I had no food in my backpack but another burden: Western art history
CHANEL .COM THE CHANEL MOMENT
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Gerard Byrne, In Our Time, 2017 (still). Single channel film installation. Dimensions variable
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ArtReview vol 69 no 8 November 2017
Balancing act Hiwa K’s work, which graces the cover of this issue and features throughout the magazine, is characterised by movement, interruption and disruption: themes not least inspired by the artist’s journey on foot as a refugee 15 years ago, as he left Iraq and eventually settled in Germany. The artist’s 2011 video and action This Lemon Tastes of Apple is perhaps typical. He and a collaborator join a protest in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, which is being violently suppressed by armed forces deployed by the local government. Amid the noise and bloodshed, the artist and a friend play, on guitar and harmonica, and with a heavy dose of dark irony, Ennio Morricone’s refrain from the 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West. The work both links the conflicts of Iraq to the epic battles of a spaghetti western (but with no clearly defined goodies and baddies) and provides a moment of coming-together in the teargas-fogged streets. K uses his strategies of disruption to tackle power imbalances. This year he installed 20 ceramic drainpipes, stacked horizontally, outside the Documenta Halle venue in Kassel. It was there the artist’s control ended: he handed the completion of the work over to students from a local design school, who were asked to fill the pipes with furniture of their choosing. The sculpture was both a nod to a story of how the artist at one point lived inside such a pipe on his journey to Europe, and a symbol of collaboration; how, as K explained in an interview this year, ‘capitalism
Hiwa K in collaboration with the Diplom Degree Programme in Product Design, Prof. Jakob Gebert, Kunsthochschule Kassel, When We Were Exhaling Images, 2017 (installation view, Friedrichsplatz, Kassel). Photo: Mathias Völzke. Courtesy Documenta 14
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is obsessed with verticality and wipes out everything based on horizontal ideas’. It is this same spirit of collaboration that runs through K’s Chicago Boys, a project that originated during a 2010 a residency at the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project, in which the artist convened a 1970s revival band and neoliberalism study group, entirely formed of people with no prior musical training, and from different backgrounds, who alternatively jam and study questions of free market economy in weekly group sessions. The image the artist has made for the cover of the November edition of ArtReview – which contains the annual Power 100 – riffs on another work, made for Documenta 14 (Athens), in which the artist retraced the route he had taken as a twenty-five-yearold refugee through Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy. Whereas then the artist had been escaping into the blind unknown, this time he took with him a tool he’d made from a pole and motorbike mirrors. By balancing this piece on his nose, he was able to see behind him and in front of him, as well as the view of himself from above; a form of self-portrait in which he was able to observe his place in the world. K’s work is about finding weakness in the system and exploiting it for radical ends. ArtReview’s Power 100 aims to provide you with a picture of the system; it’s up to you what you do with it. ArtReview
Hiwa K, This Lemon Tastes of Apple (still), 2011, video, 16:9, colour, sound, 13 min 26 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin
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Elizabeth Murray Water Girl, 1982
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Sislej Xhafa shadow of curls
Berlin | Potsdamer Straße 77–87 Closing 26 November: Sislej Xhafa, lost and found, Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo, Venice Biennale
shouting in the wind, 2017, Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern
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The Large Glass #1, 2017, Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern. Photo: Peter Mallet
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Farhad Moshiri SNOW FOREST 003A, (detail) 2017. Hand embroidered beads on canvas on board. 179 × 185 cm / 70 1/2 × 72 13/16 in
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El Anatsui. Horizon. 2016. Bottle caps. 260 x 460 cm
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無題 Untitled( 局部)|人造皮革於畫布 Vinyl leather on canvas 182.0 x 200.0 cm 2017
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Art Previewed
Previews by Martin Herbert 49
The House of Language: some words for activism and art by Sam Korman 66
Under the Paving Stones: Mexico City by Christian Viveros-Fauné 57
The artworld’s new liquidity by J.J. Charlesworth 70
page 50 Roger Brown, Hancock Building, 1974, acrylic on wood, 77 × 38 × 38 cm. Photo: William H. Bengtson. Courtesy Roger Brown Study Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
November 2017
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Power 100
A View from Above Artist project by Hiwa K 94
The Year in Review, 2016–17 139 THE STRIP 162
The Power 100 100
A CURATOR WRITES 166
Pre-Image Artist project by Hiwa K 132
page 132 Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (still), 2017, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 18 min. Courtesy the artist, KOW, Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan & Lucca
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ArtReview
JASPER JOHNS, Numbers, 2006 To be sold 16 November 2017 in New York Contemporary Art Evening Auction
ON VIEW IN NEW YORK BEGINNING 27 OCTOBER–16 NOVEMBER
IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART EVENING AND DAY SALES IN NEW YORK 14–15 November 2017 CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AND DAY AUCTIONS IN NEW YORK 16–17 November 2017 VIEWINGS 3–16 November ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7254 Sotheby’s 1334 York Avenue sothebys.com/magnificentgestures ART © JASPER JOHNS/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY SOTHEBY’S, INC. LICENSE NO. 1216058. © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2017
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Sol LeWitt Between the Lines Curated by Francesco Stocchi and Rem Koolhaas 17 November 2017 – 24 June 2018 Fondazione Carriero – Milan fondazionecarriero.org
Art Previewed
Your eyes will be a useless word, a suppressed cry, a silence 47
S ta r a k F a m i ly F o u n d at i o n | B o b r o w i e c k a 6 Wa r s aw | w w w . s ta r a k f o u n d at i o n . o r g
Previewed Lament the state of the world or ignore it – on founding and whose art appears everywhere the evidence of recent high-profile biennales, from museums to ferries, the scope mapped out by the 73 selected artists is somewhat wider. these seem to be the two curatorial strategies on Frequently engaging, or having engaged, 1 offer. Prospect.4 in New Orleans, though, steers with the American and Global South, they a different course. Fourth time around, the citywide project splices realism and hopeful pros- include Barkley L. Hendricks, Mark Dion, pecting, artistic director Trevor Schoonmaker Ellen Gallagher, Rivane Neuenschwander, naming it The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. That title John Akomfrah (presenting a new film about clearly refers to the bayous and wetlands that jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden) and someone named Louis Armstrong. surround The Big Easy, but also to the place’s Actually, wait: we take back that gripe about tenacious flowerings of creativity, both in birthing jazz – the phrase paraphrases the words of 2 binary choices for biennales, because Performa 17 is diagnostic but outwardly optimistic as well. saxophonist Archie Shepp – and in generating The New York-and-environs performance-art other vivid hybrids or creoles, from food to platform, just under three weeks long, focuses language to architecture. Yet if the focus is thus this time on artists working in several African initially local, appropriately for a show that runs cities, combining that theme with the legacy into next year’s 300th anniversary of the city’s
of Dada and the interplay of architecture and performance. In so doing, it aims at exploring ‘immediate and critical concerns confronting our urban centers, the shifting political and cultural currents of our turbulent world today, and ultimately the role of the arts and of artists in supporting afflicted communities’. (Also, you don’t get Barbara Kruger to devise your brand identity if you’re going apolitical.) Expect, inter alia, an ‘intimate’ Jimmy Robert performance in Philip Johnson’s Connecticut Glass House; Kelly Nipper working in a 3D printing lab; a struggle between a man, a woman and a mirror masterminded by Kendell Geers; a William Kentridge performance nodding to the Dada thematic by responding to Kurt Schwitters; and a citywide scorecard of projects by Zanele Muholi.
2 Barbara Kruger’s design for Performa 17. Courtesy the artist and Performa, New York
1 Barkley L. Hendricks, Photo Bloke, 2016, oil and acrylic on linen, 183 × 122 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
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The Chicago Imagists revival has been that siphoned the energies of underground underway awhile, spearheaded by market comics, art brut, Surrealism and general reappraisals of figures such as the exquisitely straight-from-the-id grotesquery. It still looks 3 offbeat Jim Nutt. Now, for Famous Artists startlingly fresh today, in part because the from Chicago. 1965–1975, Milan’s Fondazione influences within it are themselves popular Prada has transformed itself into a self-styled again but also, one might surmise, because laboratory of sorts for reconsidering the movewe’re living in an equally tumultuous time ment, trifurcating into standalone segments for and many young artists seemingly have nada Leon Golub and H.C. Westermann and a third to say about it. for, well, everyone else. Short course: during the To return to ‘renascent Surrealism’: start 1960s, New York and Los Angeles were besotted with Magritte, see how close to the present you by relatively nonpolitical abstraction (some 4 can get – which is what Magritte, Broodthaers supposed CIA funding notwithstanding); but in & Contemporary Art does – and you may find Chicago, scene of direct confrontation between that the style never really went away, only the counterculture and the police, priorities underground. The line you’ll follow, accordwere different. Via artists like Nutt, Ed Paschke ing to this show, links Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, César, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Gladys Nilsson, a style of painting arose
Marcel Broodthaers (obviously, for his fascination with language and designation) and younger bucks such as George Condo, Sean Landers, Gavin Turk and David Altmejd. This covert continuum, here illuminated by some 150 works including sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, films and archival documents, features enough brilliantly resourceful artists’ practices to justify the conceit; and a conceit it is, positioning Magritte as the secret sharer for decades of modern art. The locals probably won’t disagree; outsiders may not either. ‘I’m not a sculptor, I’m not a filmmaker. 5 I’m an editor,’ Neïl Beloufa said in an interview a couple of years ago, despite his being known primarily for films surrounded by,
3 Leon Golub, Interrogation ii, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 305 × 427 cm. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York
4 Marcel Broodthaers, Photograph of René Magritte in his house, 1964. © the estate of Marcel Broodthaers
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ArtReview
5 Neïl Beloufa, Untitled, 2017, steel, resin, electrical outlet, 160 × 130 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Balice Hertling, Paris
6 Sherrie Levine, After Russell Lee (detail), 2016, giclee print, 60 parts, 51 × 41 cm (each). Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London
and sometimes projected on, sculptural accoutrements. But it’s in his editing of human perspectives that the French-Algerian artist chases his core aims of undermining authority and claims to truth, whether interviewing Malians lit by lamps and threatening neon searchlights and asking them to speak about their vision of the future in the present tense (Kempinski, 2007); making a teleplaylike film about French teenagers, Bruno Renault (2010), that reveals all its artifices; or, in World Domination (2014), having amateur actors – free, as so often in Beloufa’s art, to distort the narrative the artist sets up – playing world leaders in situation rooms, declaring war on each other, in order to solve problems at home.
Since that scenario currently looks somewhat premonitory, we might respect Beloufa’s own authority even if he doesn’t. One thing that looks increasingly canny about the Pictures Generation is that as they 6 get older – and Sherrie Levine is seventy this year – they’re under relatively light pressure to come up with new ideas. Invention was never Levine’s thing (though, need it be said, her unoriginality was highly original); a daredevil duplicating was, albeit while generating a sliver-thin gap between original and copy, the space Duchamp described as ‘infrathin’, wherein new meanings percolate. So while it’s decades since Levine began rephotographing Walker Evans photographs,
November 2017
here, for After Russell Lee: 1–60 (2016), she uses the same tight process on a set of colour 1940 images by his lesser-known contemporary Russell Lee, who documented rural life in Pie Town, New Mexico: a sequence reflecting economic inequality that, however much the brassiness and clarity of Levine’s original project remains intact, feels likely to leak into the present. Alongside these, meanwhile, are bronze appropriations of sculptures from ‘outside the Western canon’, and monochromes based on single pixels from an image of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1887–88). When we think of photographers who pioneered crossing over into the artworld, Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller spring
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7 Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2004/2017, c-print, 150 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich
8 Richard Wentworth, Paying a visit, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona & Madrid 9 Mirosław Bałka, 229 × 118 × 75 cm, 1975/2017, steel, terrazzo, felt, 229 × 118 × 75 cm. Photo: Gerhard Kassner. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin & Stockholm
7 to mind, but the Swiss Walter Pfeiffer, a couple of decades older, was there before them; he’s the rare figure whose work has appeared in Vogue, Butt and sharp-minded galleries like Paris’s Galerie Sultana and Zürich’s Gregor Staiger, the latter hosting his latest show. After he started to photograph during the 1960s, Pfeiffer’s deceptively composed, deeply aesthetic, often monochrome and snapshotstyle images of friends, lovers and youth culture per se would come to be contextualised alongside those of Nan Goldin et al; from the 1980s onwards, though, he went quiet and took up brushes and canvas, before his influence and individuality were acclaimed at the turn of the millennium. Some photographers get
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called artists because their work ends up in galleries; Pfeiffer’s an artist not only because he paints (and makes videos) but because, as displayed by his bright, smorgasbord shows – driven by images displayed on image-based wallpaper – even his editorial shoots are art. At the time of writing, Spain is in disarray following Catalonia’s independence referendum and the brutal response of the Spanish government. A fateful moment, then, for an artist who first arrived in Spain in 1974 at the tail-end of Franco’s dictatorship to reconsider his relationship to the country, and to arrive 8 in Catalonia in particular. For Richard Wentworth, being in Barcelona at that time
ArtReview
– where he met artists and filmmakers, and had an exhibition – affected his view of reality over the ensuing 40 years, and for Paying a visit the stalwart British sculptor and photographer has gone back. If it was to see what’s changed, then the answer might be ‘a lot, and yet not enough’; but one can, at least, rely on Wentworth’s endlessly improvisatory invention vis-à-vis reframing and recombining elements of the everyday, his ability to view the world through a sculptural filter and inject the worldly into sculpture. Since the mid-1990s, as a central plank in his project to locate personal experience within 9 collective memory, Mirosław Bałka has been producing ramplike minimal sculptures in
Franz Kline Sawyer oil on canvas 82 x 67 in. (208.3 x 170.2 cm.) Painted in 1959. © The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
20th Century. Contemporary. Now.
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale 15 November 2017, 11am & 2pm Evening Sale 16 November 2017, 5pm Public viewing from 3-15 November at 450 Park Avenue or phillips.com Enquiries contemporaryart@phillips.com
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wood, objects that obliquely (and sometimes Here as so often, Bałka’s work is undeniable fearfully, as in his route towards a giant boxful both because of its compression of bodily fear, transmuting it into austere beauty, and because of darkness for How It Is at Tate Modern’s of its generous openness; in their weight and Turbine Hall in 2009) suggest a journey into spaciousness of interpretation, the sculptures something. Another ramp – made of wood operate poetically, so it’s appropriate that and rising to a horizontal plane that faces the this show’s title, Ein Auge, Offen (An Eye, Open), empty gallery wall – features in his eighth refers to a poem by Paul Celan. show with Nordenhake. For the Polish artist, who comes from a family of tombstone makers, And it’s back to the Second World War such a transit – however abstract – is inevitably 10 again at Tate Liverpool, sort of. Mary Reid shadowed by the Holocaust, coming to terms Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s In the Body of with which is a project that will long outlive The Sturgeon (2017), the centrepiece of their Bałka himself. But his art, a vessel for projected show We Are Ghosts – where it’s accompanied subjectivity, also makes one think of mortality; by another recent film and lightbox works – is a film that ‘reimagines life on a US submarine another work, a stack of terrazzo slabs from at the end of the war’. This being a work by the artist’s family home in Otwock, Poland, the husband-and-wife pair, though, who’ve is scaled to the proportions of the artist’s body.
established an inimitably idiosyncratic aesthetic in recent years, don’t expect straight fictionalised documentary. They tend to play every role themselves, to adhere to a monochrome, super-theatrical cubist-expressionist aesthetic and to tell their stories in anachronistic rhyming verse. Their new film’s entire script is adapted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, whose idyllic take on Native American lives the Kelleys are using, somehow, as a way of talking about boredom and waiting on an industrial war machine and, no doubt, the long arc of American violence. Mary Reid Kelley, please note, wasn’t awarded a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant last year for nothing. Martin Herbert
10 Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley, Gaudy Night, 2017, photograph, transparency on lightbox, 98 × 204 cm. Courtesy the artists and Pilar Corrias, London
1 Prospect.4 New Orleans 18 November – 25 February 2 Performa 17 New York 1–19 November 3 Famous Artists from Chicago, 1965–75 Fondazione Prada, Milan through 15 January
4 Magritte, Broodthaers & Contemporary Art Musée Magritte / Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels through 18 February 5 Neïl Beloufa Balice Hertling, Paris through 24 November 6 Sherrie Levine David Zwirner, London through 18 November 7 Walter Pfeiffer Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich through 25 November
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ArtReview
8 Richard Wentworth Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona through 22 December 9 Mirosław Bałka Nordenhake, Berlin through 18 November 10 Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley Tate Liverpool 17 November – 18 March
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Under the Paving Stones
Mexico City is shaken by Christian Viveros-Fauné
Some events just can’t be planned for
The front pages of two Mexican dailies following the 2017 Central Mexico earthquake on 19 September
On 19 September, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook central Mexico, levelling buildings and causing widespread havoc. More than 360 people lost their lives (at the time of writing), many in the Mexican states of Puebla, the quake’s epicentre, and Morelos, but many in the nation’s capital as well. To add trauma to injury, the tremor hit only hours after countrywide drills marking the 32nd anniversary of the Mexico City quake of 1985, which killed approximately 10,000 people. The disaster also struck less than two weeks after an 8.2-magnitude tremor rocked the country’s southern coast, and days after Hurricane Katia made landfall in Veracruz. In Mexico City, the areas most affected by the 19 September quake were the colonias of Narvarte, Roma and Condesa. These last two neighbourhoods are chock-full of trendy restaurants, hotels and art galleries. The first is a working-class district that was, until the 19th, home to the Colegio Enrique Rébsamen, an elementary school that crumpled like a paper cup, killing 26 children and adults. When the British author Malcolm Lowry wrote about ‘the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico’, he was not, certainly, musing over the details of posh art junkets like the fifth edition of Gallery Weekend CDMX, the annual event that lures collectors, professionals and art enthusiasts from around the world to Mexico City to discover, per the organisation’s literature, ‘art in the most important galleries in the city, to view exhibits in the context of their production and to meet artists’. But for visitors who were caught in the earthquake or, bizarrely, decided to honour their flight reservations immediately after the disaster (in my case, I thought it important to support friends), Lowry’s words would have carried a newfound resonance. Originally scheduled for 21–24 September, Gallery Weekend boasted a jam-packed schedule of activities: it included tours, talks, exclusive dinners and private views of galleries and museums throughout the capital. On the morning of the 20th, as the country’s telephone and Internet communications sputtered back to life, the organisation followed the lead of thousands of other private and public businesses and wisely cancelled its event. Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto declared a citywide state of emergency; the government promptly followed this by calling for three days of national mourning. This left Gallery Weekend with a modest problem. Having decided, along with 35 member galleries, to postpone its effort indefinitely (it has since been rescheduled, for 9–12 November), the organisation had to work out what to do with 12 hangers-on (of the original 80 invited to town on its VIP programme) caught in the middle of a national disaster. If I were a betting man, I’d wager most groups in New York or London would have pulled up stakes and bid adios to their workaday responsibilities, stranded charges included. Gallery Weekend Mexico, led by general director Ricardo Porrero and director of VIP relations Ana Paula de Haro,
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did the opposite. Against tremendous logistical odds, they accommodated their dozen marooned guests with remarkable efficiency and care. After securing the safety of their families, checking in on friends and neighbours, and evaluating the literal solidity of their own homes, our hosts momentarily ignored their ruined offices – the HQ in Condesa was reportedly in shambles – rallied their staff and set about rebuilding a programme of gallery and museum visits.
Gallery Weekend, beta version Nearly 4,000 buildings in Mexico City alone were damaged by the quake. In the days after the disaster, reminders of its force were everywhere: buckled buildings, floes of concrete and brick spilling across sidewalks, street corners crisscrossed by strands of red and yellow emergency tape. Soldiers and policemen stood guard at intersections; alongside them, an army of university-age volunteers in bright construction helmets spilled onto the streets, eager to help get the city back on its feet. Unsurprisingly, Mexico’s artworld was also eager to get back to work, first by sweeping up broken glass, picking up fallen bookshelves and reinstalling interrupted art shows. Astoundingly,
Stefan Brüggemann at GAM
above Mexico City from the air, 20 September
a number of the city’s art professionals – dealers, artists and curators among them – were equally eager to welcome foreign visitors to their spaces after the catastrophe. Starting with some of the city’s most affected areas, the colonias of San Miguel de Chapultepec, Lomas-Polanco and Condesa-Roma, visits were quickly organised to a total of 12 galleries and two museums over a two-day period (more opened their doors on the day I returned to New York). Despite being officially closed, these and other gallery and museum workers graciously paused to explain their projects while they continued to ready their installations for the public. The following are a few of the highlights from these two intense days of gallery-going.
below Anri Sala’s All of a Tremble installation at Kurimanzutto
Colonias San Miguel de Chapultepec and Lomas-Polanco Driving west from the Hotel Condesa to the city’s oldest art gallery, Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM), in nearby San Miguel de Chapultepec, we saw what resembled a warzone. Every few hundred yards our vehicle passed ruined stores, fallen facades of buildings and ribbons of caution tape. Mercifully, none of the galleries we visited were structurally compromised by the quake. Founded in 1935 to exhibit mainly Mexican art – like the folk-inspired paintings of Rufino Tamayo and the confessional portraits of Frida Kahlo – GAM kicked off its legendarily Mexicanist programme with an exhibition of Surrealism curated by André Breton. This inaugural irony aside, the gallery has since updated its commitment to twentieth-century art by supporting the work of younger artists within the context of its decidedly more canonical mission. GAM’s current exhibition, Dialogues with Gunther, proved a case in point: it mixed the painterly abstractions of renowned designer, screenwriter, film director and painter Gunther Gerzso, who died in 2000,
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the spare installation included two large wallpaper drawings derived from the Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Attached to the XL sheets of paper like barrel-size limpets, two large automated cylinders stamped the drawings, while playing atonal versions of familiar music-box tunes. A study in synaesthesia, the installation closely resembles the work Sala presented at Christine Macel’s 2017 Venice Biennale exhibition, Viva Arte Viva. Besides serving, per the gallery press release, as an exploration of ‘the relationship between the construction of images and the physicality of sound’, the Kurimanzutto installation loops back to earlier sound sculptures by the artist – a number of which were on view at Sala’s other Mexico City exhibition, at the Museo Tamayo (until 7 January). At the dependably brainy Labor, the Colombian-born, LA-based artist Gala Porras-Kim debuted a marvellous multipart installation titled An Index and Its Settings. A witty, complex show that deals with how art and artefacts are named and valued, the installation marshals a giant drawing of an existing group of 78 pre-Columbian ceramics belonging to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Also featured in the exhibition: raw clay facsimiles of the same vessels. At the gallery, each unfired unit sported a GPS tracker – for future foolproof provenance, the artist declared, and facts-based art-historical research. Not content to be just an art gallery, Labor has long provided an extensive library that is open to the public, as well as an ongoing schedule of activities the space runs for the local community. Never was that community engagement more in evidence than in the days immediately following 19 September. Rather than close its doors or continue business as usual, the gallery momentarily halted its art operations to turn itself into a collection centre for food, clothing and medicine meant to support the earthquake’s victims.
Gunther Gerszo at GAM
top A drawing by Gala Porras-Kim of pre-Columbian artefacts from the LACMA collection, on show at Labor above Porras-Kim discusses her work at Labor
with canvases by living artists such as Francisco Toledo, Francisco Castro Leñero and Jan Hendrix. An appropriately unruly work in neon by Stefan Brüggemann – it resembled lefthanded writing scribbled on a moving surface – was the first and last work the viewer saw on entering and exiting the exhibition. At Kurimanzutto, on Calle Gobernador Rafael Rebollar, an orderly oasis awaited. Crammed between several shuttered buildings, the gallery is among the city’s largest (after Luis Adelantado’s multilevel, 1,500sqm extravaganza), and is by far its most elegant. Housed in an old wooden warehouse and a refurbished three-floor storefront, it has long been the seat of commercial power for the local art scene. On view inside the space was the gallery’s second exhibition of the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala. Fittingly titled All of a Tremble,
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DOOSAN Gallery New York
11.16 –12.28.2017
Colonias Juárez and Roma-Condesa An early-morning visit to the Museo Tamayo just 48 hours after the earthquake provided some idea of how the city’s bigger art museums had fared during the disaster. According to Tamayo director Juan A. Gaitán, the Tamayo’s brutalist structure – whose templelike ramps lead to the gardens of the surrounding Chapultepec Park – had sustained no significant damage; excepting delays to their planned programming. Among the installations that had suffered setbacks were exhibitions by the ‘volumetric’ Argentine painter Eduardo Costa, and a show of conceptual drawings by Mexican artist Jorge Satorre. Sala’s first major museum show in Mexico, on the other hand, was fully installed.
