining table of benefactors and demanded to be fed by them. Belott is also well known for his paintings, which, like his performances, are both thrilling and uncomfortable to experience. He likes to prod his viewer’s sense of good taste with glittery, gaudy colours and childish humour. He usually works in long-term series, most of which collide painting against a collage of dollar-store materials, including socks, wall fans, rocks, calculators, remote controls, marshmallows and hair gel. The work strikes a curious balance between the simple chromatic pleasures of Henri Matisse and the crude energy of art brut. Belott’s most recent exhibition, Dr. Kid President Jr. (2017), at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise People Pie Pool (detail), 2017, performance. Photo: Chris Sanders. Courtesy Performa 17, New York

ArtReview

in New York, was a kind of conceptual ‘collage’ of children’s art. For part of the show, Belott forged paintings of his favourite children’s-art. This work sat alongside hundreds of masterful children’s drawings, culled from the astonishing archive of art educator Rhoda Kellogg. The show also included art classes for youth in the surrounding Harlem community, most of whom plastered their own scribbles and finger paintings on the wall. Together, the onslaught of work created a bewildering soup of authorship that left most viewers unsure of what they were looking at. As he often does, Belott had cloaked himself in the mundane, this time inhabiting the underappreciated artistry of the young, those invisible outsider artists living among us. The gesture was not unlike his approach to recent performances, in which he has transformed himself into a collagist working at the directorial level, an impresario attempting to spin an impossible number of plates just to watch them all come crashing onto the floor. Brian Belott What are you doing? Ross Simonini I’m calling you. BB But you just called a second ago and hung up. RS That was an accident. BB This is so inprofessional. Let it be known that the interviewer is inprofessional. RS I don’t think that’s a word.

BB It is. RS So it’s been a few weeks since we last saw each other at People Pie Pool. What do you make of it all now? BB It could’ve been a fever dream for all I know. The whole experience was hell for me. It’s been half a year of working on this goddamned thing. My studio is filled with debris and all I’ve heard in response is ‘good job!’ That’s meaningless to me. I’m too callous for all those niceties. The only comment I remember is one woman came up to me and said the performance reminded her of The Eric Andre Show [surreal television show on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim]. And that’s exactly what I wanted. RS Organised chaos. BB It’s all mashups and unlikely combos. He’ll have someone who’s doing speed metal vocals against a priest reading from Corinthians. RS The same kind of juxtapositions going on in your show. BB I’ve been doing this stuff like since high school, since the 80s, collaging people together. I’d do Dada-inspired performances with poets and dancers and a brass quintet scattered in the audience. I wanted to simmer all different attitudes. I wanted a smorgasbord. I wanted endless confusion, and I was obsessed with Dada. RS What did you pitch to Performa as the commission? BB I told them Charles Ives [composer], Ernie Kovacs [comedian] and the Marx Brothers.

That model, the Marx Brothers model, which is essentially three hyper brothers who were all forced into the vaudeville circuit by their pushy mother – this is something I live by. You know how I am. My friends and I have a certain type of brat-pack thing, and at the drop of a hat, I can create a reverberating fugue of calamity with them. Me and [Matthew] Thurber will go nuts and then Billy [Grant] will join in, and for a few seconds you have the Marx Brothers. RS You think of a lot of your work through the lens of Dada. BB I couldn’t help but think about how Dada is celebrating its 105th birthday. Dada is old. It’s a grandfather, and I wanted to commemorate it. But then I started thinking about people like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. These were revolutionaries. But once they had achieved the badass, transgressive work that put them on the map, both of them went back to making traditional classical music. RS Neoclassical. Why do you think they’d do that? Park Nights: Brian Belott, with Billy Grant, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Matthew Thurber and Tyson Reeder (detail), 2016, performances. Photo: Yousef Eldin. Courtesy Serpentine Pavilion, London

January & February 2018

BB Because keeping your twenty-yearold sharp teeth bared is hard work. Eventually you just want to go back to loving art. And I think that’s an inevitability about being a punk. It’s not a sustainable thing. So commemorating Dadaism is a strange thing. If you’re going to commemorate something that happened in 1915, you know that by now all those punks are old and on their yachts. Maybe the true ones are dead. So the act of historicising Dada is against Dadaism itself. The very notion of Dadaism is an uncontainable wild beast, and now it’s being commemorated? Someone like Tristan Tzara, a wizard, the trailblazing father of it, he knew true Dadas are against Dada. It’s so Tao… or what’s his name? RS Lao Tzu. BB God bless you. RS So how’d you address this? BB Well, initially I just wanted people to go crazy onstage, having conniption fits, but I realised that everyone had already seen that. That’s not Dada any more. So I started hiring people who would not be seen as freaks, or punks. Sober-minded people. But the funny thing, the physicist talking about supercolliders, and the lecture about cryptocurrency – these subjects are far out. RS Did you actually direct anyone? BB I just wanted people to do whatever would excite them most, whatever makes them most

Dr. Kid President Jr., 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

ArtReview

comfortable. Wear whatever clothes you like. I think, to make a real event, it has to go beyond the subjective wishes of the director. I tried to make a piece that is beyond my taste. I think that’s an important, generous, dimensional way to make art. Sometimes. RS Do you try to do that in your paintings as well? BB I do, when I integrate found photography or amateur work, like in the kids-art show, or when I use found sound. I’m always going to grab for what turns me on sensually. But you can also go against that, towards gross subject matter. I think always choosing materials that define your own taste is limiting. It’s just checking a series of boxes, and that’s not what I want to be about as an artist. I think too many artists are just doing what makes them feel good. In my mind, an artist is someone who travels through culture and ideas and attempts to challenge the mind, to go to uncomfortable territories. RS Who does that? BB [Mike] Kelley. [Bruce] Nauman. Artists that switch it up. They don’t focus on the same material. They try and pick subject matters they don’t understand. And so, to finish what we were talking about earlier, to truly be Dada is to do that, and to be truly Dada would require exploring something totally contrarian to Dada as we know it, like an accountant for the military, or something incredibly dry and horrible. Like someone collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia from the 1930s. That would be Dada. It would have to be opposed to its own history. RS Dissonance. BB Yeah. RS And you could endlessly get off on this dissonance. BB Yeah, I guess, until that becomes such a style that I just need to become a solitary artist, like [Giorgio] Morandi, and then I’ll just spend the last 30 years of my life painting still lifes. RS The final manoeuvre. BB But you have to have an audience for this to work. There have to be expectations you can foil. Otherwise it’s just your inside joke with a small group of friends. Something has to be on record. I’m not interested in art that only three people know about. RS But when you leave five-minute long messages on my phone, singing and ranting – that’s a private artwork. It’s on record, but it’s for an audience of one. BB Yes, but at the end of the day I’m interested in what separates the professional artist from the pedestrian artist. A grandmother can bring

me to tears with her poetry, but she is not an artist. To be an artist, you have to clock in daily, and show your work to a community. Everybody is not an artist. RS But what about your children’s art show? You brought kids from the neighbourhood into the space, hung their work on the walls of a major gallery and called it art. BB Everyone is an artist until a certain point. Then you pass through the doorway and you have to work to be an artist. What’s interesting about that is that kids who can barely form a sentence can make art as good as any Ab-Ex painters, but then meanwhile, you have all the Ab-Exers drinking themselves to death to try and get back to where the kids were. RS When does this door close? BB The kid who is thirteen or sixteen will not make as interesting a finger-painting as younger kids. RS Do you remember when this change happened for you?

At the end of the day I’m interested in what separates the professional artist from the pedestrian artist. A grandmother can bring me to tears with her poetry, but she is not an artist. To be an artist, you have to clock in daily, and show your work to a community. Everybody is not an artist BB Yeah, I got extremely pretentious. I started drawing drippy Dalí stuff. The awkward time is when I wanted to grow up too quickly. I think all artists want everything to happen immediately. A kid wants to hurry up and be accepted as an adult, get a car, have sex. It’s how people are. And the hurry-up attitude is also in the parents and the teachers. They’re pushing the kids along. It’s happening now more than ever. People are spending $40,000 on kindergarten! ‘My kid learned the ABCs at 14 months! My kid can spell ‘xylophone’ at 18 months!’ But Rhoda Kellogg, for instance, said, no… slow down… leave the kids alone. They can make brilliant art if you just respect them. Do not give them crap materials. Give them expensive materials. It’s amazing what she did. A trailblazing visionary! Her collection is more important than all of Henry Darger’s work, and yet

January & February 2018

she is unknown. She expanded procedures in classrooms, while that little pervert did nothing. RS So how can you celebrate professionalism on one hand and naivete on the other? BB You have to draw a line in the sand. An artist is someone who is cursed to make art. It’s not like breathing. RS But you’re not cursed to do it professionally. You could walk away at any time. Why don’t you? BB It wouldn’t matter! I’d still make art. For instance, some of my favourite work is the sound scribbles that I do. I walk around with a tape recorder and imitate all sorts of personalities, commercials, psyches, musics, genres. So even if I stopped making saleable paintings, I would have to continue to make these sound things. Or else I would hate myself. Or I would have to get into broadcasting or voice acting. I’d have to use my voice or body or colour sense. That’s what I’ve been doomed to do. In high school I worked at [retro-diner restaurant chain] Johnny Rockets at the mall, and the only way I could survive it was by making up jokes and stories, doing bad breakdancing, speaking in a fake Irish accent to customers. I’d do that even if I was in jail. I’d imitate the warden. It’s the way I process the boring world around me. RS Do you remember when you decided you wanted to be professional about art? BB I was spoiled. My father was an artist and by example he encouraged me. He had a studio. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom with him. He also painted the house, decorated it, filled it with humour, music and food. His presence as an artist permeated every aspect of how I grew up. And everyone naysayed him. My grandparents told him to get a real job, which only made me want to show them up. I was affected by that. My father really suffered to be an artist. He was cursed. He became an artist when it really wasn’t popular. It was the 1970s. His parents were doctors. He was cursed more than I am. RS Could you break the curse? If you made work privately, would that help? BB No. It’s necessary to make work and hand it to the community. You have to deal with the frame, the install. You have to learn to talk about it, do the press release and be the face that stands next to the work. Making art alone is only half the job. Ross Simonini is an artist, writer, musician and documentarian based in New York and California

Photograph taken at Artistree

Participating Galleries 10 Chancery Lane 1335Mabini 303 Gallery 47 Canal A Miguel Abreu Acquavella Aike Alisan Sabrina Amrani Antenna Space Applicat-Prazan Arario Alfonso Artiaco Artinformal Aye B Balice Hertling Beijing Commune Bergamin & Gomide Bernier/Eliades Blindspot Blum & Poe Boers-Li Tanya Bonakdar Isabella Bortolozzi Ben Brown Gavin Brown Buchholz Buchmann C Gisela Capitain Cardi carlier gebauer Carlos/Ishikawa Chambers Chemould Prescott Road Yumiko Chiba Chi-Wen Mehdi Chouakri Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Pilar Corrias Alan Cristea Chantal Crousel

D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo de Sarthe Dirimart The Drawing Room E Eigen + Art Eslite Gallery Exit Experimenter F Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel Fox/Jensen G Gagosian Gajah Galerie 1900–2000 gb agency Gerhardsen Gerner Gladstone Gmurzynska Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Richard Gray Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Grotto H Hakgojae Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Herald St Hive Xavier Hufkens I Ingleby Ink Studio Taka Ishii J Annely Juda K Kaikai Kiki Kalfayan

Karma International Paul Kasmin Sean Kelly Tina Keng Kerlin Kohn König Galerie David Kordansky Tomio Koyama Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Krinzinger Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Pearl Lam Simon Lee Leeahn Lehmann Maupin Lelong Lévy Gorvy Liang Lisson Long March Luxembourg & Dayan M Maggiore Magician Space Mai 36 Edouard Malingue Marlborough Mazzoleni Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Francesca Minini Victoria Miro Mizuma Stuart Shave/Modern Art The Modern Institute mother‘s tankstation Mujin-to N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

Nadi Nagel Draxler Nanzuka Taro Nasu Nature Morte neugerriemschneider nichido Anna Ning Franco Noero O Nathalie Obadia OMR One and J. Lorcan O‘Neill Ora-Ora Ota Roslyn Oxley9 P P.P.O.W Pace Pace Prints Paragon Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Pi Artworks PKM Plan B Platform China Project Fulfill R Almine Rech Nara Roesler Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Rossi & Rossi Lia Rumma S SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle ShanghART ShugoArts Side 2 Sies + Höke Silverlens

Skarstedt Soka Sprüth Magers Starkwhite STPI Sullivan+Strumpf T Take Ninagawa This Is No Fantasy + dianne tanzer Timothy Taylor team Daniel Templon The Third Line TKG+ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni V Two Palms Vadehra Van de Weghe Susanne Vielmetter Vitamin W Waddington Custot Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube White Space Beijing Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Y Yamamoto Gendai Yavuz Z Zeno X David Zwirner Insights 55 313 Art Project Aicon Asia Art Center Bank Baton Beijing Art Now

Dastan‘s Basement du Monde EM Espace Fine Arts Literature Gow Langsford HDM Johyun Maho Kubota Leo MEM Mind Set Mori Yu Sakshi Misa Shin Standing Pine Star Tang Wooson Yang Zilberman Discoveries A Thousand Plateaus a.m. space A+ Contemporary Capsule Commonwealth and Council Don Ghebaly High Art Hannah Hoffman Jhaveri JTT Kadel Willborn Emanuel Layr Michael Lett Josh Lilley MadeIn mor charpentier Öktem&Aykut Project Native Informant ROH Projects SKE Société Tarq Urano Various Small Fires

Grayson Perry Making Meaning

Hold Your Beliefs Lightly, 2011 Computerised embroidery on cotton and silk Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

January 15 – April 27, 2018 Major works in ceramic, tapestry, sculpture & etching By appointment 772 388 4071 The Gallery at Windsor 3125 Windsor Boulevard Vero Beach, FL 32963 windsorflorida.com/gallery

Future Greats Frontiers

in association with

Introduction

Those of you who are familiar with ArtReview’s annual Future Greats issue might be tempted to think that what’s to come is simply a list of artists in whom you should invest your time and/or your money, selected by people who will ensure that it’s worth your while to invest your time and/or your money in them. After all, that’s the way this art business generally works, right? Wrong. Or you’d be wrong when it comes to the Future Greats business, at least. As much as the exercise of asking a series of artists, curators and writers to select an artist who they think is producing interesting work does provide a list that might be used in the manner discussed, it also serves to document new ways of looking and thinking about art. So among this year’s featured artists you’ll find not a person, but a mode of expression: the placards created by protesters at various rallies last year (which, of course, in their directness may be more personal than almost any other work in this issue). On the subject of the personal, you’ll also find, among the artists that follow, someone who refuses to sell his found-object sculptures, a group that doesn’t make objects but curates workshops that take place under a flyover and an artist selected on the basis of an intense encounter with a single work. This year marks the second of ArtReview’s ongoing partnership with K11 Art Foundation, an organisation that nurtures artistic talent within the Greater China region, promotes it to the world in general and exposes new audiences to art via its galleries throughout the region and, more particularly, its ‘art mall’ concept. The latter allows for exhibitions to take place in a retail environment. Not in the sense of the exhibition taking place in a commercial gallery; rather in the sense of the exhibition being staged within an environment other than the conventional white cube or museum. An environment that people who don’t visit museums on a regular basis find more comfortable to inhabit. And perhaps one of the common threads in this year’s selection of artists is that art becomes more interesting when it maintains a close connection to life.

