ArtReview October 2021 by ArtReview

Standing proud since 1949

Torkwase Dyson

Mendes Wood DM São Paulo New space: Rua Barra Funda 216 São Paulo, Brazil

Mend es Wood DM São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

Ron Mueck

25 Years of Sculpture 1996—2021 London October—November 2021

Thaddaeus Ropac London Paris Salzburg Seoul Ron Mueck, Dead Dad (Detail), 1996-1997. © Ron Mueck. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband

ArtReview vol 73 no 6 October 2021

Getting out a bit more As its days of hermitage slowly wane, with artworld events coming back into play and Return to Work orders in place, ArtReview thinks wistfully of that peaceful time during which it didn’t have to listen to the constant chitter-chatterings of office life, or pretend to care about everyone’s weekend plans, or worry about whether it was making the correct facial expression, or make sure it didn’t drink the last of the coffee without offering it to anyone else… Still, it supposes, there are those that like to make connections with other sentient beings. So in this issue, it looks to examples of networks, collaborations, cosmologies and kinship, for lessons in how to interact with the outside world. Take, for instance, the gradual disappearance of London’s physical project spaces as a mode of exhibiting art, and the corresponding rise of dispersed, communal popup projects: as the uk capital’s commercial artworld feels increasingly homogenised, and its independent spaces are increasingly under pressure, does this model – albeit a diffuse one – provide an ‘underground’ network that could help to preserve the city’s diversity? You’ll have to ask Chris Fite-Wassilak, who suggests that the role of any city’s informal art projects is ‘to rattle the assumptions that there is just one way to “artworld”’. Or in the work of New York-based Torkwase Dyson, who, for her exhibition in London, has created a series of new largescale geometric sculptures that act as a site of collaboration with dancers, poets, artists, curators, performers, music artists and academics (including Chicago-based dj and producer Ron Trent, and musicians Gaika and Ase Manual, who are contributing to a limited-edition dubplate that accompanies the show). The show, Liquid a Place, forms part of her

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ongoing work of making connections between the Black diaspora, imagining a fluid common space for both sharing and resistance. The photographic work of Deana Lawson, too, draws on the collective experiences of Black communities, be it in the United States, or Ghana, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jamaica and Haiti. Whether canoodling with one another, or poised nude at home, Lawson’s portraits of strangers present staged scenes of intimacy, gathered together in photobooks that create ‘an everexpanding mythological extended family’. And speaking of mythologies, Makuxi artist Jaider Esbell (who runs a selfdescribed ‘laboratory’ in Boa Vista, Brazil, which shows work by artists from multiple indigenous ethnicities and runs art and theory workshops) makes works inspired by Makunaimî – both a god and an ancestor – as well as conversations and collaborations with shamans who represent different peoples, confronting the environmental and social abuse of Makuxi land in the Roraima region of Brazil. Esbell describes his work an essential ‘artivism’, at work with wider transcosmological forces, shaping his intricate, colourful paintings. That preoccupation of human relationships with nature, and how we might create a more symbiotic, rather than exploitative way of understanding the natural world around us, is also addressed in the work of Anicka Yi, who is about to present this year’s Tate Modern Hyundai Commission. Our presence here on Earth is pretty tenuous, as she asserts in her discussion with artist Gary Zhexi Zhang. ‘It just reinforces for me how robust animal life is, and how fragile and vulnerable humans are,’ she says. ‘And we’re all kind of entangled in that zoonotic spillover.’ Yi proposes that we ‘de-position’ our certainties to get a little bit of perspective, and perhaps then we can appreciate some of the different awarenesses, attentions and forms of togetherness that the projects inside put forward. See? These artists are already teaching ArtReview how to behave, empathise, operate and be brave in this new world. ArtReview

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Convergent Evolutions The Conscious of Body Work

Anthony Akinbola Jo Baer Caitlin Cherry Delphine Desane Adrian Ghenie Sam Gilliam Sonia Gomes Zhang Huan Kylie Manning Lucas Samaras, Sittings 8 x 10, 2/21/80, 1980, color Polaroid photograph, 10 × 8" © Lucas Samaras

RJ Messineo Anna Park Richard Pousette-Dart Lucas Samaras Marina Perez Simão Kiki Smith Chibuike Uzoma Rachel Eulena Williams

September 10 – October 23, 2021 New York pacegallery.com

Noah Davis

David Zwirner

Organized by Helen Molesworth October 8–November 17

24 Grafton Street, London

MMCA HYUNDAI MOTOR SER IES 2 0 21 NEWS FROM NOWHERE

FREEDOM VILLAGE

M M C A H Y U N D A I M O T O R S E R I E S 2 0 21 MOON K YUNGWON & JEON JOONHO NEWS FROM NOWHERE, FREEDOM VILL AGE MMCA SEOUL GALLERY 5, SEOUL BOX

MOON K YUNGWON & JEON JOONHO 3 / S E P / 2 0 21— 2 0 / F E B / 2 0 2 2

拉里·阿奇安蓬

LARRY ACHIAMPONG

阿德里亚诺·科斯塔

ADRIANO COSTA

艾萨·霍克森

EISA JOCSON

里彭·乔杜里与何子彦

RIPON CHOWDHURY WITH HO TZU NYEN

劳瑞·普罗沃斯特

郑波

LAURE PROUVOST

破浪

ZHENG BO

毛利悠子与大卫·霍维茨

YUKO MOHRI & DAVID HORVITZ

雅克·雷纳

JAC LEIRNER

史莱姆引擎

SLIME ENGINE

COMING TO HONG KONG IN DECEMBER 2021 CHIM POM

PRESENTED BY

迈克尔·朱

MICHAEL JOO

CURATED BY

沃爾夫岡· 提爾曼斯

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

VENUE

Art Observed

The Interview Anthea Hamilton by Ross Simonini 28

Technologies, Climate Change and Painted Mandalas by Stuart Munro 40

Life’s a Beach by Ben Eastham 37

Racism and Memorials in the City of London Stewart Home 42

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ page 37 Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte, Sun & Sea, 2019 (performance view, Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2019). Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy the artists

Art Featured

Torkwase Dyson by Mark Rappolt 50

Deana Lawson by Fi Churchman 72

Anicka Yi by Gary Zhexi Zhang 58

Jaider Esbell by Oliver Basciano 80

London’s Underground Art Scene by Chris Fite-Wassilak 66

page 80 Jaider Esbell and Bernaldina José Pedro Kumagi (Tucupi), from the Puro Txaísmo series, 2020, wood, metal and Posca pen, 50 × 19 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artists

ALEXANDER CALDER

Gagosian Paris

Three exhibitions opening October 19 In collaboration with FIAC and with the support of the City of Paris

Inaugural Show

Flying Dragon, 1975 Place Vendôme

“Flying Dragon” and the 1970s 9 rue de Castiglione

Selected Works 4 rue de Ponthieu

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 88 Women in Abstraction, by Digby Warde-Aldam Paula Rego, by J.J. Charlesworth Martine Syms, by Evan Moffitt Tala Madani, by David Terrien Gillian Steiner, by Cat Kron Born Again Berlin, by Martin Herbert Hetain Patel, by Mark Rappolt 34th Bienal de São Paulo, by Oliver Basciano 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, by Andrew Russeth Genre-bending in Copenhagen, by Rodney LaTourelle Steirischer Herbst 21, by Christian Egger Yael Bartana, by John Quin Kerstin Brätsch and Eduardo Paolozzi, by Ana Vukadin Manchester International Festival, by Susannah Thompson

No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, by Lauren Elkin, reviewed by Ben Eastham Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Fifty Sounds, by Polly Barton, reviewed by Adeline Chia Strangers on a Pier, by Tash Aw, reviewed by Louise Darblay aftertaste 118

page 96 Lutz Bacher, In Memory of My Feelings, 1990 (installation view, Zeros and Ones, 2021, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin). Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

GRAND PALAIS Éphémère PARIS

Art Observed

He will need to use one book

Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Anthea Hamilton

“I don’t think in a sequential way, I want everything to happen at once”

Anthea Hamilton’s art speaks the language of design. Her work is often a reconsideration of classic forms: tables, rugs, boots, tiles, wallpaper, kimonos. For her Turner Prize exhibition in 2016, she exhibited a doorway in the shape of a man’s ass, an idea she lovingly poached from the designer Gaetano Pesce. Yet this piece, like her other work, stretches design beyond its function, which is perhaps why she ultimately feels more at home in the messy experiment of contemporary art. Hamilton refers to herself as indecisive, but her work expresses a bold freedom from

any decided field. Like an interdisciplinary scholar, she slides fluidly between subject matter and source material. As with the Pesce-related work, she elegantly folds other artists into her practice, through curation, collaboration and collection. Her performance The Squash (2018) in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, for example, rooted itself in an old photo of choreography by Erick Hawkins to create an otherworldly experience of movement and installation. All of Hamilton’s work is a kind of collage, playing with nostalgia: a young John Travolta,

October 2021

the size of a wall, gazes at you; a cropped R. Crumb drawing looms overhead. As in a dream, the work’s very familiarity makes it all the more disorienting. I spoke to Hamilton on the phone in late summer. She was warm and voluble and spoke openly about her life, while remaining at the measured distance of a business interaction. At that moment, she was emerging out of a pandemiclong hiatus from art and had just started thinking towards a fall show at O’Flaherty’s in New York.

Art for Extradimensionals ross simonini Your next show is two months away. Where are you at in that process? anthea hamilton I’m always slow to start. I get tentative and nervous about committing to works, keep everything propositional and wait till nearly the last minute before diving into things. I must be waiting for a final kick up the ass to do it. rs Do you usually need some external push to get moving? ah I always like things really to be in dialogue, whatever shape that dialogue might be, a deadline or conversation with someone or reading a text. I’m someone who uses reciprocity to make things happen. rs Is art communication for you? ah I’m interested in the idea of performativity within an exhibition context. I like to use the endpoint as a performative moment, there’s a transition of performing from myself to the viewer and it’s over to them to animate the work.

rs You seem to take the audience into account quite a bit. Is that accurate? ah I think it used to be more accurate, in the sense of prescribing what I think the audience is. For me, it’s a museum-going demographic. And maybe they’re the ones most designated to understand how they’re functioning within that space. I’m recognising their physical behaviours – how people tend to move, how long they stay within a space, how they’re being invited to think about something via information offered from the institution – and then trying to use that as material, as a way to create a framework for how a work can function. But it’s also thinking about potential audiences or those who don’t tend to go to those spaces – my shows can be designed for uses that may never occur. I don’t just mean people who might be underrepresented in gallery-going statistics but people from other places, times, animals, vegetables, and so on. The Squash, 2018 (installation view, The Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, London, 2018). Photo: Seraphine Neville/Tate

ArtReview

rs Is sociological behaviour an interest of yours? ah It’s more like observation of an etiquette: recognising the patterns of behaviour but trying not to have them be too prescriptive. It was always something I thought about in a sculptural and formal way, how to scale a work to make someone look at it or stand next to it in a certain manner, or what would happen when you would make something superhuman size, and then have somebody be in proximity to it. Or what happens if you make someone peer really closely at something? Sometimes it can be a good idea to put something high up on the wall so everybody can see it, not just that person who likes to squish themselves in front of it. What if your viewing height is lower than average and you can’t see something? It’s not a fair experience for them either. So I’m just trying to offer different types of people different experiences. I tend to lead with the visual but process it alongside the other senses. rs When you find an image that compels you, is your first instinct to use it? ah I used to see everything as an image, whether an object or a space, and what was pertinent about images is that they had edges.

Plus I was interested in what fell outside of their visual space. But I don’t necessarily think in images now. I’m trying to think about what happens when I take that kind of framework and zoom out and go extradimensional. Like how can those sensations or that kind of methodology work when I step further back?

I Just Wanted to Say Hi rs What do you think about originality? Does it matter? ah I’m more aware of the term ‘ownership’, and that maybe something was made by someone else’s hand. And perhaps that loops back to the idea of performativity and the multiplicity of perspectives. Because the search for originality is quite exhausting. Normally what happens is that there’s something in the air, people feel it and make it present at the same time in batches of responses but only one or two may be declared of the author of that moment. Novel things happen in waves. I find it hard to separate readings of the term ‘original’ from a territorial, divisive attitude.

rs If you were working on something and then you saw someone else was doing something similar, would you change what you were doing? ah When you’re at art school, it’s very much about staking your own territory. Like, these are my tools and this is what I’m going to do, and these are my signatures and this is my brand. That very much seemed the language, and competitiveness was actively encouraged. But normally, if you had made the same thing, the reasons why were driven by different ideals. Or, inversely, you might share an ideology and that competition was there as a destructive move to stop alliances forming. Whatever it was [you made], it was just the right object at that time in culture and had a capacity to speak in a number of different ways. So I would be wondering whether what I’m interested in is just participating in the contemporary conversation, or whether the work itself was significant. rs Has this happened to you?

Anthea Hamilton: The New Life, 2018 (installation view, Secession, Vienna). Photo: Sophie Thun/Secession

October 2021

ah Many times. The thing wasn’t important – on one occasion just a cigarette – but it kept appearing in people’s work. I realise I wanted to engage in a current conversation, to say hi and be friendly somehow. It entered the work at SculptureCenter [in Cigarette Pipes, 2016] as a pipe work in the courtyard. And maybe I just needed to get through it, you know? It supported me through that moment of wanting to make that work. rs That’s such a nice, noncompetitive perspective. ah Yeah. Maybe that’s a thing of being a bit older. My battles and ambitions lie elsewhere now. A notable artworld figure once said to me that the first ten years of working as an artist is a gift. Does that imply that you only have ten years’ worth of ideas within you? My first ten years is already up. I expect that person was trying to psych me out. rs You return to some formal ideas, like the various kimonos you’ve made, but not others, like the cigarettes. What brings you back to an idea? ah I can be super uptight when I’m really agonising over what things to do. I try not to declare myself indecisive because I feel that’s

negative, but it probably appears to people I work with that I’m incredibly so. For instance, it took a month to decide the width of grout for The Squash at Tate Britain. It was only a millimetre’s difference, but it was important to me. It was a vast space, so the decision would have equally vast impact, and resonance. It needed that level of care – the performers would have been framed poorly otherwise, and therefore they’d be compromised. So how that lives in the work is that things are associated with freeness. A kimono, it’s like somebody in la walking down a glass staircase, just out of the shower, and they wrap themselves round in it: it’s silky, it’s chic, or it’s like the kimono-wearing geisha, who’s been declared by others as a site of sexual freedoms. The kimono has been so battered culturally, but it doesn’t ever lose its formal shape or visual impact. It’s a very stable object, I think. That’s why I come back to it. It can deal with whatever kind of absurd combination of imagery I might place on there. rs How do you end up making grout-level decisions? ah Oh my God. Usually someone’s messaging me furiously saying, ‘We need to know now’. And this forces a moment of epiphany, when I can recognise what decision to take to make the objects or materials perform as the most like themselves. And it turns out that five millimetres was the answer in that situation and the use of the black grout with white tiles ties the work to Superstudio’s Quaderna works, [French Nouveau Réalisme sculptor] Jean-Pierre Raynaud and cheaply installed municipal bathrooms. I think people may assume that the work is just quite visual, but really I’m just working with images to make other, nonvisual activity happen. rs In retrospect, do you usually feel as if you’ve made the right choices? ah I’m happy if I’ve finished something, but really finished it. I want to know I’ve considered something all the way around, inside and out. If I have to rush something, I just can’t enjoy it, even if it works. Because it would just feel cheap. rs Do you get decision-fatigue in your daily life? ah Oh, totally. I was decisioned out for quite a while for a couple of years or so. It was horrible. I’ve been working on the new public garden for Studio Voltaire in London, and when the invitation to take part in it arose I felt it would be really healthy to work on a garden because, you know, gardens are meant to be restorative, a site of sanctuary. But it was the same problem, just in a different format. It was decisionmaking fatigue and also infrastructural mess but with horticulture rather than fabric, tiles, press texts.

rs You can’t escape yourself. ah That’s why I like to collaborate with other people, seeing how other individuals or industries make decisions, or what a decision is constituted from, or how it behaves in another field. Decision-making itself is a practice.

Eyes on the Side of My Head rs Do you live by a schedule? ah At the moment I wake up early and have two hours of reading in the morning: summer schedule. I have a young kid and they have their own timescale that doesn’t map easily onto anything else. It requires a shift in what the creative process is. rs Has parenthood affected your art? ah So the first bit, when I was a new mother, was wild because there were a lot of hormones coursing through my body as a consequence of the very extreme, physical act in giving birth. There’s a lot of adrenaline and so I could get a lot of stuff done. Biologically, all was in place to protect the newborn: I was like a cavewoman, ready to fight off sabre-toothed tigers. My peripheral vision was increased, it was as though my eyes were on the side of my head. The notion of hours and minutes disappeared and time for me was wholly psychedelic. So it was a very free period because everything was totally deregulated. Several years later things are more institutionalised. rs I often think about the monastic life and how every decision is already made for you, down to the foot you use to cross a threshold. ah I’m literally thinking about monasteries and convents here: I romanticise that there’s kind of a decadence to that life because it’s so set. Like, you’re in a state of constant focus and holding oneself on a limit of rapture for even the smallest decisions or acts. You’re close to the edge all the time. Hormonally, it must be a really extreme space. rs You play with the idea of being an artist and a designer. Do you see a distinction between the two? preceding pages Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, 2015 (installation view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2015). Photo: Kyle Knodell/ SculptureCenter facing page British Grasses Kimono, 2015, digitally printed silk, linen, cotton, stainless steel, wicker, 161 × 161 × 30 cm. Photo: Martin Latham/Loewe Foundation all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London & Naples

ArtReview

ah I was recently speaking with someone who’s a product designer and felt they used a different vocabulary to how generally artists tend to speak, a different methodology of decision-making and solutions. The ways in which design problems are identified and resolved seem to exist quite differently to the way that artists deal with problems. And so, even though I agree with you that my practice maybe is quite blurry with regard to design, I think it is very much playing at it, like dressing up in the idea of being a designer. Because my problem-solving methodology wouldn’t make any sense in practical, structural terms. The physics wouldn’t hold up. Things I produce are often physically unstable – even relying on a precariousness of equilibrium – because I’m interested in the image of a solution or the image of a question, or how one asks the question. I feel like the work I’m making is just about making public the questions that are going through my head, rather than solutions. rs What was the design vocabulary you mentioned? ah This is based on a couple of conversations with individuals, I’m not trying to declare this as an absolute truth but they often spoke about this term ‘story’. Like, what is the story for this? And while I’m working quite logically through issues, the design process seemed to be more about narrativising situations. I’m almost more mathematical, or wishing to be. As a kid, maths was my absolute favourite subject – I loved it, I was very attracted by the idea of making things equal. It was about being logical. rs Do you use systems in your work? ah Mathematical is probably not the right term for it. It’s just about a sense of satisfaction when a conclusion is reached. There is no hidden technique to my process, but normally a system becomes clear to me in how I’m trying to understand things and I can fundamentally recognise myself in it all. I don’t think in a sequential way, which is why the work is the way it is – I want everything to happen at once. I can’t comprehend how you could possibly know how to have one thing before the other. I wanted to make films, be a movie director, but still now I puzzle over how one would know what frame follows the next one. In fact, I’m more interested in the transitions in films rather than what the content is. For me it needs to be one big thing that happens all at once, a state forever finding its own forms and adapting to variables. Maybe it’s like when you see a big sum on a board: it’s all there. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