Marilá Dardot’s Bienvenidos, Arredondo/Arozarena
top Anri Sala’s installation at Museo Tamayo above Ariel Schlesinger’s Structures Are Unconscious, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Few experiences shaded stranger than seeing and hearing the Albanian artist’s music-driven works – among them an installation featuring automated snare drums and another looping Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand – being played to a virtually empty building. Elsewhere, at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, superficial damage had been sustained and cleaned up, according to museum director Taiyana Pimentel, leaving muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s home-turned-contemporary-museum ready for an unofficial preview. Among the works on view, which include several ‘moveable’ murals by the Mexican master himself, two new installations by Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger merited special attention. The first, done in collaboration with UK artist Jonathan Monk, combined two seminal artistic borrowings – a yellow Schwalbe moped cribbed from Gabriel Orozco’s legendary installation Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995) and a Lawrence Weiner text piece reading BITS & PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE (TWICE G.O.) (the original dating from 1991, though resituated many times since) – to arrive at a recursive commentary about originality (hint: the artists think it’s impossible). The second, titled Structures Are Unconscious, featured a mashup of hardware-store readymades – electrified scrims and large butane tanks – combined with dishwashing liquid and soap-bubble wands. Jerry-rigged by Schlesinger, the resulting structures produced periodically explosive results. Finally, an installation by Brazilian artist Marilá Dardot at Arredondo/ Arozarena provided a coda for the two days spent seeing art under Mexico’s not-so-metaphorical volcano. For a show dedicated to exploring the signs that accompany the migration crisis afflicting Mexico, Central America and the US, Dardot installed an otherwise standard-issue, store-bought sign reading bienvenidos, or ‘welcome’, with the black protective plastic still attached. The flipside of an exceptionally warm, eye-opening experience in Mexico provided under great duress, it served as a cutting reminder of the lack of welcome awaiting many foreign visitors to the US, Europe and elsewhere. Christian Viveros-Fauné is a writer and curator based in New York
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Zeng Fanzhi, Van Gogh III, 2017
20.10.2017_ 25.02.2018 Contemporary Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964) is fascinated by Vincent van Gogh. In this intimate presentation, Zeng Fanzhi presents existing and new work inspired by Van Gogh. Four of the five captivating paintings were created especially for this presentation. Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh is a world first, now on display at the Van Gogh Museum. Partners of the museum
www.vangoghmuseum.com/zengfanzhi
Exclusive sponsor
House of Language: some words for activism and art by Sam Korman
above MTL+, Our Uprisings, 2016, poster. Courtesy Decolonize This Place and Artists Space, New York facing page Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21 (still), 1980, video, colour, sound, 12 min 15 sec. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
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Howardena Pindell’s video Free, White And 21 (1980) has been a subtle but burning presence in New York during the summer and autumn of 2017. For 12 minutes, the video puts us face-to-face with the artist while she outlines the abuses and microaggressions she’s faced as a black woman throughout her life (at the time the video was made she was aged thirty-seven and had recently left her position as associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). It’s an associative timeline of traumas that spans early education and university, a job search and a wedding in Maine. Though she was optimistic about becoming an artist from an early age, occasionally her own stories give her pause for an incredulous scoff. Her experiences proved chastening and her tone is sober while she chronicles everyday pain and disappointment. Pindell also plays a white-faced caricature of an artist peer, who continuously interrupts her counterpart: “You really must be paranoid. Your art really isn’t political either. You know, I hear your experiences, and I think, well, it’s gotta be in her art. That’s the only way we’ll validate you… In fact, you won’t exist until we validate you,” she admonishes from behind a pair of sunglasses and under a blonde head of hair. Earnest and mocking, the video seethes with anger. Pindell’s rage and weariness at performing for the white artworld nonetheless performed a fundamental cri de coeur in two recent exhibitions: We Want a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (at the Brooklyn Museum), which made urgent the art-historical reach of second-wave feminism and parallel movements for racial equality; and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940– 2017 (at the Whitney Museum of American Art), a call to arms that revisits the legacy and efficacy of protest tactics in the artworld. Both shows grapple with how to best understand, historicise and enliven a radical imagination, whether it concerns race and gender directly, or a panoply of issues under the banner of protest. To the curators’ credit, both exhibitions subtly acknowledge the deadening limits of the museum. In We Want a Revolution, Pindell’s video was installed in the context of a study of community and coalition building: self-published journals and correspondence from multiple artist collectives and splinter groups accompanied Pindell’s work, outlining the community’s rigorous self-critique, fractures and allegiances. At the Whitney, two vitrines display letters from individual and groups of artists expressing dismay over the museum’s practices, with issues ranging from gender and racial inequality, to Vietnam-era declarations calling for activism and resistance over art. In one example, a group of artists (including Edward Hopper) penned a letter decrying the museum’s apparent penchant for abstract, rather than figurative paintings. Since then, art’s social responsibility has certainly broadened. Pindell’s video is indebted to consciousness-raising, a practice of radical emotional sharing introduced by first-wave feminism. She filmed the piece less than a year after suffering a car accident that left her with partial memory loss, and indeed a therapeutic reappraisal
of trauma marks the entrance of more direct political stakes into her work. Between 1967 and 1979, she climbed the ranks at the Museum of Modern Art, and spent the same decade-plus continuing to develop her work as an abstract painter. By the time the video was made, Pindell had started to dedicate herself to teaching and, alongside her art practice, activist research and writing on the racial biases that underpin the artworld (‘the critic’ was one of her subjects). What’s on the line is language, and a growing number of artaffiliated activist groups have picked up on the issues that the curators of these shows were savvy to recognise: that the historical narrative should remain in the hands of those for whom it is a fact of living as well as a matter of art. Truth is at the heart of these considerations, and the stakes are not merely conceptual: whether combative talk, confrontational trolling, euphemistic politics, fake news and other forms of reality-bending, problems of language are both the cause of violence, and violence itself, distorting POC, LGBTQ and other communities into a fugitive state of being. Any writing that considers these activist groups amounts to an essay about truth, though truth, defined as inalienable rightness and inflexible surety, is irrelevant to these groups who understand the tools as being already in their possession. Their names already distinguish them: AQNB, Black Quantum Futurism, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, Browntourage, Brujas, By Us For Us, Chinatown Art Brigade, Decolonial Cultural Front, El Salón, Fuck You Pay Us, House of Ladosha, MTL+, No Flowers For White Powers, Strike Debt, The Bronx Is Not For Sale, Topical Cream, W.A.G.E., We Are Canaries and Yellow Jackets Collective. Bands and research organisations, resource-sharing potlucks and direct-action groups, fairhousing activists and fashion collectives, artistic coalitions and citizens against occupation, publishing platforms and ethical art directors: the handles are primed in the parlance of social media and announce that any group’s strike – whether it takes the form of a direct action or a work-stop – aims to shift the politics of the spectacle. During the Bush and Obama presidencies, exhaustion set in, and an artist would be required, by institutions’ insatiable thirst for content, not only to know many dances – writing, painting, DJing, performing, producing – but never to cease doing them on command. One bootstrapped a life out of an email inbox, while also serving as the model that the tech industry and others have used to bolster the relentless freelance economy. Class headed the mainstream conversation, and there was a belief that the best critique involved infiltrating the system. Identity politics didn’t quite jibe with this insider’s perspective, which privileged whiteness, and the artworld’s conventional wisdom held that socially motivated art, and its parochial tendency for participatory, collective and goal-oriented projects, was irreconcilable with the aesthetic provisions of the era and their ironic insistence on the market. That galleries sprang up in support of certain scenes was
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one way that community-building provided some common ground, Personal and historical legacies are stamped onto their language, at least on paper, but generally the small galleries eschewed the kind originating a house-made dialect inflected with glamour and of direct action that would define many of these activist organisa- trauma. ‘We see language as a form of cultural currency, and as a tions’ relationship to aesthetic production – for them, a visual style house our most tangible product is language,’ the group states, discussing language as a primary component in THIS IS UR BRAIN, was nothing without actionable change to back it up. Insurgency is a means to resist occupation, and fashion is an impor- an exhibition at FUG, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, tant language to understand the embattledness of a body in space. that showcased the group’s neural network. “We have a very particScholar Fred Moten makes a distinction between feeling like a citizen ular and subjective way of using it – not unlike the art world… We and feeling like a denizen: that the feeling of merely inhabiting a space refer to real-life scenarios that inform our work. Rather than indulge imbues any encounter with a sense of dispossession and unbelonging. Marxism as a political stance, we wanted to indulge our collective It’s not far from the condition of a viral video or meme, which writer nausea toward half-baked political notions that ultimately serve to and artist Aria Dean presciently offers as the means for radical black reinforce outdated canons for the avant-garde. It was also just really agency: ‘The meme moves so quickly and unpredictably as to estab- funny.’ It’s not uncommon to see queer slang enter the mainstream – lish a state(lessness?), a lack of fixity that might be able to confront our the long drawl of ‘yass’ has echoed throughout the last several years simultaneous desire for visibility and sans citations. Vigilant about language, It’s not uncommon to see queer slang and savvy about its appropriation – the awareness of the violence it brings. It susenter the mainstream – the long drawl group garners some celebrity, notetains an appearance of individuality (“it worthy to mention Rihanna’s a fan – me”) while being wholly deindividuated of ‘yass’ has echoed throughout the they summon something intractable, (“same”).’ Dean shades optimism with last several years sans citations inscrutable and unprecious when they survival, and finds liberation in a form for digital strike, asking, ‘If memes reiterate the inequalities between call out ‘ham’, a word that translates on the basis of affect alone. black creators and white appropriators, can they also move us into a For House of Ladosha, language is a uniform of sorts. Memes, too, new collective blackness?’ in her 2016 text ‘Poor Meme, Rich Meme’. call for a social bond in the coproduction of images and meaning. To consider social media not as a parallel means of promotion In the call and response between community members, many can that extracts capital from social networks in the form of added atten- feel as though they’ve authored a poetry that vies for funnier, more tion and likes, but rather as part of the overall quotient of its collec- irreverent humour. It’s this continual recapitulation of an image, tive work, informs any understanding of the House of Ladosha. particularly one that belongs in the same rapid cycles of fashion, It isn’t an outright activist group per se, but its methods cast a light that invites comparisons to other instances of when poetry morphed on the ways that aesthetics – the classical matter of beauty, taste and into policy. The Black Panther Party specially designed their parajudgement; the basis upon which one makes a decision – have become military uniform to convey dual messages: to ward off police with central to activist practices. It asks, in an interview in The Brooklyn Rail, the suggestion of a self-governing community, and to recruit new ‘What does “better” mean?… A lot of what we do as a house and as members who would find security in those politics (the party’s chief participants in nightlife is create alternatives, and worlds… Even cultural officer, artist Emory Douglas, would cite the clothing as if it’s just for a night, or an hour, or a photo.’ Its many active members an important motivation for his enlistment). This aesthetic would fortify a cabalistic mythology by adopting Ladosha for a last name; the eventually give way to social services; that the Panthers delivered more rhizomatic relationship between the group and its individual breakfasts to schoolchildren in need was a pioneering intervention members originates in ball culture, and the houses that offered filial- on their part, and one that drew perhaps the heaviest attention from the government. surrogates in the early years of the trans-rights movement.
‘Chinatown Is Not for Sale’, 2016, discussion. Photo: Marz Saffore. Courtesy Decolonize This Place and Artists Space, New York
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Activism could be said to be the paradigm in 2017. Notions of ‘good capitalism’ and corporate activism mask the otherwise unbreachable division of wealth; round up, and activism accompanies the morning yoga routine. Some days, signing up for the housing lottery feels like the only exemption from implacable gentrification – or maybe it feels more effective than voting. And everything takes place on indigenous land. That Spotify quickly released an ad campaign promoting the service’s trove of Arab musicians right after Trump’s first Muslim ban reflects how thoroughly politicised content has become in an arena acutely responsive to shifts in the user experience – a culture abandoned to a false utopia, ever winnowing its potential vocabulary to describe a future by virtue of algorithmic taste. ‘When you think you don’t have the vocabulary, use more words,’ is how MTL+ founding member Amin Husain describes what the group does to accommodate and expand collaboration among its partner organisations. In 2016 MTL+ presented Decolonize This Place at Artists Space in New York, partnering with dozens of other organisations to develop an activist engine, fuelled by what they view as artists’ skill in intimate communication, and artistic incorrigibility. To ‘liberate art from itself’ was their intention, a collectively negotiated act that centred on the production of protest signs and publications, which were used in strikes, protests and direct actions at sites including the American Museum of Natural History, and then brought back to the gallery to be used as set pieces for guided and informal informationsharing events. That the closing event saw organisation members targeted and attacked by a group of men outside the gallery was no small indication of the stakes of these events, and an ambient violence toward POC and LGBTQ people encoded in public space. On offer had been de-escalation training, a method that would decrease a community’s reliance on cops. The public commons, however, is increasingly mediated by social media. It has a grip on language with a direct potential for physical and psychic violence – by no means would it be paranoid to suggest that episodes like ‘Pizzagate’ will happen more and more – and such space, perhaps because of a certain social downgrading and inculcated naturalisation, is not only where we come to understand the real, but also learn the language to describe it. By Us For Us (BUFU) is a group that considers its mission to build solidarity, especially with regard to black and East Asian
diaspora communities – liberation is the long-term cultivation of a collective imagination. Its workshops, parties, screenings and panel discussions are in part designed to de-centre whiteness; safe spaces, in which clear provisions are made to ensure the safety and equal participation of attendees, are prioritised to create adequate conditions for the bodies of queer POC to thrive. Remember that this essay is in part about truth. An outsider converting this information into media, especially social media, gives little room for the release of trauma or the celebration of rebellion. There are self-started blogs in place: AQNB is an artist-centred platform for writing and other media, and Topical Cream hosts relevant documentation and editorials surrounding feminist and trans issues. BUFU has attracted notable attention, with coverage found in Fader, Vice, i-D and other outlets. But in spite of the seeming commercial success and increased visibility to its cause, a recent fundraising video expresses frustration with the fraught relationship between self-representation and content generation. With its life on the line, its humour is biting: it offers a date with BUFU for $1,000 (and donations welcomed at more affordable tiers). It could seem that BUFU has gone corporate: its fundraising efforts attempt to establish the group as a production company, delivering original content, as well as a distribution platform, not unlike subscription-based services Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Studios. Activism, however, exists within this paradigm as a space outside, and towards this effect, BUFU has been collecting documentary materials throughout global diasporic communities. The safe space it seeks to make is, of course, contingent on user participation, but its ambitions are to encourage viewership as the vital connecting tissue. Performing identity is, after all, contingent on the gaze. As the Internet is stored on each of our computers, the hope here is to strengthen a community not on the basis of a dominant cultural narrative, but rather on a horizontal organisation of its ranks. Though it remains in development, the language of utopian futurism is precisely what opens up safe spaces within the present, and offers a foundational reevaluation of cultural narrative. ‘Will the revolution be adorable?’ goes the jeer. ar Sam Korman is an associate editor of ArtReview
House of Ladosha, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS: Juliana Huxtable. Photo: Victoria Jesionek. Courtesy House of Ladosha
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Liquid Value Following the fickle flow of cash through the art market by J. J. Charlesworth
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the financial crisis. In a recent article in the New Statesman titled ‘How the world’s greatest financial experiment enriched the rich’, the financial writer Christopher Thompson discusses the impact of a decade of ‘quantitative easing’, the monetary policy employed by central banks since the crash to pump vast quantities of invented money This autumn marks a decade since the beginning of the global finan- into the world financial system, in the hope of kickstarting economic cial crisis, the ‘credit crunch’ that started in the US subprime mort- recovery. As he explains, in a little under a decade, central banks ‘in gage market and spread to the global banking sector, pushing the the US, Europe, the UK and Japan have inundated financial markets world’s economies into recession and, for many people, ushering with more than $8trn using a system dubbed “quantitative easing” in a period marked by austerity in public spending, downward pres- (QE). This equates to around $10,000 per man, woman and child in the countries whose currencies they guard.’ sure on wages and rising job insecurity. And yet, in those same years the art market has been doing pretty QE’s process is circuitous and its effects are not straightforward to well. Take a look at UBS and Art Basel’s report The Art Market 2017 explain, but as Thompson summarises, central banks don’t just ‘print and you find that global art-market sales over the postcrash decade money’, ‘they do it by buying bonds, most of them issued by governbarely noticed the ‘age of austerity’. After taking a dive in 2009 in the ments, from financial institutions such as pension funds and insurimmediate aftermath of the financial crisis, annual global art sales ance companies, which hold them as investments’. In other words, had soared to $68.2 billion by 2014, surpassing their precrash 2007 government central banks generate electronic cash with which to buy back government debt (bonds) from corporate investors. This peak of $65.9b. Unsurprisingly, the decade since the financial crisis has been has had two big effects. The first is that interest rates have fallen; since marked by increasingly angry debates about how the artworld is there is more money around, it has become cheaper to borrow it, with implicated in the machinations of a global economy, and in the inter- central bank rates near or even below zero. The other consequence, ests of the ‘1 percent’ – the global elite of the ultrawealthy who now since QE has increased the market value of bonds, and investors have seem to pay such close attention – and commit so much of their dispos- sold their bonds, that money has gone elsewhere. As Thompson puts able cash – to contemporary art. As the advanced economies have it, ‘financiers have used the new-found money to go shopping, all stumbled along through the 2010s, much ink has been spilled over at the same time. Suddenly, demand for assets significantly exceeds the growing disparity between the wealthy and everyone else, and a supply. This pushes up the value of investment assets – including new set of terms has entered our vocabushares, which have surged to record highs Why would the very wealthy lary to describe the experience of economic despite weak economic growth, and bonds, and social life in the post-financial-crisis and also fine art, London property and want to put their money into era. It’s the age of the ‘gig economy’, of zerovintage Château Lafite.’ artworks, of all things? hours contracts and of precarious labour; Property, wine and art. What’s signifthe age of lifelong student debt; of urban gentrification and dwin- icant about Thompson’s rollcall of asset types is that they produce dling home ownership and stagnating real wages. nothing in themselves and are characterised by their scarcity. In ‘global The commercial artworld, however, saw the same period through cities’ like London, the property market has surged throughout the the lens of ever-increasing sums paid for art objects. Just as the global postcrisis decade, with average prices almost doubling between 2009 financial services giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on the and 2017, according to the government’s own index. morning of 15 September 2008, Damien Hirst opened a two-day public But if scarce things produce nothing, why do the wealthy buy auction of his work at Sotheby’s in London. It made over £110m. The them? As art market commentators have noted in the last few year following years have seen records continuously broken. In 2013 Jeff years, one of the biggest trends in the commercial gallery market has Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994–2000) sold for $58.4m, then the been the polarisation of the gallery system, with the biggest galleries most expensive single work by a living artist ever hammered down doing well while ‘midlist’ and emerging galleries shrink back; and at auction. In May this year, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Untitled at auction, the rising prices for individual artworks is a symptom of (1982) became the most expensive work by an American artist, selling the concentration of value in more expensive works. As The Art Market for $110.5m at Sotheby’s New York. 2017 records, from around 2012 onwards, the fastest growing segment The extreme visibility of the auction market, and the hype that of artworks sold at auction were those priced above $5m. surrounds each latest record price, tends to provoke reactions of The concentration of value in artworks at auction and the tilting moral outrage and dismay at how much the ultrarich are prepared of commercial power towards the ‘blue-chip’, upper end of the gallery to pay for artworks. But what’s less often asked is how, given the system shows how much artworks have become a ‘refuge’ for liquidity shaky state of our economies, the very wealthy have come to have this looking for security. The world is awash with cash, but this liquidity wealth to dispose of, and more importantly, why they should want to does not, as Thompson notes, seem to be making much of a difference put it into artworks, of all things. Moralistic criticism is easy to come to economic growth. up with, but it doesn’t ask questions of the nature of post-financialWhat Thompson skims over, though, is that one big issue – of economic growth. While stock markets have surged, and corpocrisis economic life. rate profits have done well, growth in the If one steps back from the narrower fortunes facing page, both Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., G7 advanced economies has weakened even of the art market, however, and takes a look at 2014, single-channel HD video in architectural further in the decade since the financial crisis. the bigger economic story, one starts to underenvironment, 16:9, colour, sound, 30 min. stand the peculiar character of the decade since According to the IMF, GDP in the G7 has grown Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin “Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend…” Bruce Lee, speaking on The Pierre Berton Show, 9 December 1971, video excerpt from Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014)
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by barely 2 percent annually since 20101. The 2000s managed only a individuals, and the financing of new wings of public galleries and little better, and these decades compare poorly with the 90s, when more. One way or the other, these are all symptoms of the boom in growth was often around 3 percent; even in the strife-ridden 1980s it assets in a time of economic stagnation. was often over 4 percent. In Hito Steyerl’s jovial and uncanny video Liquidity Inc. (2014) This decline in growth over recent decades is dealt with in more the motif of water, weather, globalisation and liquidity are twisted depth by economist Phil Mullan, in his book Creative Destruction: how together into a kind of allusive visual poem about the chaotic forces to start an economic renaissance (2017). As Mullan argues, the causes of of the global economy. A young Vietnamese American, Jacob Wood, a slowing growth and growing financialisation lie in the slowdown financial broker made redundant in the wake of the Lehman Brothof investment in new, more productive economic capacity, and the ers collapse, is seen working out and competing in a US mixed martial tendency for older, less productive industries and businesses to arts tournament. His story (he came to the US as a child refugee) is insurvive, rather than go bankrupt and be replaced by more produc- terrupted by surreal scenes of computer-generated water, hurricanes tive competitors. The blunt assertion of Creative Destruction is that and storms, and a masked weather presenter who suggests that you while each recession of the past 50 years has been less severe, subse- ask such questions as: ‘How did this gust arrive here? Where did it quent recoveries have also been weaker. Investment in making the come from and who am I to be blown by it?’ Steyerl’s hallucinatory economy more productive has declined, while corporate profits and narrative pitches individuals into a world of endless seas, with no cash reserves have grown, in what Mullan terms the rise of the zombie visible means of support, buffeted by an economic ‘atmosphere’ that economy – an assessment borne out by the current postcrash ‘jobless exists independently of them, and which they are powerless to influrecovery’, marked by historically low growth, rising debt (financed by ence or control. the new wave of liquidity) and further declining productivity. Liquidity Inc. is an ode to the postcrisis decade, in which the real In other words, however much liquidity there appears to be, economy has become a hallucination, and all that appears is a sea of however much ‘value’ it seems to represent, it’s not being invested in numbers, in an everyday world in which everything, from rent to art, revitalising the real economy. Economic growth is what makes socie- is only getting more expensive, and in which even art objects are not ties in general better off, and the absence of tangible growth is what rare enough to absorb the flood of liquidity unleashed in the wake of makes the postcrisis decade different to those that came before. the last crash. But if the tide of liquidity isn’t going into investing in R&D or new But if liquidity is a tide, some indications suggest that it may be infrastructure or better manufacturing, it has to find somewhere to turning away from art. After reaching new heights in 2014, The Art go, and it is going into art. It’s not just going into single artworks Market 2017 reports that art sales declined to $62.8b in 2015 and then $56.6b in 2016. The biggest contributor to that bought in galleries or at auctions, of course. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, acrylic, fall was the big drop in sales of art at auction, Increasingly, it’s going into the building of spraypaint and oilstick on canvas, 183 × 173 cm. which shrank by 26 percent between 2015 and museums and private foundations set up by Courtesy Sotheby’s, New York
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2016 (from $29.9b to $22.1b), and within auction sales, the biggest transparent market, in which the value of an artwork will be set by decline was in those high-ticket $10m-plus artworks. Other indicators a market of multiple buyers. The prospect, of course, is that the of a cooling in the auction market include a rise in lots not achieving ‘value’ of individual artworks will rise as investors who don’t have $50m to buy a whole Jeff Koons start buying into parts of a Koons, their reserve price and in works selling below their estimate. The stuttering auction market’s focus on high-price items is a spec- or square centimetres of a Gerhardt Richter painting. Hidden in tacularly public display of vast wealth condensed into rare objects. secure vaults, artworks won’t have to be traded between billionaires, But the dealer-led primary-sales market has also seen a concentration but instead fractionalised by smaller investors, all buying into the of value in higher-priced works. And in the secondary market – those promise of rising prices. dealers who trade in works that have previously been bought and sold Beyond the hype of such a scheme, one can detect the prospect – median prices have increased substantially between 2015 and 2016. of yet another asset bubble, as investors scramble to find ways to put All these tendencies suggest a tightening of supply of artworks, as their wealth into assets that promise guaranteed growth. Meanwhile, collectors look to a narrower range of artworks whose future value is in the real world, real growth, as measured by how much is produced more assured. in a given period of working time – productivity – continues to stall. In those circumstances, liquidity may start to flow elsewhere, into As Mullan points out in Creative Destruction, investment in R&D and even more exotic forms of assets, as demand for other older assets capital investment across the developed economies continues to grows and their prices rise. One of those seems to be cryptocurrency wane. The tide of liquidity that has washed into the art market should – as I write, the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has seen a massive rise be understood, not in moralistic soundbites about the greed of the in its market value. At the start of 2017 it was trading around $400. In ‘1 percent’, but as the long-term failure of our capitalist economies October its price soared to over $5,000. Investment funds are piling in. to produce more wealth for everyone. Producing more, however, is The art market has started to take note of this strange new type itself controversial today, at a time when radicals prefer to insist of asset-currency, and financial entrepreneurs have seen an oppor- that we already have ‘too much’, and are more at home talking about tunity to fuse the art market with cryptocurrency. This summer ‘de-growth’ than about prosperity. saw the launch of Maecenas, a cryptocurrency based art-trading And yet, if there’s no renewed debate about what prosperity means platform, which offers investors the possibility of buying into and society’s ability and willingness to renew economic growth, the shares of high-value artworks, rather than buying and selling indi- real economy will continue to stagnate, while being subject to increasvidual works. Actually, they’re not exactly shares, but asset-backed ingly extreme flows and crashes of finance and fictitious capital. certificates: the owner of a work retains ownership, raising money In Steyerl’s video, nothing solid is visible, only an endless sea of by auctioning these certificates, which can liquidity, with nothing on the horizon. ar Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994–2000, then be traded on Maecenas’s own trading mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent platform. The promise is of a more ‘liquid’ and J. J. Charlesworth is director of digital of ArtReview colour coating, 307 × 363 × 114 cm. © the artist
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THREE CROSSINGS: Ibrahim El-Salahi David Hammons Stanley Brouwn Curated by Salah M. Hassan
The Prince Claus Fund, together with the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), presents three visionary artists across three locations For more details visit princeclausfund.org
By His Will, We Teach Birds How to Fly Ibrahim El-Salahi in Black and White 23 November 2017 – 2 March 2018 Prince Claus Fund Gallery Herengracht 603 1017 CE Amsterdam Netherlands with support from Vigo Gallery
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Hiwa K: To remember, sometimes you need different archeological tools
Hiwa K, Pin-Down (2017). Commissioned by De Appel. Photo by Daniel van Hauten and Veronica Schoberer.