ArtReview

ce u d o r t n i e r, w a e y h c a e f you ing o k n n i n i h g t e s b r o e t h u At t trib n o c r u e o m s a t s s i t e r h a t f t o A ut for. o a group e y e n a ing p e uch e k m e s a b s d i l t u r o a h s that s i s a b e h t ask n e o w d , n s t a c , e e j tim ut ob o b a s i key t i e s m a o s s a e e s d i ropo p about o t s t s i t r that fa e o m p e u h t o r a g o r ted t c e anothe n n o c s t p w. e o c n n t o h c g i r d n n ctio u d words a o r p t r a nt to ded a n t o r p o s p e r m i e s v s ha t seem s i t r a ed d n e t e i t v h n i g i e e h h t f , me o i t a t This year a : ’ s r rontie f ‘ s of f e o p y a t e d n i e e e h w t to bet – s r e d r ons i o t b a t n u , o s r b u a o eighb n concern , e c a p s l efia d n f o o s r e e s p n , e s s our s a identitie h w o h oes ces – d r u w o o s h s d w n e a ged, and n n a h c s n o i gency is a v i t d a h d n w a , d s dee n i nition , r O ? g n i k ifting a h s m t e r h a t t c o t e ation l this aff e r n i e v a ing h iers? t k n a o m r t f r r a o t s h mig darie n u o b , s r e bord f o s n o i t o n , we o t s e f i n a m mini s i h t r o f t n riter i o w p h g c n n i t e r r F a t t by n e As a s m e t a t s y g r n i e p w p o i l l l s o f e e h t s to t e used th g t a h t e us n o o i r , u c c e r r i e e P h s t and s George n o i t i d n o er c i t n o r f f ry. o a n e i g a m i natur e nd th a l a e r e h t elision of PTO Frontiers

m o r f d e d i v i d e r a s e i r t n u o . C s r e i t n o r f y b r e h e t i u one anot q s i r e i t n o r f a g n i s s o n r a C : o d o t g n i h t e v i t l o a i m r e e t n a a m e d a m , t i m i l y r a n i h c i imag h w r e i r r a b n e d o o w y l a l a e by r r e v e n s i s n e p p a h t i as o t s t r o p r u p t i e n i l n e z on the o d w e f a t u b , t n e s e r s p i h re t s r e t e m f o s d e r d n u h h r g o u o n e s i , t i f o t a h t r o e n d e i v s e , g n i h t y r e v e e g n a h c to . e p a c s the land c e r e P s e – Georg 56

ArtReview Frontiers

Terreyro Coreográfico selected by Bernardo Mosqueira Bernardo Mosqueira is an independent curator based in Rio de Janeiro where, in 2017, he cofounded the off-space Solar dos Abacaxis

Celebração da Terra Vermelha (Celebration of the Red Earth), a choreography led by the Tupinambás and Guaraní people at the 2016 Baixo Libertas happening

Terreyro Coreográfico is an ever-evolving group of artists based in São Paulo that was founded in 2014 with the goal of investigating and shaping public space. This they do using various means, among them architecture, choreography and public programming. Their aim is to create public space that is not defined relative to ‘private space’, developing temporary learning communities that mix ecologies of marginal knowledge: people, references and practices co-present in Brazil, including those related to the Afro-Brazilian religious matrix, native Brazilian social wisdom, different oriental philosophies and spiritualities, classical Greek theatre, the anthropophagy of Brazilian Modernism, the digital culture, contemporary dance, permaculture principles, etc. In 2015 the group occupied an empty space under an overpass, Baixo Libertas, in the Bixiga district of São Paulo. It spent several months engaging with and listening to the flows of humanity and capital that passed by: from the needs of homeless people to the desires of the real-estate market, from the memory and official history of the site to the orixá, ghosts, animal spirits and old indigenous forces that haunt and impregnate the surrounding architecture. The work

developed there – meetings and social activities, held together under the title Canteyro de Obras – was a constant process of learning from the place, remodelling the environment, dealing with visible and invisible forces, inviting other groups to collaborate, developing multiartistic practices and working on collective ways of learning. This experimental, insurgent and celebrative character was inherited directly from the nearby Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona. As with the seminal tropicalist theatre company, TC strives to create its own rituals and vocabulary in which mythology, philosophy and the material exist in parity. Taking as its motto the phrase ‘To the public what is of the public’, the TC is currently fighting for the creation of a new park, in an area of 11,000sqm attached to the Teatro Oficina, on which two towers, each more than 100 metres tall, are on the verge of being erected. In a time that is witnessing violent reinforcement of identity and the evident failure of the traditional strategies of political struggle, the TC shows its relevance by cultivating radical co-presence, dealing with the material and magical contradictions and believing in the collective transformation of spaces in the direction of a fairer and more pleasant togetherness.

January & February 2018

Terreyro Coreográfico creates its own rituals and vocabulary, in which mythology, philosophy and the material exist in parity

Meeting held during the 2015 Baixo Libertas happening. Photo: Luanda Vanucchi

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Feira dos Prazeres (Fair of Pleasures) held at the 2015 Baixo Libertas happening. Photo: Daniel Kairoz

A screening of work by Harun Farocki at the temporary Cine-MA-Ágora, held during the 2015 Baixo Libertas happening. Courtesy Goethe-Institut

January & February 2018

Choreography on the land surrounding Teatro Oficina, São Paulo. Photo: Camila Picolo

Orixá, ghosts, animal spirits and old indigenous forces haunt and impregnate the surrounding architecture

Protest and action addressing social cleansing of Brazil, staged at the 2017 Baixo Libertas happening. Photo: Heber Biella

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An action by Terreyro Coreográfico and the Opavivará collective on Avenida 23 de Maio, São Paulo, as part of the 2016 Festival Contemporâneo de Dança. Photo: Luanda Vannuchi

January & February 2018

Khalil El Ghrib I first encountered the work of veteran artist Khalil El Ghrib at AL MAQAM Art Residence in Tahanaoute, a village near the Atlas Mountains on the outskirts of Marrakech. It had a little room with a permanent display showcasing El Ghrib’s delicate work. That work comprised little pieces of decomposing objects, made out of bread, paper, etc, that nevertheless projected an allure that drew me to them. A week later, I drove with a friend to Asilah, a nine-hour train journey from Marrakech, to meet the artist. Over a long dinner we discussed everything from his Darwish-like (ascetic) lifestyle to his love of classical Arabic poetry and his devotion to the writer Khalil Gibran; all this via the tale of how he started making art at the age of seven with the encouragement of his family, and the ethics of his art and artmaking. I had yet to encounter a prophet in art, one who lives by what he preaches; El Ghrib was finally it.

Dematerialisation is the essence of his practice. His preoccupation with and advocacy of the death of things, primarily objects, is fascinating. He simply states, “If we humans die, shouldn’t objects die too?” El Ghrib refuses, on principle, to sell his artwork. He is recently retired from a lifetime of teaching history and geography at a local school. He talks about how he has lived a humble life with his family, how he consciously decoupled his love of art from the limits of materiality. He works primarily with impoverished materials that he collects or ‘adopts’ on his daily journey walking the shores of his hometown. He applies minor interventions to the collected ephemera. The results are small sculptures made with bread, string, inscribed paper and other materials that are exposed to time, moisture and oxidation. Despite being dainty and insubstantial, these objects carry a potency: they consolidate life, death, time and obsolescence all at once.

Two stones with imprints, 2017, stone. Photo: Marco Pinarelli. Courtesy Ashkal Alwan, Beirut

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selected by Reem Fadda Reem Fadda is an independent curator based in Ramallah, Palestine, and Amman, Jordan. She was previously curator of the 6th Marrakech Biennale and Associate Curator, Middle Eastern Art, for the Abu Dhabi Project of the Solomon R. Guggenheim. Last year she won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement and curated Jerusalem Lives, the inaugural exhibition at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit on the West Bank

Three manuscripts lined with paper, 2017, manuscript and cardboard. Photo: Marco Pinarelli. Courtesy Ashkal Alwan, Beirut

One manuscript tied with string, no date, paper and wood, 2 × 5 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2018

Blood and seawater Underlined in a Rachel Carson book somewhere on my bookshelf is a paragraph that discusses the similarities between human blood and seawater, a remnant of life’s origins in the sea. I imagine that inside our body we carry the sea wherever we go. But I want to flip this thought. Maybe it’s not me carrying the sea, but the sea who has shaped itself as me. I am trying to imagine how to lose this distinction between self and our environments: how to imagine that you are the sea, or a forest, or the atmosphere. – David Horvitz 64

Frontiers ArtReview

rior e t n i r e d r o The b

ma. a r d a , e c n rforma e p a s i r e so vast d s t e s h t i The bor w lls, farce, a d w n e a y y e d d e n g lights a Both tra d o o fl l l a ’s osed s it p e m c o a l c p m n i e t o tha just a p ’s t bout i a e r m e e h o w p e A s l . while e en wire k c i h c d ane, n r a b s m r e e w m o a fl s of wild order i b e h T . e r ere, e h h r w e t s n e e o ] g y what You ma [ . y d o b . Open r a o i s r a e t e l n i b a s i e perm e border h T . e r ough e r h h t t o l l g e ’t w n s o l l but d ave wi w e h oott f r d u n o a y r e e h s t o could l to [an] O u o y : d i a s ey house h a t , y e d o m b o h y r r you way. Eve a y rag d n e i n i r r k a s c a e r b e he bord ing and T . l e d a t i town. c n i a , d p n u a h d e d r shutte y raise r e v e y b ft o d al banner hel rling a D e s s e J – Artifice Frontiers a nd borders are imagin Yet crossin ary. g a border i s a material event, an e xperience of the line divides art that ifice from r eality. Perf the crossin orming g is what m atters, obje are gather cts ed in the p rocess. Arc are arrays hives of baggage lost during these cros sings, wait ing to be p up at anoth icked er event of crossing, o to be lost a nly gain. The artist a s a produc er is an arg of artifice. onaut – Sudarsha n Shetty Frontiers

Turiya Magadlela I first encountered Turiya Magadlela’s work at the FNB Joburg Art Fair in 2015, where – as the FNB prizewinner, judged by the highly respected curators Bisi Silva and Koyo Kouoh – her installation of awkwardly stacked prison beds and institutional sheeting received pride of place. To be frank, I was not overwhelmed. Although the work had considerable presence, beds have been the subject of so many installations over the years. At the time, I also saw some of Magadlela’s early pantyhose works, which I thought were more original in their materiality. It was in September 2017, in a show at Blank Projects in Cape Town, that I really reacted strongly to her new work however. The somewhat tentative quality of the earlier pantyhose works had given way to a sophisticated and assured use of her fragile yet strong material, with its intimate feminine associations. The looping arcs of translucent fabric in sombre black stretched over canvas in the series My womb is at fault (2015) suggested not only the anguished bodily reference of the title, but a maze of dark underground passages from which one might not emerge, or an unsolvable intellectual conundrum.

The nylon pantyhose stretched over canvas produce remarkably powerful abstracts, sometimes joyful and exuberant, sometimes sombre. The material visually transcends its beginnings as women’s underwear, yet the viewer’s knowledge of its history, and the way in which the fabric has been cut and stitched and stretched, adds layers of meaning to the work which could not have been conveyed by paint. And in a completely different vein, in Sithanda Ubuhlungu intoko igazi nenzondo & Inzonzo zabantsundu ziphumelela ngoba sijabuliswa yimyazwe, intokozo, nokwesaba (2017), blocks of fabric in brilliant scarlet, pinks and oranges suggest an exuberant celebration of womanhood, a refusal to allow oneself to be downtrodden. Magadlela herself has been quoted as saying, ‘I make my work from my personal life experiences. I don’t make social or political commentary. Should my work seem or look political, that makes me happy. I always want to leave it open to the viewer’s personal interpretation, and I find that talking about a work you made or writing about it narrows down the meaning that it is supposed to have.’

Ndi no Vuyo ( for Nirvana), 2017, nylon and cotton pantyhose, thread and sealant on canvas, 120 × 120 cm

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selected by Sue Williamson Sue Williamson is an artist based in Cape Town. Trained as a printmaker, she also works in installation, photography and video. She is part of a pioneering generation of South African artists who started to make work during the 1970s that addressed social change in the apartheid era

Walking towards god (from the series Inequalities), 2017, nylon and cotton pantyhose, thread and sealant on canvas, 120 × 120 cm

My womb is at fault 9, 2015, nylon pantyhose on canvas, 100 × 100 cm

January & February 2018

The way in which the fabric has been cut and stitched and stretched adds layers of meaning to the work which could not have been conveyed by paint

A slave is the little girl who trusted too much (from the series Gazi), 2017, nylon and cotton pantyhose and sealant on canvas, 50 × 50 cm preceding spread Sithanda Ubuhlungu intoko igazi nenzondo, 2017, nylon and cotton pantyhose, thread and sealant on canvas all images Courtesy the artist and Blank Projects, Cape Town

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, r e d r o b e h t s s o r c t ’ We didn s u d e s s o r c r e d r o b the d n a r a e l c e r o m e b n a c g n t i n h t a r o g N i m im e h t n a h t t n e i c e s w e ‘ r p n a g o l s t n e m e v r o e d m r o s t b h e h rig t , r e d r o b e h t s s o r c f o n o i t didn’t a x e n n a e h T ’. s u d e d s n s a A cro S U e h t y b o c i x e M f n o o i f t l a s ha i n o m e d t n e u q e p s o b p u a s f e o th t n e m e s i h c n a r f n e s g i n i s s o and d r c n e e b s a h t a h t y r n a o n i i t g a ula m i e s e h t g n i s s o r c s e r e fi d i l p an m e x e s e i r u t n e c r e o n f i n s e e n h t li f o m s i d a s c i n o y d r n i a t s e d the s t s e f i n a m y r u t n e c h t n ’. t e a te e r g ‘ ’ a c i r e m A ‘ e that mad s a m o h T s i l l i W k n a –H Frontiers

biriken

Lick But Don’t Swallow! (stills from a production video), 2010–12, theatre play. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

selected by Nil Yalter Nil Yalter is a Turkish artist, based in Paris, who works in a variety of media and is a pioneer of feminist art. She is a nominee for the 2018 AWARE Prix d’Honneur

I shut down my heart until the apocalypse, 2016, theatre play. Photo: Ali Guler. Courtesy the artists

Istanbul- and Paris-based artists Melis Tezkan and Okan Urun have worked together as biriken (which translates, roughly, as ‘accumulated’) since 2006. I met Tezkan two years later, when she was researching ‘identities’ and the relationship between the ‘intimate and political’ in video and performance, and, as part of that research, wrote several articles on ‘nomadism’ in my work. During that process we began to collaborate on new works: in 2009, for example, we created and performed Untitled as part of Temps d’Images festival, in Cluj. I’ve also followed biriken’s theatre, performance and video works, as well as its interdisciplinary creations (which also span writing, filmmaking and more general curatorial projects), which are the product of a subversive political commitment and a unique poetic language. The first work that I saw live was the theatre piece Lick But Don’t Swallow! (2010; directed by biriken and written by Özen Yula), which has subsequently been shown in contemporary theatre festivals around the world. In this work, poetic and political engagement is combined with humour – the set of a porn movie becomes a stage for the denunciation of global economic and political systems. The strength of the show comes from the way its storytelling components are layered through a variety of media – video, music, text, dance. But it was biriken’s stage language – both visual and physical – that most impressed me: the way in which the visual power, acting (performative and theatrical at the same time), humour and political aspects of the work combined.

During the past year alone, biriken has written and staged two theatre pieces, in Istanbul and in Paris – I shut down my heart until the apocalypse and THE WEST IS THE BEST – they have created an installation-performance in Istanbul (This is the end, beautiful friend, commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 13) and they’ve produced (written, directed and edited) the videoclip Sanki Hic Durmadi (As If It Never Stopped) for the Turkish band Kim Ki O. This is the end, beautiful friend – inspired by The Doors’ song The End (1967) – is a representative example of biriken’s artistic style. It’s an autobiographical installation-performance that draws on both personal and collective catastrophes. The work focuses on Tezkan and Urun accompanying one another in a rhythm created through light and sound, centred around the act of breathing and holding one’s breath. The layered work suggests two bodies accompanying each other through life, but also of migrants trying to cross a sea or the last minutes of a life or a birth. But its true power comes from its simple uniting of personal and collective images. Biriken’s fusion of different media and its symbiotic, collaborative way of working are a promising indication of future directions for art. In their representations, the complexity and ambiguity of what we know of reality is in the foreground. What makes biriken’s treatment even more original is that this complexity is not just a provocation for self-reflection, but is also present in the emotions, the gender and the attitudes of the subjects they show us.

January & February 2018

The work’s true power comes from its simple uniting of personal and collective images

both I shut down my heart until the apocalypse, 2016, theatre play. Photos, from top: Akif Turgut, Ali Guler. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

Melis Tezkan and Okan Urun (biriken) in This is the end, beautiful friend, 2017, light installation ˙ and performance, Sharjah Biennial 13. Photo: Ipek Çınar. Courtesy the artists

January & February 2018

Amitai Romm

Influencer Sarcophagus 3, 2017, steel, polystyrene, neodymium magnets, acrylic glass, acrylic mirror, UV heating lamp, green cardamom pods, black cardamom pods, earplugs, dimensions variable. Photo: David Stjernholm

Amitai Romm is a dowser for the postapocalyptic generation, using magnetic rods and 3D printers to divine how we might survive in a hybrid ecology. The Danish artist’s drawings, sculptures and installations are understated fantasy, evoking a landscape within which salvaging scrap metal, analysing algae DNA and drawing are all equally necessary activities. Romm reasserts the work of the artist as a form of science-fiction proper: a meeting of two realms of experiment – science and fiction. I first encountered Romm’s work after stumbling into his 2016 show how shall the sea be referred to, at Bianca D’Alessandro gallery in Copenhagen. An incongruous series of small framed photogravure images on worn notebook-paper were all that hung on the walls: two layered drawings that looked like depictions of densely overgrown greenhouses, another a childish portrait of a sea-monkeylike figure. Covering the gallery’s skylights was Blind/Compass (2016): two tarpaulins, each weighed down with puddles of water and a Laserdisc, that sizeable, outdated format for home-video buffs of the 1980s and 90s, with a tiny hole drilled into it and, the list of materials informs us, a small spherical magnet. In another room, a pair of large steel discs, Parable (2016), dominated the room, ungainly satellite dishes with burn marks gathered around their centres. The cumulative effect was quietly unsettling and ambiguously intriguing, leaving us to orient ourselves in a space that felt uprooted and somehow timeless.

This veering between the archaic – invocations of stargazing or ancient methods of orientation – and the constantly receding horizon of new technologies is characteristic of Romm’s work. A full wall of nine of the Parable dishes overlooked his more recent show Hibernation, at the library space Tranen in north Copenhagen, though here each was punctuated by a trilobite fossil. Scattered on the floor throughout the building were a series of low polystyrene boxes, titled Sarcophagi, offering an alternative form of library: the pleasing scent of the star anise, cardamom or cinnamon that sat in some of the boxes being distributed by small ventilation fans, or in others mace spray or plastic earplugs imbued with synthetic grapefruit oil. The drawings here seemed to illustrate Romm’s vision of a possible future more directly, peopled with humanoid figures sprouting countless tubes and complex organic machines producing who knows what gloop. Romm also works within the group Diakron, an assemblage of artists, designers and thinkers, who have set up Primer, an exhibition series hosted on the premises of the biotech company Aquaporin in the Copenhagen suburbs, positioning their group shows – which mix things like medieval biblical woodcuts, midcentury-modern designs and contemporary art – as a form of exploratory research that might benefit those in a lab coat or an artist’s smock. Among these various activities is an open-ended looking that isn’t focused so much on where we’re going as on summoning the spirits in science and the atoms in art, and embracing the tentacled chimeras we create along the way.