October 2021

The thing about attending to the end of the world is that there are so many other things to be getting on with in the meantime. That the climate crisis is escalating beyond the direst predictions, manifesting in events that would even a few years ago have seemed like sciencefiction, doesn’t relieve me of taking the dog out or, for that matter, from writing this column. The natural expectation when experiencing catastrophe – whether personal or planetary – is that everyone should stop what they’re doing to focus on this turning point in history. But, of course, this doesn’t happen. Our mundane responsibilities soon relegate even the collapse of the very systems that support life on Earth to a background hum that we must ignore if we are to muster the energy to pay the rent and keep our dependants in diapers or dogfood. That the world is changing even while I am tapping away at my computer or opening the window or putting the bins out was brought home to me by Sun & Sea, the opera˙ ˙ performance by Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva ˙ ˙ Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte. I first saw the work in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, which feels like forever ago and also, because so little has happened in the intervening time to give the period a felt duration, like yesterday. In Venice it was presented as a looping performance into which the audience could

Dreamers

Ben Eastham discovers that life really is a beach

wander at any point, an effect cleverly reproduced when Sun & Sea was restaged recently in Athens: although there are discrete performances, the audience is directed to enter (and leave) the performance in media res. Seeing it in early September, I had the impression of picking up the melody just where I’d left it two years ago. Except that the two girls lying at the centre of the artificial beach on which the opera is staged are now teenagers. The same performers play the role, but they have aged in the interim, which means their characters have aged, which means that I have aged, and while the song remains the same, the subjects of the song – the end of one’s life and the end of the world – have edged appreciably closer. I’ve rarely been so affected by a memento mori. The opera, which has been touring Europe since Venice and will be staged across the United States for the remainder of the year, consists of around 20 performers laid out on an artificial beach, observed from above by an audience ringed around a mezzanine. The holidaymakers sunbathe, read books, play badminton, eat sandwiches and act in ways broadly consistent with their ages, temperaments and class backgrounds. At intervals, they break into song, and the audience is given access to their interior monologues. What do we think about when we’re on the beach, when the pressures of life

Sun & Sea, 2019 (performance view, Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2019). Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

October 2021

under capitalism are momentarily lifted? We think about sex and death as they relate to the self, is the lesson of a libretto which flits like an omniscient narrator with a short attention-span through the consciousnesses of characters that include a stressed-out dad who hates the treadmill of work marginally less than he fears the void that opens up in its absence; a wealthy mum who treats the wonders of the natural world as boxes to be ticked in a travel brochure (“My boy is eight and a half / and he’s already been swimming in / The Black / The Yellow / The White / The Red / The Mediterranean / Aegean seas …”); two young lovers for whom it is bliss to be alive and heaven to be young; a widowed woman, lamenting the loss of her youth; and a sophomore philosopher, so unable to comprehend the scale of capitalism that he must resort to bewildered platitudes (“the banana comes into being… and ends up on the other side of the planet”). The mundanity of their preoccupations, set to an uncomplicated but affective score resembling a minimalist composition for Hammond organ, is integral to the work’s effect. In these characters’ musings on such things as the natural catastrophe that by grounding flights extended their holidays and brought the two lovers together, the audience is reminded of how fundamentally self-centred

Sun & Sea, 2019 (performance views, Athens Epidaurus Festival, 2021). Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou

ArtReview

is the human position on the world. Moreover, it feels easy to sympathise with the anxieties expressed – who doesn’t feel exhausted by the world? – and hard-hearted to begrudge people the pleasure of a holiday romance or simply ten days’ paid leave from the jobs that make their daily lives miserable. Air travel is a factor in the proliferation of wildfires that blackened the sky over Athens for a stretch of the summer, and package holidays on cheap foreign beaches are another consumer product driving global inequality, but who among this bourgeoisbohemian audience is in a position to cast the first stone? Instead of taking the opportunity to lecture viewers on their own iniquity (or, more often and less forgivably, the implied iniquity of some other class of people), Sun & Sea allows the world to speak through the experiences of its inhabitants. Which is to say that everyone is preoccupied with themselves, but those selves cannot be disentangled from the catastrophe that is engulfing us all. The experience of every person is an individuated manifestation of that catastrophe. In this opera, humans are the signs and the symptoms of disaster as much as the causes. The identical twin girls at the centre are identified by the libretto as the ‘3d sisters’, and their enigmatic song might be taken to connect a private experience of loss (the implication is that one or both of them are replicants) to the wider grief attached to a disappearing world that can never artificially be restored. I couldn’t disentangle them in my own mind from the children who in W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938) are skating

on a pond at the edge of the wood. The poem is inspired by Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560), in which ‘everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ of Icarus’s fall from the sky into a small patch of sea in the corner of the canvas. As in Sun & Sea, the protagonists are largely oblivious to the catastrophe taking place in the background. But where Bruegel and Auden could be confident that nature would endure these human calamities – the pond would freeze over next year, the farmer would once again till his harvest, the sun would continue to shine ‘as it had to’ – no such solace is available to us.

Sun & Sea, 2019 (performance views, Athens Epidaurus Festival, 2021). Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou

October 2021

Picture the scene: it’s the early morning in Tokyo; Stewart Brand, the voice of late-1960s American counterculture, sits awkwardly, struggling to hear questions through an earpiece as his image is broadcast from San Francisco, where it’s late afternoon. His keynote address opens ‘Earthshot’, and sets out the conference’s first challenge: whether the limitations of technology will lead to the speaker losing his cool. ‘Earthshot’ Whole Earth 2021 @Tokyo (to give the conference its full title), held on 11 August, was the latest edition of the annual New Context Conference series, which explores the state of technology in relation to a sustainable future. The first conference, in 2005, had as its focus ‘The Next Decade of Online Communities & Commerce’, while in more recent years the series has shifted emphasis to topics such as ‘Augmented Humans & Sustainable Technology’ (2017) and ‘How to Build a Data Ecosystem’ (2019). This year the conference takes place at Tokyo’s Digital Garage, a leading it company in Japan, and via digital connections to spaces such as Brand’s home. It’s also Digital Garage’s 25th anniversary and a little over half a century since Brand first published the Whole Earth Catalog magazine (whose regular run spanned 1968–72). Although at first glance both projects are a far cry from the Space Race and early lunar ambitions of nasa, to which the title of this conference also makes reference. The Apollo moonshot in 1968 gave the world its first complete view of the planet, in the form of a photograph taken by Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 as he orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve. He christened the shot Earthrise. Brand seized upon the chance to make it the cover

Die Hard

A conference in Tokyo introduces new ideas, writes Stuart Munro, but fails to contend with old habits

ArtReview

of Whole Earth Catalog’s first issue. It’s an image with which we’re still dealing today. Indeed images, and how we use and read them, played a surprising role in what is ostensibly a technology conference. Three mandala paintings by Miwa Komatsu were on stage for the entire event – albeit veiled until midway through the conference. The central, circular Next Mandala (2021) was painted earlier this year at Sanboin, a monastery in Koyasan, near Osaka, considered the spiritual home of Japanese Buddhism. Grounded by gold leaf, it pulls together all sorts of local iconography, from the landscape of eight mountain peaks to local wildlife: the repeated image of a blackand-white dog describes how canines led the monastery’s founder, Kobo Daishi (Kukai), through the Koyasan mountains before he settled there in 819 ce. Two other more recent

triangular artworks titled Dragon’s Gate (2021) sit either side as markers for the Occident and the Orient. Komatsu comes onstage, at first to pray and then dot each canvas with a daub of paint, ceremoniously completing each piece. She goes on to describe how all three represent the consequence of her meditative process, focusing on a single point to open a Buddhist third eye, or ‘mini-theatre’, filling and animating each canvas. At one point she clears her throat to say that the paintings are a reading rather than a performance, a channelling of a vibe. But their theatrical introduction somewhat undermines that claim. With morning sessions devoted to the Whole Earth Catalog, ‘Art & Culture’ and ‘Aims of Digital Society & Open Government’, and afternoon sessions focusing on ‘Climate Change & Intended Consequences’, followed by ‘Impact Investment & the Realization of the Sustainable Society’, these artworks seem more of a palate cleanser than integral to any debates. Yet they offer a cycle of death and rebirth that serves as a reminder of how postwar growth has continually threatened the environment. And they remind us of the space of the individual rather than, say, the industry of space, or digital futures. It resonates when Brand says that he considers the Whole Earth Catalog to be “confirming the agency” of everyone, giving each and every person the tools they need to tackle a moment of crisis. “Don’t send robots [into space],” he urges, “send embodied curiosity.” Give civilisation a way of looking back at itself, to reflect upon its mistakes, he suggests. If the Space Race was won by scientists, in Brand’s vision new challenges like covid-19 will likely be solved by everyone else. Some of these other people were present. The writer Mitsuhiro Takemura (author of The Future of Memory: Cultural Economy of Digital Archives, 2003; Goodbye Internet, 2018; and Privacy Paradox, 2020) along with Jane Metcalfe (of Neo.Life, and cofounder of wired) and artist Nick Philip tried their best to advocate for a resurgent cyberculture, replacing the old currencies of publishing with blockchains, bitcoins and nonfungible tokens. Yet there was no mention of who or what would ultimately

facing page, from top Speakers Stewart Brand and Ariel Ekblaw, Earthshot conference, Tokyo, 11 August this page, from top Presentations to the Earthshot conference, Tokyo, 11 August, including Miwa Komatsu completing her mandala painting Dragon’s Gate (2021)

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manage these cryptocurrencies or their environmental impact. Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan, put forth a ‘Fast, Fair, Fun’ strategy for social engagement encouraging cooperation. Tang even spoke of how language was as powerful as any tool if used with people in mind. ‘Programmer’ in Mandarin can also be read as ‘a designer of systems’, which in turn, she stated, chimes with Buckminster Fuller’s claims that change happens not by ‘fighting the existing reality’ but by creating ‘a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. Private industry presented one solution. The public sector presented another. Climate systems and demographics are easily bogged down by pure data. Creativity finds a way to ease regulation and bureaucracy. It’s what Kate McCallKiley of the us technology lab xd likened to orbiting a “giant hairball”. Taro Kono, the minister for administrative reform, and Takuya Hirai, the minister for digital transformation, outlined the Japanese government’s new Digital Agency. But their greatest challenge seemed more fundamental: plans earlier this year to replace every governmental fax machine with email were put on hold due to fears about the secturity implications of such a change. For all the good intentions, old habits die hard.

When it comes to addressing what to do with artworks and memorials connected to historic racism and attendant issues relating to colonialism, some talk up their commitment to change, but their lack of action exposes a preference for the status quo. The City of London Corporation is the local authority that covers the capital’s international financial district. Not only does the Corporation pack more problematic memorials into its famous ‘Square Mile’ than almost any other council in the uk (or, for that matter, the world), it is simultaneously a major patron of the arts. Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, the Corporation issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. The insincere and performative nature of this is evident to those who know that at least two of its four signatories had attended the City’s annual celebrations of legacy projects connected to the slave-trader John Cass in recent years (a charitable foundation, a primary school and a business school named after Cass have since been renamed). The Corporation’s blm statement was followed by an equally performative Historic Landmarks Consultation that attempted

Famous Men

Nothing lasts forever, says Stewart Home

Statue of William Beckford atop the huge monument in his memory, Guildhall, London. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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to dodge the issues raised by racist memorials rather than confront them. ‘The debate over contested heritage, within and outside the City of London, has proven to be politically divisive,’ stated a report published earlier this year by the City’s Findings and Recommendations of the Tackling Racism Taskforce. ‘Following global protests after the death of George Floyd, there was a re-examination of the suitability of certain contested pieces of heritage, namely public statues that displayed subject matters associated with slavery and other forms of racism.’ The only problematic memorials mentioned in the report are statues inside the Guildhall, the City of London’s council headquarters, of Cass (and a copy of it that was removed from nearby Jewry Street last year by the charity that owned it) and of slave-owner William Beckford. Both men had been senior City Corporation councillors. The Cass statue in the Guildhall had been on a long-term loan and the council decided to return it to its owners. After heated debate the City Corporation voted to remove the statue of William Beckford (which it owns), but that decision has since been kicked into the long grass: the uk government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport intervened to say the Beckford statue should stay, and the status quo holds (the uk government has subsequently changed the law to make the removal of statues less straightforward). By far the most visible among the plethora of problematic memorials dotted around the City of London are landmark buildings Cromwell Tower and Lauderdale Tower, named after two particularly odious men. The fact that the Findings and Recommendations report emphasises statues as the prime problem and then only addresses two of them would strike most people, if they believed that the City Corporation was genuinely attempting to tackle historic racism, as odd. Experienced Corporation-watchers, however, will recognise the report as classic City spin, offering the pretence of dealing with an issue while in practice ignoring most instances of it. Recently a collective of Barbican Centre workers published the book Barbican Stories (2021) alleging racism at this jewel in the City Corporation’s arts crown. Institutional racism visibly rises above the Barbican Centre in the form of the landmark brutalist residential towers that dominate the skyline around it. Lauderdale Tower is named after a slave-trader (John Maitland, 2nd Earl of Lauderdale), and Cromwell Tower memorialises a mass murderer (Oliver Cromwell) who oversaw English colonial atrocities in Ireland. There are a variety of Cromwell memorials in the City of London installed by the corporation

over the past 45 years or so – the most recent dates from 1999 – and, while some people who aren’t Irish or don’t identify with their Irish heritage prefer to see Cromwell as predominantly a parliamentarian and an opponent of monarchical power, there has so far been no indication the council views them as problematic. While the City Corporation was not the only council to avoid the broader issue of racist crimes committed in the pursuit of empire when reviewing public landmarks, it can’t credibly claim ignorance of the matter, since through its livery companies it played a key role in the Plantation of Ulster. The vehicle created for the Corporation’s involvement in the colonisation of the north of Ireland was the Honourable Irish Society. Today this venture still owns the Walls of Derry, a major albeit contested European monument – the obnoxious loyalist Walker Monument that once crowned the Walls was blown up by the ira in 1973. Many current City Corporation councillors are members of the Irish Society and some play key roles within it. By way of contrast, councillors in neighbouring Hackney have been vocal about the need to remove the statue of the slave-trader Robert Geffrye from the exterior of the Museum of the Home, which lies within their borough boundaries but not within their jurisdiction. Likewise, the Bank of England, located in the Square Mile, has been bolder too. It recently removed artworks depicting former bank grandees (a number of whom were also senior City Corporation councillors) from public display. The Daily Mail responded with fury, and in a piece titled ‘Bank of England is accused of undertaking a “bonfire of the vanities” after removing portraits linked to the slave trade’ (14 June 2021), it erroneously suggested that the former Lord Mayor of London Gilbert Heathcote, whose portrait was pulled, had not been linked to slavery. The Mail’s claim about Heathcote exposed its ignorance of the slave trade, since it said it had failed to find anything incriminating about him on the ucl’s Legacies of British Slavery database, which focuses on plantation owners. City merchants including Heathcote bought slaves in Africa and transported them across the Atlantic, where they were sold to plantation owners. No one who has done research in this area would expect to find much about a slave merchant on the ucl database. Instead they’d look to sources such as William A. Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (2013), which contains a wealth of information on Heathcote’s activities as a leading independent slave trader. The City Corporation also has a political constitution unlike any other local authority in the uk. For the past 200 years the City

Statue of Sir John Cass, Guildhall, London. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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Corporation has used its extensive financial resources – including a sovereign wealth fund that is the envy of many nations – to defend its medieval political structure and privileges, as a result of which there is an urgent need for its democratic reform. Last year the Lisvane Report, which the City Corporation commissioned into its own governance, suggested the board of the Barbican Centre should no longer be controlled by local councillors, because many are appointed who lack any relevant knowledge of the arts or their administration. The suggested change, if the City Corporation implemented it, would provide a good place to start addressing the problem of institutional racism at the Barbican Centre. Times have changed and I don’t see why the contested heritage in the City of London can’t be properly contextualised. The current Museum of London is about to be vacated, and the City Corporation has abandoned its plans to transform the site into a Centre for Music, so why not fill the space with the council’s extensive collection of contested heritage, which might very well form the basis of an institution dedicated to exposing the horrors of slavery and colonialism?

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That appeared in French in 1930 49

Liquids and Solids Torkwase Dyson may have created the perfect exhibition for this moment in history by Mark Rappolt

New York-based Torkwase Dyson’s upcoming exhibition at Pace London in response to Dyson’s work. Ricochets, if you like. An element of instaoffers something of a paradox: the show is titled Liquid a Place, domi- bility or fluidity in contrast to the stability embodied in the sculptures nated by three large, imposing, mainly black solids. There’s an imme- themselves. Even Dyson is unsure about how, precisely, that will flow. diate disjuncture between expectation and consummation: between That triangular space, its interior surfaces coloured white, is scaled to what you are conditioned to think by the freeflowing implications of accommodate the height of the tallest performer (188 cm): a potential the title and what you sense from these static, solid objects. Confusing? container of sorts, a kind of angular womb. Well, life is. You’re gonna have to think a bit. Dive in. Explore. Governed by a spirit of openness, generosity and curiosity, Dyson’s The sculptures, which are semicircular in form, rest on the centre work is generative in nature: the London exhibition is also accompaof their arcs with a triangular void nied by an album, a limited-edition We are both longing for physical running along the sagitta. Perhaps dubplate featuring collaborations the void is a gateway, perhaps a encounters with artworks as discrete objects with and new works by Chicagoshelter. As a whole, though, it based dj and producer Ron Trent, as and refiguring our expectations of art generates a sensation that is curvy well as music by London-based artist and leggy – for those of you not Gaika and Yoruba-American artist as something that does something interested in the purer geometry. It Ase Manual – its form a tribute to is as much anthropomorphic as it is architectural. The sculptures are the means by which Black music has been disseminated across African accompanied by a sound installation, and over the opening three and Caribbean diasporas in the uk. And at a time when, post virusdays of the exhibition, the space and the sculptures will be activated enforced seclusion, we are both longing for physical encounters with by a series of performances, featuring dancers, poets, artists, curators, artworks as discrete objects and refiguring our expectations of art as performers and academics. A network of Black bodies assembled during something that does something – or has agency in whatever it is we mean by ‘the real world’ rather than sitting aloof research trips to and into London and from among Liquid a Place #2, 2021, gouache, graphite, the artist’s previous collaborators. Other bodies or apart from it – Dyson’s work seems perfectly to pen and liquid charcoal on paper, 30 × 42 cm. that will introduce new or shared trajectories fit the moment. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