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THE 7
BMW M760Li xDrive: urban 15.3 mpg (18.4 l/100 km); extra-urban 29.4 mpg (9.6 l/100 km); combined 22.0 mpg (12.8 l/100 km); CO2 emissions 294 g/km. Figures are obtained in a standardised test cycle. They are intended for comparisons between vehicles and may not be representative of what a user achieves under usual driving conditions.
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View from above by Hiwa K
The last time I saw M was one year ago. It was to be our last exchange after living together for 15 years. He asked me, “Do you ever feel like you forgot the city where you came from?” The irony in his question went unnoticed, as it was I who taught him where he came from. I even gave him his name. When I pointed this out to him, he retorted, “Who are you to teach me where I come from?” I replied, “Because I am the only who knew that you have actually never been there. Do you still have the map I drew for you?” He remained silent, but his vacant gaze was articulate enough. He had lost almost all his memory from those days. I think he forgot his own story because he didn’t need it any more to exist. To check whether he lost his memory for certain, I asked, “Have we met before?” “Yes! Four seconds ago,” he said. It was in fact 15 years ago, when I helped M to learn the map for the city of K. Since 1991, after the Kurdish revolution against the central government in Iraq, a division happened between Kurdistan and the rest of the country. Kurdistan was considered by the United Nations as a safe zone. A safe zone is a fictitious place which exists only in the minds and maps of European bureaucrats. All asylum requests from people living in the “safe zone” will be declined. If you originate from this socalled safe zone, you will be deported back to the unsafe country and will have to make your own treacherous way back to the safe zone inside. M was from the so-called safe zone, and yet as a deserter from the army, it was totally unsafe for him to return there. So the safe zone was a fictional place for him. It didn’t exist, as there was no safety to be found there. And now I had to help M create a new fiction, in which he was not in fact unsafe in a safe zone, but unsafe in an unsafe zone.
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The first time we ever met, M told me there is a saying in Arabic. They say: “al-`ayn basira, wa-al-yad qasira” – the eye can see far, but the hand is too short to reach. I was always fascinated why eyes can reach astronomical vertical distances, till the black holes sometimes, but voice cannot exceed a few hundred metres, hands less than a metre. I told him then, in order for you to be accepted as a refugee, we will need to give vision to your hand, and to give you a voice that can reach as far as the eye. Before I met M, he applied for asylum in one of the Schengen countries, and he told them the truth. He got a negative answer. They told him: “You are from a safe zone, your life is not in danger in your own city.” For five years he tried to appeal against that decision, but he got one negative answer after another. He had no hope to get a positive answer there, so he decided to try in a new country. It was at this desperate juncture in his life, in a new place that was alien to the both of us, that we first met. In our final meeting, I told him, “Don’t you remember me? I am the one who hid you.” “We were hiding each other,” he replied, and I said to myself, “We are hiding from each other now.” I never knew his real name, I only ever knew him by the name I gave him, M, on the day we first met. I told him here, in this new country, you must change your story and say that you come from an “unsafe zone”. I had to put him in this unsafe zone for my own safety. He said, “That shouldn’t be a problem, my mother comes from the unsafe zone of K and I was there many times to visit her family.” I told him, “Then they will test you, so be ready to know the city like the back of your hand.” He replied, “Well, as long as it’s not the front of my hand, after you erased my fingerprints.” I spent weeks teaching him the map of K. He kept saying, “The last time I saw my mother’s city, you couldn’t tell the streets from the buildings.” “Don’t worry,” I finally replied, “all cities have destruction in common.” He could only remember the destruction, I could only remind him of the map. I helped him commit to memory the streets, the important landmarks and a random selection of unimportant buildings. At first, he was unable to memorize these details, his own memory of the city was polluting his thoughts.
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The day of the interview arrived. I was silently with him the whole time, never before have I stayed so silent, not a single person noticed that I was there. They asked him questions and checked whether he knew the city like the back of his hand. The interviewer was checking whether his answers were identical to the map to which he was comparing. The judge was surprised, even impressed. It seemed M had learned to see the city from above, to see it from the judge’seye view. After a five-year wait, it now only took him 20 minutes to get a positive answer. He was finally accepted as a refugee coming from an unsafe zone. My own positive answer came 15 years later, the day M disappeared off the face of the earth. Maybe someone else is hiding him now, he is getting under my skin. The only place for which I have no map. Before he disappeared for good, he told me, “I met a person the other day who was actually from K. He has been waiting since 2003 for his asylum to be granted, and the authorities don’t believe that he actually comes from that place.” “I thought no one actually lived in K. From 20,000 feet up you can’t see any sign of life.” “Wife! Whatever happened to my wife?” “You never had one!” I reminded him. “I gave you that wife when I made up your story.” “Ah, yes,” he said. “You know, to divorce that fictive wife I had to pay the lawyer 900.” We laughed in perfect unison.
all images Hiwa K, View from Above (stills), 2017, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 12 min 27 sec. Courtesy the artist, KOW, Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan & Lucca
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Introduction For the past 15 years, ArtReview’s Power 100 has sought to trace the networks of interest and influence that lead to certain types of art, or indeed certain ideas about art, being pushed to the fore. The process by which the list is produced is deceptively simple. It is compiled by a panel of around 20 experts (who remain anonymous so that power-crazed art people don’t hassle them or enact various types of cruel revenge), spread across five continents, who assess who is exerting the most influence on the type of art that’s being produced in the region in which they are based. We ask them to make their judgement according to the following criteria: that the person must have been active over the past 12 months; that the person’s influence reaches beyond national boundaries and is felt on an international stage; and that the person has an effect on the type of art that’s being produced right now. And alongside that we ask our panel to suspend the kind of judgement that you’d normally expect to be bandied about in a magazine like this one: that based on taste. After all, powerful people tend to be powerful whether we like them or not. Finally, the most difficult bit: assessing the relative merits of being the most influential person in one region versus another. Which is often the moment at which a certain dose of geopolitical reality and a second panel, tasked with checking that the same principles have been applied in one region and the next, come into play. But beneath all that, the list allows for readings that suggest some deeper truths, and perhaps a desire to assuage an art-lover’s more paranoiac fears. Among these might be: is the artworld really controlled by a sinister cabal of art dealers, their clients and a circle of financially dependent curators and critics? Is the consensus on what we deem ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art a kind of willing industry complicity or is it a judgement based on real values that have some worth? And, given that contemporary art occupies a space in which a work’s economic (accessible, increasingly, to the few) and intellectual (accessible by the many) value may have no relation to each other at all, which of these factors has the greatest impact on that work’s potential to endure and circulate? Is an exhibition about what’s viewed in a three-dimensional space or something that can be experienced just as well through a two-dimensional screen? Does art have any value at all in the face of ‘real’ issues such as climate change, armed conflict and rising gaps between rich and poor? Or is it something designed to distract us from engaging in a real way with real life? Of course, the desire to look for answers to questions such as these in a simple list of names may also be a reflection of an art-lover’s inherent capacity to overanalyse everything. After all, art has always been associated with excess… The panels, the debates and whatever analysing there is in the list that follows would not have been possible without BMW, whose support gives ArtReview the time and space to drive freely and carefully down the far-from-straightforward highways of power. BMW has, of course, been providing contemporary artists with the time and the space to realise their ideas for many years now, whether via the BMW Art Journey, produced with Art Basel since 2015 and enabling travels for artists such as Samson Young, Abigail Reynolds and Max Hooper Schneider, or the BMW Art Car, the latest iteration of which was produced with American artist John Baldessari. On the occasion of this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, BMW will team up with Studio Drift to premiere a performative artistic show involving hundreds of drones showcasing the beauty of movement, on 6 December 2017. ArtReview
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I belong to the mid-90s immigrant generation who came from Iraqi Kurdistan to Europe on foot. Walking through countries like Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France and Germany in five months and 20 days.
Artist German Last Year 7 Art is powerful. Or at least it’s the construct of powerful forces, not always of the positive kind. This is something Steyerl recognises. ‘Contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital, plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories and growing income inequalities,’ she told The Guardian this year. ‘Let’s add asymmetric warfare, real-estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering and deregulated financial markets.’ Steyerl makes the top slot on this list because she actively attempts to disrupt this nexus of power. Her own art – characterised by research-heavy, narrative-led video (combining found, filmed and digitally animated footage) and installation, which took a prominent place in this year’s once-a-decade, eradefining Skulptur Projekte Münster – is combined with dogged outspokenness and academic rigour through her writing, performative lectures and teaching, critically influencing agendas internationally. She is slowly effecting change too. In September, for example, on discovering that an exhibition she was part of, Deutschland 8: German Art in China, spread across eight museums in Beijing, was sponsored in part by Rheinmetall AG, a Düsseldorf-based manufacturer of tanks and military technology, Steyerl protested. As well as writing to the organisers and, on receiving no reply, drawing attention to the issue in the press, the artist, alongside a number of the others in the show, was characteristically proactive, drawing up a standard exhibition agreement for artists that places an onus on curators and institutions to perform due diligence. The Berlin-based artist’s writings – restless, fast-moving speculations on digital culture, the politics of images and the state of human consciousness in the age of technologically advanced capitalism – have become go-to texts for a generation for which the lure of art and networked culture have lost their utopian promise. She writes in Duty Free Art,
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an anthology of essays published this year, ‘Contemporary art belongs to a time in which everything goes and nothing goes anywhere, a time of stagnant escalation, of serial novelty as deadlock’. But rather than eschew a corrupt system, Steyerl has exploited the opportunity to occupy the platforms available with works that have become emblematic of the postcrash decade. And maybe it’s indicative of the ascendance of ‘postInternet’, network-conscious art that Steyerl’s art should be popping up around the globe. This year alone has seen solo appearances of her 2015 video installation Factory of the Sun (premiered in the German Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale) at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Düsseldorf’s Julia Stoschek Foundation and coming up at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, alongside a slew of presentations in institutional group shows from Helsinki to Vienna, and excursions to São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Gwacheon. Lecture theatres are packed out for her talks, which then invariably circulate on You Tube. Being connected on both sides of the Atlantic helps – her profile in the Anglosphere is bolstered by strong relations with New York-based critical platform e-flux (at 45 in this year’s list) and its e-flux journal, and a network of political art luminaries such as Trevor Paglen (87) and Laura Poitras. December sees her 2014 installation Liquidity Inc. arrive at Boston’s ICA, and inclusion in Still Human at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection. So, her work is everywhere, her ideas have urgency. In 2016 she wrote on how art’s circulation outlines its operational infrastructure. ‘Could these structures be repossessed to work differently?’ the artist asked. ‘How much value would the alternative currency of art lose if its most corrupt aspects were to be regulated or restructured to benefit art’s larger communities?’ Steyerl is on a mission to find out.
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1 © Trevor Paglen
1 Hito Steyerl
3 Donna Haraway Philosopher American Last Year 43
2 Photo: Ola Rindel 3 Photo: Rusten Hogness 4 © Melanie Hofmann
Haraway maintains her tentacular presence in the artworld. Her writing, which is both academic and breezily poetic, and which ranges from ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984), now regarded as a key text in discourses regarding identity and the rise of artificial intelligence, and Staying with the Trouble (2016), which tackles the Anthropocene, was cited, explicitly or implicitly, by any number of artists and curators as inspiration. She was namechecked this year in group exhibitions such as Past Skin at MoMA PS1, New York; The Dream of Forms at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Belgium’s Contour Biennale; and the Lofoten International Art Festival in Norway. Alongside her continued teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she and her work were central to a conference held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and she delivered a keynote lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
2 Pierre Huyghe Artist French Last Year 24 Huyghe, currently based in New York, has gone from strength to strength in recent years, producing ambitious work with a perspective that goes beyond the human, whether in terms of thousand-year time scales or animal experiences. Along with major shows at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo and Venice, and his win of the 2017 Nasher Prize (including $100,000), Huyghe sent work to Münster that was the undisputed highlight of this year’s Skulptur Projekte: a postapocalyptic ecology within the rubble of an abandoned ice-skating rink featuring bees, peacocks and algae. Sensors monitored the movement of the animals, as well as the CO2 and bacteria levels, transmitting the information to an incubator containing cancer cells. The more vitality recorded within Huyghe’s ecosystem, the higher the rate of reproduction catalysed in the petri dish. As Huyghe has stated, he’s not interested in creating fictions, but new realities; the realities he has created have proved unsettlingly visionary.
4 Adam Szymczyk Curator Polish Last Year 2 If anybody was unsure about the seriousness of Szymcyzk’s ambition to dramatically up the stakes of what a ‘largescale exhibition’ can do in a period of political crisis, then his Documenta 14 – staged in both Athens and its usual Kassel home – confirmed he was prepared to polarise his audience. Drawing on every radical zeitgeist of marginality and resistance, from trans politics to indigeneity, from the migration crisis to various flavours of anticapitalism, Szymczyk’s show upbraided cultural tourism by confronting the audience with the contradictions of globalisation. In Athens there were accusations of disaster tourism; in Kassel (very) mixed reviews, particularly from the local press. Szymczyk’s fraught relationship with the German town came to a head in August when it was learned that the costs of the Greek adventure had overrun, landing Documenta a reported €7m in the red. Szymczyk hit back, declaring that it was time to talk critically about the purpose of the mega-exhibition. You don’t hire this curator for an easy ride.
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6 Hans Ulrich Obrist
Gallerist German Last Year 4
Museum Director Swiss Last Year 1
In addition to representing contemporary heavyweights such as Yayoi Kusama, Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Tillmans, Zwirner continues to hoover up artist estates: that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (represented alongside the estate’s executor, Andrea Rosen) being his most significant gain this year. A New York show of Gonzalez-Torres’s work was, like so many others the gallery puts on, worthy of any museum. In February Pulitzer-winning critic Hilton Als curated a show of work by Alice Neel, and the gallery’s interest in writers and writing was further reflected in the latest offers from Zwirner Books, among those French art-historian Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s Pissing Figures, a history of urinators in artworks through the ages. Outside the US, a new space in Hong Kong launches in 2018, while in London the gallery gave exhibitions to artists not (yet) on the roster, including octogenarian British painter Rose Wylie and young Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda. No wonder Zwirner invested in Arta, a price comparison startup for art shipping.
There are not many people on this list (and not many people full stop) whose average day might include presenting lectures alongside astronaut Buzz Aldrin, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, philosopher Bruno Latour and ecopsychologist Peter Webb. But then most don’t employ an assistant to work from midnight to 6am transcribing and editing interviews, hundreds of which Obrist conducts a year. To describe Obrist as a curator therefore – and he does curate, of course, aside from the day job at the Serpentine: shows this year included Maria Lassnig at the Municipal Gallery of Athens and a group show featuring the likes of Philippe Parreno, Etel Adnan and Adrián Villar Rojas at Villa Empain, Brussels – undersells him. Information ‘node’ might be a better description, moving incessantly from place to place (the interviews gathered from various trips to India were published this year). The Serpentine’s two spaces hosted, among others, exhibitions by Rose Wylie, Wade Guyton and, most notably, Arthur Jafa. Obrist is also part of the core advisory team of Luma Arles, due to open in early 2019.
7 Iwan & Manuela Wirth
8 Thelma Golden
Gallerists Swiss Last Year 3
Curator American Last Year 29
Combining a nose for important artists with an understanding of art collecting as a lifestyle is key to the Wirths’ gallery strategy. Fondazione Piero Manzoni and the August Sander estate were added to Hauser & Wirth’s roster this year; living artists joining the gallery include Jack Whitten and Geta Brătescu. The latter was just one of several of their artists with pavilions at the Venice Biennale, alongside Phyllida Barlow and Mark Bradford; and then there was the not-to-be-missed show of Philip Guston’s paintings at Accademia. Former Centre Pompidou curator Florence Derieux was recently appointed director of exhibitions, somewhat compensating for the moment in February when Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in LA suddenly became plain old Hauser & Wirth. Looking east, a Hong Kong space is to come, alongside offices in Beijing and Shanghai. The pair are also renovating a boutique hotel in Braemar, Scotland, no doubt to be filled with work by their artists – as is the guesthouse at their gallery in Bruton, Somerset.
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The Studio Museum in Harlem celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2018. Golden, who returned to the institution in 2000 (after starting her career there in 1987), is now overseeing the building of a new home designed by David Adjaye, with ground due to be broken on the site of the museum’s longtime headquarters next year (the museum is due to reopen in 2021). As one of the curators who has helped define what she and Glenn Ligon called ‘post-black’ art, in an era that continuously and tragically asserts the fact that race is still not a ‘post’ issue, Golden has been at the forefront of African-American art for three decades. While committed to Harlem, she continues to shape museum policy and curatorial approaches in advisory roles at LACMA, the Obama Foundation (she’s helping to plan the presidential library) and New York’s Committee on Cultural Affairs.
ArtReview
5 Photo : Dirk Eusterbrock. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York 6 Photo: Roe Ethridge 7 Photo: Hugo Rittson Thomas. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London 8 Photo: Julie Skarratt
5 David Zwirner
9 Bruno Latour
10 Gavin Brown
Philosopher French Last Year NEW
Gallerist British Last Year 27
9 Photo: Hannah Assouline 10 Courtesy Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York 11 Photo: Sarah Bohn 12 Photo: Scott Rudd
Latour is arguably the artworld theorist of recent years, if we accept that much of the object-oriented ontology / speculative realism philosophy that’s driven recent art is crystallised by his thinking in volumes such as Reassembling the Social (2005). Equally crucially, the sociologist and philosopher Frenchman isn’t hiding away in an ivory tower. His work directly connects abstract ideas and real-world crises: Gaia, the planet as a fragile interconnected organism (including people), is his avowed preoccupation now, as in his recent Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017), a logical development of his thinking on the agency of the nonhuman and his conception of a ‘Parliament of Things’. Latour also has a zealot’s energy, maintaining a steady stream of lectures and essays: a public intellectual for the Anthropocene era. If he’s the young artist’s bedside companion, he’s also – surprisingly for a philosopher – likely to make them get up and do something.
If you locate your space outside the usual New York gallery neighbourhoods, you’re either foolish or supremely confident in your exhibition game. Brown, we’d assess, is the latter. He’s right to be so; staging Arthur Jafa’s debut gallery show just after the US election proved a powerful gesture (The New Yorker noted that ‘Jafa’s subject is bigger than politics – it’s the matter of black life in the United States’). Brown completed the refurbishment of his Harlem gallery (which complements a space in Chinatown and an outpost in Rome), and the rest of his programme has proved no less notable: solo shows for Joan Jonas, Rirkrit Tiravanija (who also hosted a fundraiser for Puerto Rico) and Rachel Rose (whose exhibition boasted 6pm – 6am openings hours). Brown does good business, but the gallery also acts with the spirit of an off-space: in February, he cohosted a minifestival of talks that attempted to formulate a collective response to the changing political and cultural landscape in America.
11 Wolfgang Tillmans
12 Adam D. Weinberg
Artist German Last Year 9
Museum Director American Last Year 8
Undeterred by the failure of his 2016 print-it-yourself poster campaign to keep Britain in the EU, Tillmans produced a similar project ahead of the German elections in September, aimed at stemming the rise of the Alternative for Germany political party (also perhaps not fully successful). It wasn’t all activism in 2017: the artist mainly did what he does best, staging major solo exhibitions of his photography (and some video), the first at Tate Modern, London, and a second at the Beyeler Foundation, in Basel. Both retrospectives of sorts (though they showed entirely different works), the exhibitions could be read as paeans to liberal internationalism, as depicted through the photographer’s hedonistic wanderings. In September he enjoyed yet another museum solo, this time at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. While Tillmans included soundworks in his Tate exhibition, the Hamburg show demonstrated a commitment to the medium, featuring a four-channel sound installation centre stage.
In August, the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Weinberg has been director since 2003, staged An Incomplete History of Protest. Yet it was the Whitney Biennial, that will be most remembered as the site of discontent. The show attracted ire for including painter Dana Schutz’s semiabstract depiction of Emmett Till, an African-American boy who was lynched in 1955. Facing a picket about the suitability of the subject for a white artist, Weinberg stood by Schutz. The museum’s PR team will have another battle on their hands come the November opening of a show by Jimmie Durham, an artist whose self-identification as Native American has also been controversial this year. It’s a shame that to date the media furore has almost drowned out the Whitney’s stellar programme – including the first survey of Hélio Oiticica’s work in the US in two decades, the first major museum show for Bunny Rogers and the announcement of a largescale public art project by David Hammons.
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14 Joan Jonas
Artist Chinese Last Year 10
Artist American Last Year NEW
There’s a certain buoyancy to Ai Weiwei’s activities, wherein the message is definitely more than the medium, as in recent exhibitions and installations raising awareness of the plight of refugees. Alongside big shows at the Israel Museum, the Czech National Gallery and the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, he was hailed in the US as the artworld’s conscience of choice, with presentations in Washington, DC, Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan, not to mention his set of public works Good Fences Make Good Neighbours: 300 cages, fences and banners currently installed throughout New York. Also coming soon to a theatre near you: Ai’s feature documentary Human Flow, out on general cinema release, follows the movement of immigrants in Greece, France, Iraq, Bangladesh and Mexico. While much of the art might be slight, Ai is currently using it to potent effect to see how many people he can get to notice its themes.
‘It has taken art-world power brokers almost fifty years to catch up to Jonas’s mythopoetic vision,’ The New Yorker recently noted. Artists too – so much work today looks like the frayed-edge mix of video, performance and sculptural installation that she has been essaying for decades, though nobody gets close to her dense weave of mythical, animist, shamanistic thinking and ecological consciousness. How far ahead the octogenarian Jonas has been, and remains, became more widely apparent after her winning representation for the US at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and was reaffirmed by this year’s three-floor show inaugurating Gavin Brown’s new Harlem space (her biggest exhibition in over a decade) and her honorary artist status at this year’s Sequences Festival in Reykjavík. Next year, and not a moment too soon, there’ll be a survey of her work at Tate Modern.
15 Larry Gagosian
16 Maria Balshaw
Gallerist American Last Year 6
Museum Director British Last Year NEW
Gagosian, responsible for $1b in art sales annually, has 16 spaces around the world. He is something close to omnipresent, and this is the attraction for the artists and estates he looks after, from Ed Ruscha to Jeff Koons and Zeng Fanzhi. Joining their ranks this year was minimalist painter Brice Marden, who jumped ship from Matthew Marks (Gagosian debuted Marden in October at one of his two London spaces) and Beijing-based painter Jia Aili. If he doesn’t have a gallery in town, Gagosian is gung-ho on taking a fair booth, turning up at the smaller, regional fairs, including Dallas and Chicago, both for the first time. Exhibition highlights across all those gallery spaces include (beyond, you know, solos for Cy Twombly, Ruscha, Helen Frankenthaler) Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors in London, curated by the artist’s biographer John Richardson, Picasso’s Picassos, a New York survey of Maya Ruiz-Picasso’s private collection, and an exhibition of Chinese antiquities on Madison Avenue.
Balshaw arrived at Tate in June, after 11 years as director of the Whitworth, while also director of Manchester City Galleries since 2011. There her talent for fundraising and navigating the often treacle-thick waters of local politics saw her appointed director of culture for Manchester City Council in 2014. So, Balshaw is an adept politician and bureaucrat – useful skills in her new job. The network of galleries she takes over is in good shape: a record 8.4 million visits were made to Tate’s four sites in the last financial year, a figure boosted by Tate Modern’s extension (renamed the Blavatnik Building in June after a £50m donation by billionaire Len Blavatnik), the 478,082 people who saw David Hockney at Tate Britain and the newly expanded Tate St Ives. Wolfgang Tillmans and the group show Soul of a Nation proved highlights of a largely inherited programme. It’s now a question of seeing what she does with this legacy.
ArtReview
13 Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio 14 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York 15 Photo © Roe Ethridge, 2016. Courtesy Gagosian, New York 16 Photo: Hugo Glendinning
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13 Ai Weiwei
This self-made creature is somehow an extension of my body. Including something to my body which is external. Longing to my body rather than belonging to it. Every reflection pulls this moody device in a certain direction. A shaky subject has to adapt to this mood in order to keep the balance and pressure when walking. The lack of stability makes me penetrate any of these possibilities… before they become images.