ArtReview

selected by Chris Fite-Wassilak Chris Fite-Wassilak is a contributing editor at ArtReview and author of the essay collection Ha-Ha Crystal (2017)

Parable (9pcs), 2017, steel, neodymium magnets, flexicalymene trilobites, dimensions variable. Photo: David Stjernholm

January & February 2018

Influencer Sarcophagus 6, 2017, steel, polystyrene, neodymium magnets, acrylic glass, computer hardware fan, LED light unit, earplugs, synthetic grapefruit oil, dimensions variable. Photo: David Stjernholm

ArtReview

Romm veers between the archaic and the constantly receding horizon of new technologies

top and above Custom book display featuring a Danish National Library copy of Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, 2009. Photos: David Stjernholm and Jakob Emdal respectively all images From Amitai Romm’s exhibition Hibernation, 2017, Tranen, Copenhagen. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2018

Future Greats

Terreyro Coreográfico

biriken

formed in 2014 and is currently based in the neighbourhood of Bixiga, central São Paulo. Most of the collective’s works take place beneath the Viaduto Libertas overpass, inhabiting and cultivating the public space with choreography, dance, discussions, seminars, film samples, reading groups, plantings, etc. Terreyro Coreográfico’s most recent collaborations include performances at the Goethe-Institut (2017), Praça das Artes (2016), Vila Itororó (2015), Casa do Povo (2015) and SubPrefeitura da Sé (2015), all São Paulo.

was formed in 2006 by Istanbul-based artists Okan Urun and Melis Tezkan. Their most recent projects include the installation-performance This is the end, beautiful friend (2017), commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 13 and performed at Istanbloom and SALT Galata (both 2017); the theatre piece I shut down my heart until the apocalypse was presented at Jerk Off festival in Paris in September 2017. They are currently working on their next performance, THE WEST IS THE BEST.

Amitai Romm Khalil El Ghrib lives and works in Copenhagen. His recent exhibitions include a solo show, Hibernation, at Tranen Contemporary Art Center, and a group show, Mediated Matter, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (both Copenhagen, 2017). Romm is one of three finalists for the 2018 Dorothea von Stetten Art Award, which will culminate in a group exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn.

lives and works in Asilah. He teaches Arabic in nearby Tangier and rarely exhibits his artistic work. His works were recently included in Marrakech Biennale 6, however, and the Sharjah Biennial 13’s programme at the Sursock Museum, Beirut.

Turiya Magadlela lives and works in Johannesburg. She has had six solo exhibitions to date: at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Museum Africa, Johannesburg; and Blank Projects, Cape Town. She has participated in recent group exhibitions including Blue Black (Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, 2017) and Simple Passion, Complex Vision: The Darryl Atwell Collection (Gantt Center, Charlotte, 2017). Most recently her work has been included in Looking Back… Moving Forward, anexhibitionatConstitution Hill, Johannesburg, which is on through 28 January.

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Matthew Angelo Harrison selected by Cécile B. Evans Cécile B. Evans is an artist based in London and Berlin whose work often incorporates new technologies, including robotics and AI, to explore the effects of the digital world on how we feel. Her video installation What the Heart Wants (2016) was a centrepiece of the last Berlin Biennale

Mk-004-conjoined, 2017, ceramic, acrylic, aluminium, 22 × 28 × 22 cm

Each time a digital file is copied to a computer, it mutates – taking on or losing a certain amount of ‘computational dust’. Indeed, for some several-thousand years, there has been talk about whether something is being added or taken away in the relationship between humans and the machines they have produced. Historically, the discussion has ignored the wider context of these machines, how they relate, directly, to race, gender, age or ability – the human experience of production. Detroit-based artist Matthew Angelo Harrison squares this discussion, squeezes and doubles it ad infinitum through his own experience, to create effective distances and proximities for viewers to navigate. Harrison’s work is produced using 3D-printing machines, which he has made himself, and by other industrial processes that fold in computational information. The 3D printers, which he considers ‘platforms’, are primarily tasked with making copies of wooden African masks in visible layers of ceramic. Printed from digital scans (already copies), using information inputted by Harrison, each iteration has an identity that can’t be confused with its original. As the iterations continue, forced variations (such as compressions or doublings) are added to the information and documented in each mask’s title, magnifying the difference. Like a file that has been copied, opened and saved in another format, they are respectfully tied to their origins but distinctively not the same. The pressure of authenticity is released and an agency takes its place.

This agency is also generously extended to the viewer. By laying bare the 3D printer for what it is, a platform making three-dimensional objects by stacking two-dimensional layers, Harrison lets the viewer into the agency-building process. Viewers can observe its poetry without being disillusioned by it, a rare encounter in the field of technology. In performances where he is present for days or even weeks in the exhibition, he oversees a live version of this building process. The energy that he creates by moving about the space like a surveyor stays with the works even after he has left, as though the objects become memories of their construction. The labour, and who has performed it, is not erased. The late Suriname-born Dutch artist Stanley Brouwn’s 1970 exhibition Going Through Cosmic Rays at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach consisted of exhibition rooms with seemingly nothing in them. Brouwn insisted they were full of cosmic rays visitors had to walk through – an allusion to the tangible possibility of unperceived matter. One of Harrison’s most recent works, SBrwn_1x1x1 bkgd ; 1x1x1 bkgd (±0.1) (2017), takes on an edition of books by Brouwn as another artefact of meaningful history. When a dimension was needed to determine the length of printed ceramic filament that would layer itself into a box shape to represent the books, he chose the distance from his studio (in central Detroit) to the factory where his mother used to work. This numerical detail has no visibility in the final output but remains as matter sprung from the human desire to construct, from memory, from the movements of the artist. To me, these are Harrison’s cosmic rays.

January & February 2018

The pressure of authenticity is released and an agency takes its place

MK1_002_Scar, 2017, ceramic, acrylic, aluminium, 23 × 20 × 25 cm

ArtReview

SBrwn_1x1x1 bkgd ; 1x1x1 bkgd (±0.1), 2017, 3D-printed ceramics, acrylic, aluminium, 135 × 122 × 43 cm

BKGD: Brouwn, 2017, three books, acrylic, aluminium, 116 × 122 × 43 cm all images Photo: Corine Vermeulen. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

January & February 2018

Dineo Seshee Bopape So complex are the fragile constellations of Dineo Seshee Bopape’s practice that her sculptures evade the easy didacticism of a casual description. But here goes: an egg-shaped form rests alongside a strip of compressed soil decorated with womb-healing herbs and minerals, casts of a uterus and curved lumps of clay rendered by a clenched fist. I first encountered her work in 2015 while we were both on residency at Hospitalfield in Arbroath, Scotland. In conversation, she spoke about sonically mapping the continental rivers of Africa, before shifting focus to talk of “cosmological beliefs” and “voodoo priestesses”. The substance of Bopape’s practice is as various as her intellectual interests, and becomes even more magical as she begins to elaborate. Through her use or misuse of the language of Postconceptualism, Bopape’s work reveals something of the sculpture’s inherent porosity. Forms might feel random, but rarely accidental. For the past year or so, her work has grappled with questions of individual, collective and planetary sovereignty through a broader meditation on the Anthropocene. The outcome is a chorus of codependent forms bound by a sense of containment, displacement and the sociohistorical politics of land and landlessness. While they may not ‘represent’ the artist’s experience of growing up in Polokwane,

South Africa, they appear to speak of a specific use of language and poetics both rooted in personal meaning. The violent objects of collective memory, taken up in the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement’s call to ‘decolonise’ education across South Africa, resonates with Bopape’s ongoing interest in the reconfiguration of a history shorn of its ideological limitations. The trace of Afro-diasporic traditions can be seen in +/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791), presented at the Sharjah Biennial in 2017, a homage to Haiti’s revolution against French colonial rule. This work seems to lay the ground for her contribution to the fourth edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, recently presented in Venice: slabs of soil are covered with feathers, wax, crystals, gold leaf (a reference to the gold rush that led to the founding of Johannesburg), shells and, again, the same fist-indented lumps of clay. Its spiritual aesthetics suggests a kind of ideological inversion of Land art, speaking to the landlessness of Africa’s indigenous majority as an ongoing sociopolitical trauma, and to the dispossession of land under colonial orders that led to precarious conditions of soil. Like the palm-clenched clay, her work mediates between the self and the object; it can be formed into something or simply disintegrate back to dust.

sa___ke lerole, (sa lerole ke___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York, 2016)

ArtReview

selected by Osei Bonsu Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator and writer based in London. He is the curator of the tenth edition of Satellites, titled The Economy of Living Things (2017), a four-artist exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and CAPC Centre for Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, that focuses on revealing migration routes of people, animals, plants, goods and ideas through zones of conflict

sa___ke lerole, (sa lerole ke___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York, 2016)

January & February 2018

222, Phurulloga, 2017 (installation view, Bielefelder Kunstverein, 2017). Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

Bopape’s work mediates between the self and the object; it can be formed into something or simply disintegrate back to dust

Sedibeng (It Comes With The Rain), 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Contemporary Art Society, London

ArtReview

Lerole. footnotes (The struggle of memory against forgetting), 2017 (installation view, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2017) all images but one Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut

January & February 2018

Giulia Bruno

Sometimes it’s not about a person or a career; it’s simply about a single work that provides you with an experience so rich that you can spend months or even years digesting it. And sometimes you encounter it in a Budapest basement during last year’s Off-Biennale. That’s where I stumbled into Artificial Act. Research for a Film (2017–), an ongoing videowork by Berlin-based Italian Giulia Bruno. I knew nothing about her. Later, when I looked her up, I found out that she had a degree in biology, and then studied photography and video in Milan. More recently she’s been a part of the Anthropocene Project at the HKW in Berlin and has collaborated with artist Armin Linke. Before I looked her up I sat on a rug in the basement and spent a little over 40 minutes watching this latest version of Artificial Act, and then another 20 minutes watching bits of it again. And not just because my legs had fallen asleep either. Artificial Act is a video about Esperanto, the language developed in the late nineteenth century by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist from Białystok; it’s spoken by around two million people today. Zamenhof (who wrote about his invention under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto – hence the name) wanted it be an international language that would remove the hassle of learning multiple foreign tongues, overcome the cultural and social divisions caused by those tongues and promote some version of international harmony. More generally, Artificial Act is a film about language and power, its

narrative built up around a dizzying network of connections that implicates everything from morphology and linguistics to twentieth-century utopianism and postcolonial theory. Visually that means that we encounter professors of English from universities in Jamaica and Connecticut, a museum devoted to the 1955 AfroAsian Bandung Conference in Indonesia, a series of Fiat technical manuals in Esperanto (which the company published in some of its markets until the late 1970s to save itself the hassle…), the 2017 World Esperanto Congress in Seoul (which staged a side meeting in parliament about Esperanto and Korean unification) and a small martial-arts demonstration by children. Watching all this was like witnessing the mapping out of some sort of backdoor globalisation, or, more simply, to be like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. And if your initial thought was that the subject of the video might be a little obscure and whimsical, 40 minutes later it seemed to be connected to every key issue of the age of globalisation: internationalism, nationalism, colonialism, marketing, cost-saving, power relations, cross-border economics and identity formation in its necessary and contingent states. The ability to do that is a rare art. Bruno’s previous video is titled Capital (2014); it’s about the politics of drinking-water. And I’m looking forward to spinning down that plughole next. Presumably I’ll emerge in time to witness the final version of Artificial Act.

ArtReview

selected by Mark Rappolt Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview and ArtReview Asia

January & February 2018

Watching all this was like witnessing the mapping out of some sort of backdoor globalisation

all images Giulia Bruno, Artificial Act. Research for a Film (stills, 2017), 42 min. © and courtesy the artist

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nism

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m’ s i n u m m o cid C ‘A k o o b d e ote, r ish w n fi r e n h u s i s i F h In Mark t s i r o e h ed, t t l a a r r r u a t l n u e c r ) (2016 nually i t n o c e b tives a o r t r a s n a h y r t a s action e ‘The pa r f o t n i o lp wait, a a c l i l i t i t l s o h p c i e h and th ials w t n e t o p e h t ents… s s m e o r m p p r u e s d l is to d, in o e n e k a ivity t w c a e l e l r o e c b f o o t forms ready e l p i t l u etm g r e o s f e n h u t f l l o a than g n i r so to rec e b m e of of rem t e r c t a c e n p a s s s e is le of th m s i c r o x e r nte ting, a cou ee’. r f e b d l u o ich c h w d l r o w a till has s g n i t i r w ark’s M f o rticua e p c , r s o f u l n a r e t mbold e d The spec n a e s i galvan t and n o t e r m e n w g i l o a p the e of re m i t e g n a r tting t e s g s r i o h f t n n u i f y o l lar otion n s i entify h d T i . o n t o i r t e a d r r u gy in o e t reconfig a r t s usly a o i s v a e r d p e y s o e l r n futu e h w can be dep , e r u t nd fu more a s t i s h a t p d , e s t e n n mome d. We e l d n i k on e r m e m b u s n a n c a c d ry that imagine a n i g a m i l ia sing. i c n o a s g r a o , r d e n v king a than e n i h t f o ipas c y n a a w m e w f e o n ments o radically m e t a ncy v a i t t i l c i a m e r f o o t s hpoint s a fl This desire n o m iving o sum h t c , l r a a i t t n u e o t b o tory p s not a i , a i nt. r e o s h e r p p u e e h e t v i into m e h t g and collect n i l l i , but w g n i t n e m u or doc Ford e c a r G a r – Lau Frontiers

Chen Zhou

After spending several years on scriptwriting in a rural area with limited Internet access, Chen has recently entered his ‘blue period’

this and facing page Life Imitation (stills), 2017, digital HD film, 82 min. Courtesy the artist

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selected by Venus Lau Venus Lau is artistic director at K11 Art Foundation. She is based in Shanghai

Born in Zhejiang province in 1987 and currently based in Shanghai, Chen Zhou works mainly with installation and video. A hallmark of Chen’s videoworks is the way he sees and treats colour – he has a penchant for spreading a patch of symbolic colour across the video frame, as if a lighting gel has been superimposed over the picture. By doing so, Chen blurs the visual depths in his moving images, generating a visual flatness that contrasts with their narrative progression (which takes influence from literary writers such as Milan Kundera and Raymond Carver). The pervasive use of colours in Chen’s artworks is an indicator of his research interest in common affective experiences. In his ‘yellow period’, for example, which included the exhibition I’m not not not Chen Zhou (Magician Space, Beijing, 2013) and his presentation at ON | OFF, a survey show of young Chinese artists (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013), he often utilised everyday objects and icons of the bright, warm colour, including bananas and

smiley-faced emojis, rethinking the notion of yellow being a global signifier of general happiness. Underlying his inclination towards this particular colour is an interest in laughter, which Henri Bergson saw as ‘in need of an echo’. As a form of social suspense and a void of meaning, laughter rebuilds the narrative space. Chen’s enthusiasm is explicated by the exhibition titled after the late American comedian Andy Kaufman (Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai, 2014). After spending several years on scriptwriting in a rural area with limited Internet access, Chen has recently entered his ‘blue period’, ushered in by the appearance of Blue Hole (2017), a video in which the whole screen is flooded with a hue similar to that of the so-called ‘blue screen of death’ on the Micrcosoft Windows operating system. Staring at the video for a while, one could discern in it visual depths evocative of Sinofuturism – a neologistic term to suggest the examination of the archaeology of the future in nonWestern contexts.

January & February 2018

both images Blue Hole (stills), 2017, HD video, 26 min. Courtesy the artist

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Neuro-capita li

Many people still seem to believe that n ationalism an d the (re)erecti on of physica l walls can pro tect them fro m depletion; th ey are unabl e to see the tr ue threat po sed by the demo lition of the l ast personal bor ders and eth ical frontiers. Now that our priva cy has been ero ded, the inva sion of our bodies and minds fr om within has b egun. – Eva Grubin ger Frontiers

Protesters, 2017 For me the most inventive image- and text-making of 2017 was on the streets. This is what I’ll be looking out for in the coming year.

Protesters at the Women’s March, London, 21 January 2017

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selected by Jeremy Deller Jeremy Deller is an artist based in London. His Speak to the Earth and it will tell you, a ten-year project involving allotment associations in Münster, Germany, reached its conclusion at last year’s Skulptur Projekte. He won the Turner Prize in 2004

Pro-EU March, London, 25 March 2017

January & February 2018

Pro-EU March, London, 25 March 2017 all images Jeremy Deller

ArtReview

Future Greats

Matthew Angelo Harrison lives and works in Detroit. Recent solo projects include Post Truth / The Lie That Tells the Truth, at Culture Lab, Detroit, and Dark Povera Part 1, Atlanta Contemporary (both 2017). He participated in four group shows in 2017, including The Everywhere Studio (on through 26 February) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Fictions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include I Was Raised on the Internet at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. Harrison will also show work at the 2018 New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage.

Dineo Seshee Bopape lives and works in Johannesburg. In 2017 she won both the Future Generation Art Prize, awarded by the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, and the Sharjah Biennial Art Prize. She has recently shown work at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and the Jakarta Biennale and National Arts Festival Grahamstown (all 2017). A solo exhibition, 222, Phurulloga, is on show at Bielefelder Kunstverein through 28 January. In 2018 she will present work at the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles.