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While she is fundamentally a painter of broadly abstract works, polluted Lake Michigan (at the time, the boys recalled that the water Dyson’s output spans a wide range of media, including performance, in their favourite area of the lake would be, by turns, hot and cold sound, sculpture and architecture. 1919: Black Water, a 2019 exhibition depending on whether it was adulterated by effluent discharged by at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, featured either Keeley Brewing or Consumers Ice Company) and used it to drawings, paintings and sculptures created in response to the cente- paddle and swim in a zone between the then segregated Black and nary of the ‘Red Summer’ of white-supremacist terror and racial white beaches, which is where the stoning took place. For Dyson the riots across large parts of the us. Dyson’s inspiration derived from creation of the raft is an act of resistance, of ingenuity, of architecture the history of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who was stoned both linked and opposed to the space that held enslaved Black bodies as by a white man and who, as a they crossed the Middle Passage. result, drowned in Lake Michigan A space that Stefano Harney and The creation of the raft is an act of resistance, (Dyson grew up nearby). The Fred Moten, in ‘Fantasy in the of ingenuity, of architecture both linked and riots that followed the Chicago Hold’, a chapter included in The opposed to the space that held enslaved Black Undercommons (2013), describe as police’s refusal to take any action against Williams’s attacker left 38 one that generated ‘certain abilibodies as they crossed the Middle Passage ties – to connect, to translate, to people dead and 527 injured, with a thousand black families made homeless. Dyson, through a series adapt, to travel’ – among its inhabitants, but more importantly ‘a way of abstract paintings and drawings that incorporate the languages of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you’. Which of geometry, mapping and sometimes encrusted accumulations of might, in turn, describe Dyson’s London project. It’s notable, indeed, pigment and colour washes and collaged flotsam and jetsam, which that when she describes the work, Dyson deploys words of a sensory are then mirrored on the dark reflective surfaces of a series of sculpted nature: ‘intimacy’, ‘touch’, ‘movement’, ‘proximity’, ‘encounters’. geometric forms, focuses on Williams and his Inescapably, after all that, the sculptural forms in Liquid, Space and Light #1, 2020, swimming companions, who had constructed the London show echo the curve of a ship’s hull, gouache and pen on paper, 31 × 31 cm. a raft out of detritus gathered from the heavily and those triangular voids another kind of hold © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

October 2021

Dark Black (Bird and Lava), 2021, wood, acrylic, steel and graphite, 305 × 183 × 386 cm. Photo: Luke Stettner / Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

I Am Everything That Will Save Me #4 (Bird and Lava), 2021, acrylic, string and graphite on wood, 153 cm (diameter). © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

I Can Drink the Distance: Plantationocene in 2 Acts, 2019 (performance view, Pace Gallery, New York, 2019). © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

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and a play on nautical scale as well as architecture. They offer a poten- In Conditions of Fresh Water. With it the artist and lawyer and social scientist Danielle Purifoy travelled from North Carolina to Alabama, tial hiding or conspiring space. We begin to think of water as space of resistance, liberation, terror, documenting the experience of Black communities and the infraconflict, oppression, refuge, extraction and pollution. In London, the structures and architectures they, as the pair described it, had to River Thames, the locus of much of Dyson’s research for her show at ‘navigate, negotiate and transform’ (the provision of clean drinking Pace, carries its own histories of colonisation, community, commerce, water and the biases and injustices inherent in its supply being one of trade, transport and the dumping ground of urban effluent. We them). It was, Dyson and Purifoy have written, ‘a black-within-black might think about how we locate ourselves within all that. There is place, a living room where people gathered, lent a hand, asked quesan element of nomadism in the story of the boys’ construction of the tions, and offered their memories of everyday life and change in these raft in Michigan, which Dyson would refer to as an act of architec- communities, covering at least seven decades’. A key part of Dyson’s work then is creating this kind of commons, ture. An attempt to exploit a liquid geography in order to construct a free space: to connect, to translate, to adapt, to travel. Aspects of whether it exists within a community or within the less obviously this were foundational to Dyson’s Studio South Zero (ssz), a (defini- porous space of a gallery. It’s at once the creation of a space and the tively land-based) smallscale, solar-powered wooden studio-struc- liberation from a defined place, through the tracing of the moveture comprising half of a Quonset hut that the artist was invited to ments of Black and brown bodies in the world. A trace of the waters construct by Theaster Gates (supported by his Rebuild Foundation) we hold and the waters we absorb, what we do and what is done to in 2010. It’s at once a studio for solitary work and, following Dyson’s us. To liquidise a space, and to assert that what is fluid can be a place; invitation to other artists (such as sound artist Duriel E. Harris) to feel with and through others. ar to use the space, a communal meeting place. I Can Drink the Distance: Plantationocene in 2 Acts, A second iteration on wheels, built from recycled Liquid a Place is on view at Pace London, 2019 (performance view, Pace Gallery, materials and conceived as an interactive space, 8 October – 6 November, with a performance New York, 2019). Photo: Maria Baranova. was constructed in 2016 as part of the project programme running on 7, 9 and 11 October © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery

October 2021

“I’m not too attached to ‘survival’” Anicka Yi on how the pandemic has changed her approach to life and art Interview by Gary Zhexi Zhang

There’s a large, blurry fly hovering around during the video call, but Anicka Yi doesn’t seem to mind. “There are lots of insects upstate,” she tells me. As it turns out, Yi and her team have been working from a compound in upstate New York. Over the past two years they’ve been developing on their largest project yet, a commission for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. To our mutual dismay, the work remains under embargo, so we discuss the world around her instead. gary zhexi zhang So you’re out in the forest. anicka yi In the woods, yes. You know, I was just talking to my research director this morning – she’s remarking upon a bird on her windowsill because she’s in the house next door. I just warned her, jokingly, that that bird is probably carrying lots of ticks. And we were talking about how sad it is that as humans, we now regard all animals with an initial bit of alarm and suspicion, you know? And it seems to be the curse of our species to have that, with our recklessness. gzz I guess this sense of threat comes with a kind of respect as well. ay I think it’s respectful on my end. I think that humans are really extremely vulnerable on the planet – it’s almost like we’re not really supposed to be here. This coexistence with these other animals that carry, you know, ticks that are potentially lethal to humans, it just reinforces for me how robust animal life is, and how fragile and vulnerable humans are. And we’re all kind of entangled in that zoonotic spillover, right? gzz Right, I’m kind of taken by this idea that a biosphere is an expression of a planet. I guess humans are part of that too. ay Yeah, I guess I’m not too attached to [she makes air quotes] “survival”. I think that we had a good run and that, you know, we should maybe just conform to evolutionary processes. That being said, artificial intelligence and the extension of life is part of our evolution as well. It’s not outside of our evolution, and neither are machines. gzz That’s an interesting way to put it, you think we’re an ending phase? ay I was being cheeky about how we had a good run, but I mean, I just don’t think we need to save ourselves at all costs… to what end, you know? At the peril of all these other planetary entities and concerns? I’m okay if the species isn’t propagated, but it’s hard because as biological entities that is part of our drive, right? At the same time, we’re also introducing new species into the world, we are designing life and coexisting with new life that wasn’t there before.

Retrospectively, Yi’s artistic trajectory looks remarkably focused. She rose to prominence in New York in the early 2010s with a body of works which leaked, seeped and wafted around galleries, demanding an engagement from her viewers that was at turns humorous, sensual and sharply cerebral. She became known for combining unusual chemical and organic materials, often perishable, with a wry autobiographical drive. A case in point is Sister (2011), a funny, figurative work of sorts comprising a red cotton turtleneck crowned by a bouquet of tempura-fried flowers, their abject glory temporarily fixed in crystalline growths of panko and batter. In some ways, this knowingly subversive curation of consumer signifiers was characteristic of the late-capitalist, postconceptual gestures of the early 2010s, but Yi’s work also alluded to an interest in another reality. In works like Sister, language, subjectivity and chemical transformations effortlessly converge, as if to suggest the entropy underlying it all. On the occasion of her first solo show, Sous-vide (2011) at 47 Canal, Yi said she wanted audiences to approach her work with “a presentness of biological and intellectual receptors” while speculating about “[exploring] more biotechnologies. Cryogenics, grafting, impregnable materials”. In the decade that followed, she did just that, becoming known for her work with scent and olfaction, living micro-organisms, and her extensive collaborations with biologists and technologists. After a lauded solo show at the Guggenheim in New York and a multi-year residency with microbiologists at mit, the Turbine Hall commission was, she tells me tentatively, developed in collaboration with three different types of engineering teams. gzz Has your relationship to science and technology changed over these collaborations? ay My relationship to science and technology is becoming looser and looser, and less about knowledge production. I think art ought to be far more than that, and can be a lot more akin to something like some of the functions of quantum mechanics, if we let go instead of trying to steer it into some knowledgeproduction territory of certainty, to almost mirror scientific research or the way that science preceding pages 7,070,430K of Digital Spit, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Philipp Hänger. Courtesy Kunsthalle Basel facing page Sister (detail), 2011, tempura-fried flowers, cotton turtleneck, dimensions variable. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York following pages Of All Things Orange or Macedonian Wine, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Philipp Hänger. Courtesy Kunsthalle Basel

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articulates the phenomenon. My job is not to articulate the phenomenon of art. I’m more interested in opening up these nonconceptual spaces. And that’s something that science and technology doesn’t purport to do. gzz Can you say more about this nonconceptual space? ay I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m trying to be much more open to an absolute reality, versus the relative reality we concern ourselves with through culture. And that is the value of science for me, in that it can tell me about something beyond my own relative reality. Even though I may not perceive things in a certain way, I know that if I were to die, tomorrow, the sun will still come up in the morning, with or without me, and that there will be rain, there will be weather patterns with or without my experience of that reality. Another way of looking at it is really just to reposition, or maybe even de-position a certain kind of certainty. gzz Right, a space outside your own relative way of knowing, and beyond the powerfully relative world of “culture”. ay I’m very, very squeamish with culture. Culture seems like it’s really fundamental to who we are as social beings. However, culture can really perpetuate the worst aspects of humanity and it also can perpetuate all of the falsehoods of humanity. You know, patriotism, nationalism, racism, sexism. It’s all story and narrative. I guess they say that humans need stories [laughs]. But I think that these stories perpetuate a lot of suffering and a lot of obstacles to our growth and evolution. gzz That’s an interesting place for art to begin, against knowledge and culture. How do you approach this absolute, transcendental world in your practice? ay This is kind of an evolving way of thinking with the practice. If we could create a kind of timeline, I think in the last five, seven years, I’ve been thinking about how there is no autonomous, sovereign self, right? And if you look microbiologically, you know that there is no individual and that the self is comprised of a multitude. And so what that means is that the self is – we are – vessels for interdependence. So the work I’ve been exploring has really been thinking about the entanglements of this coconstitutive life, and also just not having this over-reliance [on the distinction] between life and death. Because if ultimately there’s only energy, then the difference between the living and the non-living is pretty insubstantial. So a great example of that is a virus. I mean, technically, it can’t reproduce. Technically, it would not qualify as living. And yet, it is res-

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ponsible for regulating all biodiversity on the planet. So we have to constantly update these scientific concepts with new meanings, and this certainty starts to collapse. One of the great lessons that I take from science is that you probably shouldn’t be too attached to any certainty. Because every generation comes around and says, “well, we need to update this idea of what the human is, and we need to update this idea of what climate is.” And so the larger meta-project is maybe that, as an artist, attachment to knowledge production is becoming more of a hindrance than an asset. gzz Has this changed your relationship to your work? ay I’m trying to have a different relationship to the practice. I think that in order for real re-genesis to take place, you have to force yourself to rest. I have never been good at doing that. It was just like: pile on 20 projects and keep going. And I just think I burned through too much energy. And I guess now I have new goals towards having more of a whole-body balance, rather than just being this disembodied, cerebral will, where you’re just like, “No, we can do it, we can do it if I think it!” It does catch up with you, and you can pay attention, or you can ignore it.

I can’t really speak for anyone else, but for me, I’ve learned a lot from this pandemic. gzz The process of reorientation you’re talking about is tremendously difficult, with the history we’ve inherited. How are you finding it? ay Yes, absolutely. I find it really pretty blissful and challenging. It’s this different sort of quantum engagement through the body, and how it can lead the mind. I find it really stimulating, but not in the way that I used to get stimulated reading George Church’s books and discovering his theories or something like that. It’s this kind of immersive, totalising way of learning rather than this siloing of knowledge, of experience, of reality. I don’t know, I’m not an expert, I’m just starting out on [laughs] waking up to this path. gzz You’ve mentioned quantum a few times, in a figurative way, in describing this process. What do you mean by that? ay I’m not an expert on quantum physics, but you know, I read a lot about it. So it’s not just figurative, it’s quite literal, in the way that I think my practice can sort of parallel the way that quantum physics can teach us about how

the mechanics of the world works. And it also speaks to the history of consciousness, and I’m not sure that there is an ultimate sort of primacy here, but I’m kind of doing my due diligence, you know, in trying to live by the phenomenon [laughs]. Whether it’s microbiology, synthetic biology, quantum physics, these are the phenomena that shape our understanding of the world and ourselves and others. And so, without knowing that, it’s hard for me to try to live the phenomenon. But I would definitely save the phenomenon over the theory any day of the week. gzz I really appreciate your interest in reality, in all the fuzziness and non-fixity of that pursuit. ay Yeah. I mean, one of my goals is to appreciate just existing in the way that birds get to appreciate existing, in the way that plants get to exist without having any value judgement, and without having to produce my own subjectivity or consciousness or anything. I want to exist, and I want to appreciate that I can exist. That’s the goal. ar Anicka Yi’s Hyundai Commission is on show at Tate Modern, London from 12 October to 16 January

Biologizing The Machine (tentacular trouble), 2019, kelp, acrylic, animatronic moths, concrete, water, dimensions variable. Photo: Renato Ghyazza. Courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels; and 47 Canal, New York

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Lifestyle Wars, 2019, ants, mirrored Plexiglass, Plexiglass, two-way mirrored glass, led lights, epoxy resin, glitter, aluminium racks with rackmount server cases and Ethernet cables, metal wire, foam, acrylic, aquarium gravel and imitation pearls. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

October 2021

Running Out of Alternatives? by Chris Fite-Wassilak

With London’s commercial artworld looking increasingly homogenised, its independent spaces increasingly commercialised, can the capital preserve its diversity? 66

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A few months ago, I found myself locked alone in a small room, things are changing, as they always have. Commercial galleries gonna watching the spotlight of sun shining through a circular window commercial gallery, and the various subscenes, with their various work its way across the large pieces of cardboard, coloured in at shades of intention and access, will do their thing (see, for example, various points with chequered black squares, that covered all the the plant-and-amateur-gardening art scene, the parttime-job-limbo room’s other windows. Cryptic markings in yellow tape dotted the scene, the academic-conference scene, the sitting-room-corner gallery floor, alongside a faded white plastic chair that I was warned not to sit scene, etc). But it does feel as if there is a shift that needs to be marked, in. More recently, I stood amidst a small crowd in a narrow alleyway and that we should acknowledge what’s at stake in any city’s art landwhile a man and woman in white robes, looking something like scape. The point, as I loosely understand it, of project spaces is to chalbaroque sci-fi priests, hooted at each other. Communicating in a sing- lenge what gets shown, to widen the homogeneity and repetition that song back and forth, with phrases that sounded like abstracted, elon- commercial galleries tend to lean towards, to rattle the assumptions gated ‘hi’s and ‘wow’s, they nodded and bowed like courting birds that there is just one way to ‘artworld’. To give a more truthful specin a performance that was as harmoniously mesmerising as it was trum to the forms of art that are made, and to what is validated with awkwardly comedic. an irl exhibition and the potential of chance glances and encounters. Both experiences were instigated by London project spaces – the And – something that I feel acutely after the past year – to allow more first, Lucy Gunning’s exhibition In Passing at Palfrey; the second, a space for more art and artists to fail: to see what doesn’t hold up to performance of Sing Sign (2015) by Hanna Tuulikki at Kelder. Both sustained looking, to exist beyond the manicured and poised frame of were remarkable, in part because they an image online, to fail constructively Current practitioners, and landlords, had a simplicity and directness that and build on that. felt appropriate for a moment in which Speaking to several people helping are more savvy to the uses of we are just beginning to reengage with to run some of the city’s project spaces, the presence of ‘creatives’ in the city. the wider world; but also simply in I hear that the issues at the forefront London’s ‘underground’ is getting that they were there in the first place. of their minds are funding structures and, overall, sustainability. It’s worth London’s alternative exhibition spaces, more diffuse, and more private noting that many of the city’s more or whatever you want to call them – the artist-led, curatorial, informal and experimental spaces that have, august project spaces, including Cell Project Space (founded in 1999), at points, helped define the city’s art ecology – are disappearing. Chisenhale Gallery (1986), Cubitt (1991), Gasworks (1994), Kingsgate To be more accurate, such spaces are dissolving. Even prepan- Project Space (1978), Studio Voltaire (1994) and Matt’s Gallery (1979) demic, some readers might have noticed that London’s steady tick started as studio-based and studio-provider exhibition spaces, some of new galleries and exhibiting spaces had continued, but where of them eventually formalising with public funding and patronage previous years might have seen a decent percentage of those at least systems. With reliable square metreage being the city’s prime start as project spaces, the majority of newer spaces have opened as commodity, the studio-gallery is the current dominant mode, with expressly commercial ventures. The pandemic has seen blocks of rooms to show work at studios including Black Tower Projects (2017), abandoned city offices and shops left empty: perhaps, in the more Collective Ending (2019), set (2016), Turf (2013) and Zona Mista (2017), among others. It makes sense: immediate future, this will see a return The point of project spaces is to of short-term exhibitions, a nod to the if you’ve carved out space to make squatted days of yore, but this time in challenge what gets shown, to counter- work, you can use a part of that infrastructure to display it. Though the hollowed-out caverns of a carpeted act homogeneity and repetition, compared to those spaces founded in insurance office or an abandoned hotthe previous century, however improdesk café. I get the feeling, though, to rattle the assumptions that there that current practitioners, and landvised their original aims, the question is just one way to ‘artworld’ of which of these current spaces will lords, are more savvy to the uses of the presence of ‘creatives’ in the city. London’s ‘underground’ is getting still exist in three decades’ time seems much more precarious. more diffuse, and more private. It’s moving away from the postindusDiscussing recent shifts, Edward Gillman, current director of trial, squatting legacy-model of taking up physical space with group Auto Italia in Bethnal Green, noted that, “for new spaces to survive shows in massive crumbling warehouses or old shopfront locations, in a hostile economic environment, they need to quickly learn to like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s The Shop (1992), or the done-up engage with opaque and conservative bureaucratic systems. These betting shop of City Racing (1988–98), or Associates (2006–07). Such processes are often opposed to the logics of artist project spaces, which spaces gave artists like Keith Coventry, Susan Hiller, Mike Nelson and are run on the basis of shared ethics and desires for community.” Gunning herself a chance to experiment, mess around and develop Project spaces pointedly aren’t businesses, and don’t have the structure of finite quarterly aims or the potential for their work in unusual locations. By necessity, facing page unlimited growth. Auto Italia began as a project what the city is moving towards is smaller, itinJim C. Nedd, Fiesta En Guacherna, Barranquilla 2020, 2020 (installation view, in a squatted car warehouse in 2007 and is now erant and more events-based ways of working, Auto Italia, London, 2020). a charity with Arts Council funding (incidena hybrid collective and popup model that might Photo: Lucy Parakhina tally, based in the building that used to be The equally organise gigs, print a zine or hold a onefollowing pages Showroom; founded in 1983, now based in West night show in a community café. Hanna Tuulikki, Sing Sign, 2015 This isn’t a eulogy, or an old-timey whinge London). Gillman talks of the necessity of shifting (performance view, Kelder, about how things ‘ain’t as good as they used to be’; focus from the mentality of completion, as the London, 2021)