18 Marian Goodman
Museum Director American Last Year 12
Gallerist American Last Year 13
In June, timed with the reopening of the renovated east wing of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lowry unveiled the full details of the next project at the institution he directs: a $400m extension and refurbishment. Financing for the new work – which will increase exhibition space by 17 percent – got a $50m boost from the hedge fund manager Steven Cohen and his wife, Alexandra. Lowry is keen to point out this isn’t just a capital project for the museum, but also a curatorial one. On completion in 2019 the museum will have moved away from medium-specific presentations to a thematic approach to the collection. (Though Lowry is now sixty-five, the age at which MoMA directors have traditionally retired, he shows no signs of leaving before the project is completed.) This year, when Trump barred entry to the US for travellers from several Muslimmajority countries, the museum quickly hung work by artists from those states. Is this remarkable responsiveness a sign of things to come?
Goodman celebrated the 40th anniversary of her gallery this year: and with the likes of Pierre Huyghe, Yang Fudong and Adrián Villar Rojas on her books, the octogenarian still has her work cut out. Huyghe had the standout exhibit at Skulptur Projekte Münster, Yang had a solo at OCAT Xi’an and Villar Rojas had three projects, ranging from the Met’s roof garden commission in New York to solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz and the National Observatory of Athens. Nor, with galleries in Paris and London, does she leave the travelling to her staff. A New York Times profile from last year notes that Goodman had crossed the Atlantic four times in three weeks for art fairs and artist visits. And it’s not just Europe to which the New York gallerist pays close attention: a longtime supporter of African artists, she represents David Goldblatt, William Kentridge and Julie Mehretu too.
19 David Hammons
20 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
Artist American Last Year Reentry (83 in 2011) Among the most expensive of American living artists, Hammons has for decades been exemplary in gaming the artworld he despises. Mostly he’s done so while staying hidden, refusing all retrospectives (he did curate one this year: at MoMA, of pioneering artist Charles White, who died in 1979). Lately, though, while fundraising for his private museum in Yonkers, New York, the artist who once sited his sculptures directly in black neighbourhoods has gone overground, engaging more with commercial galleries. Meanwhile CCA Wattis in San Francisco has staged a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays and reading groups around the artist’s work and persona. And Hammons’s recently announced public commission in Manhattan – a spectral sculptural outline of the pier warehouse where Gordon Matta-Clark worked, a glimmering elegy for freedoms annihilated by gentrification – will, in classically elusive Hammons style, make him more visible via something that’s barely there.
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Gallerists German Last Year 14 Next year will mark 20 years since Sprüth and Magers conjoined their considerable gallery-directing forces, during which time they’ve expanded, ever-classily, from Cologne to Munich, Berlin, London and Los Angeles. And despite a temporary glitch in London – the Mayfair space shuttered for a year due to lease issues – their drive remains undimmed, never toppling into reckless growth for the sake of it. The artist list, built around a core of steadfast blue-chippers, is an evolving balance of stars and next-gen ones, from Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger to Kraftwerk, Jon Rafman to Analia Saban. A show like Power in Los Angeles, this spring’s survey of African-American women artists, did the work that museums hesitate to. And the London space has just reopened, renovated and now occupying the entire Georgian townhouse.
ArtReview
17 Photo: Peter Ross 18 Photo: Thomas Struth 20 © Robbie Lawrence. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin
17 Glenn D. Lowry
21 Marc Glimcher, photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Arne Glimcher, photo: Ronald James 22 Photo: Jesse Untracht-Oakner. Courtesy New Museum, New York 23 Photo: Kitmin Lee. Courtesy White Cube, London 24 © Art Basel
21 Marc & Arne Glimcher
22 Massimiliano Gioni
Gallerists American Last Year 19
Curator Italian Last Year 15
This year, Pace, the gallery run by the Glimchers, extended its presence in Asia with the opening of a new space in Seoul and the announcement of a second Hong Kong space to open next year (which will bring the number of galleries to 12). Back on home soil, the Glimchers took on the estate of Tony Smith (the gallery already represents his daughter, Kiki) and added young New York painter Loie Hollowell to the roster (‘Georgia O’Keeffe for the Instagram Age’, according to Vice). The gallery staged a museum-worthy, not-for-sale exhibition of Jean Dubuffet in London (marking 50 years since the late artist signed with Arne); David Hockney packed out Tate Britain and the Centre Pompidou; and 1980s star Julian Schnabel has been so busy since rejoining the gallery last year that Artnet. com was led to ask, ‘Is the Julian Schnabel Renaissance Officially a Thing?’
The New Museum, where Gioni is artistic director, staged exhibitions by two typically youthful artists, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Kahlil Joseph and Kosovan Petrit Halilaj, in the New York institution’s newest galleries, located in the shopfront adjacent to the main building on The Bowery. Refurbishment work on the rest of that annexe is ongoing. Keeping Gioni in New York were exhibitions by the likes of Carol Rama and Raymond Pettibon, and taking him to Shanghai was the museum’s continuing partnership with the K11 Foundation, to which it lent curator Lauren Cornell for group show After Us (she has since moved to upstate New York’s CCS Bard). Away from the US, Gioni, with his other cap on – artistic director of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan – curated his own group show, titled The Restless Earth (the show looked at migration as a theme). Gioni once again surreally stood in for Maurizio Cattelan, parroting the Italian artist’s thoughts in a new documentary on his longtime collaborator.
23 Theaster Gates
24 Marc Spiegler
Artist American Last Year 16
Art Fair Director American Last Year 22
Gates has long taken scraps from the South Side of Chicago – bits of roofing, flooring and synthetic leather from abandoned schools and shops – and transposed them into art, semidisguised as abstract canvases and sculptures, dispersing them around the world; transforming rubble, effectively, into artworld support for his activities back in Chicago. A recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and soon one at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (following on from winning the Kurt Schwitters Prize), as well as winning the Nasher Prize, have bolstered his profile. As Gates’s endeavours in rebuilding neighbourhoods have grown and formalised, and as his work has spread increasingly internationally, more painterly, personal gestures have appeared in recent shows. But whether in Helsinki or Hong Kong, both places Gates has shown in the past year, his work continues to narrate a story of inner-city transformation and redemption.
The collected value of work taken to Art Basel in Basel each year is approximately $3b. The mayor of Miami Beach reckons having the fair come to his city brings in $500m of revenue. Art Basel Hong Kong drew 70,000 visitors this year. You can see then why other cities might be up for Spiegler coming to town. In November this year, a preliminary talks programme, the first fruit of Art Basel’s inaugural ‘Cities’ initiative, takes place in Buenos Aires. This won’t be the usual booths and dollars affair, however. Instead BA pays AB to stage a series of cultural events – coordinated by Cecilia Alemani, the chief curator of New York’s High Line Art programme – most of which will take place over a week in September next year, nonprofit and free to access, with Spiegler and colleagues bringing their international network of artworld types to the city for the duration.
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26 Christine Macel Curator French Last Year 17
Gallerists British Last Year 28 Nine months after opening their first outpost in New York, the now half-century-old Lisson, where Nicholas Logsdail, son Alex and Greg Hilty are partners, opened a second venue in the city. Initially sourcing the 325sqm space as a temporary site for Haroon Mirza’s ããã – a multimedia installation based on the effects of the drug ayahuasca – they’ve kept it on, hosting exhibitions of paintings by Carmen Herrera in May and of Stanley Whitney’s drawings in September. What space they lost closing their Milan gallery this year they made up for by hiring three storeys of an office block in Central London to stage a show of gallery artists in October (complementing Daniel Buren and Allora & Calzadilla’s solo shows at gallery HQ across town). Lisson also signed up French video and installation maker Laure Prouvost and took on the estate of American Hard Edge painter Leon Polk Smith. Oh, and Logsdail père received an OBE from the Queen.
27 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
28 Bernard Arnault
Collector Venezuelan Last Year 21
Collector French Last Year 41
The collector and patron – whose personal collection of Latin American art is one of the most important in the world – won Independent Curators International’s Leo Award this year. Phelps de Cisneros was recognised for the fact that she doesn’t just buy art, but gives quite a lot of it away too. MoMA, where she is a trustee, had previously received 40 works from the collector; this year it laid hands on a cache of another 102, curators choosing the works personally from the walls of her house. Along with that gift, she endowed a research institute at the museum. This year she also gave a total of 119 works to museums in Lima, Austin, Denver and Boston, and to the Hispanic Society of America Museum & Library in New York. The director of her collection, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curates the São Paulo Bienal next year, while Phelps de Cisneros is a major funder of mega-exhibition Pacific Standard Time.
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It is safe to say that Viva Arte Viva, Macel’s nine-chapter Venice Biennale, did not receive an enthusiastic critical reception. ‘The display as a whole is among the least visually stimulating I’ve yet encountered,’ wrote Apollo’s critic; a show full of ‘mediocrity and irrelevance’, thought The Guardian. Macel’s pointed avoidance of politics ‘seems as basic as it is infantilizing’, bemoaned Art Agenda. Yet Macel, chief curator at the Centre Pompidou since 2000, should at least be applauded for inviting 103 artists (out of a total of 120) to participate in the biennale for the first time. Nor did the criticism hurt the show’s footfall: over 60,000 people visited in the first three weeks, a 23 percent increase on 2015. Back in Paris, highlights at the Pompidou, which would have been without Macel’s full attention this year, included survey exhibitions for Walker Evans and Nalini Malani.
Being the eighth richest man on the planet (according to Forbes) isn’t everything, but it was probably decisive in having the Shchukin Collection – masterpieces rarely seen outside Moscow – travel from Russia to Arnault’s Paris-based Fondation Louis Vuitton. The exhibition, with a historical range from Van Gogh to Picasso, closed in February having received 1.2 million visitors, an all-time record for attendance of an art show in France. Nor are numbers likely to drop significantly this autumn, when the Fondation receives a selection of 200 works from the MoMA collection, the largest loan ever made by the New York institution. The Fondation also operates smaller gallery spaces, with a more contemporary edge, across the globe, which this year staged shows by the likes of Pierre Huyghe (Venice), Ian Cheng (Munich), Yang Fudong (Tokyo) and Gerhard Richter (in the newly opened Beijing gallery).
ArtReview
25 Photo: Jack Hems 26 Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy Biennale di Venezia 27 Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 28 Photo: Todd Eberle
25 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty
29 Beatrix Ruf
30 Daniel Bucholz
Museum Director German Last Year 11
Gallerist German Last Year 39
29 Photo: Robin de Puy 30 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne 31 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 32 Photo: Elizabeth Daniels
As we go to print, it has turned into a tough year for Ruf, who just resigned from her position as director of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the midst of alleged conflicts of interest between her institutional role and her broader activities as an adviser. While the effects of that remain to be seen, she nevertheless managed to develop a programme at the Stedelijk that navigates seamlessly between her usual focus on art’s next hot young thing and reexaminations of work by more mature practitioners, as recent shows for Jana Euler and Jordan Wolfson, but also Jean Tinguely and Ed van der Elsken, demonstrate. Furthermore, Ruf’s strength has always been her ability to operate as a meta-curator, in various advisory and panellist roles. In January, she launched the first Verbier Art Summit around the question of whether museums should consider ‘de-growth’, and she continues to be one of the core advisers to Luma Arles.
Daniel Buchholz doesn’t do anything before the time’s right, and the creaky floor in his Berlin gallery, which he opened 22 years after his Cologne space and seven years before his Manhattan one, evidently isn’t quite noisy enough to warrant fixing. (He opened his first space in 1986: do the maths.) But, and despite Buchholz saying of their New York expansion in 2015 that they’re ‘too old for Brooklyn’, those timeworn planks are the only thing around him really showing their age. The gallery continues to move smartly with the times, representing young movers like the Venice-wowing Anne Imhof, precisely quirky painter Caleb Considine and rising video star Loretta Fahrenholz. Meanwhile, if you diagrammed recent influences on sculpture, photography and painting, most of the lines would lead back to figures like Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans and Michael Krebber – all of whom happily tread Buchholz’s boards.
31 Maja Hoffmann
32 Eli & Edythe Broad
Collector Swiss Last Year 26
Collectors American Last Year 23
Hoffmann’s Luma Arles ‘campus’ is still in construction, slated to open fully next year (though two of the six Annabelle Selldorf-refurbished former train sheds are already operational). In the meantime, Hoffmann has gone on a buying spree to complement her usual patronage. So while still donating to Kunsthalle Basel, Palais de Tokyo and the Serpentine Galleries, and maintaining board and trustee positions at Tate, Kunsthalle Zürich Foundation, the New Museum, CCS Bard and the Swiss Institute (and this year matching a $3m fundraising drive by Jonas Mekas’s Anthology Film Archive in New York), she, together with Tate, bought Martin Parr’s 12,000-strong photobook collection (they will be catalogued and available to view in both Arles and London) and the archives of Annie Leibovitz. The latter was on view in Arles over the summer. At her Zürich space, Luma Westbau, the third 89plus exhibition, Americans 2017, opened in May.
The Broads are Los Angeles’s cultural powerbrokers, having put an estimated $4.1b into education, scientific research and arts programmes in the city. Of these, contemporary art, in the form of their collection and the institutions they have supported, has often been the most visible form of their philanthropy. It has been two years since the couple opened The Broad (spending $140m along the way) and installed their 2,000-strong art collection. The museum remains one of the busiest in the world, welcoming a sold-out solo show by Yayoi Kusama this year. Their patronage of other institutions and activities has continued, including, this year, Pacific Standard Time. Only weeks ago, Eli Broad announced his retirement from philanthropy, leaving the running of the museum and the Broads’ philanthropic foundations to others, including newly appointed board member and former Met director Thomas P. Campbell. They leave an ambitious model for other patrons to follow.
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33 Miuccia Prada
34 Sadie Coles
Collector Italian Last Year 45
Gallerist British Last Year 31
35 François Pinault
36 Michael Govan
Collector French Last Year 35
Museum Director American Last Year 34
A month before the opening of the Venice Biennale this past spring, Pinault opened Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a much-hyped Damien Hirst exhibition across the two spaces of Pinault’s collection in Venice. And although the monumental sculptures (supposedly treasures from a shipwreck, salvaged from the bottom of the ocean) were received with some critical ambivalence, the exhibition was by far the most talked about in Venice, if only for its ambition and scale (over 180 works, some of them in Carrara marble and weighing up to four tons). After receiving the Légion d’Honneur from the French president in April, Pinault, who is chairman of luxury goods empire Kering, revealed preliminary plans for his Tadao Ando-designed foundation, set to open in a refurbished landmark building in Paris in 2019. What to expect? A building that will ‘renew hope in the future’, says Ando.
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It is perhaps telling that the first of the more established galleries to take part in Condo this year, the now annual gallery exchange programme, was Sadie Coles HQ. The eponymous gallerist has become something of a role model for more fledgling enterprises, thanks to her strategic growth mixing the established (John Currin, who Coles showed in November; John Bock, in March), the fashionable (Jordan Wolfson, combative as usual, in April; Helen Marten, who won the Turner Prize in December) and the politically engaged (bringing Martine Syms into the fold). Coles evidently also has eyes on Asia: at the time of Frieze London, she brought in curator Victor Wang to stage an exhibition of ten young Chinese artists (not represented by the gallery) and a solo project by Xu Zhen, featuring a working Chinese grocery shop, fully stocked and everything for sale (there’s a catch though: you’d be buying empty packaging).
The director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a reputation as a formidable fundraiser, but in 2017 he outdid himself, securing the largest private donation ever made towards the construction of an American public museum, when mogul David Geffen pledged $150m in October towards the $650m needed to start construction of a new Peter Zumthor-designed home for the museum (scheduled to break ground in 2019). When Govan is not hanging an Agnes Martin show (the director curated a survey of the late artist in April), he’s hanging out with Annie Lennox (this is LA after all: the singer will perform at the museum’s gala in November, an event that last year brought in over $3m). If all this wasn’t enough, Govan is looking to take on a vacant 7,800sqm former bus-storage yard as an outpost in the south of the city.
ArtReview
33 Photo: Guido Harari 34 Photo: Juergen Teller 35 Photo: Matteo De Fina 36 Courtesy LACMA, Los Angeles
Since opening her Rem Koolhaas-designed headquarters in Milan in 2015, Prada’s private art foundation has played continuous host to of-the-moment shows. Not least, this year: American artist Michael Wang’s ode to dying ecologies, and a survey of William N. Copley’s work (and his collection of other people’s art). A smaller Milan outpost, dedicated to photography, opened in January. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied, an ‘exchange’ at Prada’s Venice palazzo between theorist Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, theatre designer Anna Viebrock and curator Udo Kittelmann, was one of the most talked-about shows during the biennale, while Prada’s coproduction of Carne y Arena, a virtual-reality film and installation by Mexican director Alejandro J. Iñárritu, was a first (VR movie) when it screened in Cannes and will be a must-see when installed in Milan. A knack for being in the right place at the right time also led to a pop-up show in Athens in time for Documenta.
37 © Pia Riverola 38 Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 39 Courtesy Power Station of Art/Shanghai Biennale 40 Photo: Karl Lagerfeld
37 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
38 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
Gallerists Mexican / Colombian Last Year 32
Gallerists American Last Year 25
A relatively low-key year for the husband-and-wife gallerists – if turning Kurimanzutto, their Mexico City space, into a fully functioning grocery can be considered retiring. That project, by Gabriel Orozco, kicked off Zona Maco art fair week and was a space where visitors could buy groceries using specially issued ‘Orozco dollars’ (notes decorated with a geometric pattern by the artist). In addition to this spectacle, Kurimanzutto welcomed Patti Smith to the city, during which she exhibited her photographic work in a local café (a regular offsite venue for the gallery), created a work for the ongoing Sonora 128 project (a giant advertising billboard, curated with Bree Zucker) and embarked on a series of public performances. All this, and supporting the industrious careers of the likes of Adrián Villar Rojas and Jimmie Durham, is business as usual for the duo. Less expected – and less welcome – was having to postpone their Anri Sala exhibition in the aftermath of September’s earthquake.
Last November Blum & Poe LA acted as a polling station for the US presidential election. When Trump triumphed, and later moved to act on a campaign promise to end the so-called Dreamers programme for undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, the response of gallery artist JR was to erect a 21m cutout billboard on the Mexican side of the US–Mexico border depicting a child peering over the wall. Overt politics aside, in July the gallery’s LA headquarters staged a survey of Mono-ha and Dansaekhwa, the Japanese and Korean postwar movements Blum and Poe have long championed. Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa got her first exhibition in the US, also in LA. Meanwhile Tokyo-based Kazumi Nakamura showed in Blum & Poe’s New York space (which also hosted a survey of work by French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda, in March); and Juergen Teller had his first solo presentation (curated by Francesco Bonami) in Japan in 25 years, at Blum & Poe’s Tokyo gallery.
39 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta
40 Emmanuel Perrotin
Artists Indian Last Year 86
Fittingly, the gallerist who introduced Takashi Murakami to the West has now opened a gallery in Tokyo. The 130sqm space, which Perrotin inaugurated with an exhibition of recent paintings by the nonagenarian artist Pierre Soulages, follows on from the launch of a Seoul outpost last year (the programme highlight there this year was Daniel Arsham’s exhibition of ghastly coloured teddy bears sculpted in quartz). The real expansion, however, came in New York, where Perrotin opened a new museum-size space across three floors on the Lower East Side, complete with garden and shop (a place from which to retail KAWS limited-edition toys, the same ones that on first release crashed the website of MoMA’s shop). With the renovations half-complete, Perrotin staged a solo by Iván Argote; the space opened fully this month. Back in Paris, Xavier Veilhan (having represented France at the Venice Biennale) had an exhibition in September, alongside simultaneous shows by Klara Kristalova and Chen Fei.
It’s been another busy 12 months for Raqs Media Collective. At the end of last year, their edition of the Shanghai Biennale, Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories, opened to positive reviews. They took up residence in Tate Modern, London, in December, leading a series of public workshops. The New Delhi-based collective, formed in 1992, had its first major UK exhibition, at the Whitworth Museum in Manchester in September, titled Twilight Language, and the trio took part in eleven solo shows internationally, including the Sharjah Biennial, and delivered a further four lectures. In London, they presented a new holographic sculpture, Hollowgram (2017), commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries for its pavilion, which rather enigmatically considers ‘the inner life of power’.
Gallerist French Last Year 44
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42 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang
Curator Emirati Last Year 40
Gallerists Chinese Last Year 55
While mixed reviews greeted this year’s Sharjah Biennial, which Sheikha Hoor has organised since 2003 through her Sharjah Art Foundation, the festival is established as one of the most significant art events globally. In September she was announced as the new head of the International Biennial Association, a move that sees the organisation relocate its operations to the United Arab Emirates (which is ruled by Sheikha Hoor’s father), reinforcing its outsize position in the artworld. Sheikha Hoor balances the academic (the foundation’s annual March Meeting conference boasted a typical artworld band of intellects, curator Charles Esche and artists Raqs Media Collective included) with the accessible (the Yayoi Kusama exhibition that closed early this year, curated by Sheikha Hoor herself). She also sits on a plethora of boards at museums in and outside the region, including MoMA PS1, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Ashkal Alwan and Darat al Funun.
Zhang Wei (who sits on Art Basel Hong Kong’s selection committee) and Hu Fang (contributor to both e-flux and ArtReview Asia) this year celebrated the 15th anniversary of the multidisciplinary platform Vitamin Creative Space they cofounded. While the Guangzhou- and Beijing-based gallery now represents artists (Anton Vidokle, Lee Kit, Koki Tanaka and Olafur Eliasson among them), it nonetheless continues to operate with the ethos of an offspace, staging a regular programme of installations and exhibitions at the Sou Fujimoto-designed Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, including Hong Kong-based Pak Sheung Chuen, Zheng Guogu (also a founding member of art collective Yangjiang Group) and Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui, who last year was invited to perform The Reverse Collection (2014–16) at BMW Tate Live. After three years of development work, fellow Vitamin artist Cao Fei is the first Chinese artist (and youngest artist overall) to have created a BMW Art Car, unveiled at a launch in May.
43 Nato Thompson
44 Hou Hanru
Curator American Last Year 84
Curator Chinese Last Year 71
Flying above the New York headquarters of the commissioning organisation Creative Time, where Thompson was artistic director until November, a different flag designed by an artist is raised each month as part of its 16-flag Pledges of Allegiance project. From Ahmet Ögüt’s instruction in black and white, ‘If You’d Like This Flag in Colors, Burn It’, to Marilyn Minter’s multicoloured command to ‘RESIST’, each is a small protest woven into daily life. That it’s managed to get other art institutions to fly the flags simultaneously speaks of Creative Time’s reach. With its annual summit (this year held in Toronto) a focus point for the politically engaged, the organisation has set out an ambitious trajectory of exploring what art can do in the world (a recent commissioned Sophie Calle performance in a cemetery notwithstanding). That’s something that Thompson does in his 2017 book, Culture as Weapon, and will no doubt take with him as the inaugural artistic director of Philadelphia Contemporary.
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Having steered Rome’s MAXXI out of its rocky first few years, artistic director Hou is still listed on the institution’s website as ‘based in Paris and San Francisco’. But what distinguishes this perpetual internationalist from other globetrotting curators is not just relentless energy but also a progressive vision, with MAXXI’s recent programme including architect Yona Friedman and ecological artist Piero Gilardi. Hou just can’t sit still, also acting as a consulting curator for the Guggenheim (for whom he is one of the guest curators of the current and controversial Art and China after 1989 exhibition) and curator of Shenzhen’s Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, which opens in December under the title Cities, Grow in Difference and will be exploring themes of otherness and coexistence.
ArtReview
41 Photo: Nato Welton. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation 42 Photo: Zhang Wei 43 Courtesy Creative Time, New York 44 Photo: Musacchio Ianniello. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome
41 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
45 Photo: Ray Anastas 46 Courtesy K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong 47 Photo: Hugo Rittson. Courtesy White Cube, London 48 Photo: Stefan Gutermuth
45 Brian Kuan Wood, Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle
46 Adrian Cheng
Artists American/Mexican/Russian Last Year 37
Cheng’s K11 Foundation has become the go-to partner for institutions interested in capturing millennial culture (Cheng was, after all, the man who launched a new investment fund this year targeting youth-focused brands that might develop in China, including the Paddle8 online auction house) as well as East–West exchange. Alongside exhibitions at the spaces located in K11’s ‘art malls’, the foundation continues its partnership with a number of Western institutions. In March, After Us, a group show exploring gaming and chat apps through work by the likes of Jon Rafman, Cécile B. Evans and Chen Zhou, programmed in collaboration with the New Museum, took over Cheng’s Shanghai space; in March MoMA PS1 used a K11 temporary gallery in Hong Kong to investigate ‘regional differences within the digital ecosystem’ via .com/.cn. And, as a disclosure of interest, K11 were natural partners for ArtReview’s longstanding Future Greats project, getting onboard this year.