Giulia Bruno lives in Berlin and works with film and photography. After graduating in biology from the Università degli Studi, she studied photography at CFP Bauer and cinema at Civic School of Cinema, all based in Milan. Her artistic research focuses primarily on the interaction between identity, space and technology. She has collaborated with French philosopher Bruno Latour, photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke, and on projects at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and ETH Zürich University.

Chen Zhou is based in Shanghai. Since graduating from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009, Chen has experimented with aesthetic languages in his videowork, and describes his current stage of work as ‘hedonistic’. Notable solo projects include I’m not not not Chen Zhou (2013) at Magician Space, Beijing, and Hot Spots Project (2012) at SH Contemporary, Shanghai. Chen has exhibited widely both in China and around the world, namely Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013), Today Art Museum, Beijing (2012), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2012), and Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid (2011).

05th 08th April Grand Palais 2018 www.artparis.com An overview of the French art scene Switzerland Guest of Honour

P O R T I K U S Moyra Davey Hell Notes 09.12.2017– 28.01.2018 Bruno Gironcoli in der Arbeit schüchtern bleiben

3.2.– 27.5.2018 MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien www.mumok.at

Bruno Gironcoli, Ohne Titel, um 1964, © Bruno Gironcoli Werk Verwaltung GmbH / Estate Bruno Gironcoli / Geschäftsführerin Christine Gironcoli, 2017

Candice Lin A Hard White Body, a Soft White Worm 10.02.– 08.04.2018 www.portikus.de

Art Reviewed

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank (So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best – A perfect and absolute blank!” 103

Poor Art / Arte Povera: Italian Influences, British Responses Estorick Collection, London 20 September – 17 December Gino de Dominicis Works from the Collection of Guntis Brands Luxembourg & Dayan, London 4 October – 19 January That ideas have a measurable effect on bodies and things would have been self-evident to the generation of Italian artists that grew up amidst the ruins of the Second World War. Poor Art / Arte Povera at the Estorick Collection considers how their various responses to the dehumanising tendencies of fascism, global information networks and commodity capitalism influenced the British artists who emerged, during the 1970s and 80s, into an altogether different reality. The most enduringly powerful of the works exhibited here – Michelangelo Pistoletto’s silkscreen-on-stainless-steel mediascape Television (1962–83), a version of Mario Merz’s Cone (c. 1967) – reflect on community by implying social function (the original Cone contained a pot of boiling beans that puffed smoke out of its top; Pistoletto’s mirror paintings insist that the viewer consider his relationship to the work and the world around him). Inscribed in ink onto gridded paper, Alighiero Boetti’s Untitled (1968) has the quality of a hurried hieroglyph. A hermetic system in ideograms humanised by inadvertent smudges and botched lines, it prompts the thought that – like the earliest forms of written notation that come down to us – it might have as its ultimate purpose something so humdrum as recording the transaction of grain. The oft-cited ‘poetry’ of arte povera consists, here, in adapting mundane forms and functions to generate the charge we associate with ritual. Displayed on an adjacent wall, Gavin Turk’s Red Senza Titolo (2012) also plays on conditions of legibility, reimagining one of Boetti’s colourful ‘word search’ tapestries as a small monochrome painting. Where Boetti’s original jumbles up the letters that make up his own name, forcing the viewer to decode it, Turk’s pastiche reads GAVINTURK from left to right, on every line. Small Gold Senza Titolo (2012) repeats the joke, but with the artist’s name written from top to bottom. Instead of elevating human gestures and collaborative labour (Boetti’s tapestries were made in collaboration with Afghan textile workers) to the status of art, Turk tethers art to its economic function as commodity (in a commercial medium, at a sellable scale) and assertion of individual selfhood. That the British artist successfully satirises the humanitarian pretensions of his Italian

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predecessor doesn’t make his work any less dispiriting. Yet the ingrained Anglo-Saxon mistrust of grandiose statements or metaphysical truths has shaped British responses to the legacy of arte povera in more productive ways. Ceal Floyer’s Ladder (2010), for instance, seems to riff on Joseph Beuys’s elegiac Scala Napoletana (1985). The German’s bombastic meditation on his own mortality comprises an Italian ladder tied to two hulking lead boulders, seemingly to prevent it rising to heaven; Floyer’s more prosaic aluminium equivalent is propped up against the wall and deprived of all but its top and bottom rungs. It reads simultaneously as wry comedy – perhaps this is the career ladder that young artists are advised to climb – and existentialist statement: there are only two states, and no path between them. Arte povera’s commitment to performance as a political medium – Germano Celant had Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ in mind when coining the term – is extended by Roadworks (1985), Mona Hatoum’s silent protest against police harassment. The short video of her performance, during which she walks barefoot around Brixton with a pair of Doc Martens laced to her ankles, not only returns art to the streets but – like Pistoletto’s mirror – records and incorporates the bemused or sympathetic responses of passersby. The symbolic weight of ‘poor’ or popular materials informs Tony Cragg’s Runner (1985), a figure in relief composed of plastic objects recovered by the artist while mudlarking on the Rhine. If Cragg’s work speaks to contemporary environmental concerns, Richard Long’s ENGLAND 1968 (1968) retrieves the Burkean sublime from the alpine summit and relocates it in the Bristol Downs. Poor Art / Arte Povera is hampered by the cramped conditions in which it is staged and some hard-to-fathom inclusions: Eric Bainbridge’s fur-covered The patination of… (2015) marries the different modernisms of Barbara Hepworth and Meret Oppenheim, but is only obscurely related to the work of artists like Giulio Paolini. The show nevertheless hints at the myriad ways in which the founding principles of the movement were – and might continue to be – adapted to suit a different time and place. An exhibition of paintings by Gino de Dominicis

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at Luxembourg & Dayan offers a reminder, by contrast, that some artists do not translate from their original context, however much they aspire to timelessness. Dominicis is typically treated as an outlier in the history of postwar Italian art, best remembered now for neoconceptual pranks and a determined self mythologisation – he faked his own death, had ‘invisible sculptures’ delivered to the houses of collectors, refused to allow his work to be photographed – that from today’s perspective seem wearingly indulgent. This exhibition presents the artist’s later forays into paintings that flaunt the trappings of profundity: cosmic scenes, geometric symbols, quasiprimitivist busts (Dominicis made much of his interest in Sumerian civilisation). The most intriguing of these paintings invite readings at odds with the awe that the artist aimed to provoke. Senza titolo (Lady Diana) (1985) presents a gigantic black-clad ghoul with a long, conical proboscis that extrudes from the surface of the painting. It’s not clear whether the tiny Lady Di, depicted in powder-blue silhouette on the ghostly figure’s upturned index finger, is to be deposited on the tip of the nose, and thereby to ascend it, or huffed up its nostril like a prettily shaped bump. Geometric abstractions such as Senza titolo (Regina) (1991), with its clean lines and glamorous gold and blues, translate the democratic intellectualism of Suprematist forms into something more closely resembling a luxury-brand logo. Dominicis was a capable painter who specialised, as this show illustrates, in the production of works that are both visually seductive and suggestively mysterious. But the implication of esoteric meaning feels like an empty promise, and by extension a cause for suspicion. These paintings propose the artist as a semidivine figure who – like a priest, shaman or ideologue – has access to some underlying principle that would justify what otherwise reads as wilful mystification (his lifelong reluctance to discuss his work suggests either that he was jealously guarding the portal to revelation or, less generously, that it didn’t exist). Dominicis’s work depends on faith in the artist as genius, channelling truths into forms that must remain obscure to others. The greatness of arte povera is that it doesn’t. Ben Eastham

top Michelangelo Pistoletto, Television, 1962–83, silkscreen on stainless steel, 100 × 120 cm. Courtesy Mazzoleni, London & Turin

bottom Gino de Dominicis, Senza titolo (Lady Diana), 1985, mixed media on panel, 215 × 275 × 43 cm. © estate of the artist / Archivio Gino De Dominicis, Foligno

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Abstract Hungary Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz 24 June – 9 September The title Abstract Hungary would seem to articulate a contradiction: it proposes to make an international language local. More precisely, it promises art whose language, by conventional definition, exists without external referent or context, and then frames it within a (geographical) referent and context. In that sense, this group exhibition – featuring works by 24 Hungarian artists, representing three generations (their output roughly spanning the 1960s to the present day), spread across the two floors of the Künstlerhaus, plus an outdoor sculpture in the adjacent park – might seem to offer art that is simultaneously liberated and constrained. Or perhaps you could read the title as proposing that the very idea of ‘Hungary’ is an abstraction in itself. One look at Little Warsaw’s Armor (2016), a circular slice through the mailboxes of a Budapest apartment building, would suggest this: inasmuch as the work serves to highlight the abstract nature of names (that label each mailbox) in relation to a person, and of a fragment of interior architecture to a building. While the work is ostensibly a fragment of something ‘real’, it tells us little about the reality of either the mailbox users or their dwelling. The exhibition begins conventionally enough, with works by some of Hungary’s most celebrated (particularly in contemporary times) abstractionists of the late 1960s and 1970s (albeit here represented by recent works):

among these the Matisse-like colour compositions of Imre Bak and the more purely geometric abstractions of Dóra Maurer. This type of formal abstraction is both extended and disrupted by László Lakner’s Untitled (1990) painting (and its more recent counterpart), which features a series of numbers, letters and punctuation marks arranged, against a navy-blue background, so as to appear simultaneously like the remains of some heavily censored text or a carefully planned, yet ultimately meaningless, concrete poem. From there things develop in ever more intriguing ways. Photographer Péter Puklus’s staged images of people, objects and colours – in Golden Decadence (2013) a blue bicycle, held by a gold-painted nude woman against a blue curtain – seem to collapse the languages and media of artists such as Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp into a single photographic statement. Far from being a language that eschews context, abstraction today, it seems, is a language with a history. Perhaps a key work to the show is Viennabased Andreas Fogarasi’s Vasarely Go Home (2011), which takes the form of a video installation that includes archival material and a documentary video related to celebrated Hungarian Op art artist Victor Vasarely’s 1969 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Budapest – the first time abstract art was shown at a Hungarian public institution. At the time of the exhibition, Vasarely had been living in Paris for almost 40 years; his show took place in a context where abstract art was frowned upon, as a sign of Western decadence

Abstract Hungary, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Pascal Petignat. Courtesy Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz

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and representative of a profoundly ‘unMarxist’ consciousness (although, notably, at other times and in other places abstraction has been Marxist enough), and such exhibition opportunities were not offered to those artists still living in Hungary. One of the latter, János Major, protested at the opening, pulling a card with ‘Vasarely Go Home!’ written on it whenever a fellow artist passed. It’s a reminder that while you certainly don’t need to know about the sociopolitical context of Hungarian art to enjoy the formal mutations exposed in this show, context can change your reading of things. But then again, Márton Nemes’s Temporary Images 02 (2017), a series of five variously proportioned landscape canvases, held together by a ratchet strap, onto which are printed various abstract patterns and shapes (some of which look like they might be derived from extrusions of plastics or other new materials), suggests that there’s not that much holding some of these abstract works together at all. Although that strap, however temporary it looks, is clearly a means of constraint. Abstract Hungary, then, turns out to be many things: a focused history of a nation’s recent art, an index of new forms (for this viewer, Zsófia Keresztes’s melting mix of painting and sculpture represented something of a discovery), a study of the way in which art creates its own histories and of the manifold directions in which abstraction can go. With or without a particular context to animate it. Mark Rappolt

Folklore: A Controversy with Works from the Collections Museum der Moderne, Salzburg 7 October – 15 April As a meditation on uneasy attachments to the past, Folklore could hardly have been more sharply timed: it opened a week after Austria’s Freedom Party (which was created by former members of the Nazi Party) won enough votes to become half of a coalition government. Nor could it have been better located. Picturesquely alpine and castle-dotted, Salzburg still makes tourist money aplenty off having been the location for The Sound of Music (1965) – a videotape of which nestles among the works – and people around here still wear lederhosen. Still, the show, which features some 50 works by 28 artists, doesn’t simply disdain backward glances but, rather, offers an unpredictably gear-shifting take on nostalgia and tradition. The opening feint of David Hockney’s ghoulishcartoonish drawings for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969) aside, it achieves this mostly using conceptual art from the museum’s own holdings (and those of the Generali Foundation, which it now stewards), plus a smattering of ideological 1930s photographs of mountains, bearded elders and dirndlwearing fräuleins. The past, these braided

strands suggest, requires filtering through the cerebral cortex before it tugs at the emotions. On occasion, fuzzy history and icy realism meet in a single work. In their 20-photo leporello Neunzehnhundert_Ötvenhat (Nineteenhundred_ fiftysix, 2004), Anna Artaker and Lilla Khoor flip between two sides of the region’s past, alternating scenes from the Austro-Hungarian nostalgia movie Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) with scenes of the Soviet invasion of Hungary from the same year. Beside it, Erwin Wurm’s one-liner Self-Portrait as Pickles (2008) directly skews national pride: it transmutes the artist into 37 painted, cast-acrylic upright gherkins on plinths, turning a comestible beloved by his countrymen into a monotonous portrait of the artist – and maybe Austrians in general – as ridiculous green phalluses: naive dicks. Kader Attia’s Dispossession #2 (2013) cycles through slide images of looted tribal objects in ethnological collections (such as the Missionhaus Maria Sorg near Salzburg, the wall text points out). On video, a talking head discusses how these things are stored away in vast numbers in, for example, the Vatican’s collection, rarely seen by the public

and losing their meaning. As such, Attia offers an unknowing counterweight to Kathi Hofer’s equally problematic traditional three-buttoned woollen alpine vests, hung on the wall and titled after saints and foreign cities, from 2016. These connect their wearers soothingly to the past, and keep it alive; but, again, such a connection is the bedrock of Austria’s dangerous nationalist streak. Elsewhere the thematic context serves to lightly refresh such editioned-video warhorses as Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) – his video-collage thesis that rock music extends an American religious lineage dating back to the Shakers – and Martha Rosler’s sardonically violent upending of the woman’s traditional role as cook, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), though by the time we reach Rodney Graham’s concrete poem concerning Moby-Dick (1851), one might fairly wonder if any connection between past and present is up for grabs here. But even in the stumbling progress one makes towards accommodating such a piece, Folklore’s curating has done its work. It makes the category a question, a problem: both unsettled and unsettling. Martin Herbert

Kader Attia, Dispossession #2 (detail), 2013, installation with slide projection and video (colour, sound). © Bildrecht, Vienna. Courtesy Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

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Ali Kazma Subterranean Jeu de Paume, Paris 17 October – 21 January If they have any regard for their personal freedom, Turkish artists, journalists and academics cannot be as overtly critical as others; Ali Kazma has made this restriction an advantage, developing a modest yet mighty filmic practice characterised by impassive observation. When he exhibited in the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Kazma showed several works from his Resistance series (2012–), and two of these, Tattoo and Calligraphy, are among the small-format projections in the first gallery here. They are placed alongside works including Kazma’s best-known work, Clerk, of 2011, an observation of the hands and mien of a man with extraordinarily speedy, accurate – and surely outmoded – document-stamping skills. Kazma’s close camera is respectful, intimate even, and the portrait unspectacular but unsettling: though the framing and skill suggest we might be impressed, the subject of analogue bureaucracy is depressing. This exhibition of more than 20 filmworks continues in the next space with Safe (2015) and North (2017): a three-minute single projection and a five-minute double projection respectively of snowy Norwegian landscapes and architectural structures found there. Safe is set on the Svalbard Islands, where thousands of seeds are preserved inside the Global Seed Vault, while North records an abandoned Soviet mine and

its accommodation and community buildings on Spitsbergen Island. While North records erstwhile habitation and the relics of a past working-culture, people are absent from both works. Kazma’s commentary lies in his selection and his framing, the subjects he finds worthy of quiet focus: a store to preserve plant species in a site of melting permafrost; the architecture of a community outliving its inhabitants. He illuminates subjects worthy of attention, among them the overlooked and the little-known. Taxidermist (2010) reveals the craft of gutting and skinning an animal cadaver, fixing the skin on a synthetic foam form and primping it to make it appear lifelike again. It’s not pretty: we are rapidly sensitised to the process while likely desensitised by exposure to it. House of Letters (2015) concludes the first suite of galleries on a cosy, pastoral note, observing Alberto Manguel at home in rural France among countless books, the camera looking in through the window or poring over manuscript pages and personal inscriptions from authors to the Argentine-Canadian writer as a sunny day turns to night. If it feels a bit too enchanting, it turns out that Manguel – with whom Kazma had collaborated for several years on the publication Recto Verso (2012) – left his idyll soon after to become director of the Argentine National Library. In contrast, there is plenty of horror

North (still), 2017, two-channel video, HD, colour, sound, 5 min 10 sec. © and courtesy the artist

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in the final sections of the exhibition, sometimes evident, sometimes an unseen presence in buildings that have witnessed brutality. The earliest work, Brain Surgeon (2006), shows surgeons undertaking – and their patient undergoing – what looks like trepanning; it is almost impossible to watch. Mine (2017), however, consists of still-camera observation of the skeletons of buildings in the Atacama Desert: once a mine, the exhibition notes state, this site became a concentration camp during the Pinochet regime. Yet Kazma films most often without human subjects; when people are present there is no engagement or exchange with them. His pointed focus examines a world as it has been formed by humanity, but we are not present. Sometimes the world – weather or nature – takes back control, when buildings rust or are subsumed by snow. Still, in shaping our environments as we and our ancestors willed, have we created Frankenstein’s monsters? In the last film, Tea Time (2017), Kazma watches machines producing glassware as closely as he did the clerk six years earlier, but this subject is a powerful machine working with glowing, molten raw material at speeds sometimes perceptible, sometimes too fast to fathom. Kazma’s attitude is ambivalent, though he does convince us we need to pay attention. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Preis der Nationalgalerie 2017 Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 29 September – 14 January This year’s shortlist for the biennial Preis der Nationalgalerie (or National Gallery Prize) offers up an unequivocal statement: all four artists – Sol Calero, Iman Issa, Jumana Manna and Agnieszka Polska – are women, and none of them was born in Germany. Outwardly, this is a welcome declaration in an age of both growing nationalistic rightwing populism and increasingly visible misogyny; but such a proclamation always comes at the cost of individual qualities that may not fit its message. Some days after the opening, the four nominees published a statement against the thematic shortlist. In their opinion, they were being instrumentalised by the museum in the services of political correctness and sponsorship relations; they also complained that they received no fee for the show. Despite all that, the jurying has led to a unified aesthetic constellation, one where the works contrast each other effectively. Sol Calero presents her multipart spatial installation Amazonas Shopping Center (2017). In the tradition of Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl’s displacements, the work assembles functional spaces into a cheap-looking shopping complex in the exhibition space: a hair salon, a salsa studio offering dance classes, an Internet cafe, a travel agency, a moneyexchange station. The Caracas-born artist wrapped the ensemble in a Caribbean aesthetic full of lush sensuality, one that’s long been a cliché for an exotic Latin American lifestyle. At the same time, the economies gathered here tell of a precarity that globalisation has brought about in big cities over the past few decades.