October 2021

Lucy Gunning, In Passing (still), 2021, video, 30 min. © the artist. Courtesy Palfrey, London

ArtReview

goal-oriented approach of economics, towards the more holistic Despite this, what Ongaro and Simpson see as currently taking shape across London is “connected more to the drive to create and approach of nurturing in the long term. Carolina Ongaro and Katie Simpson of Jupiter Woods echo this: engage with art in multiple ways, rejecting the older pattern of “We have been considering ways of working as an organisation that gallery spectatorship only”, nodding to spaces like fat Studio’s Old step away from an extractivist mentality and the patterns of compe- Kent Road Arts Club and the Avalon Cafe. So farewell to the ghosts tition that make up the artworld to instead embrace approaches of City Racing, Fieldgate Gallery, Gallerie Poo Poo, Million Miles that prioritise community growth, joy, wellbeing, and in general, Per Hour, Res, Space in Between and innumerable other models of contribute to an economy based on solidarity. Access to and the sharing previous decades; the battle for much of the physical aesthetic terrain of resources should be a priority right of the city has been relegated to the market. What’s rising from the hostile now.” Jupiter Woods was set up in 2014, With reliable square metreage being originally given six months in a house environment of an ever-commodifying the city’s prime commodity, the that was going to be demolished, evencity instead is a dispersed set of guerstudio-gallery is the current dominant rilla activities, where small, semitually shifting to a nonprofit organisation focusing on discursive projects porous peer networks appear for an mode: if you’ve carved out space with a long gestation period, such as instant, before swiftly moving on. The to make work, you can use a part their show with Carl Gent, opening in project scene is the fertile soil and necof that infrastructure to display it September, which was developed over a essary humus, if we want to continue the nature metaphor, for any city’s yearlong residency with the space. It’s the conception of taking more permanent or long-term ecology: a space for unchecked and unexpected growths, where space that is now both elusive and exclusive. Gillman sees a neces- unruly ideas push through the pavement cracks. It needs tending, sary communal potential in having a bricks and mortar location, and attention: catch it while you can. ar describing Auto Italia as having a function analogous to the area’s queer bars and social spaces: “Both have a vested interest in develChris Fite-Wassilak is a London-based critic and author oping a conversation around the people that arrive at that building, creating a forum in which an evolving conversation can take place”. A guide to these and other London project spaces can be found on artreview.com

Carl Gent, Over the fallow flood, 2021 (installation view, Jupiter Woods, London). Photo: Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Jupiter Woods, London

October 2021

Deana Lawson Sign Language by Fi Churchman

Holy Mami, 2021, pigment print, 103 × 85 × 7 cm (framed). Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Chief, 2019, pigment print, 147 × 185 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Mama Goma, Gemena, dr Congo, 2014, pigment print, 89 × 112 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

ArtReview

Lives are bound together in a collection of photographs. Two young former slave, Abolitionist and womens’ rights activist Soujourner girls, dressed identically, sit on a sofa: one looks directly at the camera, Truth used portraits of herself in the form of cartes de visite (popular her painted lips pursed in a pout; the other, her sister perhaps, looks at that time among Civil War soldiers who kept them as reminders slightly down, as if caught in a daydream, her attention elsewhere. A of their sweethearts and families, but which were also used to spread woman dressed in a pink swimsuit smiles coyly at the viewer as she political messages) to promote her speeches advocating for the end sits on her topless beau’s lap, locked in an embrace against a back- of slavery. Both Douglass and Truth believed in the power of photogdrop of lush foliage, their neat high-tops, seemingly out of place raphy as a medium that allowed self-representation but that also within the natural environment, appear like a status symbol. A baby, visualised empowerment and defiance for a part of American society just born and still covered in amniotic fluid, is wrapped in a towel more used to this subjecthood being stripped away under the white as their exhausted mother gazes down, her partner’s disembodied gaze: their portraits were the early picturings of basic human rights hand held protectively around her head. Another woman wearing a and social equity. silk purple dressing gown, possibly a mother, styles the hair of her Fast forward more than 150 years and Lawson is photographing nude daughter who sits in a chair in their living room – in one corner an empowering, dignified and visually complex Black aesthetic that stacks of CDs and DVDs, and on the other side of the room, display celebrates African-American culture, tradition and spirituality, as cabinets upon which stand a porcelain doll in Victorian dress, candles, well as those in locations specific to the Black diaspora such as Haiti, and what appear to be a pair of graduation certificate folders proudly Jamaica, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia. taking their place among framed family photographs. The result, perhaps best showcased in her 2018 Aperture monograph Questions of Black agency, dignity and self-determination and forthcoming mack photobook that will accompany her first are addressed in the work of American artist and photographer survey show (opening at ica, Boston, and touring to other instituDeana Lawson. Drawing from photographic genres such as studio tions), is the creation of a kind of universe that makes connections photography, documentary, family photographs and the tableaux, between Black communities in what Lawson calls ‘an ever-expanding mythological extended family’. That Lawson’s large-format colour work Lawson’s work operates within mythology, in part, is due to Lawson’s typically portrays members of her keen eye for constructing scenes that local community in Brooklyn, as well a canon of Black photographic blend her subjects’ lived experiences as strangers, in scenes that reflect portraiture that has been, prior to on family, love, selfhood, beauty, with the imaginary – at once picturing the twenty-first century, largely overpride and the Black aesthetic. It’s them in the reality of their own homes part of an ongoing project to visuand domestic spaces, composing intilooked by art-historical academia mate scenes between strangers, and alise a standard of values that, while informed by certain stylistic qualities, are distinct from and challenge recalling stylistic tropes from art-historical paintings. those that have been imposed by a Western art-history of portraiture Take, for example, Holy Mami (2021), in which a woman poses nude before a mural of the Yoruba goddess of weather O.ya; like the majority that has historically excluded Black bodies. Lawson’s work operates within a canon of Black photographic of Lawson’s subjects, she looks directly into the camera, half kneeling portraiture that has been, prior to the twenty-first century, largely on a sofa draped with a pink and beige satinlike material, one hand overlooked by art-historical academia, but which dates back almost set against the top of her thigh, the other resting against her tilted, to when photography first became a publicly accessible medium. inscrutable face. Adorning her fingers are long, brightly painted In the United States the Goodridge Brothers set up one of the earliest acrylic nails. In recent years, artificial nails and nail art have become Black photography studios in York, Pennsylvania, in 1847, which relo- a beauty trend popularised by celebrities like the Kardashians, whose cated to Saginaw, Michigan, and made daguerreotypes that reflected whiteness has made acceptable what was for many years regarded as a individuals and families in a dignified manner that opposed those look associated with the ‘ghetto’, and as such ‘inappropriate’. (Indeed, taken for anti-Black propagandistic purposes; Frederick Douglass, record-breaking athlete Florence Griffith Joyner was mocked by the a social reformer and freed man who escaped slavery in Maryland us media for the four-inch nails she wore during the 1988 Olympics, before settling in Rochester, New York, and the most photographed despite winning three gold medals.) Lawson’s photograph, however, American of the nineteenth-century, delivered the ‘Lecture on shows that acrylic nails are a means of self-expression and pride – Pictures’ in 1861, arguing that photographs had the power to define in much the same way that jewellery in Renaissance portraiture, for a person and reveal their humanity. This was during a time in example, would be included as a signifier of one’s stature, wealth or which that subject was informed by ethnographists and naturalists family. Gold jewellery appears in Chief (2019) and Black Gold (“Earth turns like George Gliddon, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz, who had to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi) (2021): in the former photograph, made a case for a hierarchical polygenism by ‘proving’ racial infe- made in Ghana, a man sits in his living room wearing gold necklaces, riority via a taxonomy of physical traits. During the same decade, bracelets and a headdress associated with the Asante Empire; in the

following pages Jouvert, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 2013, pigment print, 102 × 126 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

October 2021

ArtReview

latter, another man holds up an array of contemporary gold necklaces. teenagers) following a photo taken by his mother and published on For Lawson, the gold jewellery represents a duality in Black culture, social media, in which he held up three fingers to reflect the number one that has a deeper ancestral meaning: “When I was researching on his football jersey. The school’s quick judgement that the sign gold in West Africa, particularly the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ghana, was associated with the Vice Lords, a Chicago-based gang, brought and most notably in the Asante Kingdom, I realised that the way gold to light the racial bias surrounding hand gestures. In Signs, the focus was worn by chiefs and the Asantehene king is similar to the ways in on the subjects’ hands as signifiers recalls a historical use of gesture which young Black men in hip-hop culture have worn these amazing in paintings, which comes from a system established in the ancient gigantic medallion pieces. Those big gold necklaces – that’s Asante Greco-Roman era known as Chironomia – though these are related right there,” Lawson explains. But in Black Gold, Lawson’s decision to rhetorical and oratory practices, the gestures found their way into to collage in a holographic image of Ron Finley, a Los Angeles-based paintings to denote personal status as well as spiritual intention. In food-access activist, who is working to renature and raise aware- Signs this non-verbal form of communication brings notions around ness of ‘food deserts’ in his city’s South Central area, creates a further language, interpretation, translation and the use of secret codes to multiplicity of meanings. “A mentor once said, ‘You can’t eat gold and the fore: the meanings of the signals are known by some, yet impenyou can’t eat diamonds,’” recalls Lawson. “I wonder about the ways etrable to others. we value these things in society when, in the Anthropocene age, our Collected together in both photobooks, these photographs are planet is becoming more uninhabitable. When one is able to grow further enriched by a format reminiscent of a family album. It’s a one’s food, what does that mean in terms of power? And what if the photographic style that serves as a broad frame of inspiration for subject in Black Gold was selling collard greens and herbs, making just Lawson, whose father was a prolific image-maker of their own family as much money as he is by selling those necklaces and Ralph Lauren and friends, a practice made more widely affordable by Kodak’s develcologne? It’s a question of what value and power means now.” (Until opment of cheaper film and disposable cameras (Lawson’s grandnow, of course, ‘black gold’ is widely used to describe crude oil.) mother and mother were also employees of the Rochester-based firm). Yet more material visual affiliaMultiple depictions of sisters (Roxie “The way gold was worn by chiefs tions with classical Western paintand Raquel, 2010, sit back-to-back on a ings can be found in Ashanti (2005) bed positioned against a bright yellow and the Asantehene king is similar and Sharon (2007), in the folds of the to the ways in which young Black men wall, their arms raised behind their curtains that behave as a backdrop for heads, fingertips touching), lovers (Binky in hip-hop culture have worn these the two nude women. There is some& Tony Forever, 2009, a couple embracing on a gold-duveted bed beside thing of Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus amazing gigantic medallion pieces” which a green drinks bottle contains (1647–51) in Ashanti, in the pose of the woman lying on a bare blue mattress, yet instead of an insular passive yellow flowers, the scene partially reflected by an oval gilt-framed subject gazing at her own reflection, Ashanti turns her head to meet mirror), mothers (Daenare, 2019, pregnant and reclining nude against the viewer (or voyeur) eye to eye. That prolonged eye contact in non- a stairway, decorated by floral and spiral motifs on the tiled floor, Western cultures tends to be regarded as confrontational and a chal- the painting of flowers on the wall and the curling tattoo at her hip lenge to authority lends the sitter’s expression in this photograph a – the image’s softness punctured by the ankle monitor strapped to further magnetic intensity. Non-material associations, too, are made the base of her calf) create a sense of unity, and at the same time they visible in Signs (2016), a photograph of four topless men sporting are undeniably individual in their commitment to perform a sense tattoos, whose bodies are dramatically illuminated in the camera’s of self. Lawson photographs every stage of life, from a newborn held flash – the chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of a Caravaggio painting. in a man’s arms (Sons of Cush, 2016) to Monetta Passing (2021), a funereal Each has their hands raised in various gestures at the camera: two portrait of a woman lying on a bed of purple satin while a mourner sits men do a thumbs down; another points his middle finger into a beside her – the two images quietly connected by the array of framed space between the fingers of the other hand; another holds his family photos displayed on side-tables. By collecting these images in hands in parallel, forefinger tips and thumbs pressed together, as if photobooks as extended family albums, Lawson blends vernacular holding an invisible sheet of paper or cloth, banknotes or the strings and art photography in a way that effects a fundamental shift in our of a puppet. Three of the men’s faces are obscured, either by their perception of the normalised didactics of Western art history, and in gestures or by an anonymising pixilation, while the fourth man, doing so, confronts, challenges and reframes those tropes and iconohis arms raised higher than his fellow subjects, stares directly at the graphies to shape a contemporary Black aesthetic that is bold, affirmlens, his chin jutting in a strong-willed expression. The issue of hand ative and loving. ar signs has a contentious history of being associated with gangs – in 2014, teenager Dontadrian Bruce was suspended from school (in one Work by Deana Lawson is on show at the ICA Boston from 4 November of a number of similar incidents experienced by African-American through 27 February

facing page Sons of Cush, 2016, pigment print, 109 × 138 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

October 2021

Jaider Esbell An ancient vision for a new art by Oliver Basciano

A guerra dos Kanaimés, 2020, acrylic and Posca pen on canvas, 110 × 145 cm. Photo: Marcelo Camacho. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 34th Bienal

Portal Makuxi, from the Jenipapal Series, 2019, Posca pen and natural genipap ink on paper, 42 × 30 cm. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo

A Guerra dosKanaimés (detail), 2020, acrylic and pen on canvas, 110 × 145 cm Photo: Marcelo Camacho. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 34th Bienal

ArtReview

“I’ve never taken a course in art history, I’ve never taken a course their hindlegs, their backs to the viewer. Yet their hands seem human in almost anything related to art, but very early on I had access to and their plumage – which seems a better description than ‘fur’ – is cosmology, right? Another type of art,” says Jaider Esbell. The artist is represented though ornate and detailed multicoloured patterning, a member of the indigenous Makuxi people, whose land is occupied more peacock than canine. These figures, tall and hunched and not by Roraima, the northern state of Brazil, as well as parts of Guyana necessarily friendly in demeanour, are kanaimés, deadly spirits in the and Venezuela. “Mount Roraima is an indigenous work of art, a tradition of the Makuxi people. Elsewhere in the series, three birds mythological, cosmological, and even geological work of art. Why huddle together in a similar formation to the wolves, this time facing is it a work of art? Because Makunaimî” – who the Makuxi consider out of the painting; another canvas shows a goat-like figure merging both a god and an ancestor – “drew it, he made it with the axe and with its highly decorated surroundings. created that sculpture. That’s long, long before Europe existed, long A few weeks prior to the opening of the Bienal, and of an Esbellcurated group show of fellow indigbefore a museum existed in Europe. So enous artists at the city’s Museu de we’re actually way ahead of Europe – “I started to walk a lot in the world, Arte Moderna, we meet in the garden light years.” To see that point made in I met many shamans – pajés, xamãs – of Galeria Millan in São Paulo. Esbell his art, consider one of Esbell’s works speaks to me in Portuguese through an in the recently opened Bienal de São from different peoples. And they interpreter, and we agree he can look Paulo: in Carta ao Velho Mundo (Letter begin to guide me, to expand my at the interview transcription to check to the Old World, 2021), he has drawn awareness to larger cosmogonic issues” the translator’s accuracy. He says that and written over a book of European to not have this control or agency with classical art, layering it with motifs of Makuxi culture and commentary on their cause. respect to his words would be a “colonial” act and run counter to what Spanning an entire end wall of the exhibition pavilion is also his work has been about ever since he started painting: the use of art Guerra dos Kanaimés (War of the Kanaimés, 2020), a long line of paint- as a form of pedagogical activism – “artivism”, as he calls it – aimed at ings by Esbell showing scenes of a forest, the tree canopy drawn with giving voice to his own indigenous group and others. acrylic markers in an exhilarating palette of green, pink, yellow and The latest paintings hark back to one of his earliest works, which blue across a black background, the latter a dominant trope of the shows a baby crowning through the vagina of a woman, its pate black artist’s work since he began showing regularly a decade ago. The effect against the mother’s wide stretched legs. “It’s as if that first work is as if this profusion of colour has exploded from the inky darkness. also gave birth to a little bit of my self-awareness [as an artist],” says The landscape is populated by creatures: some familiar, some, at least Esbell. “This baby was born during an ecological crisis that involves to the European eye, supernatural. Three wolf-like figures stand on and affects everyone’s life.” He went on to make a series titled It Was

A Guerra dos Kanaimés, 2020 (installation view, Bienal de São Paulo). Photo: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

October 2021

Amazon (2016) which, again in white paint on black, depicts incur- interior. “The Makuxi people are essentially warriors,” Esbell says. sions on Makuxi land, the destruction of the forest and the continued “They have survived to this day because they are warriors. They know attack on indigenous cultures. One work shows a boat shipping off how to fight, they know how to make war. A very beautiful war. We a haul of caged birds, with ‘trafico’ written across the prow; in fight very well. And one of these days my mother, teacher, said ‘Jaider, another, a giant figure wearing a fedora drags several others along go! And take the word of the Makuxi to the world’. I am carrying out by their hair. (‘O explorador’ is written above.) A third shows the an order from the women, from the matriarchs of my lineage. And forest cleared and littered. “The baby is born in the Amazon but it sees she heard it from her mother, her grandmother. We’ve always been its birthplace, its crib, deteriorated, destroyed,” the artist explains. in politics.” Esbell moved to the state capital of Boa Vista in 1998 and studied Esbell runs a self-described ‘laboratory’ in Boa Vista, which shows geography at university, before work by artists from multiple indigeWhile Esbell’s formal career dates back a nous ethnicities and runs workshops becoming a lineman at the state electricity company. He left the job in decade, he says that he considers himself on art and theory. Since 2013, he’s organised the Meeting of All Peoples, 2016. “I started to walk a lot in the to have been an artist ever since, aged six, a recurring large-scale group exhibiworld, I met many shamans – pajés, he first heard the stories of Makunaimî, tion. On the opening day of the Bienal, xamãs – from different peoples. And they begin to guide me, to expand which came just after the largest ever both ancestor and a god to the Makuxi my awareness to larger cosmogonic gathering of indigenous people in issues,” he continues. Brasilia – a weeklong occupation protesting land rights ‘reforms’ being “My masters, the shamans, said ‘art is our knowledge’, it is pushed through the supreme court by the far-right government of Jair capable of recreating the world,” in response to which Esbell started Bolsonaro – he and several other exhibiting indigenous artists unfurled introducing colour to his painting. “The black background would a banner declaring it the ‘Bienal dos [of] Indigenous’. He says he wants be emptiness, collapse, and the small fragment of coloured paint to set up an indigenous art ecology that runs parallel to the institutions begins to arouse, to promote again the reintegration of life… These and galleries that grew out of colonialism and exploitative capitalism. paintings, in a way, have the support, the instruction of masters Though he has shown with Galeria Millan, he refuses to be represented of thought from various cosmoloby any gallery other than his own. gies, who nourish me with these “Artivism is this place for us to take those “Artivism is this place for us to take visions through rituals, through those things that don’t reach the mainthings that don’t reach the mainstream ancient practices. And then I, as an stream media, because of machismo, media, because of machismo, patriarchy.” patriarchy,” says Esbell, adding that ‘artist’, start to do a kind of downwhen the Makuxi voice is heard in the load, accessing information from this environment, bringing it to our material, everyday nature. In short, media, “they want to flourish, fantasise and disguise, distort, soften our words. We are in this fight, a fight for life, for territory.” transforming it into a ‘work of art’.” He considers himself to have been an artist ever since, aged six, Yet the artworld, I suggest to him, is also adept at hoovering up he first heard the stories of Makunaimî (whom Esbell says is grossly good political intentions and exploiting them. The Makuxi, Esbell mischaracterised in Mário de Andrade’s 1928 novel of the same name, counters, “could have not given a shit about the world and stayed a founding text of Brazilian modernism). “Makunaimî is our grand- there in Raposa Serra do Sol. There we have everything. Sun, water. father and at the same time our God. We don’t put God somewhere We have millions of diamonds. All our ‘wealth’ is there. But we are not selfish, we are fighting for greater else, he belongs to the family. We dignity. Which is not only indigehave the same dna, our blood is his “We are not selfish, we are fighting for blood. Makunaimî is also the creator greater dignity. Which is not only indig- nous, it is human. In fact much more of everything we know, a creator of than human. We are fighting for the enous, it is human. In fact, much more worlds.” He continues: “The creaEuropean, we are fighting for the tive ability that I bring to my work than human. We are fighting for the Eu- children, the children of the guys comes, I have no doubt, from this ropean, we are fighting for the children, who killed our family, because we are of that nature, do you understand? idea of enlightenment, this ability to the children of the guys who killed our That’s ‘artivism’. It is something that reconstitute things apparently from cannot be explained. Call it love, nothing, from the absolute emptifamily, because we are of that nature” madness, anything, but it’s an energy ness. From the thing that doesn’t even exist in the material world.” with which the mother tells us to fight. So, we are not fighting for the In the Makuxi tradition, kanaimés can be malevolent – deadly even maintenance of privileges, which is this mediocre thought that these – or they can come to the defence of those to whom they feel an alle- Brazilians think we have, privileges. We don’t have any privileges. So, giance. Outside the pavilion, on a lake in Ibirapuera Park, the artist for me it is very clear that the urgency is ecological, it is transracial and installed a pair of 17-metre inflatable snakes, whose purple-and-pink transgenerational, transcosmological.” ar patterned bodies each end in a pair of red eyes. The beasts are thought to offer the Makuxi protection. They face towards a permanent Work by Esbell in on show at Moquém_Surarî: Contemporary granite statue commemorating the seventeenth-century bandeiras, Indigenous Art at MAM São Paulo, through 28 November, and the Bienal de São Paulo, through 5 December the flag-carrying slavers and fortune hunters who ‘discovered’ Brazil’s