E-flux, the half-commercial, half-academic outfit headed by this trio of artists continues its hybrid mission, acting as a (paid-for) distribution centre for the artworld’s press releases, a journal (in which Hito Steyerl has published many of her most influential essays), a partner on many a symposium (particularly the site’s architecture offshoot) and, perhaps not quite so successfully, an online forum for debate. This year, the saga of e-flux’s bid to control the .art top-level domain extension took a new turn. Having lost out in the bidding, e-flux has partnered with the new owner, marketing .art to its extensive network. E-flux’s influence ensured that prominent institutions signed up straightaway (including the Stedelijk Museum and Para Site), with e-flux subscribers getting second dibs before the domain extension was put on wider sale. Meanwhile Vidokle, Aranda and Kuan Wood had their individual art practices to contend with too.
Collector Chinese Last Year 54
47 Jay Jopling
48 Judith Butler
Gallerist British Last Year 33
Philosopher American Last Year NEW
Jopling’s White Cube has made a concerted effort to shake its reputation as a bastion of the YBAs. Early steps to update itself didn’t quite hit the mark (Eddie Peake’s one-dimensional cheekiness has the hallmarks of an earlier era). But as late-1990s mainstays such as Marc Quinn and Jake and Dinos Chapman left the gallery, a more critically rigorous gallery programme was implemented this year (as befitting White Cube’s museum-scale South London gallery, in Bermondsey, which operates alongside the Central London space and the gallery in Hong Kong), featuring the likes of Ibrahim Mahama, Park Seo-Bo, Wayne Thiebaud and Theaster Gates. The recent Dreamers Awake, curated by Susanna Greeves, provided an expansive and well-researched group show on the influence of the Surrealists, featuring over 50 women artists. Nor has Jopling entirely abandoned his legacy: Gilbert & George are to take over all four galleries of the Bermondsey space, to mark the 50th anniversary since the duo began making art together.
The foremost philosopher of gender issues, particularly relating to performativity – see her landmark Gender Trouble (1990), which influentially sited gender as something we do, rather than something we are – Butler most recently has applied her thinking to protest. The American philosopher and Berkeley professor’s recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) looked at movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the Standing Rock protest, as a form of bodily performativity on the part of precarious communities – which, she believes, ought to bond together for strength in numbers. In particular, Butler’s thought has underwritten the increasing visibility of gender fluidity in mainstream culture: as one website article opined in its headline last year, ‘It’s Judith Butler’s world’. For artists, increasing numbers of whom are considering the body as a site of protest, she’s an essential guiding spirit.
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50 Christine Tohmé
Gallerist Brazilian Last Year 57
Curator Lebanese Last Year 49
Despite the fact that the Brazilian economy is still (slowly) recovering from its worst-ever recession, Strina is not one for hanging on and hoping for the best (this is a gallerist who has seen worse: when she founded her gallery, in 1974, Brazil was under a military dictatorship). While others looked primarily to overseas collectors to get them through the past few years (with other Brazilian galleries opening New York outposts), Strina sought to shore up the domestic market by cofounding (alongside gallerist Thiago Gomide) her own art fair in São Paulo. Semana de Arte featured 37 galleries – mainly domestic but with the likes of Galleria Continua and Luhring Augustine rocking up for good measure – and a whole week (hence the fair’s name) of less commercial activities. Back at the office, it was a busy year in terms of institutional shows for the likes of Leonor Antunes, Alexandre da Cunha and Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck.
With Ashkal Alwan, the nonprofit art space she cofounded in 1994, in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War, established as one of the most progressive voices in the Lebanese and regional art scenes, helping to foster the careers of artists such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari and Rabih Mroué, this year Tohmé took the reins at the Sharjah Biennial. ‘Are we just speaking to the same 200 people all the time?’ she asked at Sharjah’s March Meeting conference. And so, in a manner that’s seemingly in vogue these days, she included projects in Dakar, Ramallah, Beirut, Istanbul and online. Reviews were mixed: Hyperallergic thought it ‘generous and speculative, unfolding into something almost hopeful’; the Financial Times said, ‘low-key, dispassionate and lacking fire’. Taking the show to Palestine, then, where Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan opened the event with Bird Watching (2017) – an acoustic investigation into Saydnaya Prison in Syria – was an attempt to open up the conversation.
51 Lorenz Helbling
52 Liam Gillick
Gallerist Swiss Last Year 76
Artist British Last Year 67
With Western galleries continuing to open in Greater China (by and large in Hong Kong) and Western museums attempting to introduce audiences to the development of contemporary art in the region (witness the Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition), it’s no surprise that Helbling, who has been promoting contemporary art in China since he set up Shanghart in 1996, is the first port of call for advice and information. Of course, that he represents a bunch of leading artists in China (11 of them in that Guggenheim show) and beyond helps too. At gallery HQ there was a museum-worthy summer solo exhibition by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, work by Birdhead was at Tate Modern and pretty much everywhere else, Xu Zhen’s Supermarket (2007/17) popped up at Sadie Coles during Frieze London and even one of the less active gallery artists, Zhou Tiehai, saw his iconic 14-painting-and-one-video, Will/We Must (1996–2004), enshrined in Shanghai’s Yuz Museum.
An assiduous student of first-wave Conceptual greats – consider the Donald Judd DNA in his coloured Plexiglas sculptures, the Lawrence Weiner in his poetic wall texts, the 1960s vibe of his nudges towards group activity – Gillick is getting to be a grand if not-so-old man himself, ensconced as sharp analyst of cultural change and essential connective node in the artworld. Part of the furniture, even, or so his work’s appearance in 30 group shows this year might suggest. He’s still self-challenging, though. This year Gillick revisited the soundworks he’s made for a show at Eva Presenhuber, while his editions were the subject of a show at Esther Schipper. In Manchester he unexpectedly collaborated with New Order, designing their stage show in a rare move into mainstream territory. ‘Their music’, he said at the time, ‘continues to create new levels of intensity and control based on a constant testing of fundamental structures.’ Words, you suspect, by which Gillick has long steered.
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49 Photo: Ruy Teixeira 50 © Gilbert Hage / Rain Tree 51 © Birdhead 52 © Stella Krause
49 Luisa Strina
I don’t even have the luxury of gazing at them – walking through spaces with which I am quite unfamiliar. Scattered, fragmented, puzzled spaces. Spaces with no overview. One cannot have a relationship to those spaces. Only an affair. A nonbelonging which makes me stick to it but not stuck in it. A swinging centre who doesn’t know any more where it comes from because of amnesia. A centre which doesn’t know where it is heading to because of dis-orient-ation.
54 Jeff Koons
Museum Director British Last Year 63
Artist American Last Year 30
While he may not have curated any biennials himself in the past year (albeit with São Paulo and Jakarta recently under his belt), Esche was a cocurator of the NSK State Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, making a sort of temporary floating embassy for the territory-less artist state. Esche is also both an adviser to the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and a director of London publishing house Afterall. ‘It’s important that we constantly stretch the definition of what “making art public” means in terms of exhibitions,’ Esche told ArtReview last year, and the programme at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, which he has directed since 2004, reflects this: a new three-year exhibition titled The Way Beyond Art showcases some of the socially engaged and expanded practices that Esche champions, like Chto Delat and Can Altay. The Van Abbe also supports archival research and revision under its ‘Deviant Practice’ grants. Esche remains dedicated to exploring the limits of the contemporary museum.
55 Yayoi Kusama
56 Kara Walker
Artist Japanese Last Year 93
Artist American Last Year New
Kusama has come a long way from bribing police officers to let the polka-dot-painted models pose long enough for documentation while staging naked happenings on the Brooklyn Bridge during the 1960s. Last year saw new highs for sales of her work at auction: $970,000 for a 1965 canvas and $53.8m in total according to artprice.com. This October she opened a museum in Tokyo, dedicated entirely to her work, with My Eternal Soul (2009–), an ongoing series of paintings. Meanwhile, several touring exhibitions continue to ensure that those Instagram posts of visitors to her mirrored installations never stop, with shows to date in Washington, DC, Seattle and LA, and more lined up for Atlanta, Brisbane and Toronto. With all that comes money. Submit yourself to the dots and, as Kusama says, return to the infinite universe.
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Despite a show of his ‘blue balls’ paintings at Gagosian Beverly Hills and another at Almine Rech in London, it hasn’t been the most positive year for the former stockbroker: Paris has yet to find a site for his Bouquet of Flowers, gifted to the city last year as a mark of solidarity following the November 2015 attacks, with the city baulking at the expense of manufacturing and installing the 30-ton work. (Koons donated the concept, not the finished work; one critic called it a ‘poisoned chalice’.) Despite this, Koons remains undeterred, focusing on a series of bags being created with Louis Vuitton: a Mona Lisa backpack or a Rubens duffel, anyone? When it comes to an unruffled engagement with capitalism and the smoothest of productions, Koons remains king.
Walker’s work has long foregrounded the perversion and violence inherent in the American Dream, and this past year has seen her vision cast far and wide. An oversize, sugar-coated left hand was exhibited in the Deste Foundation on the Greek island of Hydra this summer, a remnant of her monumental 2014 Creative Time installation A Subtlety, and she was part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Legacy of Lynching group show, as well as having solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Art Museum and Victoria Miro, London. She’ll also be participating in the Prospect New Orleans triennial opening this month. Walker’s much-shared text accompanying her September gallery exhibition, titled Sikkema Jenkins and Co is Compelled to Present the Most Astounding and Important Painting Show of the Fall Art Show Viewing Season!, gives ample evidence of the irony, impatience and accuracy that defines her work: ‘I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology?’
ArtReview
53 Photo: Judith Warringa 54 Photo: Chris Fanning. © Jeff Koons 55 © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Victoria Miro, London, David Zwirner, New York, and Yayoi Kusama Inc 56 Photo: Ari Marcopoulos
53 Charles Esche
57 Photo: Benjamin Fredrickson 58 Photo: Marc Shoul 59 Courtesy WKCDA 60 Photo: Andrea Rossett
57 Klaus Biesenbach
58 William Kentridge
Museum Director German Last Year 51
Artist South African Last Year 62
The modus operandi of MoMA PS1’s director has been to balance cult, influential figures with hip relative newbies, and 2017 sees no change in the formulae. So exhibitions for Carolee Schneemann, Cathy Wilkes and Naeem Mohaiemen sit alongside shows by Tomáš Rafa and Ian Cheng. In August, Sculpture Center curator Ruba Katrib was poached to help deliver the programme. Biesenbach (also chief curator at large at MoMA) is almost as well known for his celebrity-filled fundraising work, and again delivered this year, organising a benefit to aid the Hurricane Maria recovery in Puerto Rico (the event’s committee include Ricky Martin, Lady Gaga, Patti Smith and James Franco). The tragedy must have felt raw to the museum director: he has a farm on the island, and in January, to coincide with artist Papo Colo’s 2016 PS1 show travelling to the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Biesenbach not only curated a performative parade by the artist, but led it, holding a goat on a lead.
It’s hard to keep up with Kentridge, who’s been working on events, operas, exhibitions and long-term installations globally this past year. He’s had gallery exhibitions in Berlin, Milan, Paris and New York, and significant shows at SFMOMA and the Cincinnati Art Museum, while his Thick Time exhibition toured from the Whitechapel Gallery, London, to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Louisiana Museum, in Denmark. All this alongside taking part in festivals in Athens and Johannesburg, and creating a temporary riverside mural in Rome. Kentridge’s sketchy, fragmented examination of history’s underbelly is reaching more than just art audiences; his stage direction and set design for celebrated productions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937) currently tour the globe. And if all that wasn’t enough, the artist also set up The Centre for the Less Good Idea – an art foundation in Johannesburg that provides a ‘safe space for uncertainty, doubt, stupidity and, at times, failure’.
59 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong
60 Philippe Parreno
Australian / Korean Museum Director / Curator Last Year New
Artist French Last Year New
Formerly director of collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Suhanya Raffel joined Hong Kong’s M+ as executive director in November last year (after the resignation of Lars Nittve over frustrations with the museum’s construction process; it is now scheduled to open in 2019). The delays don’t seem to have affected the growth of the collection, which has reached an enormous 6,000 works – its Sigg Collection alone making it the largest collection of modern and contemporary Chinese art in the world. Deputy director and chief curator Doryun Chong, who oversees the museum’s acquisitions, joined M+ in 2013, and has programmed a steady stream of exhibitions held at the M+ Pavilion, which opened last year; Chong was also the consulting curator for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (supported by M+ Museum and Hong Kong Arts Development Council), which presented Songs for Disaster Relief (2017) by Samson Young.
Parreno shares with his sometime collaborator Pierre Huyghe a sense of long-term perspective and dislocation; his controlled sci-fi situations were installed this past year in a large solo show at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (one of two exhibitions in the city; in the summer he joined Anri Sala and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Pond Society – his second show of the year with Gonzalez-Foerster, alongside Huyghe and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in March, in the nature-inspired Infinite Garden: From Giverny to Amazonia), as well as in the critically acclaimed Anywhen at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. The combination of video fragments, redirected live sound and floating Mylar fish ran on a six-hour cycle that was partly controlled by jars of yeast that sat in a room at the back of the hall. In creating exhibitions that guide us towards unimagined futures (and helping to steer Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Arles institution), there’s no one like him.
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62 Elena Filipovic
Gallerist German Last Year 56
Museum Director American Last Year Reentry (68 in 2012)
She may have told Bloomberg that there are ‘less and less people coming into the gallery to buy art’, but that didn’t stop Schipper from taking on new premises this year. A former warehouse, it features 678sqm of floorspace across two galleries. Perhaps footfall isn’t paramount for Schipper – she has, after all, established a strong presence globally with her artists, reaching a lot farther than Potsdamer Strasse. The new Berlin gallery opened with solo shows by Angela Bulloch and Anri Sala, the latter with work all over Latin America this year, including one to be installed outside Museo Jumex, plus exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo. Schipper’s real inroads have been in Asia, however, with staff on the ground and shows like Tomás Saraceno’s ambitious solo at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Philippe Parreno’s no-less-ambitious exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai and both Sala and Prabhavathi Meppayil’s inclusion in this year’s Yokohama Triennale.
63 Olafur Eliasson
64 Barbara Gladstone
Artist Danish-Icelandic Last Year 74
Gallerist American Last Year 53
It’s not just that Eliasson has wielded a version of art as a wondrous, spectacular laboratory to popular effect, with largescale installations that dazzle and daze. It’s also, deeper down, that he makes use of art’s hazy parameters as the adaptable research and development wing to cure society’s ills. Following on from his Little Sun (2012–) project, he launched Green light last year, a series of workshops for refugees, migrants and students geared towards building sustainable modular lamps of Eliasson’s design; the project was part of the Venice Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale this year. The second Festival of Future Nows also took place this year, at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, an ongoing brainstorming initiative that came out of his Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), which was part of the Berlin University of the Arts until 2014. Which is to say, the art might just make your eyes pop, but keep an eye out for the next scientific breakthrough too.
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This year Filipovic made most institutional curators look like idlers. Three years into her directorship at Kunsthalle Basel, she’s lately been balancing the emphatic championing of women artists – solo shows in the last year for Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sadie Benning, Maria Loboda – with rewardingly elliptical group shows like this past summer’s Ungestalt. That’d be plenty, but in the past year the Princeton-trained art historian has also published two (admittedly long-gestating) books: a substantial and brilliant study of the ‘apparently marginal activities’ of Marcel Duchamp that additionally serves as a sly exegesis on curatingas-art and an exhortation to artistic boldness, and a tightly researched Afterall ‘One Work’ volume on David Hammons’s iconic 1983 Bliz-aard Ball Sale. Even her predecessor in Basel might be looking on enviously, and he just directed Documenta. Filipovic is ambitious enough to do that too; but also smart enough to rewrite the script.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, Gladstone seemingly doesn’t need to keep building galleries beyond those she already has, in New York and Brussels. Her unfailingly classy artist list is all she needs, with its several generations of American greats (Sol LeWitt, Robert Mapplethorpe, R.H. Quaytman, Matthew Barney), smartly chosen Europeans (Kai Althoff, Thomas Hirschhorn, Philippe Parreno) and international stars such as Wangechi Mutu and Shirin Neshat. While her artists were expectedly all over institutions this year, and Sharon Lockhart exhibited in the Polish Pavilion in Venice, back in Manhattan the gallery experimented, with summer group show Lyric on a Battlefield a timely consideration of how first-person experience is transmitted in ‘a time of precarity’. A showcase for brilliant Belgian painter Walter Swennen followed soon after; as an artist friend of ours remarked recently, “Gladstone? Now that’s a gallery.”
ArtReview
61 Photo: Felix Brüggemann 62 Photo: Natalia Evelyn Bencicova 63 Photo: Heike Gottert. © Olafur Eliasson 64 Photo: Lena C. Emery
61 Esther Schipper
65 Photo: Mark Blower 66 Massimo De Carlo (right) with artist John Armleder. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan 67 Photo: Giorgio Perottino 68 Photo: Cameron Wittig. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
65 Thaddaeus Ropac
66 Massimo De Carlo
Gallerist Austrian Last Year 69
Gallerist Italian Last Year 64
In June last year Ropac heard that Ely House, an eighteenth-century mansion in Central London, was on the market. He immediately got on a plane, making it to the Mayfair property at 6.55pm, five minutes before viewings finished. By 7pm the gallerist’s plans to add a London outpost to his two spaces in Salzburg and two more in Paris were settled. The London gallery opened in April with four shows spread across two of its five floors: Gilbert & George, a solo show for young British artist Oliver Beer, a display of early drawings by Joseph Beuys and a showcase of Egidio Marzona’s collection of American Minimalism and European Arte Povera. Two months later, Ropac installed longtime director of the Serpentine Galleries Julia Peyton-Jones as global senior director. She joined in time to oversee exhibitions by Robert Longo and Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, the latter coinciding with a Tate survey.
In 2019 De Carlo will move one of his two Milan spaces to Casa CorbelliniWassermann, an icon of 1930s Milanese architecture designed by Piero Portaluppi. For now however the gallerist continues to show an eclectic mix of international artists across his four spaces – the others being in London and Hong Kong. This year saw the first London gallery show of work by Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion (also featured in Cristine Macel’s Venice Biennale), while in Italy there were displays by Swiss artist John Armleder (who also showed in London) and new signing Jamian Juliano-Villani. In Hong Kong there were shows by Lee Kit, Ai Weiwei and Roland Flexner, Zero legend Enrico Castellani and Gianfranco Baruchello (with Marcel Duchamp). Outside the galleries Baruchello had a critically acclaimed show at Raven Row, London, Elmgreen & Dragset took the reins at the Istanbul Biennial and once-retired Maurizio Cattelan continued on the comeback trail.
67 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
68 Kerry James Marshall
Museum Director American Last Year 61
Artist American Last Year New
As if heading two of the Turin area’s major institutions, Castello di Rivoli and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, weren’t enough, Christov-Bakargiev recently took on another significant responsibility: incorporating a historical collection into a museum of contemporary art. In July Christov-Bakargiev announced that the collection of the late Francesco Federico Cerruti, now on permanent loan to the Castello, would be placed on display in his nearby villa, to be operated by the Castello as an annexe to the existing contemporary art museum. It is expected to open in 2019. The collection is valued at around €500 million and includes work by Picasso, Pontormo and Modigliani. Meanwhile, besides curating a biennialsized exhibition ruminating on the subject of colour (with approximately 400 works by 130 artists from the last four centuries) across her two institutions, Christov-Bakargiev continued her professorship at Northwestern University in Chicago and sat on the Artes Mundi prize jury.
The American artist’s survey show of paintings from the past 35 years of his career, aptly titled Mastry, toured the US to both critical and public acclaim for much of the last 18 months, from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to New York’s Met Breuer, before ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in July. Along the way he picked up the Rosenberger Medal from the University of Chicago (delivering the winner’s lecture in May), was offered honorary doctorates from Columbia College, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and broke ground on A Monumental Journey, a 9m-high public sculpture in Des Moines. His figurative canvases, riffing on past masters, comicbooks and urban settings, and populated with characters that are literally black, have helped reshape the skin tone of art history and paved the way for artists like Kara Walker, Chris Ofili and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
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69 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
70 Claire Hsu Curator Austrian-Chinese Last Year 68
Collector Italian Last Year 72
71 Richard Chang
72 Sunjung Kim
American Collector Last Year 52
Curator Korean Last Year Reentry (88 in 2015)
Earlier this year art collector and investor Richard Chang was named president of the board of Performa, the New York-based performance art organisation – which holds its fourth biennial this November and brings together a cohort of South African artists including Zanele Muholi, William Kentridge and Kemang Wa Lehulere. Word is the next biennial will be looking out towards Asia. Chang, who splits his time between Beijing and New York, is the founder of Domus Collection, Beijing, a trustee of London’s Royal Academy and vice chair for Tate’s International Council, as well as a member of its Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee. In March Chang joined artist Bosco Sodi at the Casa Wabi Foundation, Mexico, to launch a new Alvaro Siza-designed Clay Pavilion, which houses an education centre. He’s also a board director for eco-conscious Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s nonprofit FAOU Foundation, currently helping her to realise her third site-specific installation on the continent of Africa.
The Seoul-based curator (founder of Samuso curatorial office) and director of Artsonje Center, Sunjung Kim was appointed president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation (GBF) in July, coming into a role that had been slightly tarnished following a censorship scandal that saw then-president (and biennial founder) Yongwoo Lee resign from his post in 2014. But Kim’s no stranger to tackling messy politics head-on, having curated a series of exhibitions along the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea for the Real DMZ Project since 2012. She’s already making waves at GBF, announcing plans to include multiple curators at the next biennale (echoing the ninth edition, which she codirected with five international women curators), which looks to explore ‘matters of emotional concerns, of border/lessness, of existing inside/outside the border, and of being in-between the borders beyond geopolitical boundaries’. She’s also on the advisory board for this year’s first Bangkok Biennial.
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69 Photo: Stefano Sciuto 70 Courtesy Dave Choi 71 Courtesy Richard Chang 72 Photo: Seung Mu Lee
It is one thing to have a private foundation in which to show one’s collection, mount ambitious exhibitions with works from other people’s collections and provide an education programme to young curators. It’s another to have two of them. This year Sandretto Re Rebaudengo announced that she would be opening a Madrid space to complement her Turin institution; it’s to be designed by David Adjaye and will be located at the Matadero Madrid. In Italy Sandretto Re Rebaudengo staged a series of solo shows – featuring the likes of Alex Cecchetti, Kapwani Kiwanga and Bedwyr Williams – under the title The Institute of Things to Come, as well as exhibitions by more established names such as Harun Farocki and Hiroshi Sugimoto. She sits on boards and councils at MoMA, the New Museum, Tate and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is an adviser to the Art Basel Cities programme, among other activities.
Cofounder and executive director of Asia Art Archive (AAA), Hsu is also a member of the acquisitions committee and board of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, and serves on the board of the international grant-making Foundation for Arts Initiatives – all roles that reinforce her position as a broadly influential figure. This year she’s also been on the jury for the BMW Art Journey (awarded to Indian artist Astha Butail) and for the Hong Kong Human Rights Arts Prize 2017, organised by Justice Centre Hong Kong. AAA, an independent nonprofit organisation based in Hong Kong, remains the most comprehensive library of Asian art-history, comprising a number of personal archives in addition to books, catalogues and periodicals. The organisation also administers a number of research grants, workshops, conferences and symposia. As the cultural partner of Art Basel Hong Kong, held in March, AAA programmed a series of events and popups. In June AAA launched its new website and online journal, Ideas.
73 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider
74 Anselm Franke Curator German Last Year 85
Gallerists German Last Year 59 73 Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin. © Paweł Althamer. Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 74 Photo: Laura Fiori 75 Photo: Michael Danner. Courtesy the artist 76 Photo: Ela Bialkowska – Oknostudio
Although themselves low-key, Neuger and Riemschneider are inextricably entwined with a generation of highly visible artists that includes Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Rehberger, Simon Starling and Jorge Pardo. This year they turned their attention to history – both art’s and their own – with a show of works on aluminium by Michel Majerus (who died in 2002) during this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend. The paintings looked, both in terms of execution and subject matter, as if they were made for the contemporary digital age. Alongside that, the Majerus estate launched the first instalment of a three-stage project titled Laboratorium für die Feststellung des Offensichtlichen, housed in the artist’s studio, which aims to show his early, lesser-known work. Majerus came to prominence through a series of museum shows in 1996. He had worked with Neugerriemschneider since the gallery was founded, in 1994. If he was pioneering, so are they.
75 Kader Attia
Now in his fifth year overseeing visual arts and film at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Franke is no longer the freewheeling biennale curator of yore (although he was an adviser to this year’s Contour Biennale of moving image, in Mechelen, Belgium); but he continues to think bigger (and more influentially) than most curators. At this point he owns the exhibition-as-essay format, as was amply demonstrated by this year’s 2 or 3 Tigers (on colonialism and modernity in East Asia, cocurated with Hyunjin Kim) and Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism (on the centuryold spiritual-artistic movement, now back in vogue). If we feel now to be living in an endless present, Franke continually tracks backward, demonstrating how obscured patterns in history can light our way forward; meanwhile, his challenging shows reflect an admirable desire, as he put it recently, ‘to acknowledge and defend complexity’.