Also on view in the Amazonas Shopping Center is the 30-minute telenovela Desde el Jardin (2016): filmed as a queer opus with over-the-top acting in collaboration with Dafna Maimon. The telenova delivers the modern-day ‘opium of the masses’, television as a leading distraction from our everyday precarity. Iman Issa’s Heritage Studies (2015–17) focuses not on the power of excessive sensuality but rather, and conversely, on strict conceptuality, as we know it from art-market-critical work of the 1980s. The Cairo-born artist creates geometric sculptures that are reminiscent of minimal art and react to examples from antiquity. This reaction is, however, structured less through mimetic reproductions than it is through an interpretation of Issa’s impressions of the past. The artist calls her reconfigurations ‘mental prints’ – subjective remembrances, seemingly, less to do with how something looked than how it felt – about which she then comments via short texts that read like museum information labels. The work HS 22 (2016), for example, consists of two bowling-pin-like structures stuck into each other; the accompanying text points programmatically to the original’s fictional location: ‘The Global Museum of Ethnic Arts and Culture Collection’. Princeton-born Jumana Manna shows several works, including the video project A Magical Substance Flows into Me (2015), with which she brings a more documentarian aesthetic to the exhibition in lieu of a fictional narrative. The starting point was Manna’s exploration of the work of Jewish ethnologist Robert Lachmann, who researched traditional Arab

music in 1930s Palestine and assembled this into a radio programme. Manna then searched for Palestinian musicians from the same demographic groups with which Lachmann worked, and filmed them playing music researched by him. The film thus positions history and the present in a tense dialogue, in which traditional cultural heritage functions as a kind of catalyst for narratives on life in Palestine today – some scenes are shot in the musicians’ apartments. Even if the film isn’t particularly original in terms of its aesthetics, it is convincing, thanks to the political weight of its subject matter. Finally, Agnieszka Polska presents her twochannel video What the Sun Has Seen (Version II) (2017). The film is partly animated, combining computer-generated images with real footage from everyday scenes. A cigarette butt, for example, seemingly flies through the film screen; a busy street is shown in fragments; and sun and earth, rendered like emojis, show up again and again. Amid this flood of images and words, the sun and earth – gifted with ersatz mouths – tell of our environmental problems, at times with a comedian’s humour, at other times with a scientist’s gravitas. But all in all, and despite its virtuosic handling of animation’s possibilities, What the Sun Has Seen remains trapped in smart pop-cultural convention and is thus the weak point of this otherwise interesting exhibition. Ironically, given that Polska walked away with the prize. The decision seems a wrongly drawn conclusion from Documenta 14: that political art is acceptable, but only when it behaves itself. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Kimberly Bradley

Sol Calero, Amazonas Shopping Center, 2017 (installation view. Photo: Trevor Good. Courtesy the artist and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

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The Yellow Wallpaper Ginerva Gambino, Cologne 10 November – 16 December These days there is no shortage of exhibitions focusing on the body in general and the female body in particular. Yet this is to be expected, since the exploration of this issue is as urgent and topical as ever. Even so, this group show offers a different approach, connecting the works through references (some obvious, some not) to the eponymous 1892 short story by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman – a tale that obviously hasn’t lost importance for female artists since it was first deployed in Feminist Art Program’s Womanhouse exhibition in Los Angeles in 1972. In brief, Gilman’s story tells of a female character confined to a room to recover from ‘nervous exhaustion’. There she discovers a woman imprisoned inside the pattern of the room’s wallpaper, which she begins to rip off, eventually hallucinating that the woman is herself, descending into insanity along the way. If the story is dominated by techniques for the pathologising of womenhood, the works here, by the five female artists, focus instead on the leitmotif of the madness-inducing incompatibility between self-image, the image of women and an actual woman. For example, in her sombre all-over paintings Tar Baby #7 and Tar Baby #8 (both 2015), Phoebe CollingsJames has applied a wildly patterned black colour using the sole of her foot. The extent to which

she uses this Carolee Schneeman-inspired painting technique to create counterimages of female corporality becomes clear when contrasted with Cunt (2014). This insult is repeatedly written, in baby blue, on a dirty cleaning rag, summarising a misogynistic view of women as contemptible domestic workers. A more humorous path is taken by Ebecho Muslimova, whose satirical ink drawings show her alter ego Fatebe, a naked pop-eyed corpulent, who variously uses her body and its orifices for her entertainment, for example as a human curtain clip in Fatebe window curtain (2016), wherein the curtain goes into her mouth and emerges again somewhere below her waistline. The raw activism of this cartoon character almost functions as an antithesis to the woman in Gilman’s story, who is compelled to lie still as part of a resting cure, because medical science at the time related physical stimuli to female hysteria. Movements of female flesh are also central to Vanessa Conte’s Polished Out (2017). Constructed in panels like pages of a graphic novel, the drawing shows how a woman’s dead tooth is violently extracted from her mouth. The flapping of cheeks after a slap to the face or the intrusion of fingers into the oral cavity are all exaggerated in the kind of pro-violence

Phoebe Collings-James, Cunt, 2014, oil on cloth, 50 × 53 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ginerva Gambino, Cologne

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fashion we associate with, say, Quentin Tarantino’s films. This really is an orgy of demeaning brutality. Initially the combination of American pulp and sexualised violence seems highly problematic. Yet this concern largely disappears as soon as one flicks through Conte’s short-story collection Cures for Pouting Girls (2016), also on display. These tales, inspired by the genre of corporal-punishment fiction (well known via Fifty Shades of Grey, 2011), also show female caricatures with enormous breasts and watermelon-size bums being sexually humiliated by angry men, as a punishment for… nothing much really. By means of this unrestrained, ultragraphic amplification of casual sexism, in stories with titles such as ‘Going Down’ or ‘Pamela’s Hard Day’, Conte forges a clever connection with Gilman’s portrayal of a cure that was aimed at women’s minds but intended for their bodies. The dark, at times cynical humour in most works, especially in those by Conte and Muslimova, manages to remove the sour taste of moralism from this bitter topic. Nonetheless, it’s a damning indictment of how women are viewed in our times that Gilman’s story continues to be a reference point for young female artists – even if, as here, it’s wittily mobilised. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Kevin Kennedy

Beth Laurin Provisorium Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm 16 September – 3 December The wall text of Beth Laurin’s exhibition Provisorium bears a handwritten correction. In the space between ‘systematically’ and ‘investigate’ of Axel Wieder’s curatorial introduction describing (in Swedish) her ‘way to systematically investigate the question of what can be done with art’, the artist inserted the words ‘and intuitively’. This daub suspends closure, turning the statement itself pointedly provisory. The exhibition comprises floor-based sculptures, photographs, drawings, collages made from magazine snippets and vitrines with assemblages of paraphernalia the artist collected over the years. Among these is Objekt (1984), joining newspaper-wrapped bottles, porcelain shoes and wooden debris found on a beach, among other items. Many objects occur more than once: Relief (1985), an enlarged polyester sculpture covered with gold leaf leaning against the back wall finds its lifesize model – a found ice-cream-cone paper – in one of the vitrines. Laurin’s oeuvre, the exhibition makes clear, is one of tentative translations between materials, scales and contexts. What we see at Index oscillates between process and object, abstraction and figuration, art and life. Here, coherence surfaces in the persistence on the fragmentary. Laurin’s ‘heaps of fragments’, to use Fredric Jameson’s phrase concerning postmodernism, negotiate personal life experiences, but also point to what Jameson saw as the decentred dismantling of social life in late capitalism, in which images and

commodities circulate (almost) without impediments. On the other hand – adding to the list of poles between which Laurin’s works sway – fragmentation has also been a feminist strategy to voice discontent with universalising finalisms. The exhibition makes me think of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), in which such continuous shifts take place between attention being directed inward and outward, while the dispersed form of the novel alludes to the fragmentary form of life itself. Provisorium includes a model of Del I (Part 1) (1976), a section of a bent pillar with sculpted creases marring its smooth white surface. The classical ideal of the monolithic column, durable and flawless, is humorously undercut with wrinkles, markers of the imperfect human body. This work, a recurring form in Laurin’s practice, was first exhibited at Nybroplan square in Stockholm; then the artist covered the white fibreglass in greenish hues emulating bronze, the archetypical material of public art. A similar metamorphosis takes place in Nr 1 and Nr 4 (1995–96). These are meticulous pencil drawings of magnified paint smudges, the perfunctory originals of which, Färg avtorkad från pekfingret (Paint wiped off from the index finger, 1995), are also shown. My favourite piece in the exhibition is a smallscale pencil sketch for one of Laurin’s key works, titled Vad händer med Terrassen? (What is happening with the terrace?, 1977), oddly tucked away in a corner. The finished version

was realised in 1978 on the concrete rooftop of Kulturhuset, an astonishingly ordered space surveilled by cameras: here, Laurin introduced several rose-pink organic forms that seemed to emerge from the tiles. The shapes resembled scaled-up labia, blowing up the lacunae of public space (and life) with intimate body parts in an otherwise ‘orderly’ surrounding. I wish documentation of this installation had been included in the exhibition, as public sculpture and its defiance are integral to Laurin’s oeuvre. Laurin’s proximity to Fluxus via contact with Alison Knowles, among others, is evinced through systems she employs and simultaneously challenges. The exhibition includes photocopied letters to the artist Magnús Pálsson, expounding the plan of writing to him every day while contemplating if the correspondence will become art or remain ‘just’ life. Already on day three, Laurin didn’t have time to write. Another interruption à la Lee Lozano is exhibited as photographs. In 1979 Laurin cleared out her studio and had all of her works driven to a dumpster. Initially intended as a break from art to work in the health sector, the documentation later turned into the series Den 15 november 1979 (1979), when Laurin resumed making art. The exhibition highlights the interim that is life (and art), convincingly suggesting, as one of the collages reads, that ‘Disorder gives the dead life’. Stefanie Hessler

Sketch for Vad händer med Terrassen? (What is happening with the terrace?), 1977, pencil on paper. Courtesy the artist

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Pressure/Imprint Malmö Konsthall 30 September – 28 January Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Charlotte Johannesson and Ester Fleckner outwardly have nothing to do with one another: they’re from different eras, making divergent work in unrelated media. Yet here they are, presented under the title Pressure/Imprint, at once distinct and entangled. A loose arrangement of temporary walls divides the wide-open space of Malmö Konsthall into chapters reserved for each artist, but chapters large enough to remain porous at their edges, each allowing sightlines to the other two. The exhibition architecture is a manifestation of the borders that also separate the three women in life, the artists being born respectively in 1932, 1943 and 1983 in the former East Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Johannesson, during the 70s, was one of the first artists in Scandinavia to work with nascent computer technology, while Fleckner aligns herself with a tradition of woodcuts dating back to the fourteenth century. Yes, difference abounds in this show. And yet it is transcended as easily as stepping over a doorsill. As revealed here, one of many points of contact across their positions is the meeting between the manual and the technological. Or rather, the ways in which that’s a false binary, the two existing in constant oscillation. Working together with the computer engineer Sten Kallin, Johannesson and her husband, Sture, built their own software to translate images

from textile to a digital format. Like computer graphics, a woven tapestry consists of ‘pixels’, is constructed numerically and is made on a screen (albeit a different kind). Featuring hard-and-fast eponymous messages like Drop Dead (1977) and I’m No Angel (1974), Johannesson’s large tapestries appear as iconic forerunners of an aesthetic and a type of communication that, a decade on from their making, would have migrated to the digital realm and become ubiquitous. When Johannesson started working with the Apple II computer, subversion and experimentation were synonymous: there simply was not enough precedence for proper usage to have been established. In a similar way, Ruth WolfRehfeldt pushed her medium, the typewriter, to its limits, but for different reasons. With restrictions on exhibition and movement for artists in the GDR, Wolf-Rehfeldt participated in the widespread artistic exchange across the Iron Curtain through mail. In what must have been an immensely laborious process, she made intricate patterns using only letters and spaces: one diamond shape reads Limits Endlessness (1975); another, undated, Aufbruchstimmung. The latter roughly translates to ‘a sense that something is going to change’, a sentiment actively at play in Wolf-Rehfeldt’s wildly experimental output long before it materialised politically in 1990. Following this turn of events, there

Charlotte Johannesson, Computer Graphics, 1983. Courtesy the artist and MalmÖ Konsthall

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was no strict reason to send art through the mail and, for this connoisseur of the genre, no reason to make art at all. Wolf-Rehfeldt’s work allows us to see language as graphics, simply as different uses of straight and bent lines. When things are broken down, we begin to realise how they might be reassembled differently. How letter A’s might make the roof of a building, as in Concrete Architecture (1980), or how, in Ester Fleckner’s Clit-dick Register, 1–22 (2013–4), a clit and a dick both look like a U, and a U, too, proves manifold. In Fleckner’s woodcuts trial, and especially error, are key. Although reminiscent of blueprints or instruction manuals, the strange figures flaunt their irregularity as if adamantly resisting completion. Woodcutting was invented to reproduce, but Fleckner uses this method because it doesn’t, or not precisely anyway. As with Johannesson and Wolf-Rehfeldt, her subversive use of technology challenges normativity and attempts to form alternative connections between things. The series of woodcuts A closet does not connect under the bed, 1–20 (2016) shows disassembled closet parts, one with ironic instructions to ‘build and seduce’ pencilled in above. This would be a normative approach to exhibition-making. The one that spawned Pressure/Imprint, thankfully, is not. Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Carola Bonfili 3412 Kafka Smart, Rome 23 November – 23 February 3412 Kafka takes its title from an asteroid discovered, in 1983, by US astronomers Randolph Kirk and Donald Rudy; they named it after Franz Kafka, a writer so famous that he has his own adjective – Kafkaesque, used outside of literature to indicate phenomena ranging from the complex to the uncanny to the bizarre. The asteroid, which became known to the Romeborn Bonfili while researching the Prague-born author, was used as the inspiration for two workshops for local schoolchildren she conducted with educator Irene Bianchetti in the peripheral Roman quarter of Quarticciolo in 2015 and at Smart in 2017. Drawings made by the attendees of these workshops are shown looped on two projectors (Stellario #1, 2015, and Stellario #2, 2017) in one of Smart’s three rooms, alongside a looped video displayed on a tablet, itself entitled 3412 Kafka (2015). The latter work documents the culmination of the Quarticciolo workshop, in which the names of imaginary planets conceived by the workshop participants were signalled in Morse code using automated spotlights positioned in two adjacent apartment blocks, beaming from top to bottom of their facades. As the buildings thus appeared to converse with space, the Morse code performance

conveyed the boundlessness of the human imagination and its capacity to transform worldly materials into something like heavenly bodies.In a separate room, six sculptural landscapes are displayed. Five of them, modestly scaled and placed on plinths, evoke scale models of alien landscapes. The pieces, again titled simply 3412 Kafka (2017), were made of resin mixed with marble, pigments and salt, and thermoformed using industrial processes used to mould plastic; they convey crude architectural features, evoking the dens of humanoid creatures. Much like Kafka’s own works, they rely on the audience’s innate ability to relate a scenario to their own experience and imaginative capacities. A sixth, rather larger work (3412 Kafka, 2017), made of wood and cement, has a more terrestrial feel, being based on the artist’s personal language derived both from memory and her imagination (as stated in an interview featured in the exhibition catalogue). Bombed-out or ruined warehouse-scale buildings, which appear postindustrial, are depicted almost empty, acting as a kind of tabula rasa to be occupied by the audience’s own dreamworld. One of these six modern ruins houses a number of crudely rendered single beds in rows; others contain what appears to be broken industrial

machinery. It is characteristic of Bonfili that the viewer is left without prompts to navigate this hinterland. In the third and final room a single virtualreality headset features the six-minute 3412 Kafka (2017), set to a soundtrack by sound and installation artist Francesco Fonassi. Following the aesthetic of a first-person open-world VR game, it takes the viewer through an earthlike landscape, familiar yet somehow unsettling. The positioning of the sun follows an accelerated diurnal cycle, leading to a slight temporal disorientation as the viewer is flown through a seemingly postapocalyptic world of forests, plains and, at one point, a broken industrial platform seemingly linked to mineral extraction or construction. We finally arrive at a lagoon, an undefined glowing geometric form glowing at its centre before the video comes to an end. As Bonfili explains in the aforementioned interview, she is interested in ‘the ability to recreate, for just a few minutes, a temporal suspension that stops the user’s constant flow of thoughts, and above all my own’. Her confidence that her own personal dreamworld will speak to the viewer pays off, as the gaps between her explicit references act as fodder for the viewer’s imagination. Mike Watson