ArtReview

Entidades, 2021 (installation view, Bienal de São Paulo). Photo: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

October 2021

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And that has never been translated 87

Women in Abstraction Centre Pompidou, Paris 19 May – 23 August In recent years, museums have embraced a trend for exhibitions devoted to overlooked female modernists. Capitalising on the resurgence of political feminism, these retrospectives have served as correctives to the hitherto maledominated timeline of twentieth-century art history, the best of them (most notably Tate Modern’s 2015 Sonia Delaunay show) setting a new standard for institutional surveys, and in a broader sense presenting instructive challenges to prior understandings of modernism. Into this lineage steps Women in Abstraction: a vast survey of women’s role in the development of abstract art, and one that can be read as an attempt to synthesise the disparate narratives proposed by earlier exhibitions into a definitive new interpretation of the canon. Beginning in the 1860s and finishing up,

without explanation, in the 1980s, the show is structured as a series of thematic microexhibitions, with the odd space dedicated to the work of a single artist. It is an enormously ambitious undertaking, incorporating 500plus works by 106 artists. The story starts in Victorian England, where the spiritualist Georgiana Houghton devoted herself to creating a body of watercolours that she claimed had been mediated to her by her artistic forebears. The works are presented on plinths, allowing us to see both the intricate, cosmic images and the contextual information that the artist jotted down on the reverse: ‘[I,] Correggio, have endeavoured through Georgiana’s hand, to represent The Eye of God’, begins one. This introduction to the nineteenth-century esoteric sets the scene

for the emergence of theosophy, the occultist faith that so enraptured the likes of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Yet before either of them was Hilma af Klint, the Swedish theosophist whose monolithic devotional paintings were arguably the first true works of abstraction. If you’ve ever encountered her art before, the examples of it on show here – for instance, the targetlike The Swan, No. 16 (1915) – will seem familiar, but previous arguments that af Klint was a savant working in isolation from the avant-garde are solidly rebutted; for one thing, we now know that Kandinsky admired her work and visited her at least once. Rather more interesting are a number of works by theosophist fellowtravellers, notably the Dutch mythographer Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, whose vividly coloured

Saloua Raouda Choucair, Fractional Module (detail), 1947–51. Photo: dr. Courtesy Galerie Saleh Barakat. © Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation

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works on paper from the 1920s appear to draw on Constructivism as a graphic reference for her imaginings. What follows is a wild ride through the interwar period, taking in avant-garde dance, Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s adventures in functional design, Vorticism and, most revelatory, a section devoted to the women abstractionists of revolutionary Russia. Varvara Stepanova in particular stands out for her proto-Op art textile designs, while Alexandra Exter’s watercolour visions for theatre sets are as radically futuristic as anything from the period. If proceedings so far have been heavy on the decorative arts, it’s no coincidence: as we are consistently and convincingly reminded, women artists tended to be relegated to the institutional Siberia of craft. A section on the

Bauhaus, for instance, points out that of the departmental heads at the nominally genderequal school, only one – Gunta Stölzl – was a woman; her domain was the textile department. By the time we reach 1939, the show still has two thirds left to run. Small wonder: postwar abstraction – previously an artistic language with relatively few practitioners that was, by its very nature, a radical statement – became the global lingua franca for contemporary art. For the curators, this poses a problem: there are suddenly too many players for the exhibition to maintain its previously slick coherence. Save for a couple of rooms – notably those that depart from Anglo-European-centrism, instead concentrating on movements in Lebanon, Japan, Korea and Brazil – the show becomes increasingly unfocused. Paradoxically, it also starts

to feel like an exercise in box-ticking, as big names (Frankenthaler, Hepworth, Krasner, Clark, Martin, Riley, Bourgeois) are breathlessly crossed off the checklist with second-rate and sometimes unrepresentative works. There are many exceptions, but in general, proceedings get duller and more confused the closer we come to the present day. To complain that a survey like this one isn’t a different exhibition entirely is bad form. Yet it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that Women in Abstraction would have benefitted from a tighter historical focus. If it tells us anything, it’s that the story of women’s involvement in abstract art is as disparate as abstraction itself; on this evidence, it is far too various to summarise in the space of a single exhibition. Digby Warde-Aldam

Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 16, Group ix/suw, 1915. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Courtesy the Hilma af Klint Foundation

October 2021

Paula Rego Tate Britain, London 7 July – 24 October There’s a small painting, the oldest one, in the opening room of this chronologically organised retrospective, that seems to anticipate something of the coldly quizzical, dreamlike register of sexual anxiety and violence found in Paula Rego’s later work; the work for which, in the last 30 years, Rego has become famous. The Interrogation (1950) would have been painted when she was fifteen, two years before she enrolled at London’s Slade School, having been sent to Britain by parents keen to get her away from the catholic conservatism and political repression of Portugal’s one-party dictatorship under António de Oliveira Salazar. In the painting, a skinny, drably clothed woman sits on a chair, head bowed and clasped in one hand, as two male figures, their heads outside of the frame, stand threateningly on either side of her, fists clenched. The odd feature – maybe unintended by the young painter but diverting the viewer’s attention within this otherwise formulaic attempt at political realism – is the slight bulge in the crotch of the man on the right. Once seen, it’s hard to unsee, but it lets slip something about what Rego would come to be known for, years later: a sardonic, inquiring, discomfiting attention to the power of men and the rebellion of women, and of desire and violence; a political question embedded in how women might be depicted, but also – critical for any consideration of Rego’s work – how women depict themselves. The Interrogation sits awkwardly outside and before Rego’s career as a woman painter in a world of men: marrying her tutor Victor Willing, living between Britain and Portugal, and by the beginning of the 1960s rejecting the realist mannerism of the Slade in favour of a wild, crude, Dubuffet-inspired mix of painting and collage, full of surrealistic biomorphic forms and bitter satire of the authoritarian conditions in her native Portugal. Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960) is a gathering of abject figures: some kind of white bottom on legs, puking out of a long neck, next to what looks like a pear (or vulva?) atop a hairy fruit or testicle.

It’s hard not to get the sense here that, through the 1960s, Rego is struggling to work out whether the avant-garde legacies of art brut, surrealism and expressionism could really work for her, as the styles of the prewar are tried on like costumes, while other more recent trends in the art of the time jostle for her interest. Turkish Bath (1960) incorporates bits of consumer advertising for women’s cosmetics (one fragment is apparently for some bogus ointment for breast enlargement), nodding to the advent of Pop art, along with the clean, flat colours allowed by the arrival of acrylic paint, but also groping to work out how to address the new consumer culture’s objectification of women from a woman’s perspective. By the mid-60s Rego’s canvases are full of twisted, gnarled half-figures, increasingly delineated by clear graphic lines rather than sploshed paint. These are not realistic subjects, though the way they are rendered is pulling them back to a sense of realistic forms and bodies; the most recent of these, The Firemen of Alijo (1966), is a baroque tumble of mythical figures falling out of a terracotta sky, a fusion of cartooning, fishtails, ferns and fins, bits of architecture, intestinelike trails and much else that evades description. And then, it seems, Rego has had enough of this Pop-retrofitted surrealism. The Firemen, if we follow the biographical story, was followed by the death of her father, depression and what the artist has described as ‘general decline for years’. Jungian therapy would bring her back to folk tales and fairy stories, and a return to more traditional means of drawing and depiction. Rego’s way through to her knowing, claustrophobic world – of determined young women and childlike adults in De Chiricoesque interiors, where intimacy is forever troubled by sadism and obsession – was through the return to figuration that more broadly marked the end of the 70s and early 80s. Paintings like the creepy The Little Murderess, tiptoeing to strangle her victim, or The Policeman’s Daughter (both 1987), her arm dutifully thrust into a riding boot as she

The Pillowman, 2004. Collection Ostrich Arts Limited. © the artist

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polishes it by moonlight, opened this otherwise rather blokeish reaction to the possibilities of psychosexual mischief and a female view of gendered power and codependency, just as the artworld was trying to work out the contradictions of the ‘revival of painting’, while also trying to make sense of feminist theory. By the 1990s Rego is in full stride. Dog Woman (1994) is still ugly and impressive, her baying, cornered model devoid of dignity, left with only a savage will to survive and stand her ground. A more subdued brutality suffuses the series of large Untitled pastels Rego made in response to the failed referendum on legalising abortion in Portugal in 1998. Rego’s weary, impassive women lie and kneel alongside plastic buckets and squat on bedpans that, it’s implied, are the miserable accessories of criminalised abortion. By the 2000s Rego’s scope combines sexual politics, patriarchy and the spectres of fascism and Portugal’s own history of colonialism in ever more ambitious allegorical scenes in which her female subjects appear alongside nightmarishly outsize puppetlike characters, such as in the triptych The Pillowman (2004), with its oppressively flaccid, bulbous-headed figure, always asleep while women look after him, with glances that blend anxiety and disdain. Hints of a broader violence and repression – Christian crucifixes, the peculiarly tropical coastal background of the middle painting (and Pillowman’s own racially caricatured head) – turn the psychopolitical tensions of race, sex and class into a sinister, overlit burlesque. It’s maybe fitting that figurative painting – historical bastion of the male artist and (in today’s language) the ‘male gaze’ – should be so confidently ransacked and remade by an artist who had to put up for so long with an artworld that kept women at the margins. But Rego’s skill at materialising her subtle, self-conscious view of empathy, desire and the powerful forces that corrupt the lives of women and men, invents a world that, while acknowledging this everyday damage, does so knowing it can be overcome. J.J.Charlesworth

October 2021

Martine Syms Loot Sweets Bridget Donahue, New York 15 July – 25 September Cita was a woman of the new millennium: clever, stylish and self-made. As the host of the tv programme Cita’s World (1999–2003), she played music videos, responded to fan mail, commented on celebrity gossip and delivered blunt cultural criticism. The catch is that she wasn’t real. A brainchild of Black Entertainment Television (bet) producer Curtis A. Gadson, Cita was the first Black virtual-reality character on television. When Martine Syms was in her early teens, she watched Cita’s World religiously, and for this tour-de-force exhibition at Bridget Donahue she wrote down the advice that she wishes Cita could have given her. In a new video, kittie KaBoom, Cita’s original voice actor, resurrects the avatar – here named Kita – who speaks to us in a leather miniskirt and tube top from the rendered bet control room. Materterine talk of Black hairdos and barbecues takes a turn when Kita directly addresses Syms’s fellow millennials: “On the one hand, you is the bridge, the connective tissue, that Gorilla Glue between generations. On the other hand, y’all social media crash-test dummies.” Lab rats in a corporate behavioural experiment, the young people who came of age with the internet have developed a dangerously antisocial materialism, she argues. “Y’all don’t even realise that capitalism resigned y’all to sketch out a culture of total simony,” warns Kita, adding sagely that “the world has collapsed many times”. Our only choice, she continues, is to “embrace change”.

The work initiates a relay of other new videos that play in custom frames collaged together from shopping bags, receipts, photographs and various signifiers of millennial cool. Along with a series of accompanying sculptures, these incorporate logos for hip fashion labels Telfar and Eckhaus Latta, and ephemera from hotspots around Los Angeles, where Syms lives and works: a hand towel from the local techno party Boiler Room, a business card from a Glendale acupuncturist, a hat from the photo and video store chain B&H and a receipt from a vegetarian restaurant in Highland Park, all sutured with packing tape bearing the name of Syms’s press, Dominica Publishing, or the logo for Zankou Chicken, a popular Armenian rotisserie joint. T-shirts and stickers printed with pithy statements – ‘She Mad’, ‘Boring Life Isn’t It’ – add a touch of disaffection familiar from Instagram accounts like @affirmations. All this forms a composite portrait of the artist and her generation in the ironic lingua franca of the internet, their identities comprising so many slogans torn up and pasted back together like memes. Syms’s layering of the personal and commercial are in line with the current absence of any boundary between life and lifestyle. In the exhibition’s second video, a series of Black athletes – a runner, a golfer, a gymnast – perform gracefully across the screen. Languorous shots of glowing blue jellyfish melt into a screensaver view of Stonehenge at sunset and, finally, slow pans of Artemisia Gentileschi’s

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Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612–13). The baroque, protofeminist masterpiece tugs on a narrative thread of emotional turmoil in the exhibition that jibes with the millennial penchant for self-analysis. Soon after, a third video plays, in which a digital avatar clearly modelled on the artist, wearing a ‘To Hell With My Suffering’ T-shirt, reassembles herself from a pile of bloodied limbs. “If I waited ’til I was ready, I would never do a thing,” a plaintive voice sings as Syms stumbles wearily forward. “I just want to feel something,” we hear as she vomits, falls, picks herself back up again; shoots herself in the head; and commits hara-kiri. The refrain of dull affirmations continues: “May I be well, may I be happy” and, echoing Kita, “The only God is change”. It’s a scene redolent of Ed Atkins, but with a greater sense of existential dread. Yet just when we feel trapped in a cycle of trauma, Kita reappears in a fourth and final video in a state of apotheosis. Floating in lotus position over drone footage of fields and forests, she leads a guided meditation, reminding us, “Sometimes we need to let go”. That’s always the hardest part in capitalism, yet the only way to create change. Living our lives largely online, defined by our patterns of consumption, we form Gorilla Glue attachments that are difficult to break. Syms lingers in that breach, asking us to consider what’s left when the world inevitably collapses again: a pile of limbs, a renewed sense of purpose, a voice of reason from beyond the virtual grave. Evan Moffitt

all images Loot Sweets (installation views), 2021. Photos: Gregory Carideo. Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

October 2021

Tala Madani Chalk Mark Pilar Corrias Savile Row, London 8 July – 8 September Chalk Mark represents – marks – a graduation of sorts from the chocolatey brown smears and splatters with which the artist shapes despairing and beshitted figures – often women – and the ghostly producers of all this effluent – babies and young children. This is the second of two consecutive exhibitions of Madani’s paintings at Pilar Corrias (the first, Skid Mark, was staged at the gallery’s longtime Fitzrovia address; Chalk Mark inaugurates an airy new space in Mayfair). Here the visitor finds a palette of marginally lighter tones across 15 mediumto largescale works, as well as the recurring figure of a saluting uniformed man beaming out at the world as though from a recruitment poster. Many of the moods and themes that are hallmarks of Madani’s work – exhausted befuddlement, priapism, deadpan, pitchdark explorations of the overlap between

procreation and digestion – remain central to this exhibition, though as the shift in titles from faecal marks to instructive chalk marks suggests, there is also an expanding interest in how children learn, both formally and through observation and imitation. The most prominent works, physically and conceptually, are three ‘blackboard’ paintings: white ‘chalk’ lines drawn quickly across green ‘slate’ backgrounds, with previous efforts visible in the smears – now white – of erasure and redrawing. In one, titled Blackboard (Further Education) (2021), a doctor operates on the coiled intestines of a stick-figure human; a world globe sits atop a table poised for use; a naked hairless man lies prone on the floor, his gaping mouth receiving a line of miniature figures who climb in and then ‘graduate’ from between his buttocks, clad now in black gowns and

Perfect Copy ii, 2021, oil on linen, 100 × 80 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

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mortarboards. Lying alongside the man is a child undergoing the same, hapless experience, but presented with a more sketchy, perhaps childish perspective: in contrast to the curves and details with which the man’s anatomy has been rendered, the child is all stick-figure limbs and a scratch of hair; instead of gowned graduates, he farts exclamation points and question marks. Whether bodily function, developmental stage or classroom learning, this process is clearly inevitable and often unpleasant. Barely visible in an upper corner of this work is where it all begins: the erased outlines of two lumpen figures in bed. It’s not all sex, shit, violence, death – there’s humour too, of the dark, survival sort, to be found in the fraught, beleaguering intimacy of life, and it is here that Madani consistently makes herself at home. David Terrien

Gillian Steiner Vernon Gardens, Los Angeles 17 July – 21 August In her final interview before her death, in 2019, Agnès Varda recalled meeting the photographer Brassaï when she was a young filmmaker. As she described it, he advised her to ‘“take your time, look at things. Look carefully.” I liked the idea that it’s not the act,’ Varda recalled, ‘it’s what you have in mind before you take a picture.’ In the decades since this encounter, numerous female artists have taken on the project of ‘reclaiming the male gaze’ over women. Significantly fewer have, like Varda, probed the experience of subjection to this gaze and how the awareness of its presence might inform the very actions they document. Photographer Gillian Steiner similarly mines the presuppositions of viewer and subject alike. Hers is the record of an unreliable narrator who troubles the division between performance and truth.