76 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
Artist French Last Year NEW Taking part in three biennials while staging two museum exhibitions and a gallery show has kept Attia busy. His participation in the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de Cuenca was topped off by a special project in Dakar as part of the Sharjah Biennial’s expanded field of activity this year. In October the artist, who was born in France to Algerian parents, won the $82,000 Joan Miró Prize in recognition of his ongoing interrogation of colonialism and its legacies: themes evident in exhibitions at Block Museum of Art, Illinois, and the MCA Australia, Sydney. La Colonie, Attia’s art space in Paris (which opened last year as a place ‘built around the desire to answer to the compelling urgency of social and cultural reparations’) continues to engage with the local immigrant population; less generously, late last year the artist took legal action over what he claims to be the appropriation of his 2007 sculpture Ghost in a music video for rappers Dosseh and Nekfeu.
Gallerists Italian Last Year 73 Marking ten years since setting up shop in France, the trio behind Galleria Continua (founded in San Gimignano in 1990) staged three simultaneous projects at their space in Les Moulins, where Paris meets the countryside. Accompanied by largescale installations by Daniel Buren (a barber-polestriped maze of fencing) and Pascale Marthine Tayou (whose large wood structure referencing Malian togunas was front and centre at the 1:54 art fair in London this year), the headliner was a show of Cuban art. This was the fruit of Cristiani, Fiaschi and Rigillo’s fourth gallery, which opened in Havana last year. In September gallery artist Ai Weiwei came to the defence of fellow gallery artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, whose videowork featuring eight American pit bulls on treadmills was pulled from an exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York.
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78 Cecilia Alemani
Writer American Last Year New
Curator Italian Last Year New
The artworld’s love affair with experimental fiction-slash-nonfiction owes a huge amount to Kraus, without whom art writing in particular would be far more moribund and hidebound. The LA writer (and former artist and filmmaker) has been a vital bridging figure since the start of the 1990s, first via her involvement with the Semiotext(e) publishing house and its Native Agents series, where she mostly advocated for and published first-person women’s fiction by the likes of Cookie Mueller and Eileen Myles; then through her epistolary roman-à-clef I Love Dick (1997), and her wrongfooting stream of books since: criticism, novels set in the artworld and echoing Kraus’s own life (eg Summer of Hate, 2012) and her recent After Kathy Acker, a lauded bio of the late writer, whom she knew well. More people are recognising Acker’s greatness as a result, just as more are reading Kraus and experiencing her postgenre prescience – a situation not hurt by last year’s Amazon TV series based on I Love Dick. That can only be a good thing.
The Italian curator has been director of New York’s High Line Art programme since 2011, and has helped to create what has become a model for public art commissioning and urban planning alike, with murals and installations by Barbara Kruger, Kerry James Marshall and Sheila Hicks. This year she also curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, featuring the work of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi and Adelita Husni-Bey. Alemani is the preeminent example of that curious entity, the ‘art-fair curator’: she has led the artist projects strand at Frieze New York since its inception in 2012, going beyond just commissioning new works designed for the fair to create an annual recreation of historical artist projects like George Maciunas’s Flux-Labyrinth (1976) or Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant FOOD (1971). It was also announced that Alemani will be artistic director for a week of public programming to launch Art Basel’s first ‘Cities’ project, in Buenos Aires, next year.
79 Hyun-Sook Lee
80 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian
Gallerist Korean Last Year 77
Collectors Chinese Last Year 87
Lee’s Kukje Gallery has long operated well beyond the limits of its Seoul HQ. This year that meant 14 art fairs in addition to the activities of the stellar range of artists – both international and Korean – the gallery represents. Haegue Yang picked up the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Park Chan-kyong had his first show in Korea for five years, concurrent with a presentation of his increasingly influential three-channel video Citizen’s Forest (2016) at Art Basel Unlimited; artists from the Dansaekhwa movement, most of whom the gallery represents, continued to garner international attention (Chung Chang-Sup, for one, was everywhere); and the gallery’s ever-curious nature was demonstrated by a summer group show, Gridded Currents, which followed the relationship between water and modernity through the work of an intriguing range of younger artists from East and West, among them Runo Lagomarsino, Nina Canell, Charles Lim and Ayoung Kim. Oh yes, and Kukje rounded off the year with a show by Paul McCarthy.
Chinese megacollectors and founders of the Long Museum, Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian have previously shocked the artworld by dropping serious money on a Modigliani, sipping from a Ming Dynasty teacup (paid for with an Amex card) and posing in front of an 11m-long Gerhard Richter artwork (later confirmed as an acquisition). Wang, who is also the director of Long Museum and has proclaimed her commitment to promoting cultural exchange between China and the West, programmed a roster of blockbuster exhibitions at the Long Museum’s Pudong (which celebrates its fifth anniversary), West Bund and Chongqing sites this year including James Turrell’s first retrospective in China, an exhibition of Chinese revolutionary art, the largest collection of Rembrandts (The Leiden Collection) and a major presentation of Antony Gormley’s art. The couple also announced their plans to open a new 43,000sqm museum in Wuhan, Hubei province, scheduled for 2018.
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77 Courtesy MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 78 Photo: Marco De Scalzio 79 Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul 80 Courtesy Long Museum, Shanghai
77 Chris Kraus
One of the mirrors is showing me what is behind me… another warns me what is coming on my way… the rest reflect my surroundings, including myself. What you see in the moment of panic is a pre-image.
81 Arthur Jafa
82 Tom Eccles
Artist American Last Year New
School Director British-American Last Year 81 Where there’s an artworld controversy, there’s a Scotsman giving his thoughts to the press, whether it’s about the Guggenheim’s removal of work from Art and China after 1989, following animal rights protests (‘chilling’) or the debacle of Sam Durant’s Scaffold/gallows sculpture at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, overseen by the Walker Art Center (the museum has a ‘slight cloud over it’). The executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York does, after all, know a thing of two about exhibition organising: he’s curated a fair few himself, and taught many of the dominant names in the field along the way. This year, former New Museum curator Lauren Cornell was brought into the fold as graduate programme director and the first chief curator at the school’s Hessel Museum of Art. Eccles also brought Ai Weiwei to the Park Avenue Armory in June (a curatorial collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist, with whom he – as well as Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf – advises Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation).
83 Rirkrit Tiravanija
84 Riyas Komu & Bose Krishnamachari
Artist Thai Last Year 36 Two of Tiravanija’s projects in the past year tell you everything you need to know: for the Socle du Monde Biennale in Denmark over the summer, he created a garden design for a local high-school and hosted a barbeque event where food from Denmark, Syria, Afghanistan and his native Thailand was cooked and shared; and at the STPI gallery in Singapore he took part in Exquisite Trust (Blindly Collaborative Creations) with his longtime sparring partners Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger and Anri Sala, trading offprints and drawings among each other in an extended game of exquisite corpse. With collaboration and gatherings as his main materials (he recently organised a fundraiser to benefit Puerto Rico at gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem), Tiravanija has managed to keep the ‘relational’ flag flying longer than any others gathered under that banner, whether it’s working with schoolkids or the same gang of artists for 20 years.
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Artists Indian Last Year 83 Artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu saw through the third edition (curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty) of their Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ended in March and, despite some logistical hiccups, enjoyed a generally positive reception. They have since named artist Anita Dube as curator for the 2018 edition. Krishnamachari’s first solo exhibition in four years, Colour Code, took place in July at Gallery G, Bangalore, for ‘one polychromatic week’. Komu has been continuing to promote contemporary Indian art through URU Art Harbour, a cultural hub housed in an old warehouse in Kochi that he opened in November. He recently launched a two-month inaugural exhibition titled Mattancherry – named after the historic quarter in Kochi in which URU Art Harbour is based – bringing together 13 artists and research collectives to reclaim the site from the tourist gaze.
ArtReview
81 Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York 82 Photo: Liam Gillick 83 Photo: Anette Aurell 84 Courtesy Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation
Although a relative newcomer to exhibiting in art galleries – Jafa was part of Kara Walker’s group show Ruffneck Constructivists at the ICA Philadelphia in 2014, before debuting with Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2016 – this veteran filmmaker has been shaping the trajectory of black art and artists for some time. Having worked with Walker, Kerry James Marshall and John Akomfrah on film projects, not to mention as a cinematographer for Spike Lee and Julie Dash, and as director of photography of music videos for Solange, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, his A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery this summer was a dense web of American history and black portraiture, and his sampled videowork Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) is rapidly becoming one of the key works of our time. Expect to see more of Jafa in the near future.
85 Haegue Yang
86 Walid Raad
Artist Korean Last Year NEW
Artist Lebanese Last Year 65
85 Photo: Abigail Enzaldo 86 Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut 87 Photo: Trevor Paglen Studio 88 Photo: Lea Crespi. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
In 2017 audiences in Bremen, Bolzano, Bonn, Göteborg, Lund, Malmö, Leverkusen, Paris, Gwacheon, Hong Kong, New York, Belluno, London and Newport Beach got to see Yang’s sensorial and conceptual assemblages of industrial, domestic and folk materials in various group exhibitions and biennials. She had solo exhibitions at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (her first with the gallery), KINDL Berlin and Kunsthaus Graz (for whom she recreated her 2001 work VIP’s Union, asking luminaries from the Styrian capital to lend the institution a table or chair from their home or office, which she then arranged throughout the exhibition space). Next year there is a solo show at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, the fruit of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, which Yang won in September, and spots in the Liverpool Biennial and the Biennale of Sydney. With all this work in circulation, and her new professorship at the Städelschule, expect to see Yang-shaped ripples in the practice of younger artists.
For over 35 years, Walid Raad has used art to explore the psychological effects of war and violence on people and communities, not least as they play out in his native Lebanon. The artist had solo exhibitions at Fondazione Volume!, Milan, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, this year. This last, Better be watching the clouds (notionally a project from the archives of Raad’s fictional Atlas Group, which collects documentary material related to the contemporary history of Lebanon), was a typical expression of Raad’s sensibility, featuring pages from a book of flora native to the Middle East, onto which he had overlaid the portraits of political leaders connected to the Lebanese Civil War. Outside the gallery space, Raad is a prominent activist within the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, looking out for those building the baubles of the Emirates. Raad’s students at New York’s Cooper Union are getting a vivid demonstration of how art practice and real life can marry.
87 Trevor Paglen
88 Almine Rech
Artist American Last Year 82
Gallerist French Last Year 90
Part of the criteria for inclusion on this list is that one’s influence be felt all over the world. Paglen thinks bigger than that: if all goes to plan, he’ll be taking his career into space. Or at least Earth’s low orbit, into which he will launch a satellite – a reflective, faceted polyester inflatable – visible at night, from Earth, for approximately eight weeks in the summer of 2018. The $1.3m project, which was announced this year, is being billed as the first space sculpture and utilises the kind of military technology that Paglen’s work has long critiqued. Paglen’s work – which addresses issues of privacy and surveillance by governments and private companies – was shown in myriad group shows this year, as well as two solo exhibitions, at Metro Pictures, New York, and Fotograf Gallery, Prague. He was shortlisted for next year’s Artes Mundi prize and, in October, was made a MacArthur Fellow.
Having last year added a second London gallery and a New York space to a mini-empire that spreads to Paris and Brussels, Rech this year settled into a programme that included solo shows by big-name artists (many of whose markets are bouncing back) such as the late Tom Wesselmann, Julian Schnabel and Anselm Reyle; that introduced Dansaekhwa artist Ha Chong-hyun to new markets; and that mounted more experimental exhibitions, such as one by musician-artist Ryoji Ikeda and a group show organised by gallery artist DeWain Valentine that showcased work made from plastic (titled, simply, Plastic Show). In May in New York, anthropologist Carlo Severi was brought in to stage Imaginary Ancestors, a museumlike show surveying the relationship between Primitivism and Modernism. The latter, naturally, featured Picasso, whom the gallerist had paired with Alexander Calder to inaugurate the US space in 2016 (Rech has good connections with Picasso’s estate: she is married to his grandson, Bernard).
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90 Yuko Hasegawa
Artist Serbian Last Year 46
Curator Japanese Last Year Reentry (90 in 2015)
It would be hard to overestimate Abramović’s superstar status, or her role in pushing performance art to its current position of prominence in contemporary art, and yet there is a sense in which the genre is moving on. Nevertheless, a retrospective of Abramović’s work travelled from Moderna Museet, Stockholm, to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, this year, and its title, The Cleaner, communicates the performance artist’s ongoing interest in gender, pain and labour. In October she spoke at the Serpentine Gallery, having been the honoree at the Royal Academy’s America gala a week earlier, while in the same month she announced the cancellation of plans for a $31m Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art in upstate New York, due to fundraising difficulties. Yet, in a typically odd turn of events, she also collaborated with confectioners Kreëmart to create a Prussian-blue gold-leafed macaron inspired by her work. Its taste? ‘Smoky, lingering, sensual.’
The chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) had little time to work on her Moscow Biennale: Hasegawa was appointed in January and delivered her exhibition of 155 works in September. That didn’t stop her assembling an ambitious, 52-strong artist list for Clouds Forests, including Olafur Eliasson, Forensic Architecture and Pierre Huyghe, together with the singer Björk. The day job proved no distraction, however: the MOT has been closed for renovations since May 2016 and isn’t scheduled to reopen until next year. On the heels of the biennial comes Japanorama, an ambitious survey of Japanese art from 1970 to the present at the Pompidou Metz. Plus Hasegawa judged both the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and the MAXXI Bulgari Prize. Meanwhile the Inujima Art House Project, a series of pavilions Hasegawa cofounded and directs on Naoshima, each with a permanent installation by artists including Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell, continues to receive pilgrims.
91 Pedro Mendes, Felipe Dmab, & Matthew Wood
92 Koyo Kouoh Curator Cameroonian Last Year 75
Gallerists Brazilian / Brazilian / American Last Year 91 After opening a project-space-cum-viewing-room on New York’s Upper East Side in 2016, São Paulo-based Mendes Wood DM launched its New York outpost as a gallery proper this year, with a pairing of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda and the late conceptualist On Kawara. The main event came in April however, when the gallery opened in Brussels, taking curator Carolyn Drake onboard as a partner. No modest outpost, this is a two-storey townhouse opposite the Église Notre-Dame du Sablon. Inaugurated with a group exhibition of gallery artists and others, curated by Pivô artistic director Fernanda Brenner (complete with Lawrence Weiner mural on the wall of the gallery’s manicured garden), the trio followed up with solo shows for Brazilians Luiz Roque and Paulo Nimer Pjota, for British artist Prem Sahib and for Japanese sculptor Kishio Suga.
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Kouoh, the founder of Dakar’s Raw Material Company, has been busy organising a series of talks programmes outside Senegal this year, including Salon Suisse (hosted by Pro Helvetia), a four-part collateral event at the Venice Biennale centred on themes of music, food, cultivation and performance, and 16 lectures and discussions at both the New York and London editions of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. The newly instated Raw Académie (‘an experiential residential study programme’, which takes place over eight weeks in Dakar and began at the end of last year) is well into its third session, directed by Senegalese rappers Xuman and Keyti (under the moniker Journal Rappé, the duo’s satirical televised news show). In October Kouoh curated the inaugural exhibition for Gallery 1957’s 2,230sqm second venue in Accra, focusing on a new body of work by Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor.
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© Antoine Tempé 89 Photo: Reto Guntli 90 Photo: Yasuyo Takahashi 91 Courtesy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo 92
89 Marina Abramović
93 Photo: Noor Photoface. Courtesy the Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka 94 Photo: Paul Stuart 95 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 96 Photo: Michael Setzpfandt
93 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani
94 Eyal Weizman
Collectors Bangladeshi Last Year 96
Architect Israeli Last Year NEW
The collector couple, members of Tate’s International Council, whose biennial Dhaka Art Summit received 138,000 visitors in 2016 (up from the 20,000 who came to the inaugural edition, in 2012), were awarded the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award this year. That recognition came shortly after details were unveiled of Srihatta, an art centre and sculpture park the Samdanis are building in Sylhet, 250km from Dhaka, due to open in 2018. The complex will spread across 40ha of land, with artist residency spaces, plazas and a 465sqm gallery. In June, in keeping with the Samdanis’ appetite for global partnerships, Swiss Institute director Simon Castets was brought in to draw up the shortlist for the Samdani Art Award, a prize for Bangladeshi artists, who will receive a residency at the Delfina Foundation, London, before the winner is announced at February’s summit, now expanded to cover over a week’s worth of exhibitions, conferences, talks programmes and intercultural exchange.
Weizman’s research agency, Forensic Architecture, founded in 2010, works with architects, artists, filmmakers and investigative journalists to analyse war crimes and human-rights violations through animation and 3D models, providing evidence for possible prosecutions. The architect, professor of spatial and visual cultures, and director of the Centre for Research Architecture, at Goldsmiths, University of London (as well as Global Scholar at Princeton), epitomises a strain of research-led practice currently prevalent – one that goes beyond conventional artmaking. The stakes in Weizman’s work are, after all, high. Nonetheless, this year, Forensic Architecture was a notable inclusion in Documenta, and the agency staged Towards an Investigative Aesthetics at MACBA, Barcelona, in April, a show that travelled to MUAC, Mexico City, in September. Weizman authored a book on the agency’s work, titled Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, published in April, and the paperback version of his The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence (2012) came out in October.
95 Eugene Tan
96 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 94
Curator Cameroonian Last Year NEW
Under Tan’s direction, and in its second year of existence, the National Gallery Singapore (which will host November’s annual CiMAM conference for directors and curators of modern and contemporary art collections) continued to pull in significant numbers of visitors, 235,000 of them flocking to see a solo show by Yayoi Kusama, plus those drawn by the family-friendly ‘Children’s Biennale’, which included interactive art installations and workshops, and the yearlong rooftop installation by Danh Vo. With the collection concentrating on reinforcing a sense of Singaporean national identity, Tan staged a solo exhibition by Chen Chong Swee, an early Singapore artist and educator who made a considerable contribution to the local art scene over his six-decade career. In January Tan helped launch the first art-history course at the National University of Singapore, and he has recently joined the advisory board of Thailand’s inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, due to open November 2018.
Founder of Berlin’s eight-year-old Savvy Contemporary – an art space, discussion centre, food-and-drink hangout and general theoretical laboratory that turns hospitality into a cultural-political issue – the Cameroonian curator has perhaps had less time to spend there lately. Ndikung, who also holds a PhD in medical biotechnology, was curator at large for this year’s Documenta, where his conceptions of productive uncertainty shaped the show, as did his aim to undermine a North/South dichotomy within the artworld, a desire that has long shaped Savvy’s own internationalist programming (the space was formed to be a place in which Western and non-Western art could communicate on an even footing, without the latter being framed in colonial terms as ‘exotic’). This year, the exhibitions and symposia there kept the intellectual bar high, including group shows variously considering the political situation in Poland and the implications of revered filmmaker Harun Farocki’s Germanisation of his name.
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Art Fair Directors British/British/British/American/American Last Year 66/NEW When the ‘partnership’ between Frieze, the fair business run by Sharp and Slotover, and sports and entertainment agency Endeavor (formerly WME-IMG) was announced last year, details were scarce. This year the impact of the US company’s purchase of a 70 percent stake in Frieze became apparent, with a drive towards digital (and even talk of selling art through virtual reality); hence the arrival onto the list of Emanuel and Whitesell, CEO and executive chairman respectively. ‘The content opportunities are endless,’ an Endeavour representative enthused, ‘…especially as it relates to bringing the Frieze brand home to the consumer.’ In the fair aisles, overseen by Siddall, London is king: Frieze Masters commands respect critically, and the original contemporary fair pulls the kind of galleries that have not fully embraced the New York edition.
98 Pablo León de la Barra Curator Mexican Last Year 97 Though de la Barra maintains his role as Latin American curator at large for the Guggenheim, he is now based in Rio de Janeiro, as curator at the spaceshiplike Oscar Niemeyer-designed Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói. Brazilian museums are currently under attack – de la Barra was one of many arts professionals who signed an open letter expressing concern about public and political pressure on art-institution programming coming from the country’s increasingly vocal right – but his influence spreads far beyond his day job(s). He was appointed adviser to the inaugural ‘Art Basel Cities’ in Buenos Aires this year and sat on the juries of the Nasher Prize and the SESC_Videobrasil awards. There were outside curatorial jobs too: not least overseeing Carlos Amorales’s exhibition for the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a show of younger queer art at Despina, Rio, and the ‘Referentes’ section (with Ericka Flórez) at the ArtBO fair in October last year.
99 Kiran Nadar
100 Vanessa Carlos
Collector Indian Last Year New
Gallerist Brazilian Last Year New
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art opened in 2010, the first private museum in India. Located in a New Delhi shopping centre (intended to make the institution accessible to as wide a public as possible), the 3,159sqm space this year hosted a series of related solo exhibitions by F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and M.F. Husain, all members of the mid-twentieth-century Bombay Progressives artist group, and Enactments and each passing day, an exhibition of video art by mainly South Asian artists. Owning approximately 5,500 works (by both Asian and Western artists, of which 300–400 are displayed in New Delhi and Nadar’s second gallery, in Noida), the collector coproduced or loaned many of the works on show at Documenta, including Amar Kanwar’s films and Ganesh Haloi’s paintings; supported the Jayashree Chakravarty exhibition at the Musée Guimet and Nalini Malani’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, both in Paris, and sponsored a special project by Sudarshan Shetty at the India Art Fair.
Carlos, the founder of London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, staged the first Condo – a ‘collaborative exhibition’ – in 2016 as an alternative (if not competing) model to the art fair. That year 24 international galleries – ranging from New York’s Essex Street to Shanghai’s Antenna Space – set up shop for a month on the premises of eight young London galleries. From the outset Carlos envisaged versions of Condo rolling out in North America, Latin America and Asia. This year the first of these came to fruition, when gallerist Simone Subal and Chapter NY’s Nicole Russo staged Condo New York. Condo London’s second edition saw moreestablished spaces, such as Sadie Coles (hosting Bridget Donahue) and Shanghart (ensconced at Carlos/Ishikawa), come onboard. When not matchmaking, Carlos spends her time navigating the careers of Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ed Fornieles, Pilvi Takala and others.
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97 Photos: Jonathan Hökklo. Courtesy Frieze, London 98 Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 99 Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi 100 Photo: Jackson Bateman
97 Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp, Victoria Siddall, Ari Emanuel & Patrick Whitesell
The 2017 Power 100
1 Hito Steyerl
35 François Pinault
69 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
2 Pierre Huyghe
36 Michael Govan
70 Claire Hsu
3 Donna Haraway
37 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto
71 Richard Chang
4 Adam Szymczyk
38 Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
72 Sunjung Kim
5 David Zwirner
39 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta
73 Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider
40 Emmanuel Perrotin
74 Anselm Franke
41 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi
75 Kader Attia
42 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang
76 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
6 Hans Ulrich Obrist 7 Iwan & Manuela Wirth 8 Thelma Golden 9 Bruno Latour 10 Gavin Brown 11 Wolfgang Tillmans 12 Adam D. Weinberg 13 Ai Weiwei 14 Joan Jonas 15 Larry Gagosian 16 Maria Balshaw 17 Glenn D. Lowry 18 Marian Goodman 19 David Hammons 20 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 21 Marc & Arne Glimcher 22 Massimiliano Gioni 23 Theaster Gates 24 Marc Spiegler 25 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty 26 Christine Macel 27 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
43 Nato Thompson 44 Hou Hanru 45 Brian Kuan Wood, Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle
77 Chris Kraus 78 Cecilia Alemani 79 Hyun-Sook Lee
46 Adrian Cheng
80 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian
47 Jay Jopling
81 Arthur Jafa
48 Judith Butler
82 Tom Eccles
49 Luisa Strina
83 Rirkrit Tiravanija
50 Christine Tohmé
84 Riyas Komu & Bose Krishnamachari
51 Lorenz Helbling 52 Liam Gillick 53 Charles Esche 54 Jeff Koons 55 Yayoi Kusama 56 Kara Walker 57 Klaus Biesenbach
85 Haegue Yang 86 Walid Raad 87 Trevor Paglen 88 Almine Rech 89 Marina Abramović 90 Yuko Hasegawa
58 William Kentridge
91 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood
59 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong
92 Koyo Kouoh
60 Philippe Parreno 61 Esther Schipper
93 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani 94 Eyal Weizman 95 Eugene Tan
28 Bernard Arnault
62 Elena Filipovic
29 Beatrix Ruf
63 Olafur Eliasson
30 Daniel Buchholz
64 Barbara Gladstone
31 Maja Hoffmann
65 Thaddaeus Ropac
97 Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp, Victoria Siddall, Ari Emanuel & Patrick Whitesell
32 Eli & Edythe Broad
66 Massimo De Carlo
98 Pablo León de la Barra
33 Miuccia Prada
67 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
99 Kiran Nadar
34 Sadie Coles
68 Kerry James Marshall
100 Vanessa Carlos
November 2017
96 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
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Pre-Image by Hiwa K
Hiwa K, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (still), 2017, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 18 min. Courtesy the artist, KOW, Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan & Lucca
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Last time I saw my mom before my farewell, I said: “Mom, I am leaving for good. I don’t know… maybe I will not make it, like the other 28 people who got shot last week.” She said: “Son, if death comes, don’t panic. It is just death.” I wasn’t surprised by her relentlessness. After all, I survived her attempt to abort me three times. The last time she tried to have an abortion, she got some pills from her sister-in-law who was also pregnant and was suffering from a very nasty illness. The doctors gave her the pills and said: “If you don’t take them, you or the baby or both of you will die.” Her husband didn’t allow her to take them, though. It was “against Allah’s will,” he said. My mom was so desperate that she convinced her brother to give them to her. To keep the story short, her last attempt didn’t succeed either, and she ended up in the hospital. After a few months, I was born, and her sister-in-law gave birth to a son, too, and he didn’t die either. In the same year that I crossed the river between Turkey and Greece – 1997 – he, my cousin, drowned in the river. No one found his body. He is buried, probably, in the “nameless” cemetery in Komotini.