3412 Kafka (still), 2017, VR, 6 min 30 sec, sound project by Francesco Fonassi. Courtesy Smart – polo per l’arte, Rome

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RaŠa Todosijević Siege of London 2097 Handel Street Projects, London 4 November – 20 January Apparently it all started with a gymful of Serbs at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. Invited over by Scottish gallerist Richard Demarco, a group of artists who had in recent years been gathering in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Centre to make improvised, informal work away from the then-Yugoslavian ‘official’ socialist realist style, used this foreign opportunity to make their first public performances. Raša Todosijević apparently did something with lube and a goldfish; his cohort Marina Abramović presented the first iteration of her Rhythm 10 (1973) performance, cutting her hands with an array of knives. What’s presented here, though, at a small, cosy solo survey show of Todosijević’s work, is a room of dour text paintings, collages and assemblages made between 1977 and 2017 that are the result of decades of the artist’s roleplaying, making series of works alternately as an ironic prophet, provocateur or imposter. Todosijević is considered a central figure for the performative strain of conceptual art that formed in Belgrade during the early 70s, developed by a group that included Abramović and Zoran Popović. Their early performances

seem to share violent and sadistic tendencies, but their careers have followed very different trajectories: Todosijević represented Serbia at the 2011 Venice Biennale, but of course Abramović has been lauded as an icon of performance art, has set up a self-aggrandising institute and, more recently, has been pushing Marina-flavoured macarons. Todosijević has remained in Belgrade, simply getting on with making work: posters for nonexistent films (such as one included here, Murder, dated 1997–2017, which enlists Demarco as its lead character and filmmaker Lutz Becker as its director of photography), deliberately bad Picasso knockoffs (My Name is Pablo Picasso, 1980) or tongue-in-cheek predictions, such as the black-and-yellow cursive text-painting from which the show takes its title: Opsada Londona 2097 (Siege of London 2097, 2007). The inert, faded objects gathered here have a dry sense of dark humour, a wry existentialism: God Exists (2013) is a portable radio on a scuffed-up piece of cardboard, the titular claim written in Serbian in red. In the next room a worn-out electric blanket is folded and stuck on the wall, a wooden painted sign in red

beneath it claiming it, again in Serbian, as The Soul Warming (2000–9). Spiritual comfort is just rhetorical spin, Todosijević suggests; or as the cutout words on one small collage admit: Weltschmerz is My Business (2015). The wall sculpture Vive le Mort (2004) is a box that contains another portable radio, a small red flag that in Cyrillic letters apparently spells out ‘Long Live Death’ and a small tea saucer with the words ‘Gott Liebt Die Serben’ (God Loves the Serbs) painted on it. Both slogans are part of longrunning series of his work, casual but poignant reminders of a history that erupted again recently into the news, with the suicide of Croatian general Slobodan Praljak in the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But this box seems a quietly concise emblem for this exhibition: a set of worn-out objects, all loaded with symbolism and associations, but here too densely packed and sparsely contextualised to fully bring out a lifetime of work. What we’re left with are weary, almost anonymous relics that appear all too similar to those more famously left behind by Todosijević’s Eastern European conceptual contemporaries. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Siege of London 2097, 2017 (installation view). Photo: FXP Photography. Courtesy Handel Street Projects, London

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Julian Rosefeldt Manifesto London Film Festival/British Film Institute 6 October This is the second coming of Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, a multiscreen installation featuring Cate Blanchett declaiming 50 artistic manifestos that premiered at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2016 and subsequently toured spaces such as the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Now it has been edited into a 95-minute feature film, released theatrically in the UK at the end of 2017. Containing spoken texts ranging from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909) to Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Golden Rules of Filmmaking’ (2002), plus a prologue recitation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ (1848), the work is a disorienting and thrilling ride through the past century of cultural history. Disorienting because the actor delivering the words is one of Hollywood’s great shapeshifters, that talent on full display here, and thrilling because of what happens to the words in the process of their delivery. Addressing twentieth-century movements in art, architecture and performance, the film is divided into 12 scenarios, each containing a selection of manifestos chosen to represent a given category, many of which are combined. André Breton and Lucio Fontana, for example,

are the authors of the three manifestos featured in ‘Surrealism/Spatialism’ (as the segment is titled in the end credits – no such guidance appears in the film itself), including an unnerving scene in which Blanchett plays a puppeteer holding a hand-and-rod miniature of herself while reciting Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1929). Over the duration of the film, Blanchett inhabits 13 roles, each acrobatically different from the last. Her characters are more or less presentday: a homeless man slouches through an abandoned Cold War listening post while shouting the words of Constant and Guy Debord (‘Situationism’), a layered and feathered anchorwoman delivers Sol LeWitt and Sturtevant to camera (‘Conceptual Art/ Minimalism’), a choreographer in the mould of Pina Bausch runs a dance rehearsal with guidance from George Maciunas and Kurt Schwitters (‘Fluxus/Merz/Performance’). The time spent shooting all this was brief (11 days in total), which, given the high production values, complicated sets and numerous extras deployed, suggests a technique akin to single-take photography when it comes to Blanchett’s delivery; there couldn’t really have been time for more, and the director himself has described a sort of workshop environment

on the set. The manifestos, stripped of context and then given an accent, emphasis and tone that was presumably worked out between the director and actor on the fly, supply these statements with a fresh urgency. The viewer is simultaneously and continuously straining to make sense of what is being presented onscreen, such is the disjunction between words and actions – or unexpected affinity, as when Blanchett, playing a schoolteacher, walks through her class imparting quiet words from filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Dogme 95’ (1995). And the words themselves stand out for being delivered (mostly) by female characters (only four of the original manifestos were written by women: Yvonne Rainer, Mierle Laderman, Adrian Piper and Sturtevant). But something else happens: the words become part of the aesthetics of the film. What the viewer picks out are the cadences and forms of manifestowriting rather than strictly its content: the boldness, full of claim-staking and revolution, anger, naivety and idealism that connects Guillaume Apollinaire to Debord, and Bruno Taut to Claes Oldenburg, bridging political, historical and cultural differences in the creation of what sound like new manifestos, all making a claim to the importance of art regardless of form. David Terrien

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Luciano Fabro Simon Lee Gallery, London 30 November – 11 January It’s hard to imagine a more rudimentary, more starkly simple sculptural form than Luciano Fabro’s Squadra (Square, 1965–2001). A thin steel rod, about a metre-and-a-half long, juts perpendicularly out from the gallery wall, supporting at its outward end a second, identical rod, positioned upright so as to almost reach the gallery ceiling. Together, the two segments look like a kind of elemental line drawing in space – like, indeed, two sides of a square, or a diagrammatic representation of a right angle. Except that, actually, the arrangement isn’t precisely rectilinear, because the structure sags slightly under its own weight, the vertical rod producing a downward torque in the horizontal one – that’s the reason the topmost point doesn’t quite touch the ceiling as it otherwise would. And so the work, rather than being about purity of form, ultimately relates to an opposite notion – the fallibility of matter and the way that idealisations have a tendency to become warped or distorted when materially realised. Fabro would go on to expand upon this theme with what are probably his best-known works, his large, sculptural reliefs of the Italian map produced in gold, bronze, even leather – sumptuous-looking pieces that were made under the auspices of the arte povera movement, with its emphasis on the associative poetry of materials. The works in the current show,

however, stem from a prior, pre-arte povera phase (though all were remade by Fabro during the last decade of his life), and are more directly concerned with phenomenological matters, with the here and now of the gallery space. The works come in two sorts: Metalli (metal works) and Vetri (glass works). The former group consists of rather spare-looking, rod-based pieces, including Squadra and also a companion piece, Ruota (Wheel, 1964–2001), in which another wall-anchored armature supports a hoop whose circumference is of equal length, the horizontal element again bending slightly under the load. But other Metalli constructions are less the result of physical forces than they are deliberately crafted – such as the vast, freestanding Croce (Cross, 1965–2001), whose four vertices are fractionally misaligned to each other; or Asta (Pole, 1965–2001), a long, pointed pole apparently suspended straight from the ceiling, but which actually deviates from true verticality by a single, barely perceptible, degree. And questions of perception are similarly at the heart of the Vetri pieces. Buco (Hole, 1963–2005), for instance, is an upright sheet of glass decorated with a transparent, latticework pattern, while the background areas remain mirrored – so that looking simultaneously at and through it creates a dissonant, discombobulating effect.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, though, its most enjoyably complex exploration of the act of looking, is a combination of two Vetri and one Metalli, which Fabro originally brought together as an installation in 1992. Tubo da mettere tra i fiori (Tube to Place Among Flowers, 1963–2001) consists of a dense arrangement of pot plants covering the floor, whose lush foliage semiconceals a horizontal pole running the display’s length. At one end of this greenery is Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965–2007), a rectangle of transparent glass held aloft on a metal stand – so that what’s ironically being presented is the opportunity to look past the pane, to consider instead the garden scene beyond. At the other end, Mezzo specchiato mezzo trasparente (Half Mirrored Half Transparent, 1965–2007) is the same setup, except with half the glass surface reflecting additionally what’s behind the viewer. Tellingly, the panes are in landscape format, implicitly invoking the history of framing views of nature – of nature, that is, being regulated by the suzerainty of the gaze, quite as much as through the domestication of plants. At the same time, though, the long sag of the central steel pole reminds us that, ultimately, the determination of natural forces remains something beyond our control. Gabriel Coxhead

Luciano Fabro, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro and Simon Lee Gallery, London, New York & Hong Kong

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Kati Heck Heimlich Manoeuvre Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London 23 November – 10 February German-born, Antwerp-based Kati Heck’s first show with Sadie Coles HQ centres on six large paintings hung in a purpose-built enclosure within the gallery’s main space. They’re based on Austrian composer Gustav Mahler’s 1911 six-part sung symphony Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), itself a setting-to-music of texts derived from Chinese poems of the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD). The Song of the Earth is all about the joys of life, of friendship, of drinking, music, youth and beauty, tempered by melancholic apprehensions of life’s transience and the omnipotence of death. Heck’s revisiting of this (maybe corny) romanticism, winding through the centuries, produces these surreal, anarchic and weirdly charming paintings of pale, charismatically awkward thirtysomethings (and one or two paunchy older men); all vaguely bohemian in their demeanour and dress, with questioning stares and knowing smiles playing about their lips. They exist in a faintly Northern European subcultural ambiance – drinking in an old bar, performing in a rock band – or, more bucolically, sitting by lakesides among the reeds, contemplating beauty and the pathos of existence, maybe. But their status as subjects is precarious, subjected to Heck’s quizzical meddling in how they’re painted. Heck’s painting has been known to draw on the history of classical

painting, but modern art is also here in faint, random historical echoes of the twentieth century’s disenfranchised, also-ran history of figurative painting – Otto Dix, DDR socialist realism, early Lucian Freud, Francis Picabia, postwar Surrealism filtered through progrock album-cover art… But Heck riddles her paintings with bizarre malfunctions: the arm of the lutewielding woman in the twilight forest of Der Abschied (The Farewell, all works 2017) is rendered with pasty, chunky fleshiness, but her hand disintegrates, letting the background pierce through. In the louche bacchanal Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow), the shoes of a raincoated man blend into the patterned tiles he’s standing on. The dive-bar four-piece of Der Trunkene im Frühling (Drunkards in Spring) play their 1980s indie rock in a swirling, slathered maelstrom of black paint. Naturalistic modelling deteriorates into a flat, sketched-in area in the leg of the scarlet-dressed woman in Von Der Schönheit (Of Beauty), as she gazes with anticipation, perhaps, towards some out-of-frame handsome youth: ‘Her proud pose is but a pretence; in the flash of her big eyes, in the darkness of her ardent gaze beats longingly her burning heart’, read Mahler’s lines, a century back. The word ‘bingo’ appears in two paintings, like some involuntary reflex.

What stops these devices from ending up as deconstructive whimsy is how they create a tension between narrative seriousness and delirium – Heck’s figures have the mien of friends and collaborators, with the look of those complicit in their being staged by the painter, whose painterly skill gives them shape as much as it threatens their dissolution. This is painting as sociability, which Heck does plenty of. In the adjoining space is a soft sculpture, a whitish spiralling sausage-arm with a fist, a support for a screen looping Der springende Punkt case II: O – a psychedelic outing of Heck’s alter ego Babydetektiv. Somewhere in that narrative is a self-administered Heimlich manoeuvre, to dislodge a pitted olive, and an egg is swallowed by one character only to be regurgitated by another. Something needs to be released from a throat. On the plinth of the sculpture an inscription from Heck’s Babydetektivclub manifesto: ‘To hell with all definitive ideologies! The shy, yes almost shameful ignorance is my hot spring, my deception. The sensical and the non-sensical,’ it starts. Heck implicates passion, feeling, friendship, intoxication, without setting these against self-consciousness, reflection or knowledge of history. Painting, poetry, music, singing – it’s living-as-an-artist-asgesamtkunstwerk. J.J. Charlesworth

Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow), 2017, oil and colour pencil on canvas, artist frame, 250 × 350 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Ad Minoliti, Aleksandra Domanović, DIS, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Vikky Alexander, Wang Newone Project Native Informant, London 2 November – 9 December ‘The future’s not what it used to be,’ Robert Graves and Laura Riding quipped 80 years ago. Billed as an exhibition ‘on gender, domesticity and technology in the present’, this sparse show – comprising just nine works by six artists – offers a chance to consider futures past, as well as those still to come. Take Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Digital Venus #1: After Titian (1996): a slight work by a great artist, this colour print sees the exposed flesh of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) – itself a radical innovation in its time, pioneering the presentation of the nude in a commonplace domestic setting, unsupported by mythological allusion – overlaid with circuit board. Made one year before the first Cyberfeminist International, the work’s thin, two-dimensional imagination of the merging of living subject and machine seems almost quaint: it reminded me a little of the cover of Add N to (X)’s 1998 album, On the Wires of Our Nerves – in which a synth deck emerges from a woman’s bloody chest – minus the deadpan humour.

The work of onetime Pictures Generation artist Vikky Alexander offers another intriguing historical position, represented in the form of two mid-2000s digital collages on canvas (2006’s Rising River and 2007’s Green Lake). Both depict domestic interiors, unreal in their cheerful sterility, with the floating, weightless quality of buildings designed in SketchUp (the looming presence of the titular bodies of water, stretching across each depicted room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, further unmoors the scenes’ stability). They are charming, quietly unsettling things, yet when compared to much of the flood of ‘postInternet art’ that would follow a few years later, also strikingly traditional, feeling as close in spirit to Patrick Caulfield as, say, Cory Arcangel. There are further Pop echoes, too, in two contemporary works, drawn from Ad Minoliti’s Queer Deco series. Displayed against a lozenge-shaped orange wall vinyl (Puppy, 2017), the kitsch fantasy space of Queer Deco (Visiona 1) and Queer Deco (Total Furnishing Unit) (both 2017) reek of Richard Hamilton, but

replacing the cartoonishly heteronormative inhabitants of Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) with genderless geometric presences. Whatever else the dialogue between these works raised, one resounding impression is of how closely aligned gender and domestic space have been and remain: how when we talk about the home, we are still in some sense talking about the feminine (however construed). It is striking, then, that the installation here by DIS, Sleep Mode (2017), while drawing its title from IT, takes the form of a videowork mimicking cable TV channel hopping – with snatches of family scenes, women jogging and formal public apologies – played from a fullscale double bed, in which the viewer can settle. Evoking a slightly hysterical version of a ‘duvet day’ at home, the work immerses the viewer in a gendered world of comfort and soft feelings. What DIS do is often treated as cultural prophecy; here, I’d say the prediction is: the future is, in some sense, female. Matthew McLean

Installation view, 2017. Courtesy the artists and Project Native Informant, London