In this intimate exhibition of ten small photographs, the women Steiner depicts reveal the multifaceted realities of gendered performance. There are no men, though some works feature dogs and children, and there’s one night-lit shot of startled donkeys. Like the photographer Roe Ethridge, Steiner wryly imitates the tropes of highly stylised, even campy fashion photography, as in Playgirl (2021), whose nude model lies Odalisque-like poolside, wrapped in a serpentine garden hose. But in contrast to the vacant smiles of Ethridge’s models, Steiner’s subject, vamping for the camera, is in on the joke from within the frame. The photographs range from posed to candid, with many residing in between. A young woman cradles a baby doll in a frontal

wrap (Fake Baby, 2019), perhaps experimenting with motherhood, perhaps simply reenacting the image of it for the camera. Mennonite Mother and Child (2020), which shows a bonneted Mennonite mother cradling her child on the beach, formally recalls Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother (1936), a gaunt Depression-era migrant mother who also averts our eyes. Yet these subjects, however consumed by, respectively, the reverie of new motherhood and poverty, must surely have been aware of the person capturing them at such close range. These works are moored in the performance of femininity. Steiner trains her eye inward, recording the experience specific (while not unique) to female-presenting persons who are being watched and have taken on agency in deciding what to do with this gaze. Cat Kron

Mennonite Mother and Child, 2020, digital c-print, 55 × 79 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist

October 2021

Born Again Berlin by Martin Herbert Anyone flying into Berlin recently would have encountered a reshaped cultural and infrastructural landscape, discernible even in a city where renovation never rests. For starters, they’d arrive at the long-delayed, super-sterile Berlin Brandenburg airport, whose recent opening also served to gestate more culture. For when the conveniently central airport Tegel closed in consequence, it did so with sonambiente berlin txl, a minifestival of sound art that featured eerie audio accompaniments to wandering the deserted hallways of its iconic hexagon – including Susan Philipsz humming Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (1978), and Blixa Bargeld’s melancholy announcements of nonexistent flights – and, on several occasions, enticing Lagos-flavoured dj sets by Emeka Ogboh out on the tarmac. Art-related farewells have, of late, been a bit of a thing in Berlin: the Bierpinsel, a futuristic tower – shaped like a tree but called the ‘Beer Brush’ – from 1976 in the southwest of the city, was given a sendoff in September via experimental electronica and a ‘guided ritual’ by artist/musician Ayesha Tan Jones. These, however, were not the splashiest developments. In late summer, the city’s Berlin Palace opened, a reconstruction of the seventeenthcentury baroque edifice that stood there until 1950. This now houses the Humboldt Forum museum, and is a fabulous place if you like multiple cafés and giftshops, soulless atria, rambling displays of Berlin’s history and ‘interactive’, choose-your-own-adventure signage; restitution controversies over the ethnographic collection are meanwhile evolving in real time. And yet, soothing symmetry: as this white elephant finally laid to rest its (in retrospect, pretty great) modernist gdr predecessor, the Palace of the Republic (1976–90), another sleek twentiethcentury box was revived. Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, shuttered for the last six years, returned with rehung collection displays, a subterranean warren of rumbling projectors and partly abstract films courtesy of Rosa Barba, and, most ostentatiously, a loan-heavy Alexander Calder show mixing his looming public sculptures, graceful mobiles, dinky maquettes and bespoke chess sets. As this display doubled down on the glass-box building’s abundant modernist froideur – and sidestepped the main space’s

famous hitch, no walls – the implicit message from the Calder/Mies combo was that classic modernism is forever. (Unless, as above, it was made by communists.) That’s underwritten by the building’s David Chipperfield Architects-directed refit, which has involved all kinds of invisible shoring-up, unobtrusive updating and a cost of €140 million. Yet a few weeks after the opening, news broke that there’d be a new boss, too: Klaus Biesenbach, cofounder of Berlin’s kw Institute for Contemporary Art, aka Kunst-Werke, but long a sojourner in the us; and so the programme, in turn, is likely to become showier and angled towards the new. Anyway, the city’s commercial galleries, sensing synergy and attention, doffed their caps with ‘Mies in Mind’, a simultaneous raft of exhibitions relating in varying degree to the architect’s work. These ranged from the literal (a group show of responses to the Barcelona Pavilion at Nordenhake; Jorge Pardo’s for lilly reich at Neugerriemschneider, a suite of undulating semiabstract paintings dedicated to the eponymous designer and Mies collaborator), to lateral exercises like Galerie Nagel Draxler’s Heimo Zobernig miniretrospective, a forestlike mix of upright figures and geometric forms predicated blandly on the Austrian sculptor and the German architect’s shared interest in bodies and abstraction. Spoilsport shows interrogating Mies’s futile overtures to the Nazi regime before he decamped to the us were notable by their absence. Not all galleries caved in to the starchitect imperative, either. Esther Schipper, for example, gave a debut show to French artist Etienne Chambaud that served to summon, or suggest, many ghostly presences: the exhibition was a low-lit, atmospheric mix of, among other things, icon paintings whose faces are covered with gold leaf; ceiling-hung lighting panels designed to specifically mimic, say, the light on Mars in the late fifteenth century (don’t ask how); a bronze sculpture of conjoined severed birds’ necks; and a scent installation that used chemical compounds common to animal markings and ‘human environments’ to generate some kind of scent that cross-splices the habitats of tigers and cinema multiplexes. Which sounds exciting, until you realise you’re in a gallery that’s maintaining a mask policy.

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Knottier fare was on offer at Biesenbach’s old stomping ground, Kunst-Werke, where the group show Zeros and Ones treated algorithms as an organising principle for nondigital artworks, focusing on proposals that combine the everyday world and stepby-step unemotional processes as analogies for deeply impersonal systems of social control. In practice, within a show slanted towards women artists, this meant a lot of work that iterates without conclusion and advertises external authority, and which – in part – addressed our current relationship to computers as but the latest stage in a progressive depersonalisation, without including much recent or digital work. (In a show named, seemingly, after Sadie Plant’s 1997 book about women and computers, this was a feat of curatorial legerdemain.) So, for example, the exhibition cued up Lutz Bacher’s In Memory of My Feelings (1990), a sequence of T-shirts placed in Donald Judd-like wall mounted metal trays bearing incomplete statements such as ‘If I weren’t afraid of myself, I might’ (…) and ‘Mother always was’ (…), phrases based on a medical questionnaire Bacher was given prior to having her uterus removed: a process captured on video in the six-hour Huge Uterus (1989). Sturtevant’s Study for Yvonne Rainer’s “Three Seascapes” (1967), photographs showing her performing the eponymous choreography, meanwhile offered a further twist on the artist’s long-running undoing of meaning and artistic selfhood, serving as a culture-jamming microcosm of the refusal to be understood and constrained within a larger structure – society, say. And Tishan Hsu’s Bio-Cube (1988), a squarish, low-slung ‘utility unit’ in flesh-coloured tiles – looking a bit like a miniature pink Neue Nationalgalerie, with various stainless-steel ingresses that suggest places for washing but also, if you squint, screens – here ominously and emphatically reflected the artist’s belief that modernity and, increasingly, the digital condition have erased the self. Mies, who once said that ‘the individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us’, might have been looking down happily, for all the wrong reasons.

top Mies in Mind, 2021 (installation view, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin). Photo: Matthias Lindner. Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Stockholm & Mexico City

above Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2021. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

October 2021

Hetain Patel Trinity John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 3 August – 30 October Mixing the production values of mainstream Hollywood movies with actors drawn from marginalised communities in Britain and a deep, deep love of martial-arts films, Trinity gathers a trilogy of films by Bolton-born Hetain Patel in a setting that gives something of the feel of a multiplex cinema experience. Aided by the John Hansard Gallery’s architecture (a contemporary purpose-built arts complex with a glazed corner facade, to which it relocated in 2018) and its location next to the shops, bars and restaurants of Southampton’s city centre. Oh, and an artist-designed giftshop – part exhibit, part marketplace – in the show. In the two-channel installation The Jump (2015), Patel, clothed in a very convincing homemade Spider-Man costume, performs one of the character’s signature crouching leaps, filmed in ultra-slow motion. One channel features Spider-Man leaping through a foggy night sky, just like in the movies; the other, screened on the reverse of the first, locates the same scene in Patel’s grandmother’s Bolton living-room, where a sofa serves as

the springboard and an ornate carpet as a landing pad, while 17 members of the artist’s family, dressed in decorated saris, kurtas and other types of Indian formal wear, and somewhat crushed into the space, witness the act. Posed as if waiting to join the collection of family photographs that decorate the matriarch’s walls. The whole has the feel of schoolboy fantasy meets reality, while conjuring notions of costume and identity (some of those clothed in the Indian formalwear are white), escapism, transformation and appropriation. And the potential to leave all that behind when you don a suit and a mask. But just for a moment, however slowed down and suspended that moment might be. The second film in the trilogy, Don’t Look at the Finger (2015), is at once more expansive and exotic. The title derives from one of Bruce Lee’s catchphrases in Enter the Dragon (1973) and the action centres on a balletic fight scene choreographed Hong Kong-style with a touch of contemporary dance, a fusion broadly identifiable with movies such as The Matrix (1999) that borrow from the genres. While the action may

The Jump (still), 2015, two-channel video installation, 6 min 32 sec. Courtesy John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

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derive from East Asia, the video’s two main protagonists are Black and dressed in brightly coloured, luxurious robes influenced by West Africa. Asian moves and African aesthetics. A man and a woman, the actors seem to be engaged in what may be a ceremony that’s part of a formal or arranged marriage, witnessed by similarly dressed attendants. The action plays out in a choreographed fight in which the pair seem to be feeling each other out and testing who has the upper hand in the union’s power dynamics. A battle of the sexes. All of it conducted without dialogue and purely through the actions of the body and the hands. It’s not just the bodies that perform but the clothes that cover them; after each ‘round’, the attendants adjust the costumes so that they take on a different pattern and shape. You might see the whole as an attempt to place the Black body centre stage in a blockbuster-style production, or as an attempt to test the hybrid cultural references and aesthetics that are so much a part of real life in the urban West and in the often unreal and unrepresentative world of the

mainstream cinema that those urbanites consume. Although this is notably an aesthetic, and a blend, that has since been replicated to some degree in an actual blockbuster: Marvel Studio’s Black Panther (2018). And presumably for many people seeing Patel’s work for the first time, that connection is going to appear to be the other way around. Perhaps there’s a satisfaction in getting there first; perhaps there’s a satisfaction in the fact that Patel’s motivations are not commercial (Don’t Look at the Finger was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella with Manchester Art Gallery and quad, and supported by the Jerwood Choreographic Research Fund). But then there’s the shop. A statement by the artist displayed at its entrance includes the line: ‘In the world where we – as marginalised people – are typically given the soap drama, EastEnders [a long-running uk soap opera, set in London’s ‘gritty’, working-class East End] treatment, rather than the big movie Batman treatment, we have to create our own’. Accordingly, Patel’s giftshop includes a range of clothing (unisex bomber jackets and shirts – you can buy them online), boxed action figures of characters from the three films (prototypes of products to come) and posters, postcards and tote bags (available from the museum shop). A mix, then, of revolution and capitalism; art and

commerce. A critique of sorts, but representative of a desire to join the object of that critique as well. If the first two works seem not far removed from documentary records of dance performances, the final film in the trilogy, a new work, Trinity (2021), represents an evolution of sorts. Featuring a more extended plot, verbal (a mix of Gujarati and English) as well as nonverbal dialogue and multiple locations and character relationships, the video centres on a young British Indian woman (played by Vidya Patel, a dancer and performer trained in the classical Kathak dance form) and her encounters with a motor mechanic (played by deaf dancer and performer Raffie Julien) and her mother, who we learn at the beginning of the film was told that the souls of their ancestors lie sleeping in women’s bodies. The work riffs off the two younger women, with the mother, her home filled with avatars of Hindu deities (the opening shot lingers on a garlanded image of Saraswati), attempting to organise an arranged marriage for her daughter as she supervises and critiques the latter’s Kathak dance practice. The daughter’s bedroom is decorated with Transformer-style toys, and it is within this space that she constructs a superhero costume of her own. She has rage. Taken out at one point on a car that nearly runs her off the road, which she keys and steals.

From there she meets the deaf mechanic, with whom she struggles to communicate. Eventually the pair fight, in the manner of the performers in Don’t Look at the Finger, gradually reaching some form of understanding through a seemingly universal language combining sign language, Tai Chi and other martial-arts moves, as their bodies flickeringly shapeshift through the multiethnic, variously sexed bodies of what we presume are their ancestors or representative of some of the cultural forms they appropriate. To a greater extent than its predecessors, Trinity rises above its slick choreography and seductive aesthetics – in part because of the evident trouble, conflict and frustration in the main character’s soul as she attempts to find a place in the multiple realities she inhabits – yet at the same time you could see it as little more than an expanded and complexified form of the cultural confrontation of The Jump, and the exploration of body language in Don’t Look at the Finger. While the trilogy certainly moves, develops, is perfectly sumptuous in the production, performance and staging of each individual film, and makes a point about the nature of tradition, access to representation and the hybrid reality of urban cultural landscapes, it’s not so clear that it actually goes anywhere. Mark Rappolt

Trinity (still), 2021, video, 23 min. Courtesy John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

October 2021

34th Bienal de São Paulo Fundação Bienal de São Paulo 4 September – 5 December The artist Uýra describes themself as a ‘hybrid entity’, part human, part of nature: in the 15 photographs that open the Bienal de São Paulo, this quasi-mystical figure seems to merge with or perhaps come from the landscapes in which they pose. In one, a single blue dilated eye peers out from a mass of straw hair, their body painted a deep ochre through which chest hair pokes; the ruddy palette blends with the excavated earth of the pit in which the artist stands. A digger can be seen in the background. In another, their skin now oily black, shells covering their eyes, Uýra stands in a heavily littered landscape, a beach of discarded plastic and chemical slime: an alien being born of a polluted world that is in itself not alien, simply ours now. The downbeat introduction to the exhibition continues: nearby, a giant meteorite sits on a plinth, one of the few objects left undamaged by the fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, which set off widespread mourning and anger in this country. The black surface of this extraterrestrial survivor is replicated in the dozens of monotypes by Carmela Gross on the wall behind, each a single sooty smudge – akin to an enlarged dirty fingerprint – titled Boca do Inferno (Hellmouth, 2020). Curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti’s opening gambit captures the sombre mood of Brazil in 2021. The exhibition, titled Though it’s dark, still I sing, was delayed by a year as Brazil sleepwalked its way into one of the pandemic’s most rampant hotspots, a negligent government presiding over the death of half a million of its citizens. Fires burn throughout the Amazon – a consequence of the deforestation carried out with the tacit approval of President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right administration; a new attack on indigenous land-rights is being orchestrated through the courts as I write; and inflation is going through the roof, leaving the always-precarious working population floundering. Even the arts, so often perceived as a bastion of optimism in a land that is frequently the locus of negative critique, are sullied in Visconti’s introductory picture: up the ramp to the first of the three further floors of the Oscar Niemeyerdesigned Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion – home to the Bienal since 1957 – the visitor will find Ana Adamović’s My Country is the Most Beautiful of All (2011–13), a film that reunites the members of a 1970s Yugoslavian choir to sing a song steeped in nationalism. The composition, which may have sounded sweet (if cynical) in the voices of children, feels grim when sung by weary adults. Nearby play a series of ‘news reports’ made by

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Andrea Fraser for the 1998 Bienal, intended for broadcast on Brazilian television but never aired. With her trademark satire, the American artist interrogated the Bienal through a series of pointed interviews with that edition’s curator, Paulo Herkenhoff, and other such luminaries, including Brazil’s then culture minister. The latter waxes lyrical about the importance of corporate sponsorship, which back then extended to companies like Kodak being given concessions to sell their wares within the show itself. The inclusion of Fraser’s work is a pointed bit of institutional self-reflection by Visconti. As his show progresses, there unfolds a much needed recognition of Black and indigenous artmakers: in Carta ao Velho Mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2021) Makuxi artist and activist Jaider Esbell has written and drawn across a book of European art-history in condemnation of the colonisation of indigenous lands; next to Lasar Segall’s brooding semi-cubist 1950s oil paintings of forests, and Lygia Pape’s Amazonias – neo-concretist red steel sculptures dating from the 1990s – is a series of double-sided works by Daiara Tukano suspended from the gallery ceiling. On one side of each, the artist – who belongs to the Yepá Mahsã people (also known as Tukano) – uses acrylic to depict birds sacred to her people; on the verso are bright abstract weavings using feathers. Likewise Sueli Maxakali has built an installation of dresses and masks dedicated to the Yãmiyhex, the spirit women in Maxakali cosmology. An exhibition highlight is the ink drawings of Abel Rodríguez, now based in Bogotá, who draws the flora and fauna of the Colombian Amazon from memory, in the Nonuya tradition of recording the natural world. A series of collages by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Jamaican dub pioneer who died just days before the exhibition’s opening, make reference to the transatlantic slave trade, as do the largescale paintings of Brazilian Arjan Martins, who also contributes an installation in which a thick rope is strung across the vast venue, tied around pillars, the two ends meeting at an anchor to form a triangle representing the trade route between the European and African continents and the Americas. As traumatic, but less bombastic, are two delicate embroideries by João Cândido, a Black Brazilian sailor jailed for his role in an uprising against the corporal punishment meted out to Black sailors in the navy, many of whom had been forced into service. One is dedicated to love, the other to freedom, their beauty at odds with the circumstances of their creation: made in prison

ArtReview

around 1910, they recall the injustice that birthed Brazil and remains endemic within it today. In the context of such works confronting structural racism past and present, Fraser’s inclusion suggests, even more emphatically, that Visconti (an Italian-born white male) recognises that the organisation that appointed him should also be the subject of critique. And for all the laudable antiracism on show here, the Bienal – the preeminent exhibition of a country in which white people account for less than half the population – has never in its 70-year history been led by a Black or indigenous curator. Few women have been appointed to lead it either. And yet, despite all this, Though it’s dark, still I sing provides some space for optimism. Indeed, from its mournful beginning an emotional journey cleverly unfolds as one proceeds up the pavilion’s ramps. Surrogates, a 2016 slide projection by American artist Amie Siegel, depicts repairs made to ancient and classical European artefacts. Nearby is an exhibit of Tupiniquim earthenware, the likes of which were swapped with Portuguese settlers in an attempt to preserve indigenous identity (and possibly stave off violence) and which went on to be appropriated into the colonial ceramica paulista style. That they are now being shown institutionally, and due credit made to the inspiration they provided, is itself a moment of social repair. The last floor features many artists the visitor has previously encountered – Esbell again, Rodríguez, more phenomenal sculpture by Juraci Dórea, an artist who, apart from documenting their installation in photographs and texts, would walk away from works he’d placed in the landscape of Brazil’s northeast, an environment that informed their making (and where they tended to be found and disassembled by locals, who would use the materials, often leather, to patch up hats and clothes). A gesture, perhaps, towards the cyclical nature of history. The penultimate work encountered is Towards The New Baroque of Voices (2021), by Manthia Diawara, a series of video interviews with radical, emancipatory, anticolonial activists and thinkers (including Nigerian playwright Wole ~gı~ wa Thiong’o). Soyinka and Kenyan writer Ngu Spilling through is an optimistic, beautiful piano score, the soundtrack to Two Choirs (2013), a second work by Adamović: this time it’s a group of deaf children signing the song. Where the show started in horror, it ends in beauty. There will always be bad times, all we can do is try to make amends. Oliver Basciano

top Uýra, Elementar (Rio Negro), 2018, photograph, 110 × 74 cm. Photo: Ricardo Oliveira. Courtesy the artist

above Abel Rodríguez, Território de Mito, 2017, ink on paper, 52 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and private collection