* We are a group of 53 people, preparing ourselves to walk 180km deep into Greece. You should walk by night through the hills and tuneless – completely quiet – so that you are not ambushed by the Greek police. In the daytime, you can sleep… Unlike the rest of the group, I had no food in my backpack but another burden: Western art history (with which I was quite unfamiliar). During my journey to Turkey I made these, a few abstract paintings.
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We were supposed to arrive in Kaval on February 9. Then take the bus to Thessaloniki and then on to Athens. The third night I forgot about food. I was more into walking, without a map. My feet were my point of arrival. Walking is a nice habit… sometimes. But sometimes I had the feeling that I was the burden upon my own feet. The upper parts of my body were enslaving the lower parts – riding them as if they were external beings. The way is stretching… when you are walking. Or when you are playing a melody, you are never piling tones on top of each other or accumulating them, not dwelling on any of these tones but slipping away into another one. To avoid the verticality of chords. Everyone I encounter along my journey asks: “Where are you based?” “On my feet,” I answer. “Where are your feet based then?” “Feet are never based,” I say. I might recover from this state of amnesia. I walked this path already. Centuries ago. I almost remember even though I can’t see any traces (of my journey). But this path is… almost familiar to me. To remember, sometimes, you need different archaeological tools. Tools with which you dig upwards. To see… your scattered parts… fragments. Or other tools, with which you can excavate silence. Once it was the only witness to your presence here. Mirrors that reflect your voice rather than your appearance. You must take Narcissus by surprise. When he is asleep. You must walk up to the hill, to see the original Ishtar Gate. Gilgamesh… He also fell asleep when the snake ate the plant that he got for eternity. Helplessly, he wanted to defeat death… but he was defeated by death’s younger brother… sleep. Probably I will not arrive. My foot is not articulate enough.
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Or maybe I need toes under my heels. On the ninth night we stole a sheep from one of the villages near Kavala. We butchered it on this hill. It was the first time I ate something after so many nights of walking. The next day we walked down off the hill towards the city, where we took a bus to Thessaloniki, then on to Athens. In Athens I saw my brother-in-law, who told me: “I have bad news for you.” He said: “I am sorry! You father died five months ago when you were on your way here.” I was quite apathetic. I was still numb from my journey. He said: “You don’t seem to be shocked.” I said: “Well, I don’t know… it is the first time that my father has died.”
* Patra: After spending three weeks in Patra, in this old forsaken train station, where we slept in pipes, where we tried every possibility of escaping to the other side, Italy – I remember that I once climbed up one of the ships, up into the lifeboat on the very top of the ship, and was hiding there all the night long, until early morning, when they caught me just before the ship was about to depart. In my last attempt, I hid in one of the trucks, hoping that it would go into the ship. On that first day, I finished a piece of cake and a bottle of water but the truck didn’t move. I had to be patient. Waiting… and waiting… three days of lying on the same position. Maybe something will happen.
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On the third day I heard the truck engine start and I didn’t move at all. I felt it when the truck drove into the ship. After a few hours I heard the ship departing. But it was dark. I was blind… blind as the mother tongue. No food again and on top of that no watch to measure time. It might take me an hour or two… or a month. I don’t even know where this ship is taking me. It can take me anywhere: Turkey, Basra, South Africa. What if this journey takes ages? The only clock is my stomach. I even ate the package of the cake I had three days ago. As long as I am not arriving, let there be darkness. Maybe vision is the final touch we got from nature. When you are blind, you are gehorsam but also gehörsam. Ear becomes the medium of slavery. You surrender to your master. Your half-brother who is dependent on you. Your void, where he can resonate his appearance. This journey took quite long. What if this ship never arrives… or maybe it never departed in the first place? I must get out before the joy of hearing becomes the pleasure of listening. After a while sounds become silence itself. Like love… when you become fear itself and it disappears for good. You just surrender… Who am I to revolt against it, anyway? After I don’t know how long, the ship arrived somewhere – I didn’t know where. But I saw a cross from far away. I didn’t know that I was in Ancona. I took the train to Rome. I arrived even though arrival was not one of my habits. But why are they so still? Why don’t they run any more? Or maybe they just froze in their velocity. Overdosed on their beauty. Or they ran faster than their memories?
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Hiwa K, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (still), 2017, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 18 min. Courtesy the artist, KOW, Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan & Lucca
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The Year in Review
Death has a look for everyone 139
November 2016 Blackness rules, bouquets refused, marketing the
7 Nov Having won critical acclaim while on show at the MCA Chicago, Kerry James Marshall’s 35-year retrospective, Mastry, has come to the Met Breuer, New York. The painter’s figurative works take blackness as their primary theme. More praise follows: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl calls it ‘exhilarating’ and ‘a big deal’: ‘it marks the museum’s blessing of Marshall’, the writer explains, ‘and, in turn, Marshall’s benediction of the museum, and it affirms a revival of grandly scaled, thematic figurative painting’. ‘My orientation has always been to make a contribution toward creating a critical mass of black images in museums,’ Marshall tells the Chicago Tribune. ‘If you keep seeing images like that, finally it becomes normal’
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1 Nov Iraqi government forces cross into Mosul for the first time in two years, facing artillery, sniper fire and suicide attackers from the city, which has been under ISIS control since 2014
ArtReview
dot before art, plus ripoffs, snipers, peace and the end of an era
24 Nov Drawing a half-century conflict to a close, the Colombian government and leftist FARC rebels sign a revised peace agreement
25 Nov Cuba’s revolutionary communist leader Fidel Castro dies at the age of ninety, after 50 years of railing against the evils of capitalist imperialism from a small island 165km off the US coast 25 Nov The new Internet domain .art launches with 60 institutions and art organisations onboard
21 Nov Jeff Koons gifts the sculpture Bouquet of Flowers to the city of Paris on the anniversary of the 2015 terrorist attacks there; the gesture is criticised as self-promoting, and the work labelled ‘flashy’. To date, it has yet to find the funding required for its installation
29 Nov Kader Attia sues Universal Music France, claiming that the silver foil costumes worn by the dancers in a music video for Putain d’époque, by rappers Dosseh and Nekfeu, ripped off his 2007 artwork Ghost, a large installation of faceless kneeling figures shrouded in foil. Fellow artist Kendell Geers comes to the musicians’ defence, telling Attia he should be ‘flattered’
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December Prizewinners, decolonisers, neofascists, murderers, an 2 Dec Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska, director of the Polish Institute in Berlin, is summarily dismissed by Poland’s Foreign Ministry six months before her contract is due to expire, allegedly for giving ‘too much attention [to] Jewish subjects’ in the institution’s programming 4 Dec Brazilian poet and art critic José Ribamar Ferreira, better known by his pen name Ferreira Gullar, and most famous for penning the manifesto for Neoconcretism, dies 6 Dec Helen Marten wins 2016 Turner Prize
4 Dec Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi resigns after his proposed reform to the constitution is rejected by voters in an anti-establishment frame of mind, plunging the country into economic and political uncertainty
12 Dec Forming in the pupil of an eye, the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Sudarshan Shetty, opens in Fort Kochi, Kerala
11 Dec Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh suffers his first electoral defeat (to Adama Barrow) since seizing control of the country in 1994 and declares that he will contest the results in court
10 Dec Kurdish militants set off two bombs outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul. The bombs detonate within a minute of each other, killing 38 and injuring 155 others. The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), claims responsibility
ArtReview
outbreak of dipsomania and farewell to a neoconcretism legend 18 Dec Activists leaving the closing party of the Decolonize This Place residency at the New York nonprofit Artists Space are attacked by a group who claim to be Donald Trump supporters. The three-month residency involved workshops and assemblies that advocated African-American and indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom for Palestine and issues around gentrification
13 Dec The Battle of Aleppo ends after four years of grinding, block-by-block fighting, the rebel withdrawal signalling a victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his military coalition of Russia, Iran and regional Shiite militias
19 Dec A state of emergency is declared in the Siberian city of Irkutsk after at least 49 people are reported to have died from drinking Boyaryshnik, a bath lotion known for its high alcohol content
19 Dec At the opening of Russia Through Turks’ Eyes, a photography exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Ankara, Mevlüt Mert Altıntas,, an off-duty Turkish policeman, shoots Andrey G. Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, to death, shouting, ‘Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!’
22 Dec Protests erupt just hours after the unveiling of a public sculpture in Istanbul by Kurdish artist Ahmet Günes,tekin, leading to the artwork’s removal. The work, which spelled out ‘Kostantiniyye’, the Ottoman-era name for the Turkish city, is deemed unpatriotic
22 Dec A study finds that the VSVEBOV vaccine against the Ebola virus is 70–100 percent effective, making it the first proven vaccine against the disease
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January 2017 New regimes, disavowals and abandonments, plus
4 Jan An Israeli soldier charged with shooting an incapacitated Palestinian assailant from close range is convicted of manslaughter in a military court in Tel Aviv – the first such conviction in 12 years
January On every day of the month, between 23:57 and midnight, Pipilotti Rist’s Open My Glade (Flatten) (2000) is projected over 62 screens in Times Square. The event runs in parallel to Pixel Forest, the artist’s retrospective at the New Museum
11 Jan Artist Richard Prince disavows a work featuring Ivanka Trump from his Instagram series, in protest over Donald Trump’s forthcoming inauguration. The artist returns $36,000 he received for the work in 2014. Meanwhile veteran artist Christo announces that he will abandon his Colorado River Project, on which he has been working for 20 years and in which he has invested $15m of his own money, also in protest of the new president
11 Jan The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces that plans to construct a $600m modern and contemporary art wing have been suspended following revelations of an operating deficit in the 2016 budget
17 Jan Maria Balshaw is appointed as the director of the Tate art museums, replacing Nicholas Serota. Balshaw was formerly director of the Whitworth, University of Manchester and the Manchester City Galleries, and is the first woman to occupy her new role
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an optimistic look forward to new exhibition space in New York 18 Jan Collector Antoine de Galbert announces that his Maison Rouge, an influential private contemporary art foundation in Paris, is to close. Meanwhile, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, the Centre Pompidou announces a two-year, $108m renovation 21 Jan The ‘Women’s March’, the largest single-day protest in US history, draws 500,000 people to Washington, DC, and is joined globally by some five million marchers in 82 countries who come out in support of issues ranging from human rights generally to women’s rights, immigration reform and racial equality. Held on the day following President Trump’s inauguration, many of the rallies are pointedly aimed at counteracting positions taken and statements made by the incoming president
20 Jan Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th US president, succeeding Barack Obama. More than 250 artists and critics sign the ‘J20 Art Strike’ petition, an invitation to arts institutions to close for the day in an ‘act of non-compliance’ with the event
26 Jan Saloua Raouda Choucair, the Lebanese painter and sculptor and a pioneer of abstraction in the Arab world, dies aged one hundred
27 Jan President Trump issues an executive order titled ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’, but it is widely referred to as the Muslim ban and is quickly blocked by a judge in Seattle. Artist Paul Chan’s Badland Unlimited releases the ‘New Proverbs’, a series of placards displaying slogans such as ‘God Hates Trump’
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February Antifascists and angry fascists, missile tests and artworld 1 Feb Britain’s House of Commons approves the legal implementation of Brexit by a margin of 498 to 114, formally handing Prime Minister Theresa May the power to trigger negotiations for separating the country from the EU
1 Feb Israel announces that it will build the first new settlement in the occupied West Bank since the 1990s
3 Feb An Egyptian man, named as Abdullah Reda Refaei al-Hamamy, wields a machete in the Louvre while shouting, ‘Allahu akbar’. He is shot five times by police and the museum is evacuated
3 Feb In response to Trump’s travel ban, New York’s MoMA rehangs part of its permanent collection with works by artists from some of the Muslim-majority nations whose citizens are blocked from entering the US
15 Feb Wolfgang Tillmans’s survey show 2017, curated by the artist, opens at Tate Modern. He is the first living artist to have received solo shows at both Tate Britain (in 2003) and Tate Modern
9 Feb MCH, the group that owns Art Basel, acquires a stake in Art Düsseldorf. This follows the September 2016 partial purchase of India Art Fair and represents a strategy of investing in regional art fairs
9 Feb A public artwork in Dresden by Syrian-German artist Manaf Halbouni attracts rightwing protests. Monument (2017), which consists of city buses mounted vertically and referencing a barricade set up in Aleppo to stop sniper fire does not go down well in the seat of the far-right Alternative for Germany political party and anti-immigrant Pegida movement
13 Feb Kim Jong-nam, the older brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, is assassinated in public in the Kuala Lumpur airport, presumably to eliminate any future challenge to the younger Kim. North Korea denies involvement, and the women recorded on CCTV committing the murder are arrested. The same month, North Korea test fires a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan
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deaths, a fratricide and Brexit begins, sort of...
23 Feb Yayoi Kusama’s touring retrospective Infinity Mirrors begins its North American tour at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, which experiences record crowds over the course of the season
16 Feb Jannis Kounellis, an early member of the Arte Povera movement, whose work spanned painting, sculpture and performance, dies aged eighty
24 Feb Ren Hang, a Chinese photographer known for his provocative nude portraits, takes his life at the age of twenty-nine
25 Feb Protests are held outside LD50 gallery in East London amid claims that its curator was hosting exhibitions and forums sympathetic to far-right views. Among the offences: exhibits featuring the Pepe the Frog meme, appropriated by the so-called alt-right, and speakers who had previously praised the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik
22 Feb Andrea Rosen issues a statement in which she announces that she will be closing her New York gallery to dedicate herself fully to corepresenting (with David Zwirner) the estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
26 Feb Tibetan artist Tashi Norbu cancels a performance in Macau after Beijing authorities say they will deport the artist should he enter the Chinese Special Administrative Region
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March Copyright, plagiarism, agitators, who has the right to speak, 5 Mar South Korea increases the financial reward offered in exchange for information about the North from $217,000 to $860,000. Two days later the US military begins deployment of its controversial new missile defence system THAAD in South Korea. Many believe that this will escalate tensions, both with the North and with China, who views the powerful radar system as a threat to its own security
1 Mar Metropolitan Museum of Art director and tapestry expert Thomas H. Campbell resigns following pressure over the museum’s finances (last April, a deficit of $40m was anticipated). William Kentridge opens the Center for the Less Good Idea, a foundation aimed at creating and supporting experimental and cross-disciplinary arts projects
6 Mar Turkish artist and journalist Zehra Doğan is sentenced to over two years in jail for sharing on social media pictures she’d painted of the destruction wrought by national security forces on buildings in Turkey’s Mardin Province. The court claims they depicted an ongoing military operation
1 Mar Gustav Metzger, the artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike, dies aged ninety
9 Mar British painter Howard Hodgkin dies aged eighty-four
7 Mar Hong Ra-hee, the director of Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, in Seoul, resigns citing personal reasons, though Korean media links the move to the indictment of her son, Lee Jae-yong, the acting head of Samsung Group, on bribery and embezzlement charges
10 Mar A French court finds Jeff Koons and the Centre Pompidou guilty of copyright infringement in the artist’s sculpture Naked (1988), from the Banality series. The court decides that the American’s work is recognisably a copy of a 1970 photograph by Jean-François Bauret, whose estate had brought the case
16 Mar President Trump proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
6 Mar Animal rights activists dump 40kg of manure outside the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in protest of a coming exhibition by Damien Hirst, slicer and pickler of animals. No such works are scheduled to be included in the upcoming show
18 Mar Dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown dies aged eighty
16 Mar A South African Court convicts painter and photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa of murdering twenty-three-year-old sexworker Nokuphila Kumalo
17 Mar The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announces the cancellation of an exhibition due to open at the Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, on 14 April. The exhibition, titled But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, is part of the foundation’s UBS Map Global Art Initiative, and had already been staged in New York. The cancellation is not officially explained, although some believe it to involve issues of censorship. (Ten of the artists involved had previously written a letter to complain about the foundation’s breaking off negotiations with Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, an activist group committed to protecting the rights of migrant workers involved with the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi)
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and why you should never paint a conflict situation en plein air 21 Mar The Centre Pompidou announces that it will open a satellite in Shanghai’s West Bund Cultural District
22 Mar Documenta’s CEO asks for additional government funding for the quinquennial exhibition, due to take place in both Athens and Kassel over the coming months
29 Mar London’s Vilma Gold announces the closure of its gallery, while Ibid shutters its space in the British capital 17 Mar The Whitney Biennial, curated by Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, opens. On the opening day, artist Parker Bright stages a performance denouncing Dana Schutz’s 2016 Open Casket painting as ‘Black Death Spectacle’. The controversy gains momentum when Hannah Black writes an open letter to the Whitney, asking for the removal and destruction of the painting, explaining: ‘It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun’
18 Mar A sixty-three-year-old man attacks Thomas Gainsborough’s Portrait of Mr and Mrs William Hallett (1785) with a screwdriver at the National Gallery, London. The Guardian suggests that the painting is best known for being in a room that ‘was used as the setting for a covert meeting between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Ben Whishaw’s equipment expert Q in the film Skyfall’. Mark Bills, director of Gainsborough’s House in Suffolk, tells the newspaper: ‘It’s a picture that I can’t imagine anybody finding offensive, what an odd thing to want to do’
24 Mar In a judgement that is the first of its kind, the International Criminal Court rules that warlord Germain Katanga must pay reparations to victims in the Congo. The charges relate to murder and pillaging during an attack on the village of Bogoro in 2003 in which more than 200 civilians were killed or assaulted
2 Mar Hosni Mubarak, former president of Egypt, is cleared of responsibility for the deaths of several hundred protester deaths during the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Mubarak, currently hospitalised, is due to be released after six years in prison
10 Mar Christine Tohmé’s Sharjah Biennial 13 opens
29 Mar A number of people are injured and two arrests are made as the local arts community tries to halt the demolition of Shen Jingdong and Cao Zhiwen’s studios in Songzhuang, Beijing
30 Mar Mikhail Novikov, a deputy director in charge of construction at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, is placed under house arrest on charges of suspected fraud
31 Mar American Pop artist James Rosenquist dies aged eighty-three
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April Learning or not learning, raging bulls, a slight case of over- 3 Apr Demonstrators picket the opening of Carl Andre’s retrospective at MOCA LA. The action seeks to draw attention to the 1985 death of artist Ana Mendieta, who fell from a window of the New York highrise she shared with Andre, her husband. The sculptor was acquitted of second-degree murder
3 Apr Newspapers report that officials in Chechnya have arrested at least 100 men on the grounds of their ‘nontraditional sexual orientation’. Later reports suggest that three gay men were killed in detention, while others of the arrested were returned to their families in the expectation that they would be victims of ‘honour killings’. Confronted about the incidents, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claims that there are no gay men in Chechnya
11 Apr The mutually assured Artist Pension Trust (founded in 2004) withdraws 18 lots from a Sotheby’s London auction after objections from member artists whose work is in the sale. More disagreements follow in June when APT announces plans to charge for storage of the 13,000 artworks in the fund. In September it is discovered that the APT’s high-profile advisory board has never actually met
8 Apr Documenta 14: Learning from Athens opens in Athens. A few days later Artists Against Evictions publishes an open letter complaining about the exhibition organisers’ silence in regard to a series of evictions of artists and refugees by the local authorities. The second part of the exhibition opens in Documenta’s hometown of Kassel in June
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bombing and why there’s no such thing as a gay man in Chechnya 12 Apr Art Berlin Contemporary (abc) is acquired by Koelnmesse, the owners of Art Cologne, and rebranded as Art Berlin for its tenth edition, due in September 2017
13 Apr The US drops the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on suspected Islamic State targets in Afghanistan, killing 36 alleged militants in a tunnel system in Nangarhar. The bomb constitutes the largest nonnuclear ordinance ever deployed
18 Apr Animal Liberation Tasmania launches a campaign to get a performance by Actionist artist Hermann Nitsch, involving a freshly slaughtered bull and due to take place in June, cancelled
18 Apr American painter Barkley L. Hendricks dies aged seventy-two
12 Apr Arturo Di Modica, sculptor of Wall Street’s Charging Bull (1989), demands that the Fearless Girl sculpture, created by Kristen Visbal and placed opposite his work on 7 March, be removed, stating that the work, commissioned by investment firm State Street Global Advisors and installed for International Women’s Day, violates his copyright and transforms the meaning of his work
20 Apr Inhabitants of luxury apartments next door to Tate Modern’s new extension issue a high court writ claiming that their homes have been turned into ‘goldfish bowls’ and ‘public exhibits’ by a viewing platform in the museum’s new wing. The complainants claim this is a breach of their human rights
25 Apr Senegalese artist Issa Samb dies aged seventy-one
28 Apr Francesco Manacorda leaves his role as director of Tate Liverpool to take up a new position as director of the private V-A-C Foundation, whose Moscow home is due to open in 2019
27 Apr Performance and video artist Vito Acconci dies aged seventy-seven
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May 2016 Bombs, auction records, landmarks for antiageism and 3 May Having waived its longstanding restriction that nominees be under fifty years of age, Britain’s Turner Prize shortlists two fifty+ artists, Hurvin Anderson (his Flat Top, 2008, below) and Lubaina Himid, alongside Rosalind Nashashibi and Andrea Büttner, for the 2017 prize
6 May Eighty-two Chibok schoolgirls who were seized three years ago by Nigeria-based Boko Haram are freed in exchange for detained members of the militant Islamist group
3 May German neoexpressionist painter and jazz drummer A.R. Penck dies aged seventy-eight
13 May The 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, opens. Germany, presenting a work by Anne Imhof, wins the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion; the Golden Lion for best work in the main exhibition goes to Franz Erhard Walther; and the Lifetime Achievement Award goes to performance pioneer Carolee Schneemann
7 May En Marche! candidate Emmanuel Macron emphatically wins the second round of the French presidential elections against Marine Le Pen of the Front National. Aged thirty-nine, Macron is the youngest French leader since Napoleon Bonaparte 12 May Computers around the world are hit by a largescale ransomware attack, which goes on to affect at least 150 countries
15 May Mexican Felipe Ehrenberg, an early creator of mail art, dies aged seventy-three
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same-sex marriage, and enter the new Napoleon 18 May Surinam-born conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn dies aged eighty-one. Famously, Brouwn didn’t allow his work to be reproduced or his portrait to be taken, and avoided interviews
22 May New York’s CRG Gallery announces that it will close after 25 years in operation
22 May A suicide bomber sets off an explosive device at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, leaving 22 dead and many more injured
18 May Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) becomes the sixth most expensive work sold at auction when it realises $110.5 million. The buyer is Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa
30 May Artist Sam Durant agrees to the removal of his sculpture Scaffold (2012) from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (operated by the Walker Art Center) following a protest of the piece by roughly a hundred Native Americans. The two-story installation was partly inspired by the gallows where 38 Dakotas were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862
24 May Tens of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets of Brasilia demanding Michel Temer’s resignation, following the disclosure of a recording in which Brazil’s president appears to authorise bribes
24 May Taiwan’s supreme court rules in favour of same-sex marriage, setting the country on the path to being the first in Asia to legalise single-sex unions
31 May Art Basel sues Adidas over trademark infringement. During the last Art Basel Miami, the sports brand hosted a series of events in which free trainers were given out, each bearing the words ‘Art Basel’ under the Adidas logo on the sneakers’ tongue. Art Basel claims the use of their name, which was done without permission, ‘dilutes’ its brand
31 May An LGBTQI refugee-rights group steals Spanish artist Roger Bernat’s replica oath-stone sculpture, which is on show in Athens as part of Documenta 14, in protest against the organisation’s alleged exploitation of asylum seekers
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June Expansions, contractions, the climate in crisis, who gets to 1 Jun US President Donald Trump announces US withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change
1 Jun New York’s MoMA announces a $400m expansion plan that will allow it to rethink the presentation of its collection and increase public space by 25 percent
8 Jun A UK general election called by Prime Minister Theresa May sees her lose her Conservative Party majority but remain in office following a deal with the Northern Irish DUP, adding uncertainty to Brexit negotiations
5 Jun A group of six Middle Eastern countries, claiming that the Qatari government is both directly and indirectly supporting terrorist organisations, withdraw their diplomats from Qatar, cut all trade connections and demand that the Al Jazeera television network be shut down
8 Jun Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions opens at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London 5 Jun Long Island’s Art Hamptons and Art Southampton fairs cancel their 2017 editions citing market conditions
8 Jun Japan passes a bill allowing Emperor Akihito to abdicate the throne in favour of Crown Prince Naruhito 5 Jun Los Angeles’s ACME gallery closes after more than two decades in business
10 Jun Skulptur Projekte Münster opens. Despite some incidents of work being vandalised with fascist hate speech, the decennial exhibition is critically acclaimed. Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017), an expansive installation in a disused ice-skating rink, proves to be an instant hit
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decide what you see and who gets to decide who you are
21 Jun The Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Iraq, is destroyed by ISIS 22 Jun New York’s Envoy Enterprises gallery announces that it is to close in August after a decade in business