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Simone Fattal Watercolours Heni Publishing, London 30 November – 7 January You’d be mistaken in thinking Simone Fattal’s watercolours were simple. In their uninhibited style, vivid colour and joyous mood, the Lebanese artist’s paintings are – superficially at least – reminiscent of a child’s daubs. My House (2015) even recalls the famous HouseTree-Person drawing test, often used as part of the psychological assessment of children; in Fattal’s watercolours there are no people, but there are plenty of houses and trees. Given that the ceramic sculpture for which Fattal is best known largely comprises abstracted humanoid forms, the preponderance of trees over humans in these works is particularly noticeable. Trees appear throughout, either foregrounded as the subject or incidental. This is perhaps no surprise, given the potent symbolism that Fattal ascribes them. In conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in Heni Publishing’s accompanying book, Fattal describes what she sees as the almost apotropaic role of trees in her homeland: ‘The trees, they are what protect the house, protect cities. For instance, Damascus is protected by the gardens surrounding it… With the destruction of these gardens evil comes.’ Viewed in this context, her apparently glib watercolours bear a serious undercurrent. They are a paean to trees

as a charm against devastation – coming from an artist who, in 1980, was driven from Beirut by the outbreak of civil war. Early pastel drawings of trees that prefigured Fattal’s current paintings were lost during the conflict. Like trees, fruit also appears throughout Fattal’s work. Paradise, as described in the Quran, is a garden filled with trees and fruit; in the accompanying book, she remembers her grandfather’s ‘real Arabic house’, with its courtyard filled with fruit trees, as being built on a paradisiacal model. She cites the importance of memories to her painting – in particular memories of her childhood in Damascus, which she describes as a ‘lost paradise’. Whether pictured while growing, as in The dates (2014), or as still lifes in bowls, fruit is depicted with an innocent, almost prelapsarian pleasure. Some are painted so loosely as to approach abstraction, whereas others are more naturalistic. Fattal, who studied philosophy in Paris and Beirut, describes these watercolours as being ‘like phenomenology – to understand what it is about’. Nevertheless, what predominates over any intellectualising is a Matisse-like delight in beauty; the reference also rings true in the occasional collage of cutout paper. The formative influence of European

modernist painting is clear throughout. The palette echoes that of Fattal’s partner and fellow artist, Etel Adnan, and she cites Paul Klee as an important influence, but the combination of sunny tones, dabbing brushstrokes and arcadian mood are also strikingly reminiscent of Fauvism. The only break in mood comes at the show’s end, where a small cluster of works abandon the overall sense of levity. This is clearest in Days of sorrow (2012): a blur of wet browns and rather unsubtly glued fragments of charcoal, suggestive of explosions and rubble. Despite Fattal’s obvious sincerity, their sudden, heavy-handed grimness renders them at odds with the rest of the show; these mixed-media works would perhaps be better suited to another exhibition altogether. What hits home here is the mood of optimism and warmth, which – thankfully – prevails. Created by a war-exiled artist trained in logic and aesthetic philosophy who founded a publishing press of experimental literature, these watercolours are a vision of someone unbinding themselves from rigour – and relishing every moment. If you’re in need of some visual vitamin D to ward away greyness and cynicism, this might just be it. Isabella Smith

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Puppies Puppies Overduin & Co, Los Angeles 18 November – 16 December It is, on the face of it, not an auspicious premise for an exhibition. The ruse of an artist living in the gallery, as art, has been done and done again over the past half century, whether by Chris Burden in Bed Piece (1972) or Marina Abramović in The House with the Ocean View (2002), or by Dawn Kasper at the 2012 iteration of the Whitney Biennial. Not to mention various installations in which only the artist’s domestic furnishings were present, from Lucas Samaras’s Bedroom (1964) to Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998). Now add to the list Green Ghosts (2017), a performance by Puppies Puppies in which she, her husband and their dog sleep at Overduin & Co outside of gallery hours, having transported the contents of their apartment into the white cube. And yet Puppies Puppies’ smart exhibition feels anything but derivative. This is in no small part thanks to a series of moves (here the term seems appropriately tactical) that the artist makes in the framing of the stuff in the gallery. First, there is no press release as such, although there are a series of typed texts posted around the gallery, in a disarmingly chatty tone, written by Puppies’

husband, Forrest. Though these texts are explicative, they also admit to being totally partial, and quite possibly ‘wrong’, as Forrest writes. You may know Forrest (identified here only by his first name) as Forrest Nash, founder of the fantastically popular art website Contemporary Art Daily. Which is not quite beside the point here because the primary sensation conveyed by Puppies Puppies’ exhibition is of familiarity – from the recognition of mass-media references like Harry Potter (1997–2007) or Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) to revelations of interpersonal intimacy of the ickiest order – processed through a deeply self-conscious cultural filter that makes everything seem so highly contrived that it might as well be fiction. On a rectangle of grassy green carpet tiles, blue and yellow panties are spread out beside a blue silicone vibrator. First underwear, first toy, our carpet (Blue) (Yellow)(Green) (2017) is an archly formal composition that also requires us to believe that these objects are the artefacts they purport to be. Everything in Puppies and Forrest’s apartment is putatively green, blue or yellow.

Mainly green. Of course, this is an impossible claim. I have no idea what colour their dog is, but I sneaked a look inside their green fridge and, alongside the olives and salad, I spotted some foodstuffs with chromatically aberrant labels. These slippages speak to the inevitable failures in presenting a seamlessly constructed identity to the world. They make the enigmatically pseudonymous Puppies Puppies human, make her fiction believable. The idea of identity as an aesthetic composition is thrown into relief in one of Forrest’s texts, in which he reveals that Puppies is currently transitioning from male to female: ‘a creative act, full of calibration and authorship and aesthetics’, as he puts it. The morning before I visited the show, Puppies cleared the furniture away from one wall and fixed two tiny blue oestrogen pills, side by side, to the wall. Opposite hung one of a number of ‘bootleg’ artworks, a green version of Felix GonzalezTorres’s twin clocks, Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991) – a homage that, like so much of the exhibition, beyond its appropriationist game-playing, was foremost about love. Jonathan Griffin

Toothbrushes in cup (Blue)(Yellow)(Green), 2017, pair of toothbrushes containing DNA in blue glass, 15 × 8 × 8 cm. Photo: Lee Thompson. Courtesy the artist and Overduin & Co, Los Angeles

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Laura Owens Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 10 November – 4 February If you are strategic or lucky enough to time your arrival at the Whitney’s west-facing gallery to sunset, you will see Laura Owens’s paintings catch fire. The works in this room are from the artist’s luminescent Day-Glo Pavement Karaoke series (2012). They’ve been reproduced numerous times, on magazine covers and in catalogues, where they tend to register as coy archetypes of the self-reflexive turn in painting during the 1990s and early 2000s, in which the canvases themselves seem to ponder their reason for existence, as well as frontrunners of the increasing use of image-editing software by painters. In person, however, the works engulf and embrace without a flicker of reflexive distance. These five untitled 2.7-by-2m canvases invite you in, to observe how their scintillating graphic forms are built up from layer upon layer of flat screenprinted and painted shapes; how several of the matrices that course their massive frames are made from swaths of pasted gingham. Sitting with the paintings at twilight, I was reminded of looking at Dan Flavin’s glowing neon sculptures at a similar hour at Dia Beacon. Yet Owens’s virtuosic works display an alto-

gether different alchemy: they are testaments to the transformational potential of paint. The Pavement Karaoke series marks Owens’s euphoric reembrace of abstraction at the start of this past decade. The works are positioned immediately following a windowless room devoted, salon-style, to 23 figurative works, which the artist made between 2003 and 2011 and whose subjects are rendered via loose paintwork that’s alternately reminiscent of Elizabeth Peyton and faux-naïve painter ˙ Auste. If this formal shift between the contents of one gallery and the next at first feels abrupt, it’s helpful to remember that Owens has been pursuing a line of inquiry into images – how we look at them and the diverse effects of various representational and abstract strategies – for nearly 30 years. While the earliest paintings in this show, made during the mid-1990s, reveal a self-conscious desire to imbue her work with ‘content’ – ‘This is a painting about paintings in a room!’ one imagines Untitled (1997), an interior featuring miniature reproductions of nearby Owens paintings, exclaiming – by the end of the last decade we find the artist tackling

her increasingly ambitious compositions with a reserve matching her ample wit. One of Owens’s savviest formal innovations is her subversion of the ‘build up’ – wherein a composition is initiated via a rudimentary underpainting and accrues detail and complexity as it’s worked up. Instead, her works from the early 2000s onwards are presented on complex grounds with layers that intersect in elaborate choreographies, only to be overlaid with increasingly crude interventions, including the application of gobs of paint and pumice (culminating, in Untitled, 2013, and Untitled, 2014, with the addition of actual bicycle wheels). But this is one invention among many. Indeed, the generosity of these paintings stems from the rigour with which they address the many possibilities of paint itself, without hiding from the viewer the effort behind all this exploration. If the earlier works perhaps protest too much, these masterful, raucous final canvases appear blithely unbothered by the question of the medium’s relevance as they show us, supremely convincingly, the astonishing things paint can do. Cat Kron

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Lewis Stein Works from 1968–1979 Essex Street, New York 29 October – 22 December ‘Can I be more concise?’ were all the words offered by the American minimalist painter Lewis Stein in the press release for his Artists Space show in New York in 1979, consisting of just a wall and a door – the culmination of the artist’s interest in charged objecthood, which dismayed his gallerists as well as his devoted painterly following. Almost 40 years later, the clarity of his unusually cryptic body of sculpture – stern-looking readymades, fragments and objects sourced from the streets of urban America, conceived sporadically between 1968 and 1979 – only seems to have intensified, as they’re re-presented in a sleek installation at Essex Street’s subterranean white cube. Speaking in an institutional language of industrial design, Lewis’s collection of objects share an abstract relation to the regulation of public life and the control of bodies as they move through the city streets. At the very centre of the gallery space, four polished velvet rope stanchions, as seen in museums or banks, firmly

delineate a perfect square, imposing and inaccessible, ushering its audience to move around it along the walls. A sole metal guardrail flanks its one side, aimlessly blocking access to nowhere in particular, except for dividing the space further. A series of classic American anodised trashcans – first introduced in late-nineteenth-century New York for urban hygiene – further complicate easy movement through the space. A brightly shining metropolitan streetlight casts a glaring spotlight onto the ground; and on a nearby wall, a wooden billy club hangs quietly from a single nail, an artefact of state-sanctioned policing of disobedient bodies. Yet here, in the charged space of the white cube, it feels almost beautiful, certainly auratic, as any good sculpture. Lewis’s spatialised readymades are – like most derivatives of ‘hostile’ and ‘regulatory’ architectures – seductive in their violence, and thus position themselves as deeply antagonistic, in particular to the idealist project

Works from 1968–1979, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York

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of Minimalism and its pursuit of perceptual objectivity. Here, the viewing subject is never allowed free passage or objective orientation, but is instead constantly reminded of the surveillance, authority and control enforced on her body by and through objects – objects that conceal their force under the ‘neutrality’ of functionalist design. Too rarely have the sanitised aesthetics of High Minimalism been interrogated for its resemblance to those of, say, corporations; or how the dream of an institutionally prescribed ‘meditative spatiality’ in the encounter with art bears an uncanny relation to perverse ideas of ‘public order’. Lewis’s sharp critique of institutional space extends to today, when control and surveillance in spaces used by the public have become no less pronounced. The politics of orientation and occupation inevitably changes when stateregulated space transforms into corporate space, and in this light, Lewis’s readymades feel both impactful and prophetic. Jeppe Ugelvig

Gerard Byrne In Our Time Lisson Gallery, New York 3 November – 22 December Which material in the vast cache of popular media is judged to be timeless and which is discarded as ephemeral? And how does our consumption of such media structure our lived experience? The Irish artist Gerard Byrne often raises such questions in videos restaging cultural debates from magazines and newspapers that dramatise the ways in which the views of avantgarde heroes (from philosophers to sciencefiction writers) fall in or out of step with contemporary mores. The video installation In Our Time (2017), commissioned for Skulptur Projekte Münster, is an uncanny mise-en-scène of an obsolescent media format: a broadcast radio station, complete with vinyl records and cassette tapes. While the installation seems more nostalgic than some of Byrne’s previous projects, it prompts viewers to consider how media formats influence social thinking. First installed in a Münster library, In Our Time now occupies the smaller of Lisson’s two New York galleries. A single-channel rearprojected video documents Byrne’s recreation of a pop radio station’s control room, with a velvety-voiced DJ and a live band that occasionally sets up and plays a few bars. Period details – from the announcer’s oversize glasses to the record titles – date the scene’s era as the mid-1970s to the early 1980s (a period that spans Byrne’s childhood). The gallery is a theatrical parallel to the wood-panelled radio station onscreen. Byrne has decked it out with heavy red curtains drawn against the walls, vintage speakers, a piano, sheet-music stands and freestanding

microphone mounts. A nondurational work, In Our Time is structured with the cyclical cadence of 24-hour radio broadcasting. One could be fooled into thinking that the piece was a long loop, with pop music hits interrupted by repetitious commercial breaks, weather forecasts or news updates with the same stories (Reagan’s nuclear deals circa the early 1980s, and the violent death of Alberta King, the mother of Martin Luther King Jr, in 1974). Yet it becomes clear that the piece is run through an algorithm: the DJ announces the actual local time during the station breaks, even as the same material is cycled through. Furthermore, the position of viewers in the space activates additional video and audio channels. When one lingers near the piano, for example, overhead speakers play a piano-and-drum track, and the band appears onscreen. Standing underneath a speaker at the back of the space, one hears an interview with an unnamed person about buying an amp. The pop-music offerings the DJ plays veer towards the melancholic, if not tragic, hits of the era: Femme Fatale (1967) by The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee (1971), Iggy Pop’s The Passenger (1977). Even the choice of schmaltzy wedding ballad We’ve Only Just Begun (1970) by the Carpenters is marked by Karen Carpenter’s gloomy delivery. Between the songs, vintage ads for record stores, The Gap and a Chevrolet Camaro have the warm patina of nostalgia, even as some of them betray a sexist undertone. Their macho posturing is underscored by the announcer’s exchange with a schoolgirl caller on the line, whose voice seems

to be lifted from an archived recording. As the DJ presses her to reveal the identity of her new boyfriend, the tension rises to predatory levels. The title In Our Time links Byrne’s lifetime to the heyday of pop radio. But it also alludes to how the 24-hour broadcasting cycle is organised through advertisers ‘buying time’. How are memories conditioned by such commercial interruptions, and what might we lose through the disappearance of massmedia public spheres? Scholars such as Alison Landsberg, the author of Prosthetic Memory (2004), see the potential of mass media to create collective consciousness and promote progressive politics through the work of empathy. Most historical video art, however, has been firmly rooted in Marxist tactics. Byrne’s piece is a far cry from Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s video-as-polemic Television Delivers People (1973), or feminist artist Martha Rosler’s videos of the 1970s and 80s deconstructing mass-media messages of torture and US foreign interventions. Yet Byrne also estranges viewers from a too-rosy view of the past. Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become clear that information silos have the potential to wreak political catastrophe. By fracturing the public sphere into niche markets, advertising can be more targeted, but public opinion can be also manipulated on issues such as Brexit. Byrne’s creation of a vintage pop radio station depicts, with ambivalence, what we stand to lose – mindless commercial breaks, perhaps, but also a sense of community. Wendy Vogel

In Our Time, 2017, single-channel film installation with eight-channel audio. Photo: Damien Elliot. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

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Prospect.4 The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp Various venues, New Orleans 18 November – 25 February The title of the latest edition of Prospect New Orleans, the citywide triennial founded in 2008 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, is The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. Yes, that’s right, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. Seventeen venues house the exhibition’s 73 participating artists, duos and collectives, though the city’s three art museums hold a massive majority share. Apparently based on a poetic quote from musician and educator Archie Shepp about the origins of jazz, the exhibition’s didactics tag on enough generic references to Buddhism, Hinduism and other ideas about art and rebirth to make one wonder whether the artistic director, Trevor Schoonmaker, and his team would have offered such a tepid metaphor about renewal in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And if not then, why exactly do audiences deserve it now? However, Prospect.4 does seem to predict the current mainstream debate surrounding public monuments. Indeed, in that regard it appears to have followed the lead of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who spearheaded the removal of several confederate statues in May 2017. “The South lost,” he declared several times. “Its cause was immoral.” Redressing these art-historical legacies, certain works can be plucked out as exemplary. Hank Willis Thomas’s History of the Conquest (2017), a statue of a young black girl riding a close-to-twometre-tall snail, appears to resemble some queer local folklore; and Rebecca Belmore’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), a massive megaphone handmade from wood and hide, prompts connections between indigenous tradition, monumentality and protest. It is worth consuming a large portion of an afternoon to chase the many colourful flags Odili Donald Odita designed to commemorate important sites in local black history for Indivisible and Invincible: Monuments to Black Liberation and Celebration in the City of New Orleans (2017). Still, the exhibition previously known to put art at the service of the city’s demands cordons this conversation off to institutional spaces or depends too heavily on international biennial stalwarts like Larry Achiampong, Kader Attia, Paulo Nazareth and Yoko Ono. Is Runo Lagomarsino’s eponymous riverside mural If You Don’t Know What the South Is, It’s Simply Because You’re from the North (2017) really so provocative?