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11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Seoul Museum of Art 8 September – 21 November After more than 18 months of coronavirus purgatory, we could all use a getaway. And just in time (actually, one year delayed, but never mind), the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale has arrived, ‘inspired by ideas of escapism’, as its introductory text says. Entering the Seoul Museum of Art, you are greeted by a gargantuan, pixelated wall painting of a mountainous landscape by Minerva Cuevas. A solitary figure is perched on a high rock above the clouds. It looks like pure bliss. On a small screen hanging before it, two actors are kissing with abandon on a beach, as the camera swirls around them – a 1995 restaging of a shot in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) by Brice Dellsperger, who stars in drag, as part of his ‘Body Double’ series of film remakes. Airy sanctuaries and passionate love: we are in paradise. Alas, reality will soon intervene. One Escape at a Time, organised by former M+ and Pompidou Centre curator Yung Ma, takes an expansive approach to its capacious theme. Spaciously installed and admirably accessible,

this satisfying exhibition shows how, in difficult times, artists – and laypeople – are finding fertile means of escape in communities, the past and, perhaps most of all, art. Escapism’s dark side is here too. Ma has tapped about 40 artists to present some 50 works, which tend towards compact productions rather than grand statements – fitting for a period of confined movements and indefinite waiting. Some read like snippets of daily life. (The show’s name refers to the Netflix family sitcom One Day at a Time, 2017–20.) The mood is frequently bittersweet, even melancholic, punctuated by radiant bursts of optimism and rebellion. In a trio of short videos, Li Liao films himself strolling the nearly deserted streets of Wuhan in early 2020, balancing a red plastic bag atop a long pole, amusing himself as he delivers this tidy metaphor for the precariousness of the pandemic. Bani Abidi’s The Address is from 2007 but feels of-the-moment: ten photos (one on a monitor) of spaces with a tv displaying the same

Li Liao, Unaware 2020 (still), 2020, three-channel video installation, colour, sound, 6 min 52 sec, 10 min 39 sec and 16 min 45 sec. Courtesy the artist

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empty chair and microphone. In some, people gaze at it, awaiting an announcement that will never arrive. In an era of brutal isolation, Ma’s show convincingly argues that art – creating it, reworking it, just experiencing it – can be a means not only of escape but also of connection. It is a place where we can try to understand each other, and ourselves. Friends have a wild night on the town in a music video by the charismatic musician Amature Amplifier (“Please keep dancing in front of me for one million years,” he sings in another), and Amy Lam and Jon McCurley’s sitcom-style Life of a Craphead is a painfully accurate look at life as a young artist, balancing creative pursuits and a horrible job. Meanwhile, six Swedish art students assembled by artist Ming Wong under the name C-U-T present a K-pop-style music video, Kaleidoscope (2021), that is so lovingly produced that what might sound like parody becomes a sincere tribute to

cross-cultural influence. In a behind-the-scenes interview, a C-U-T member acknowledges their influences, but explains, “We’re trying to find our own way”. We find our way – we escape – with, and through, others. Pilvi Takala films a Helsinki startup conference in If Your Heart Waits It (remix) (2018), where would-be tech barons network and impart bromides. “Hire quickly, fire quickly,” one intones, in this portrait of personal delusions leading to collective degradation. Wang Haiyang’s Apartment (1989) is a grainy video of men meeting under cover of night at a Beijing construction site. Two embrace. In brief voiceovers (altered to cloak identities) men talk about mundanities, desire, sex. It is screened awkwardly, in a cramped storage room beneath a staircase, which lends intimacy to its viewing but also uncomfortably mirrors the marginalisation of the work’s subjects: shunted out of sight again. There are forays into fantasy, but towards political ends, not self-indulgence. The duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries offers a seven-episode video series that tells a story, with rapid-fire text, of a Samsung salaryman who dies at his desk (“like dying for your country”) and is then reincarnated as a Samsung smartphone, a

napkin and more. It is an uproarious, discombobulating indictment of intense, hierarchical work cultures. Hansol Ryu’s ten-minute showstopper of a low-budget horror film, Virgin Road (2021), has a bride in a white dress rip open her head, tear apart her innards and smash her organs (along with fixed notions of gender and any sign of civilisation) underneath her high heels. It is revolting, cleansing mayhem. The exhibition astutely foregrounds how images come into being and circulate today: in alluring fragments, as potent memes and on countless screens. De Palma sparks Dellsperger. A viral video of three Black Americans debating looting becomes the heart of I Understand… (2021), a raw video essay about the limits of empathy by Hao Jingban. Alongside footage of a Catholic reliquary procession, Justin Bieber turns into a godlike presence in a concert excerpted in Paul Pfeiffer’s Incarnator (2018–21); thousands raise their phones to snap photos for their followers. The biennale has mirrored this mass distribution by including tiny bits of the show at about 100 Seoul cafés and shops: a poster of the C-U-T crew in an ice-cream store, an Oliver Laric video next to bespoke cakes. An enormous screen at the coex Artium devoted to luxury ads hosts

occasional screenings. (I enjoyed Bieber hawking Balenciaga while awaiting a sly, seductive piece by the curatorial outfit Tastehouse and the graphic-design outfit Works.) In a bracing visualisation of the current digital panopticon, Yes We Cam (2012–16), Kim Min arrays on a wall snapshots of South Korean police recording protests and documents from his indictment after attending a demonstration. Much of the time our escapes are fleeting or illusory – a level of distraction achieved by scrolling infinite feeds, buffeted by advertising and notifications, on networks optimised for pleasure, commerce and surveillance. And so the most indelible piece in Mediacity, for me, depicts that whole regime melting away. In Kang Sang-woo’s lush video Forest Neighbor (2021), lightning hits a powerline in a rural area, and the lights go out in a nearby home. A young man tries to remedy the situation as his sister ventures into the surrounding forest. Amid its shadows, she happens upon a film shoot. “We are almost done,” a worker tells her. Suddenly its bright lights cut, and her phone illuminates her path. A snake slithers by her, but she has her eye on something else: a mushroom. She crouches down and picks it. Andrew Russeth

Kim Min, Yes We Cam (detail), 2012–16, photography and printed document, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Genre-bending in Copenhagen by Rodney LaTourelle If a strong indicator of an art scene’s vitality is the diversity of autonomous project spaces and quality of commercial venues, Copenhagen is having a moment. Due to the high cost of conventional gallery-type space there, noninstitutional platforms must get creative about location, conditions and programme, and there are some unique enterprises doing just that. Consider Aye-Aye, whose shows explore the conditions of objecthood itself through a conceptual approach to display. A micro-project space, it’s situated in a vacated office upstairs from the well-established, artist-run Overgaden. Each exhibition comprises two ‘objects’ plus a soundtrack, an experimental constraint both dogmatic and, it turns out, profound, each show seemingly an instalment of a larger, ongoing exhibition. Conceived by artists Nina Beier and Simon Dybbroe Møller as a recontextualising platform that levels both ‘art’ and ‘nonart’ objects, Aye-Aye questions the cultural status of things and creates rich, weird material associations, some suggested by an authoritativesounding voiceover that hovers between irony and homage. In fact, the strategy is a playful extension of the ‘sociocultural collage’ style of the founding artists, who recently moved back to Denmark from Berlin. The current show, melding associations of motherhood, violence and the shadowy distinctions between representation and

reality, combines the death mask of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Bonaparte – borrowed from Copenhagen’s Thorvaldsens Museum, reportedly including original eyebrow hair – alongside a ten-year-old-boy’s toy weapon collection, displayed as if it was presented for sale on eBay. Simian is an independent space located in an unused, underground bike garage, adjacent to a large shopping mall, in a recently constructed neighbourhood of housing blocks whose ‘artificial’, sci-fi character is often a critical starting point for exhibiting artists. In the exhibition Rough Continuity, Lazar Lyutakov’s sociocritical interrogation of commodity production takes the form of a minimalist shop-style display: what look like tin hats are in fact assembly-line rejects from an industrial plant, while bespoke lamps made from cheap, mass-produced items such as colanders and plastic bowls hang throughout Simian’s large hall. Lyutakov’s ersatz objects are juxtaposed with Jens Fröberg’s modestly sized monochrome paintings, some of them reproductions of sections of other paintings and thus simultaneously abstract and representational. Abstraction is key to Marina Pinsky’s exhibition Undertow in the next hall, which materialises industrial metrics across various media, referencing for example water impurity and salmon-dye colour charts, and includes a scale model

Letizia Bonaparte’s Death Mask, 1836 (loan from Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen). Courtesy Aye-Aye, Copenhagen

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of a duck-hunting decoy boat with a cell-phone jammer instead of a hunter floating in a constructed pond, referring to the large lily pond located on top of Simian’s subterranean location. Meanwhile at Bizarro, an artist-run space in a tiny former storage room accessed through a courtyard at a pricey city-centre address, Tora Schultz considers the gendered politics of design in Stand Hard, a tongue-in-cheek play on ‘standard’. By refashioning the formal elements of a well-known Danish modern chair – employing its bent wood to form a strap-on dildo with a Pinocchio face, standing rolls of its brightly coloured linoleum on end in hard phallic columns – Schultz reveals the not-soegalitarian subtext of a supposedly ‘democratic’ furnishing ubiquitous to Danish schools and institutions, which is, however, based on the average male’s measurements, forcing everyone else into an awkward position. Here the midcentury modern canon submits to a sobering yet playful critique of power dynamics. Young Danish creatives are elsewhere questioning Denmark’s benevolent self-image, portraying the cosy-focused ‘hygge’ culture as a strategy to avoid critical self-assessments. Etage Projects, a gallery dealing with postdisciplinary work crossing art and design, is presenting work by the collective Dansk Export (all of whom studied abroad). Made

from waste petrochemical products, Victor Miklos Andersen and Aske Hvitved’s Hlér Jacket series (2021) refers to Denmark’s little-discussed position as the eu’s top producer of crude oil and its expansive, climate-crushing fashion industry. The colourful jackets also float, a nod to rising sea levels, especially concerning for the low-lying country. Esben Ingemann Larsen’s pig head trophy, Målet Helliger Midlet (2021), points towards the country’s notably brutal pork industry, while Mischief (2021), from Anna Aagaard Jensen’s Lady chair series, slays misguided notions regarding gender equality (#MeToo was only recently acknowledged in Denmark) by encouraging women to sit with legs wide apart (men cannot use the chairs). On the commercial side, at Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Nordic myths – albeit much older ones – are again busted and reinvented. Just as Rasmus Myrup’s exhibition title Folx is an inclusive update of the earthy ‘folk’, his sculptural figures are drawn from a range of Scandinavian legends updated with selfempowering details and telling backstories. Often constructed from natural materials related to a particular myth’s natural location, Myrup’s hybrid bodies unite fauna, flora and people with the supernatural. Posed as if checking her painted nails, The Rye Bitch (Rugkællingen) (2021) has a face and hands

made of rye wheat, while the huntress Skadi (Skade) (2021), namesake of Scandinavia, is fashioned using a pine tree from Odsherred, sports bras and spike-heeled ski boots. These, in turn, are shown alongside an exhibition of Kinga Bartis’s expressively fluid paintings of figures merging with and emerging from water, allowing nonbinary harmonies to connect the two shows. In Jared Madere’s work shown at both the artist-run Cucina – which hosts social events and dinners as a base for artistic presentations – and a local restaurant, there is likewise a shapeshifting narrative sense to cultural origin stories and rituals in combination with the use of organic material, though approached through the mashup lens of the American postinternet media landscape. Madere has used complex text-to-image ai programs to produce photography based on narrow internet search algorithms, resulting in twisted, no-holds-barred hybrid images. He shows photos and sculptures at the eatery, occupies the gallery with an exhibition/ ‘brand’ hangout space and conducts children’s graffiti workshops, while creating jewellery and a vegan dinner to raise funds in support of the main event: an elaborate ‘frozen opera’ characteristic of his practice. Taking place on Copenhill, a forested ski-hill on the sloping roof of big architects’ massive waste-to-energy

plant, The Unpopular Courage of Dutchess Orchid Drop (2021) plays out as a phantasmic origin story, as if half-remembered and retold by a culture now grown out of its myths but imaginatively, meaningfully, joyously carrying on. Finally at Christian Andersen, the dark side of (again) ai informs Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s multiplatform work, which deals with surveillance and the digital dispossession strategies of corporate control. The lengthy exhibition title is the address of Hansen’s north London flat, complete with postcode, of which she presents rough sketches drawn using methylene blue, an early antipsychotic drug, thereby concentrating the thematic focus on the corporate control and monetisation of personal space and subjecthood. Videogame controllers activate – when you click on the modified lenses in the eyes of a Keanu Reeves avatar – three short lo-fi videos that explore the debilitating effects of (no longer cc) tv in London from a first-person perspective. Nearby, Hollow Eyed (2021), a series of silicon-metal sculptures hung with nails through their eyes, appear like crude goth-style emojis. Scanning these trigger-objects with a custom app generates an augmenting sequence: a portent of our digitally dominated global predicament, and one in which ai is termed a ‘halfway house between Silicon Valley ideology and neo-fascist reality’.

Jared Madere, Honey Hideout, 2021 (installation view, Baka d’Busk, Copenhagen). Courtesy the artist and Cucina, Copenhagen

October 2021

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Steirischer Herbst ’21 Various venues, Graz 9 September – 10 October On the opening weekend of the 54th edition of Steirischer Herbst, as summer faded into autumn, Graz was in an increasingly hot phase of its mayoral election and at its most picturesque. After last year’s covid-19-enforced, purely digital edition, Paranoia tv, the festival, under the vague rubric the way out, ventured back into the analogue and, above all, into the public space of the city. Some works were strident enough to be unmissable: Marinella Senatore’s Assembly (2021), on Europlatz in front of the train station, was a poetic and, at night, dazzling entrance gate to the festival in the style of traditional luminarie art, composed of multicoloured lights and glowing texts (eg, ‘I want a name like fire / like revolution’). On the nearby Esperantoplatz, meanwhile, Thomas Hirschhorn’s parasitic extension of Jesper Neergaard’s 1987 permanent sculpture Espero into a Simone Weil Memorial (2021) served as another of his large, improvised, handcrafted homages to formative thinkers of the last century. Expectations were ramped up by composer/ drummer Uriel Barthélémi’s festival-opening Navigating the Ruins of the Old World (2021) and inaugural performances by Tino Sehgal and Flo Kasearu. In Kasearu’s Disorder Patrol (2021), security guards dressed in black accompanied a mounted group of uniformed colleagues in oversize headgear, continuously (and with only superficial politeness) asking the audience to clear the public space in the park that the horses and actors claimed for their performance: a smart exposure of spatial forces in the game between viewer and performer. Contrary to the security promised by the guards’ presence, the work served to instill fear, and to remind viewers of the very real counterparts to Kasearu’s fantasy troop who usually patrol parks like this. Amid its food stalls and busy tram traffic, the main square provided the stage for the opening musical performance, a joint production by Barthélémi, singer and bassoonist Sophie Bernado, and dancer and choreographer Salomon Baneck-Asaro. The variety of topics listed in the programme – in the form of many urgent questions concerning colonialism, digitisation, monitoring and consumerism

– seemingly couldn’t all be fitted into the performance. But the lively interplay between musicians and dancers – the movement, coordinated above all with Barthélémi’s drumming, between improvisation, breakdance and acting – was undeniable; and the audience, who’d been denied such performances due to restrictions, were clearly hungry for it. The sound of beer bottles falling over and trams arriving and departing onsite supported the piece acoustically, and to some extent reflected the interaction between art and public life intended by the festival. The popular city parks Augarten and Stadtpark served, from sunrise to sunset, as the backdrop for Tino Sehgal’s characteristic constructed situations. Within his choreographed exercises – the chants and movements of the performers – the viewer was always addressed; if they gave consent, they were told a personal story, which in turn was an answer to a question formulated beforehand by the artist and given to the performers. Another inevitable question, however, was to what extent the context for fine, understated interventions like this has changed due to the emergence and consequences of the pandemic. More pronounced than the contrast his work provided to the usual bustle of the parks was the fact of a Sehgal performance even taking place nowadays, simulating a pre-covid-19 normality. Less happily, in his first opera production, Conversations: I don’t know that word… yet (2021), Dejan Kaludjerović proved how source material that was presumably originally interesting loses all tension when converted into an unsuitable performance format. The results of his research project Conversations, for which he has so far interviewed 49 children between the ages of six and ten, in seven countries, about integration, language, isolation, war, money, poverty, work, etc, and which have so far been presented in site-specific sound installations, now evaporated in a potpourri of monotonous sonic wallpaper spearheaded by four actors. Originally developed during his studies, Hiwa K’s Cooking with Mama (2005 –) received a postpandemic update: now, a Graz-based cook with a migrant background cooks at the same time as her mother, in Turkey, cooks the same

facing page, top Marinella Senatore, Assembly, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Johanna Lamprecht

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dish, the pair linked by video conference. Geographical and cultural distances are cooked away again. Elsewhere, the local artist group g.r.a.m. succeeded in creating a moment of surprise and sensual lightness, as 13 colourful so-called skydancers – usually hired for advertising purposes – danced to Graz-based musician Rainer Binder-Krieglstein’s song Radieschen on the roof of Kunsthaus Graz, a building also known as the ‘friendly alien’. The universal imagery of friendly aliens dancing on the friendly alien that flashed up in the brief performance made for some spontaneous fun at an edition of a festival whose programming, due to changeable restrictions, was surely not easy to put together, but whose orientation was much more diverse in the past. There were notable exhibitions within the parallel programme – such as, at the halle für kunst Steiermark, the impressive insight into Kevin Jerome Everson’s diverse cinematic ouevre, Recover, and, running concurrently, Doreen Garner’s brutal sculptural confrontation with the history of medical experiments on Black bodies in America, Steal, Kill and Destroy: A Thief Who Intended Them Maximum Harm – and outside, such as Oliver Ressler’s Barricading the Ice Sheets at Camera Austria, a research project based on the recent actions of the climate justice movement and one that intriguingly explores the boundaries between activism and art production. Elsewhere were urban interventions such as the poster series that dotted the city – with contributions by artists including Nilbar Güreş, Hans Haacke, Boris Mikhailov, Dana Sherwood, Mounira Al Solh and Rosemarie Trockel – and a moving, telepathic confession of love in letter form to all inhabitants of Graz by the Spanish philosopher and queer theorist Paul B. Preciado, To all I will love (2021). But neither of these was able to distract from the fact that, as the festival got underway, the way out appeared to excessively limit itself to one critical/didactic form of performance art, while at the same time looking both overcurated – aside from that of g.r.a.m., how every performance would go was described upfront – and, for a specialist audience, also a bit predictable. Christian Egger

facing page, bottom Hiwa K, Cooking with Mama, 2021, performance with Zeynep Aygan Romaner. Photo: Mathias Völzke