23 Jun London’s White Rainbow gallery, founded in 2014 to promote Japanese contemporary art, announces that it is to close
10 Jun Documenta 14’s Kassel edition opens. On 5 July, Olu Oguibe wins Kassel’s Arnold Bode prize
14 Jun Artist Khadija Saye, whose work is on show the Diaspora Pavilion in Venice, dies in a fire at Grenfell Tower, London
27 Jun French collector François Pinault announces plans to open a new $122m contemporary art museum in Paris in 2019
27 Jun A group of Cherokee artists and curators sign an editorial contesting artist Jimmie Durham’s self-proclaimed Cherokee heritage and denouncing his association with the tribe as misrepresentative and harmful to actual Cherokee artists. The Walker Art Center, currently hosting a touring retrospective of Durham’s work, adds the following note to the exhibition website: ‘While Durham self-identifies as Cherokee, he is not recognized by any of the three Cherokee Nations, which as sovereign nations determine their own citizenship. We recognize that there are Cherokee artists and scholars who reject Durham’s claims of Cherokee ancestry’
28 Jun Berlin’s Silberkuppe gallery announces that it is to close after ten-year run
29 Jun Condo, the gallery-led collaborative initiative set up in London, launches its first edition in New York
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July Corruption, destruction and prohibition, remembering the 1 Jul New regulations issued by the Chinese government prohibit all portrayals of homosexuality, prostitution and drug addiction online. The China Netcasting Services Association claims to be clamping down on what it perceives to be the promotion of ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour. Damaging the national image, criticising revolutionary leaders and portraying the supernatural are also offences under the new rules
12 Jul Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil, whose popularity is such that he is known simply as ‘Lula’, is sentenced to nine years and six months in prison after being found guilty of corruption and money-laundering. Lula, who remains free pending appeal, maintains he will stand in next year’s elections 9 Jul Several works in the collection of the Louvre, Paris, suffer water damage as the result of severe storms
7 Jul Newspace Center for Photography, a 15-year-old not-for-profit in Portland, Oregon, announces its closure
4 Jul Russia and China urge North Korea to halt its missile and nuclear programmes after it successfully tests its first intercontinental ballistic missile
11 Jul Vladimir Urin, director of the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, announces the postponement of the forthcoming production Nureyev. The director, who is under investigation for embezzlement following a raid on his home earlier in the year, indicates that the postponement is a result of the poor state of the production, but many fear that the real cause is its gay subject-matter, which nationalist websites have accused of promoting sodomy
11 Jul French fashion designer Agnès B. announces plans to open a foundation in Paris, in spring 2018, to display her contemporary art collection 6 Jul Turkey demands the removal of an artwork that has appeared outside the German Chancellery. The work, installed by art collective The Centre for Political Beauty, portrays Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan (along with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz) as a dictator
6 Jul More than 60 artists, actors, directors and other people associated with the theatre world sign an open letter demanding that Lincoln Center in New York cancel a coproduction with the Ha’bima National Theater and the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv. The theatre companies are Israeli-government-backed and have staged performances in the Occupied Territories. The letter accuses the center of ‘helping the Israeli government to implement its systematic “Brand Israel” strategy of employing arts and culture to divert attention from the state’s decades of violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people’
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13 Jul Ali Avci, director of Uyanis, a Turkish film in which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is depicted being held at gunpoint, is arrested by Turkish police
comfort women, and how to stop worrying about the bomb
20 Jul Vandals severely damage part of Nicole Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain, included in this year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster. Another work, by Ai Arakawa, was damaged earlier, after being targeted by thieves 13 Jul Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo dies of liver cancer shortly after being released from prison on medical parole. Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year sentence for inciting subversion of state power, received the award in 2010, which honoured his ‘long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China’
14 Jul Rampa, a contemporary art gallery in Istanbul, announces it is to close after seven years in business
14 Jul New York gallery Off Vendome announces that it is to close at the end of the month. Its Düsseldorf space was closed one year earlier
7 Jul Pakistani artist and women’s-rights activist Lala Rukh, one of the founding members of Pakistan’s Women’s Action Forum, dies aged sixty-nine. Her work is on show at Documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel
27 Jul Six former officials are sentenced for blacklisting artists in South Korea, following on from the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and the revelation that her government operated a secret artist blacklist. The presiding judge, Hwang Byeong-heon, comments, ‘It’s against the Constitution to exclude artists from government support programs according to the taste of political power’
25 Jul Abounaddara, a Syrian film collective, accuses the Milan Triennale of showing its films without consent 28 Jul Birkenstock CEO Oliver Reichert loses a lawsuit brought against Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad over her use, and subsequent display, of an image of his then six-year-old daughter appropriated from an advertising campaign
19 Jul The South Korean government announces plans to institute a national holiday in memory of the ‘comfort women’ abducted as sexual slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War. The holiday will take place annually on 14 August
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August Hell hath no fury like a Donald trumped, the artists strike
4 Aug The Yokohama Triennale, themed as Islands, Constellations & Galapagos and directed by Akiko Miki, Eriko Osaka and Tomoh Kashiwagi, opens. The show’s title references the ‘Galapagos syndrome’, a Japanese term that has come to describe the increasing cultural isolation of the country from the rest of the world (pictured: Olafur Eliasson, Green light – An artistic workshop, 2016)
8 Aug Hashem El Madani, the Lebanese studio photographer whose work was catalogued extensively by artist Akram Zaatari through the Arab Image Foundation, dies aged eighty-eight or eighty-nine
12 Aug A man rams his car into a crowd of antiracist and antifascist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one and injuring 19 as demonstrations turn violent during a ‘Unite the Right’ rally
4 Aug Artists pen an open letter in support of Dana Schutz after a group of local artists and community members call for the cancellation of her show at the ICA Boston following the Whitney Biennial controversy
8 Aug After reports from Japan that North Korea has produced a nuclear warhead small enough to fit inside its missiles, President Trump warns that any act of aggression ‘will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen’
14 Aug Semana de Arte, a new art fair in São Paulo, set up by two of the city’s galleries, Bergamin & Gomide and Luisa Strina, opens
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back, Documenta retreats and a new biennial loses its head 15 Aug David Roberts Art Foundation in London, active since 2007, announces its closure, though Roberts will open a sculpture garden at his Somerset farm in 2019 (pictured: Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, something orange: our bodies slip slide through knowing, performed by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome and Jamila Johnson-Small)
18 Aug All of Donald Trump’s arts and humanities council, artist Chuck Close among their number, resign over the American president’s response to the Charlottesville violence. The committee had been appointed by Barack Obama
15 Aug In the wake of clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, between far-right and antifa groups, Kara Walker issues a statement in the press release announcing her show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, that reads: ‘I am tired, tired of standing up… or “being a role model.” Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche’
22 Aug Documenta 14 cancels Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Auschwitz on the Beach performance ‘In response to the violence and volume of complaints and disparaging remarks received during the last week’
25 Aug La Biennale de Montréal cancels its 2018 edition and confirms a deficit of more than $160,000 in the wake of the 2016 edition. Discussions of what format the event might choose when it gets out of the red are ongoing 26 Aug Hurricane Harvey makes landfall at peak intensity in Rockport, Texas, with winds of 130mph. It is the wettest tropical cyclone to have hit the US
31 Aug Rashid Rana quits as curator of first Lahore Biennale, on account of ‘differing views on the vision’ for the inaugural project
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September Petrolium protests, animal protests, antiqueer pro 6 Sep Hurricane Irma hits Antigua and Barbuda. The most intense Atlantic hurricane since 2005, it reached a peak intensity of 185mph winds. At least 134 people are killed across widely devastated islands in the Caribbean
5 Sep Laura Bartlett Gallery in London announces that it will close after 12 years in business
1 Sep Ai Weiwei’s anticipated Human Flow premieres at the Venice International Film Festival. The documentary attempts to portray the global migrant crisis with sequences shot in 23 countries
6 Sep The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation announces that a DNA test, following the exhumation of the artist’s body, has proved that a sixty-one-year-old tarot-card reader is not the illegitimate child of the Spanish surrealist
8–30 Sep Okey Dokey, Germany’s Condo-like gallery-sharing initiative, launches in Düsseldorf and Cologne
3 Sep Poet and critic John Ashbery dies aged ninety
9 Sep Taiwan’s first LGBTQ exhibition, Spectrosynthesis: Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now, opens at MOCA Taipei
3 Sep North Korea carries out its sixth and most powerful nuclear test to date
10 Sep Santander Cultural in Porto Alegre cancels a group exhibition dedicated to queer Brazilian art halfway through its scheduled run after a series of protests outside the museum by rightwing activists
8 Sep The winner of the annual BP Young Artist Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London donates part of his prize money to Greenpeace in protest of ‘being part of’ the oil giant’s ‘PR strategy’. New Zealander Henry Christian-Slane goes on to say: ‘I hope this action will help keep the issue of BP’s role in climate change from being overshadowed by their contribution to the arts.’ His issues did not prevent the artist from entering the competition in the first place
1 Sep Olafur Eliasson launches its new pocket-size solar-powered lamp, Little Sun Diamond. The new design follows on from the original Little Sun project, launched in 2012 with the aim of providing access to light in areas that have limited access to reliable energy 12 Sep Local newspaper HNA reports that the city of Kassel and state of Hesse have been forced to guarantee loans as a result of a budget deficit at Documenta 14 that threatens the quinquennial exhibition with imminent bankruptcy. The newspaper alleges that the deficit is in part due to miscalculations by Documenta’s management team and a failure of budgetary oversight. Documenta’s curatorial team refutes this and publishes an open letter in which it states: ‘In a spirit of collective reflection, we believe it is time to question the value production regime of mega-exhibitions such as documenta. We would like to denounce the exploitative model under which the stakeholders of documenta wish the “most important exhibition of the world” to be produced. The expectations of ever-increasing success and economic growth not only generate exploitative working conditions but also jeopardize the possibility of the exhibition remaining a site of critical action and artistic experimentation. How can the value production of documenta be measured?’
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tests, good neighbours, St Angela, and diamond lights
24 Sep German Chancellor Angela Merkel wins a fourth term, though the far-right party AfD manages to win 13 percent of the vote, making it the third largest party in the country and the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag in six decades
16 Sep The 15th Istanbul Biennial, titled A Good Neighbour and curated by artists Elmgreen & Dragset, opens 18 Sep Witte de With appoints Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy director shortly after the Dutch institution indicates that it will consult on changing its name to remove reference to the colonial explorer Admiral Witte Corneliszoon de With
15 Sep The Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA multiexhibition project opens across 70 institutions in California
22 Sep The £28m Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town’s first museum of contemporary African art, opens to the public
21 Sep Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. At least 93 people are killed. It is recorded as the worst natural disaster to befall Dominica
19 Sep An earthquake in central Mexico destroys parts of Mexico City, killing over 350 and injuring more than 6,000
25 Sep Guggenheim Museum New York announces that it is withdrawing three works from the exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World following protests by animal-rights campaigners. The works in question – Peng Yu and Sun Yuan’s Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003), Xu Bing’s A Case Study in Transference (1994) and Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993) – all feature animals. The Guggenheim issues a statement that says: ‘The Guggenheim regrets that explicit and repeated threats of violence have made our decision necessary. As an arts institution committed to presenting a multiplicity of voices, we are dismayed that we must withhold works of art. Freedom of expression has always been and will remain a paramount value of the Guggenheim.’ An online petition demanding the removal of the works had collected 500,000 signatures
22 Sep Protesters occupy Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre over fears that its new head, Chris Dercon, plans to take the institution in a more commercial direction. The group claims its actions are driven by a desire to foster the ‘reclamation of public space in a decade of privatization and commercialization’. Dercon’s official tenure began two weeks previously, although protests against the appointment of the former director of London’s Tate Modern have been ongoing for the past year
22 Sep Hauser & Wirth announces expansion to Hong Kong 25 Sep Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo announces plans for a new foundation in Madrid for 2019
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For more on American artist Anders Nilsen, read Paul Gravett’s text at artreview.com/thestrip
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Image Credits
pp 140–41 (Colour) Kerry James Marshall, Untitled, 2009, © the artist, courtesy The Met Breuer, New York; Jeff Koons, Bouquet of Tulips, 2016, © the artist; Kader Attia, Ghost, 2011 (installation view), photo: Sven Goyvaerts, courtesy Galerie Christian Nagel, Antwerp. (B/W) ISOF APC on the street of Mosul, Northern Iraq, Western Asia, 16 November 2016, photo: Mstyslav Chernov, licensed under Creative Commons; Colombia president Juan Manuel Santos and former FARC commander Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, aka Timochenko, sign Colombian Peace Agreement, photo: Presidencia El Salvador, licensed under Creative Commons; Fidel Castro, 2015, photo: Ninian Reid, licensed under Creative Commons. pp 142–43 (Colour) Ales Steger, The Pyramid of Exile Poets, 2016, courtesy the artist and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Decolonize this Place organise an Anti-Columbus Day Tour at the American Museum of Natural History on 9 October 2017, photo: Andrés Rodriguez, courtesy Artists Space, New York; Ahmet Güneştekin, Kostantiniyye, 2015, courtesy Istanbul Art News on Instagram. (B/W) Matteo Renzi in Bologna, 2016, photo: Francesco Pierantoni, licensed under Creative Commons; police arrive at the site of an explosion in central Istanbul, Turkey, 10 December 2016, photo: Murad Sezer/ Reuters; Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh during a rally in Banjul, Gambia, 29 November 2016, photo: Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters; people fleeing deeper into the remaining rebel-held areas of Aleppo, photo: Abdalrhman Ismail/ Reuters; an off-duty police officer shoots the Russian ambassador at Ankara’s Contemporary Arts Center, photo: Burhan Ozblici/Associated Press; an electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle, courtesy CDC/ Dr Frederick A. Murphy. pp 144–45 (Colour) Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000–17, installation view, Times Square, New York, photo: Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts; screengrab of Richard Prince’s Instagram post, 11 January 2017; protesters holding Badland Unlimited ‘New Proverbs’ placards, courtesy Badlands Unlimited. (B/W) Maria Balshaw, photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Tate; President Donald Trump being sworn in on 20 January 2017 at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, photo: White House photographer, licensed to public domain; Women’s March, Washington, DC, 21 January 2017. Photo: Brian Allen, Voice of America pp 146–47 (Colour) Wolfgang Tillmans, Tukan, 2010, © the artist; Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016 (installation view, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC), photo: Cathy Carver, courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore, and Victoria Miro, London; antifascists protest outside the LD50 art gallery in Dalston, London, 25 February 2017, photo: Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News; Ren Hang, Untitled 16, 2011, courtesy the estate of the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong. (B/W) Pro-EU march from Hyde Park to Westminster in London to mark 60 years since the EU’s founding agreement, the Treaty of Rome, photo: Ilovetheeu, licensed under Creative Commons; CCTV image showing Kim Jong-nam at the Kuala Lumpur airport before his assassination. pp 148–49 (Colour) Gustav Metzger at the Manchester International Festival, 2009, photo: Andy Miah, licensed under Creative Commons; Trisha with Stephen Petronio in Set and Reset, 1983, photo: Lois Greenfield; dung and banner outside the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in protest of Damien Hirst’s upcoming exhibition, courtesy 100% Animalisti; artist Parker Bright in front of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, 2016, at the Whitney Museum of Art; Raqs Media Collective, The Necessity of Infinity, 2017, performance at Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation. (B/W) Egypt president Egypt Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, 2008, photo: World Economic Forum, licensed under Creative Commons. pp 150–51 (Colour) Postcards in honour of Ana Mendieta at the opening of the Carl Andre retrospective at MOCA, Los Angeles, courtesy Joy Silverman; photo: Women*space, Athens; Wall Street’s Fearless Girl and Charging Bull statue, New York, photo: Anthony Quintano, licensed under Creative Commons. (B/W) Demonstration at the UN in Geneva against Chechen persecution of LGBT people, photo: Rama, licensed under Creative Commons; a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast weapon on display outside the Air Force Armament Museum, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, courtesy FI295; Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partner’s NEO Bankside residential buildings from the Switch House panoramic platform,
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photo: Tom Glover; Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972, performance documentation, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, photo: Ealan Wingate and Bernadette Mayer. pp 152–53 (Colour) Hurvin Anderson, Flat Top, 2008, courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Anne Imhof’s Faust, 2017, at the German Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, photo: Francesco Galli, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, courtesy Sotheby’s, New York; one of the signs that line the perimeter fence around the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, photo: Lorie Shaull, licensed under Creative Commons; Adidas’s ‘Art Basel’ Limited Edition EQT ADV. (B/W) An event to commemorate the first anniversary of the abduction of Chibok schoolgirls in northern Nigeria, 2015, photo: Cee-Hope, Nigeria, licensed under Creative Commons; Emmanuel Macron, photo: Presidencia de la República Mexicana, licensed under Creative Commons; a demonstrator holds a sign reading ‘Out Temer!’ near a burning barricade during a protest against President Michel Temer, 24 May 2017, photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters. pp 154–55 (Colour) Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1989, courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome; Hito Steyerl, HellYeahWeFuckDie, 2017, © Skulptur Projekte Münster, photo: Henning Rogge; Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, 2017, © Skulptur Projekte Münster, photo: Ola Rindal; Olu Oguibe, Das Fremdlinge und Flüchtlinge Monument (Monument for strangers and refugees), 2017, Königsplatz, Kassel, Documenta 14, photo: Michael Nast; Khadija Saye, Andichurai, 2017, from the ‘Dwelling: in this space we breathe’ series, © and courtesy the Estate of Khadija Saye. (B/W) Prime Minister Theresa May making a speech outside 10 Downing Street following the 2017 general election, photo: HM Government, licensed under Creative Commons; Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul before destruction, photo: Faisal Jeber, licensed under Creative Commons pp 156–57 (Colour) Louvre, Paris, photo: Eric Salard, licensed under Creative Commons; an art installation with the slogan ‘Kill dictatorship!’ by the Center for Political Beauty is seen in front of the German Chancellor’s office in Berlin on 3 July 2017, courtesy the Centre for Political Beauty; still from Ali Avci’s film Uyanis (Awakening), 2017; Nicole Eisenman, Sketch for a Fountain, 2017, © Skulptur Projekte Müenster, photo: Henning Rogge; Eisenman’s sculpture after it was vandalised, July 2017, photo: Easy Hiker’s Instagram; Abounaddara, The Lady of Syria: Part 2 (still), 2013, courtesy the artists. (B/W) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 2008, photo: ABr/ Agência Brasil, licensed under Creative Commons; South Korea’s Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun, one of six officials sentenced in the artist blacklist scandal, photo: Youtube/Arirang News. pp 158–59 (Colour) Olafur Eliasson, Green light – An artistic workshop, 2016, photo: Sandro E.E. Zanzinger / TBA21, 2016, © the artist; Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, something orange: our bodies slip slide through knowing, performed on 7 Sept 2017 at DRAF, London, photo: Dan Weill, courtesy the artist; Kara Walker, Brand X (Slave Market Painting), 2017, courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York. (B/W) Charlottesville, VA, 12 August 2017, courtesy Evan Nesterak, licensed under Creative Commons; A Texas National Guardsman carries a resident from her flooded home following Hurricane Harvey in Houston, 27 August 2017, photo: Lt. Zachary West. Courtesy US Department of Defense. pp 160–61 (Colour) Ai Weiwei, Human Flow, 2017, Ai in Greece at the Idomeni Camp, courtesy Participant Media; LGBTQ activists protest the Queermuseu show at Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre, photo: Clara Godinho; A child in Senegal uses the ‘Little Sun Diamond’ to read in the dark, courtesy Little Sun; Lukas Wassman and Rupert Smyth, A Good Neighbour Billboard Project, 2017, courtesy Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts; digital render of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, courtesy Iwan Baan /Heatherwick Studio; Huang Yong Ping, Theater of the World, 1993, wood and metal structure with warming lamps, electric cable, insects (spiders, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches, black beetles, stick insects, centipedes), lizards, toads and snakes, 150 × 270 × 160 cm, © Huang Yong Ping, courtesy Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. (B/W) Angela Merkel at Tallinn Digital Summit, 2017, photo: EU2017EE Estonian Presidency, licensed under Creative Commons; Launch of North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles, photo: Mariusstad, licensed under Creative Commons.
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Art and photo credits
Text credits
on the cover and on pages 101, 107, 117, 125 artwork by Hiwa K
The words on the spine and on pages 47 and 139 are taken from Cesare Pavese’s poem ‘Death will come and will have your eyes’ (1950), translated by Geoffrey Brock
on page 138 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
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A Curator Writes November 2017 Bloomsbury has never looked more beautiful. The leaves from the great oaks have turned a reddish-brown, the colour of dear Anish’s magisterial At the Edge of the World. I saw its gloomy, impenetrable dome again the other day just down the road, hung to celebrate Lisson Gallery’s 50th anniversary. When I stared into it I thought about the immense edifice of memory. I remembered, as if it was but yesterday, a young Nicholas Logsdail treating me to a splendid fish supper at the Sea Shell chippie back in 1987. Will another spring ever come? I am lost in thought as young Rodolf enters the room. “You didn’t knock,” I admonish him gently, zipping my flies. Quietly I admire the paisley dressing gown that he has taken to wearing since moving into my employment. “The Power 100 is out,” he says, gesturing to the august journal that lies magisterially on the Timurid engraved-copper serving tray he carries. I flick through, my rage building from 1 to 100. “Bring me the telephone, Rodolf!” I dial the number from memory. “Kurator here!” I announce. I am beside myself. There is a soft sound at the other end of the line. I realise it is the tragic noise of a grown man sobbing. I breathe deeply. “I just don’t understand it,” I say. “For years you were the most powerful curator. And now, this insult! I open up ArtReview and what do I see? Adam? Adam is higher than you in this blasted list? And me… me… I’m not even on it. It’s like these people have never even heard of my Rajasthan Triennial.” The unmistakable Swiss-German-accented voice finally replies, “You know, everything I do is somehow connected to velocity, but here life is just coming at me too fast…” It is hard to work out if he’s trying to be sympathetic, so I decide to treat it as an urgent cry for help. “Look, dear boy, I know, I know. I am as furious as everyone else. I mean, it’s one thing sticking a couple of artists at the top of this list for shits and giggles, but this? This?!” “You know, Kurator, I always have coffee and porridge for breakfast,” the great man interrupts me, his whimpering subsiding. “And when I opened the magazine, I spat my coffee into my porridge. Do you know what that did to the consistency of my porridge?” “No, er…” “But then I realised immediately that the hybrid ‘porridgee’ not only occupies the liminal space between coffee and porridge but could in fact be an unrealised project itself! What for example would happen to the feedback loop of the porridgee if I spat more coffee into it? When would it be turned to ‘coffidge’? I’m very interested in this idea…” “Look, look, you need to get back to the unfortunate subject at hand,” I say. “Adam is the highest placed curator on this list despite the critical backlash that met Documenta? Only yesterday young Rodolf noted that Sleek believed it to have ‘failed everyone but its curators’.
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What does this mean for us? And what on earth is Sleek when it’s at home? Whatever we do – and Lord knows I thought my programming of the Kranj Conference was radical – we need to do something else!” “I can’t. I was born to be a curator! Ja. Ja. It’s quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then, I knew that I would do this. And now this. This enormous kick to die Hoden!” “This is a wakeup call to us all,” I say. “What did those who venerate Adam say he achieved? The New York Times liked it but described it as ‘scattered, uneven, relentlessly unspectacular’. I mean, you wouldn’t exactly put that on a poster, would you?” “But you see, Adam is a disruptor! We too must become disruptors, Kurator, and then I can be number one again, and you can be, you can be, erm…” “Well, I think you’ll find I’m hovering just outside that top 100 – a mere knock of the door away. You know what I say? Let’s stop knocking, let’s blow the backdoors down!” I gaze longingly at Rodolf, who has turned around and is looking out the window. “Ja!” The distraught soul is regaining his verve. “One of my favourite of my many, many unrealised projects and haven’t-even-beenunrealised-yet projects is called ‘Do It’! So, Kurator, let’s fucking ‘do it!’” “Yes, let’s do it!” I yell back into the phone. Then I think for a bit. “But what actually are we going to do? How do we top this curatorial disruption? Can we find another virtuesignalling European exhibition programme and use it, as Adam has said, to ‘question the value production regime of mega-exhibitions’? Can we find another way of provoking The Sydney Morning Herald to describe a show as ‘the politically constipated, incoherent offerings in Kassel’? I mean, how does one even get an Australian so angry?” “This is a super-urgent question…” “How to improve on the magisterial open letter Adam and the team have written? ‘We would like to denounce the exploitative model under which the stakeholders of documenta wish the “most important exhibition of the world” to be produced.’ Would we have the courage to say that to the organisations who employ us? With this he has achieved the ultimate transcendence of the canon. He has fired the canon! Boom! Boom-chicka-boom!” I laugh hysterically before dissolving into tears. “Erm, Kurator, you are not currently in employment…” There is silence from both us. “You know, Ivan” – it is the first time he has addressed me by my Christian name since the awkwardness in Roppongi on what Cities On the Move was really about – “my one unrealised project is to have a palace of all these unrealised projects. But perhaps now I – erm, we, I mean – are no longer the top curator dogs, we are free. We must urgently embrace this! We are no longer exhibition-makers, we have finally become and embody…” I instinctively know where this is going, and together we cry, “…unrealised projects!” I. Kurator
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