At the New Orleans Jazz Museum you may also experience Mardi Gras Indian costumes from Darryl Montana, a centuries-old tradition that melds black and Native American traditions in the postcolonial South; you’ll also discover collages by famed jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong, including one dedicated to his devotion for a certain brand of natural laxative. Biennials are great at cherry-picking, though Prospect.4 lacks the self-awareness that allowed previous iterations to really pinpoint their stakes. ‘I am a tourism promoter,’ the curator of the first Prospect, Dan Cameron, was quoted as saying in The New Yorker. I would appreciate it if Schoonmaker, and biennial leadership, would explain why they felt it was appropriate to install Genevieve Gaignard’s Grassroots (2017) at the Ace Hotel. An exhibition sponsor, the boutique hotel chain is known for a bespoke comfort – the eye they train on every aesthetic decision is guided by an effort to pass as local. Though Gaignard’s installation uses church pews, vintage mirrors and patterned wallpaper, things you’d already expect to find at an Ace Hotel, it is disturbing just how easily a series of slave ship manifests could decorate the lobby, too. Prospect.4 is an exhibition in spite of the curator. Some of the most beguiling work was captivated by the flood cycles of the Mississippi Delta itself. At UNO – St Claude Gallery, photographer Jeff Whetstone’s series Batture Ritual (2017) is named after the in-between zone at river’s edge. The images show people, fish and tankers as they make their way up the Mississippi, locals taking evening recreation, others bathing; many of the images were shot at dusk and dawn, though the video of the same name shows the liminal area at all times of day. One image depicts a dead catfish that gleams all over with jewellike flies: the lucid light invokes Dutch still-life paintings from a bygone age of prosperity. The batture, which succumbs to seasonal flooding, is a reminder of the flood risk that pervades New Orleans, a city positioned below sea level; according to NPR, though, New Orleans successfully lobbied the federal government to remove emergency flood ratings that had prevented real-estate investment in areas that had been most affected by Katrina. In Monique Verdin’s photographs, the batture is positioned as a site of disappearance: her show

facing page, top Louis Armstrong, Gems from Buenos, 1960, reel-to-reel tape box collage containing photographs and tape, 18 × 18 cm. Courtesy the Louis Armstrong House Museum, New York

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at the Historic New Orleans Collection documents the United Houma Nation, a tribe located in southern Louisiana, and of which Verdin is a member. Mark Dion deliberately positioned Field Station for the Melancholy Biologist (2017) within the flood zone so that it will be destroyed when the river rises in winter. For now, the clapboard shed houses a tiny field-lab full of scientific instruments and animal specimens, but it will be funny when the water releases everything from its current state of captivity, including the contents of a cabinet Dion filled entirely with aspirin. The total lack of compunction on the part of a single rogue dancer (whoever it was in that Lycra bodysuit, they were feeling themselves) provided many of us with the strongest memory from the Swamp Galaxy Gala, an inaugural event for Prospect.4. Though the crowd’s phone cameras were trained elsewhere, it was actually the city’s mayor who would unwittingly set out the stakes of this edition of the triennial. Earlier editions of Prospect made urgent the larger concerns of the city, and artists notably tailored their contributions to also include financial support and other community-based resources; that biennials are strategic assets (and Prospect’s website states this very clearly) is a trap that curators of this edition succumbed to, clearly unwilling to needle the rampant real-estate market and a growing housing crisis. Who knows what went through Mayor Landrieu’s mind as he delivered his last Prospect commencement. The opening of the exhibition coincided with the mayoral election, and the city would determine his successor; local newspapers displayed pull quotes from leading candidates declaring their intention to stand up to developers. TV appearances, TED Talks, and participation at the Aspen Institute incubator have by now made Landrieu a pundit, and a New York Times editorial even named him a potential democratic presidential nominee. The greatest innovation is happening at the local level, Landrieu says, often to preface his vision of bipartisan compromise during any of his national speaking gigs. Tonight, though, he was far less convincing. “We’ve built schools, hospitals, parks,” he outlined towards the end of his gala speech, “to which Prospect has added considerable value.” I bet it did. Sam Korman

facing page, bottom Jeff Whetstone, Ode to the Algiers Batture, from the series Batture Ritual, 2017, archival pigment print, 99 × 132 cm. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York

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The New Poverty by Stephen Armstrong Verso, £12.99 (softcover) At the beginning of this year, the Conservative leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (it’s in England, in case you hadn’t guessed) demanded that police exercise whatever legal powers might be at their disposal to clear the local area of homeless people in anticipation of the upcoming royal wedding at Windsor Castle. According to Councillor Simon Dudley, ‘an epidemic of rough sleeping and vagrancy’ was blighting his ‘beautiful town’. He went on to conjure images of beggars frogmarching tourists to cashpoints and imply that visible poverty was an offence to royal and tourist eyes. Indeed, underlying all this is the suggestion that Dudley (and a great many others like him) believe poverty to be a choice rather than an imposition, a matter of behaviour rather than circumstance, and therefore a matter for the police rather than local councils (with whom, incidentally, responsibility for the provision of housing in England rests). The increasing abandonment and demonisation of people who are in need within British society is the subject of journalist Stephen Armstrong’s new study of contemporary poverty. Published at the end of 2017, which marked the 75th anniversary of the Beveridge Report (which paved the way for the establishment of the United Kingdom’s welfare state), it looks at the ways in which the nature of poverty has changed in recent times and how social-support mechanisms designed to combat poverty are either failing to do so or are making the problem worse (or are simply ‘replaced’ by privately

funded art triennials in the case of a town like Folkestone). Today two-thirds of families living in poverty are in work, albeit on zero-hours contracts or worse. For many, the value of work and the cost of living simply don’t match up. The age of the post-Beveridge welfare state may have reached its end, says Armstrong, but Beveridge’s five ‘Giant Evils’ – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – are returning. To experience poverty, Armstrong argues, is to experience injustice: poverty is unfair. And in an age when people like Dudley, and the mass media in general, have linked words such as ‘benefits’ with ‘cheat’ and ‘fraud’, language matters. So Armstrong takes us on a tour of phrases like the ‘poverty premium’ (things cost more when you have less, because the discounted options – online offers, advance payments, etc – are out of your reach), the ‘digitally deprived’ (those without access to an on-tap online connection in an age in which social services are increasingly online), the ‘democratic deficit’ (the closure of local newspapers, for example, makes it harder for local people to be heard and, according to analysis, leads to lower voter turnout because the issues at stake seem not to involve them) and the rise of ‘DIY dentistry’ (it’s simply cheaper). Context is important too: benefit fraud amounts to £1.3 billion per year; the tax gap (between what’s owed in taxes and what’s paid in taxes) for 2013–14 was £34b. It’s more popular to make a show of punishing the former rather than tackling the latter.

‘The UK is fragmenting into enclaves,’ Armstong writes, ‘divided by income and attitude, and we are no longer listening to each other. The consequences can be devastating for all of us.’ The sense of resentment that leads to Brexit is just one of them. Like all good journalists, Armstrong mixes hard facts with heartbreaking interviews, deploying the latter to give weight to the former and to make their abstractions more devastatingly real. In all this he is informed by George Orwell’s groundbreaking 1937 survey of poverty in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier (which Armstrong updated, as The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited, on the 75th anniversary of its publication). Having completed his study, Armstrong notes, Orwell stopped writing and started fighting for what he believed in (during the Spanish Civil War). If ever there was an issue that deserved to have the much-abused ‘urgent’ appended to it, this is it. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer: a definition of injustice that goes back, via Karl Marx and US President Andrew Jackson, almost 200 years. Much of the problem rests on questions of access. Of people who are left behind by digital revolutions (not everyone is digital, let alone postdigital, despite what the artworld would lead you to believe), house prices and the cost of healthcare, for example, and the corporations and governments that remorselessly drive those things on. Read this and you’ll realise that now is our time to act. Mark Rappolt

Out of Nothing by Daniel Locke with David Blandy Nobrow, £16.99 (hardcover)

David Blandy has been in an expansive mood of late. The centrepiece of his recent London exhibition was the video The End of the World (2017), in which a voice muses on eschatology – the study of end times, the demise of humanity – while viewers are given a tour of the solar system, circling Earth and Saturn. This collaborative graphic novel, made with illustrator Daniel Locke, is the video’s more upbeat sibling, narrating instead a millennia-spanning fable of the start of things, a paean to humanity’s ability to conject, imagine and create things that didn’t previously exist. Our guide is a wandering blue girl, an immortal ‘emissary’ who witnesses the creation of life on our planet and key moments in human

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development, from Ice Age cave-dwellers carving a man-lion hybrid sculpture (the oldest known figurative art) to future settlers of Mars. Though admittedly a subjective, skipping tour, the pit stops are curiously Western-centric for such a spaced-out journey: Gutenberg’s printing press, Georges Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s collage paintings, Albert Einstein’s conception of space–time, Kool Herc’s sampling of UK prog-rock band Babe Ruth to invent what will become known as hip hop. Life, Blandy and Locke suggest, is just another remix. The comic form is an ideal medium for such a story: visual associations and puns can fly back and forth between the sound waves and

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DNA strands, from planets to basketballs to vinyl records. Locke’s drawing style is almost goofy, but with thick, clear lines – all the round heads, wide eyes and loping bodies of the characters look like cleaned-up versions of more trippy comic artists like Matthew Thurber or Paper Rad’s Ben Jones. The result is an educational, slightly stiff tone that, while delivering an imaginative and cosmic tale, gives the book a feel of being aimed at a ‘young adult’ audience. As Blandy and Locke put it in the opening pages: ‘All of human history is nothing more than a brief moment in the history of our solar system’. And in these times, no matter what age, a bit of perspective never hurts. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Books

January & February 2018

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ARTIST / WORK / LISSON Edited by Ossian Ward Lisson Gallery, £60 (softcover) ‘On the outside a book is part of the world of human appearances, but inside it is governed by a code.’ So says John Latham in an extract from a conversation between the artist and John A. Walker taken from a 1987 edition of Studio International. Latham is talking about his use of books as a material on the occasion of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery that same year. It’s a statement that could apply more directly to the book it’s reprinted in, ARTIST / WORK / LISSON, created to mark another Lisson occasion, the gallery’s 50th anniversary. This book takes the form of an illustrated alphabetical record of the 150-plus artists who between them have held more than 500 solo shows at the gallery’s spaces in London, Milan and New York, between 1967 and 2017 – Ai Weiwei, Hussein Chalayan, Shirazeh Houshiary, Derek Jarman, Richard Long, Yoko Ono, Joyce Pensato and Andy Warhol among them. Interspersed under the appropriate letters are anecdotes and insights from director Nicholas Logsdail and other senior members of the gallery team, alongside thematic chronologies of group shows and main events in Lisson’s history, that highlight the gallery’s evolution and ethos. For example, there’s F for Family, G for Global, P for Private Views, N for New York and R for Relationships. If the subjects of these insertions are the most random element of the book’s

structure, part of what makes it such an interesting read (despite it being 1,152 pages long) is its dogged adherence to its own simple alphabetical and numerical logic. The entry for each artist features a text, in the form of a contemporaneous catalogue essay, review or Q&A, followed by an illustrated chronological record of all their solo shows, plus a list of the group shows in which they have participated. An index of artists featured is at the front and an index of authors at the back. That there are no page numbers assigned to either results in the reader only being able to find individual artists by employing the alphabet, and only finding individual authors by chance. Working with Lisson, the instigator of that logic is the book’s Dutch designer Irma Boom. It’s Boom’s own thin but tough translucent archival paper (IBO One) upon which the book’s pages are printed, giving it, not unintentionally, the dimensions and weight of an old British telephone directory. The clear acetate cover features an artwork in red by Daniel Buren, with limited- and special-edition covers by other gallery artists also available. The other effect of using Boom’s paper is that with each page there is intentional show-through of the one that follows. This is usually something to avoid in book production, but Boom makes a feature

of it, as she puts it – like seeing past, present and future all on one page. Some will find this annoying – although not this reader. Aside from an association with cool design, what makes this more than just a history of Lisson, a gallery established almost by accident by an art student (see B for beginnings) and which champions international minimal and conceptual artists, is the wider picture it reveals about artists and the changing nature of their relationships to the artworld within which they work. This is seen from the pre-email handwritten and often illustrated correspondence artists sent to the gallery, to how and by whom they were written about. It also throws up the question of what it might mean that some artists, Jene Highstein, for example, had only one solo show with the gallery, in his twenties, whereas others, such as Anish Kapoor, have had 16 solo shows and counting. Highstein didn’t disappear from the artworld – he moved back to the States and continued his career there; a reminder that Lisson’s history is only one of many parallel stories. That this history could be presented at all is because the gallery has maintained its physical archive. There’s a piece of advice once given to Logsdail that he likes to retell: ‘If you don’t look after your history, then you won’t have one’. Helen Sumpter

Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley Lars Müller Publishers, €19 (softcover) Written by the curators of the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human? interrogates both the basic definition of the discipline and the broader sphere that design has come to encompass today, as it permeates every layer of our world, from cities to genetic codes; from chemical engineering to systems of knowledge. As a starting point for their study, the authors take the earliest archaeological evidence of the development of tools and proceed from there to give design ontological status: they make it a necessary condition of being (human). In line with thinkers like Peter Sloterdijk, they posit that there is no world ‘outside’ design: design is not just a consequence of our existence but the very motor of our being; as much as we design tools, we are redesigned by them.

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From this base, however questionable, the authors – whose writing style is didactic without being stuffy – whiz through the more-than-200,000-year history of humanity’s attempts to shape its environment (and the range of disciplines it has harnessed to do so) in a little more than 250 pages. One of the 16 chapters collected here considers how the evolution of the human body has been shaped both in reaction to our designs (chemicals and their impact on a geological level) and to fit norms projected by our designs (through architecture, fashion, etc). Another muses on the role of ornament as a generator of evolutionary forces, drawing on papers by Darwin, archaeological research and art theory to demonstrate that it’s not the tools

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per se that define humans, but the creative impulse that goes into their reforming and repurposing, and the capacity to go beyond what is needed. And yet, however compelling this designcentric history of humanity is, it carries undertones of a creationist mythology. If design is indeed what makes us human, maybe it’s time to rethink our ‘humanity’ in a world that feels increasingly (and irreversibly) shaped to accommodate our presence. For if design is about evolution and change, it’s not always certain that that change is for the better. Perhaps that is something that can be studied in this year’s edition of the biennial, titled A School of Schools and opening in September. Louise Darblay

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For more on British artist Joe Kessler, read Paul Gravett’s text at artreview.com/thestrip

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The words on the spine and on pages 27 and 103 are from Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

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January & February 2018

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A Curator Writes January & February 2018 “‘Ring out the old, ring in the new! Ring, happy bells, across the snow!’” I chant the words of dear Lord Tennyson to my new assistant, Chuck, as he brings in my afternoon cup of Darjeeling. Just as I used to bark at my old fag at Eton, Sebastian. Out with the old and in with the new, and all that. Chuck might walk in a funny, lopsided way, but he has an upbeat American disposition that was sadly lacking in Rodolf, his predecessor. He’s also a natural when it comes to feeding Tiddles the cat, who he picks up and cradles after setting my tea down. “My pussy looks so happy with you, Chuck,” I observe kindly. “You know, Chuck, would you like me to tell you about my strengths and weaknesses?” “Are you throwing shade?” Chuck answers. He is only two weeks into his unpaid internship, and still unsure of himself, like a fawn starting to understand the grace and power of her long legs. “Don’t worry, Chuck. I’m just practising for the job offers that are going to be coming my way this New Year. Perhaps I’ll take up the Jewish Museum post, although of course I’m a High Anglican, like dear T.S. Eliot. Or I might fancy a bit of an advisory role with an intellectually renowned nonprofit foundation in Paris – although, my boy, I can tell you I fear I might not be allowed back again in that city after the incident in Les Chandelles following the recent Nalini Malani opening. I can tell you that the maquette of César’s golden thumb sculpture came in handy that evening…” “Wow!” says Chuck in his charming Illinois accent. “Have you been offered all these jobs?” “… or perhaps a foundation in Buenos Aires. I hear Argentina is beautiful in the spring…” “So many offers! And after your long period of, er, resting, this is just G.O.A.T.!” He throws Tiddles up in the air and catches the startled-looking cat on her rapid descent. “It’s lit! Which one are you going to do, Ivanhoe?” “Ah, well, to be honest, Chuck, I haven’t received any actual offers as yet, and there’s the formality of job interviews, which even someone as distinguished as myself has to undergo. I just thought, given the way things are going with my peers, and the terrible luck they’re having, that there’d be quite a few openings for a star curator like myself. I mean, I was an uncredited assistant on Chambres d’Amis in Ghent back in 1986…” “Dope. But that was 31 years ago…” “And I took Nicolas Bourriaud’s notes when he formulated relational aesthetics during the exhibition Traffic at the CAPC Musée d’Art

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Contemporain de Bordeaux, as well as regularly dusting down Liam Gillick’s floor-based work for the duration of the exhibition.” Chuck puts Tiddles down. “I don’t mean TBR, and tell me to go sips tea if you want, but TBH you’ve got to be thirsty for a job after all this time, right? If there was one important lesson I learned from my curator-in-training programme at Western Illinois Museum, it was this: what does your squad say?” “Well, if I understand what you’re saying, what most of my ‘squad’ are saying is, ‘I have never knowingly or purposefully behaved in a bullying, intimidating, harassing or sexually inappropriate manner’.” “On fleek!” I sit and sip my Darjeeling, mulling over which of the many skeletons in my closet might be hanging there for reasons unrelated to life-drawing or anatomy studies. And the fact that I’m still doing the mulling some five minutes later answers my question. It’s like being Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, watching the dead being resurrected. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones… And that’s when I see the future. When I realise I’m not a curator; I’m a prophet. “Our great glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail,” I say to my young American disciple, once his nervous fidgeting has become almost uncontrollable. “At Western Illinois did they by chance teach you anything about how to become an art consultant?” “Sure thing, bruh, it’s what all of us are going to do. It’s total goals for all of us.” “Well, of course, if it was good enough for Bernard Berenson, the great American art-historian whose book Italian Painters of the Renaissance you must of course be familiar with from the reading list at Western Illinois…” “Swipe left!” I settle back to deliver my lecture: “Berenson was something of a proto-art consultant, rubber-stamping anything that dear Lord Duveen twisted his arm into. Surely now is the time for experts like me to lend our knowledge to new collectors, albeit for a small price.” “I can’t even, Ivanhoe, ho.” “Yes you can, Chuck. Yes you can,” I reassure him. “You have just the qualities to be an art consultant’s assistant. Consult the diary! Let us make haste to our first art fair. We must lend our minds to those who need them!” And with that, and a ticket to Geneva, my career plans for 2018 start to take shape. “‘When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.’” I. Kurator

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Palexpo / 01-04.02.2018 / artgeneve.ch

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