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Yael Bartana Redemption Now Jewish Museum Berlin 4 June – 21 November The Messiah has arrived in androgynous form. She’s a Berlin blonde and looks like a cross between Tilda Swinton and Reinhard Heydrich. The latter comes to mind because the action in Yael Bartana’s Malka Germania (2021), a three-screen video, centres on Berlin’s beach resort at Wannsee. This was the site of the infamous conference where Heydrich (Hitler’s chief of security) presided over the Nazi government’s plans for the ‘final solution’: the genocide of Jews in occupied Europe. Commissioned by the Jewish Museum, the film is the highlight of this excellent midcareer retrospective with more than 50 works by the artist. The angelic figure witnesses a counterfactual Berlin: one where the Israel Defense Forces march on the runway at Tempelhof, strut under the Brandenburg Gate. Street signs are replaced with their Hebrew equivalents. Marines prepare to land on the beach at

Wannsee; the infamous conference villa is conspicuously in the background. And what of the locals? Modern-day Berliners wait at a station recalling Platform 17 at Grunewald, one of the major sites of Jewish deportation. They trudge up the tracks laden with luggage. Bartana’s message is clear: this is what you did to us. Objects are thrown from windows in an echo of what happened to Berlin’s Jews. Icons of Germany are defenestrated – a beer stein, some Arno Breker-style statuary, Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of Martin Luther (1533), a Christmas tree. Elsewhere three ghostly maidens, we assume onetime members of the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (‘strength through joy’) organisation, exercise in a wood and adopt swastikalike poses. Bartana avoids dialogue, but she has a powerful grasp of sound and its impact: we hear sirens and traffic noise, tolling bells, barking

dogs. A lugubrious camel – a symbol of eternal wandering – clops beside the railway line. At the beach there’s the playful pock of a shuttlecock. Suddenly the calm of the German present is rudely interrupted – the swimmers, the pedalo riders, the sunbathers in their strandkorb beach baskets stare in horror as the Wannsee waters bubble. Albert Speer’s horrifically pompous architectural model for Germania emerges from the lake in the giant dimensions it was meant to exist as, the accusation implicit: this is what you wanted, wasn’t it? Malka Germania is art as vengeance weapon, a timely rocket aimed squarely at those who would have the sins of Germany wiped clean. It’s election time here, with placards on lampposts supporting the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. The KdF rest-and-recreation site at Prora is being renovated. Redemption now? Bartana says not yet. Not for another eternity. John Quin

Malka Germania (still), 2021, three-channel video and audio installation, 43 min. © Commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin

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Kerstin Brätsch/Eduardo Paolozzi Sun Swallower Sant’Andrea De Scaphis, Rome 30 June – 25 September Art dealer Gavin Brown may have shut down his eponymous New York gallery to join Barbara Gladstone, but his Rome space carries on. A deconsecrated ninth-century church, it features an exceedingly high ceiling, a seventeenth-century altar and dilapidated walls. There is something genuinely spiritual about it, which the German artist Kerstin Brätsch and guest curator Saim Demircan harness in Sun Swallower, featuring glassworks and stucco marmo pieces by Brätsch and aluminium sculptures from the 1960s by Eduardo Paolozzi. Brätsch’s bright glassworks, studded with blue, red, fuchsia and turquoise gemstones, shine like stained glass, and feature figures that viewers will instinctively categorise as occult, shamanistic, atavistic. The glassworks appear to fit seamlessly in the space until you are jarred by the sight of a long mechanical arm that holds them. The works’ titles redouble

this bridging between ancient and modern, referencing subjects such as Munin and Hugin, a pair of raven spirits in Norse mythology who carried news and information to the god Odin. Munin (Gedächtnis) (2012–21) recalls a Tibetan Buddhist demon, with fiery eyes, each a different coloured sliced agate, and swirling stylised nostrils spouting bright red fire. The pieces, in this case consisting of Schwarzlot on glass jewels, sliced agates, church window bordering and lead on antique glass, are gorgeously executed patchworks of recycled materials. Below the glassworks are Brätsch’s stucco marmos, a combination of plaster, pigments, glue, wax and oil on honeycomb that create shimmering marblelike sculptures. Brätsch, a painter by training, has spoken of following the logic of the brushwork in a different language, which is precisely what is happening here – indeed a few of the works

are called Brushstrokes. In Fossil Psychics for Christa (Stucco Marmo) (2019–21), a psychedelic pixelated face looks out at us in neon shades of pink, blue and orange. Brätsch’s works take up the walls while the floor is the stage for Paolozzi’s welded aluminium sculptures. The Twin Towers of the Sfinx - State II (1962), looking like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), has been placed at the foot of the altar. Paolozzi, however, had a futurist type of faith in machines, and indeed these are not ominous constructions: Girot (1964), cocking its head at us like a puppy, is positively cute. Together, Brätsch and Paolozzi – one speaking the language of occult but playful signifiers, the other of a kind of science-fiction modernity – bounce off each other effectively and encourage us to embrace technology’s brighter sides: a rare feat in these dark times. Ana Vukadin

Sun Swallower, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Daniele Malojoli. Courtesy the artist and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome

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Manchester International Festival Various venues, Manchester 1–18 July Since its launch in 2007, Manchester International Festival has showcased new work from across the arts in venues throughout the city. In 2021 the curating of the talks and discussions programme was handed to local people, so it is with good reason that the festival prides itself on the diversity and inclusivity of its programming and its commitment to reaching new audiences. Most events are free, and there are countless ways for audiences to encounter them. Though one wonders how far such ‘democratisation of art’ stretches on seeing locals being asked to come back later as Swiss ubercurator Hans Ulrich Obrist is ushered to the front of the queue for Marta Minujín’s Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books (all works 2021). The work, a 42m-long, walk-through sculpture of a toppled Big Ben in Piccadilly Gardens, is largely composed of scaffolding, the surface wrapped in polythene that encases 20,000 books. The titles were chosen by Manchester organisations for their role in shaping British politics and range from Angela Davis and Mary Wollstonecraft to Karl Marx and Marcus Rashford. All 20,000 are to be given away for free during the final three days of the festival. In keeping with the ethos of Minujín’s work, the Obrist queue-jumping was less to do with artworld toadying than the prebooking required by some of the venues for covid-19 social-distancing purposes. Obrist was in town for Poet Slash Artist, a show he has cocurated at Home (and in spaces across Manchester) with acclaimed Manchester-based poet Lemn Sissay. It’s a worthy followup to his 2019 mif collaboration with Adam Thirlwell for Studio Créole and shares that project’s understanding of language as fluid, mobile and creolised, presented here in its spoken, pictorial and written forms. With one or two trite exceptions (the ubiquitous Emin neon) and a few disappointing omissions (Maud Sulter), Poet Slash Artist is exemplary in its selection of new work by 25 practitioners working across poetry and visual art, among them Etel Adnan, Heather Phillipson, Precious Okoyomon, Tarek Lakhrissi, Anne Boyer and Isaiah Hull. Another poetic essay takes place on the former site of Granada Studios, with theatre and opera director Deborah Warner’s Arcadia, a sound and light installation staged within

the work-in-progress space of The Factory, a new cultural venue designed by Rem Koolhaas. The Factory will become the permanent home of mif when complete and Warner’s project offered visitors a sneak preview for two days only. The installation comprised a tableau vivant of a pastoral idyll against a backdrop of encroaching industrialism and a sea of tents placed within the concrete shell of the building. The tents emitted a sound composition by Mel Mercier based on what mif describes as ‘some of the greatest nature poetry ever written’. Plus Simon Armitage. Designed to elicit a ‘consideration of the relationship between the urban and the rural’, my own idyll was conjured only by the lingering aura of the Coronation Street set on this site. However, the space itself looks impressive, and if mif can build on Granada’s legacy of truly innovative arts programming, it will live up to the hype. Another space built on a rich Mancunian history is the stunning new development at Manchester Jewish Museum, an extension of the city’s oldest surviving synagogue on Cheetham Hill Road. It is the venue for Laure Prouvost’s The long waited, weighted, gathering, an installation in the synagogue’s Ladies’ Gallery made in collaboration with the museum’s Women’s Textiles Group. The film at the work’s centre weaves together a narrative from Prouvost’s research into the museum’s collection and her discussions with the local community. The screen, opened by pigeons and doves, is bordered by an elaborate embroidered border containing words and symbols from the film, which is a part-historical, part-fictional ladies’ tea-party and sewing bee, where women reminisce, dance and share stories. The film opens and closes in the clouds, a dream-space of collective memory. Both soft politics and radical agendas run throughout the programming of mif this year, and the organisers have been largely successful in their aim of provoking discussion and engaging audiences around ideas that matter in a year that has seen such seismic sociopolitical unrest. Projects such as Cephas Williams’s Portrait of Black Britain at the Arndale Centre, the Manchester Hip Hop Archive exhibition at Central Library or Rashid Rana’s city-centre show Eart are important responses to concerns around the visibility of the contribution of Black people to

facing page, bottom Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering, 2021. Photo: Michael Pollard. Courtesy the artist and Manchester International Festival

facing page, top Marta Minujín, Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Fabio De Paola. Courtesy the artist and Manchester International Festival

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British culture and, in Rana’s case, an attempt to disrupt rampant consumerism via ‘unbranding’. But nothing at mif comes close to Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies at the Whitworth, by far the most challenging and important commission in the festival. Dismissed by some critics as merely reportage, their collaborative projects are so much more than that: critical, analytical, investigative and crucial, they show what visual methodologies can achieve. The display at the Whitworth includes a range of their investigations from Palestine, Beirut, Grenfell, Indonesia and the us–Mexico border. It showcases the first phase of their major new work on ecological racism in Louisiana’s so-called Cancer Alley, asking: ‘if toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?’ These ‘cloud studies’ examine how the air we breathe is weaponised by states and corporations to suppress protest, maintain border regimes and perpetuate racism and inequality. It’s not often you see a real paradigm-shift in the artworld, but over the last decade the group has remodelled and redefined art’s capacity to contribute to political discourse and effect meaningful change. The Whitworth has cocurated with precision and care, exhibiting paintings from their own collection in A Useful Pursuit of Shadows, a historical and contextual response to Cloud Studies that reminds viewers of the long, local history of industrial pollution and toxic air in the North of England. It is to mif’s enormous credit that such a major event has been staged at all while covid-19 restrictions are still in place, though it’s perhaps because of the pandemic that the online projects are so ambitious, going far beyond the ‘extension of irl’ role they often occupy. Mention goes here to Tai Shani’s first wholly online artwork, The Neon Hieroglyph, a mind-bending, world-building feminist fantasy in nine episodes, exploring the hallucinatory effects of ergot poisoning. The last reported uk outbreak was in 1920s Manchester, but on the weekend of my visit you could be forgiven for wondering if we’d all had contaminated rye bread for breakfast. With the free gigs at Festival Square, a jubilant return to postlockdown social life and uncharacteristically sunny weather, Shani’s carnivalesque vision seemed to verge on reality. Susannah Thompson

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Books

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No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute by Laura Elkin Les Fugitives, £8.99 (softcover) How do we create order out of the great blooming, buzzing confusion of life? Depending on which psychologists you read, we either impose abstract concepts on the world or we identify them from our experience of the world and project them into the future. In this collection of notes typed into her phone during a daily commute through Paris, the writer and academic Lauren Elkin demonstrates that these ways of making sense of the world are not mutually exclusive. Elkin deploys a simple constraint to generate her texts: she will write on the bus during the time it takes her to get to work or back. That the conceit is indebted to the French experimental writing group the Oulipo is made explicit: one of the short entries takes the form of a ‘metro poem’ as devised by Oulipo member Jacques Jouet (the writer must compose a line between each stop), while the influence of Georges Perec’s celebrated An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) is apparent on every page. What distinguishes Elkin’s diaristic entries from Oulipo’s tendency towards a dispassionate method is the messiness that writing on a bus entails. Where Perec leisurely appraises Paris from a café, Elkin is harried by manspreaders and irritated by late buses. Over the course of a year marked by personal and public trauma – Paris endures a series of terror attacks, the author suffers an ectopic pregnancy – this close

attention to our emotional experience of the everyday is revealed to be the book’s strength. It may also explain why it’s being published now, when it’s possible to feel nostalgic for the merely routine unpleasantness of standing next to a coughing commuter. Here is how life used to feel, under the old normal. Notes… reads at first like a sketchbook of Paris through the frame of a bus window, Elkin’s eye drawn to the performances that make cities so theatrical. Unsurprisingly for a literary critic, Elkin is strong on novelistic details: the man who appears to be leaning down to stroke the flank of an invisible pet, but is tenderly smoothing the suede on his ankle boot, is Parisian masculinity in a brushstroke. Yet in time she attends more closely to her fellow passengers – there are vignettes of fierce young women, angry teens and exhausted mothers – and finds in them some kind of community. Like any community, it is not perfectly harmonious. The writer rails against those who fail to observe the social contract – refusing to give up their seats, listening to loud music – yet is also, on occasion, guilty of the same transgressions. It struck me that the suppression of these irritations might be what distinguishes a real-world community from those online. You can’t choose to fill your bus with people who share your opinions, so you learn to find ways of living with them.

Elkin suggests that community might be defined as people ‘going together, while companionably ignoring each other’. Tolerance is predicated on respecting the unknowability of others. You don’t have to understand everything about the people you share a space with, nor empathise with their positions, which are not and cannot be yours. Companionably ignore those as you hope yourself to be companionably ignored: the time will come when you need to take a seat on the crowded bus for reasons you are not obliged to explain. This is itself a (liberal, Rawlsian) politics, and the reader will decide the extent to which the author is imposing these principles on her surroundings or deducing them from what she sees. Either way, the act of recording reveals as much of the writer as of her subject. When she writes one morning that ‘suddenly the world is full of strollers’, we know that it is not the world that has changed but the writer. The constraints on how she sees the city have changed, the filter has been adjusted. Notes on a Parisian Commute is a sketchbook record of the patterns that shape our experience and how they are disrupted. In order to keep living, Elkin proposes, we assimilate those disruptions into our experience by weaving them into the stories we tell ourselves. This unexpectedly moving book shows how we remake the everyday, every day. Ben Eastham

Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman Verso, £14.99 (softcover)

The world for Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman is one in which everything senses. From mussels closing when encountering pollution, and buildings recording the actions and associations of their makers and the lives of their inhabitants, to blindfolded prisoners who can recreate a space through their recollections of sounds. Everything is placed in a network of cause and effect, and of total surveillance. And if, as Fuller and Weizman do, you believe that aesthetics relies on the capacity to sense, you’re now dealing with a vastly expanded aesthetic domain that doesn’t merely relate to art and appearances, but to pretty much everything else as well. The world, in that sense, is woven together in a manner that is inherently aesthetic, and one that, when looked at in a

certain way, constitutes a sensing commons, one that requires disciplines – among them art, architecture, journalism, oceanography, ecology, technology – to merge, collaborate and mutually contaminate in order to organise the multiple perspectives and datasets on offer, to triangulate truth and make some sort of sense of it all. The deployment of that commons, as a means of uncovering or assembling buried truths, of making sense of various forms of sensemaking, features prominently in the work of Forensic Architecture (which Weizman heads and on whose advisory board Fuller, a professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths university, sits), as well as related organisations such as Bellingcat (two of whose investigations

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feature as case studies in this book), artists such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Trevor Paglen and Edmund Clark, and fellow travellers such as Feral Atlas. Such a sensory commons, of course, features just as much as in the tactics of the powerful hegemonic structures that Fuller and Weizman set themselves against. Hyperaesthesia – an overload of sensory experience – can be deployed by governments and corporations with something to hide to make sure that sensation stops making sense: a ‘shock and awe’-type tactic. Aesthetics is a battleground, a contested space; Investigative Aesthetics is part battle-plan or tactical guide and, more fundamentally, part user’s manual for surviving this beautiful and terrifying world. Mark Rappolt

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Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) In recent years, Japanese-to-English translator Polly Barton has emerged as an interesting figure for the Japanese female authors she translates. Through her, the Anglophone world was introduced to awardwinning writers Aoko Matsuda, Tomoka Shibasaki and Misumi Kubo. In short, seeing Barton’s name attached to any novel has become a mark of quality female-led fiction, so it was with curiosity that I approached her own debut, which won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Competition. A genre-bending nonfiction tome that anatomises, in passionate detail, her obsession with Japan, Fifty Sounds combines elements of memoir, essay, philosophy and linguistics. Literary translators are famously invisible, but this book pulls back the curtains in style, revealing an intellectually rigorous and soulful writer who not only thinks deeply but feels deeply, too. Here are thoughtful tracts on Wittgenstein’s theory of language-as-use, dissections of social etiquettes in Japan and England, self-flagellating reckonings of her own gaijin privilege and erotic interludes. Ostensibly the book is about her journey to fluency in Japanese, but it is ultimately about achieving a different kind of mastery: a hardearned ease that comes from the attainment of self-knowledge and acceptance. Japanese supposedly has the most onomatopoeic words of any language: a rich and expressive arsenal that can imitate sounds and even describe feelings and

actions. To Barton, this sound-symbolic vocabulary ‘is where the beating heart of Japanese lies’, and her ambition is to ‘speak the kind of Japanese which takes mimetics as its beacon: a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, or embodied reality’. Each of the book’s 50 chapters is titled with an onomatopoeic Japanese word, accompanied by a cutesy translation pitched somewhere between a koan and clickbait. Chira-chira, for example, is ‘the sound of the mighty loner and the caress of ten thousand ownerless looks’; sa’pari is ‘the sound of a mind unblemished by understanding’; bin-bin ‘the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality’. As each chapter unfolds, Barton unpacks the memory or feeling attached to the sound-symbol and, in the process, gives an account of her time in Japan, from when she arrived from England as a language teacher at the age of twenty-one, to discovering her calling as a translator. Again and again the book takes on the messy, lived reality of learning and speaking a language, and explores how language, in turn, shapes one’s identity and experience of the world. Barton’s admitted self-consciousness and hypersensitivity are strengths here, especially in her thorough elucidations of social nuances, power asymmetries and minor feelings. For anyone who has had to navigate a foreign tongue and cultural environment, many of her experiences

will strike a chord. These include the frustration of debating in a language in which you are not strong, having arguments over accents and the ambivalent, comingled feelings towards her much older Japanese lover, Y: was her affection towards him or towards the Japanese he spoke, or both? Given how Barton embraces the visceral and affective modes of language, it is no surprise that Fifty Sounds is deeply personal. Her doomed affair leads to a belated but necessary breakdown, and a slow process of healing. One of the last chapters of the book, on ho’, which is about the redeeming power of friendships, begins with a diatribe against Japanese people who say, ‘I like travelling but I prefer Japan’ (‘lazy patriots, uncritical, boring, scared people who lived oblivious to their own privilege’). But through the comfort she found in her new pals, she ‘was able to accept (gradually, unwillingly, problematically) that it was okay to want safety’. The chapter ends with her looking back at photographs of an enjoyable group outing and thinking, ‘this is what normal people feel like when they look at pictures of themselves… I looked how I looked, and for the moment that was okay.’ The hard-won revelation is worded with cool restraint (which is very Japanese? British? Or maybe just typical of people used to being hard on themselves), but it is nonetheless a sweet ending for a companionable narrator for whom one has grown to root. Adeline Chia

Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family by Tash Aw 4th Estate, £8.99 (hardcover)

‘Where are you from?’ This haunting question is at the root of this moving family memoir (originally published in the us in 2016), which also serves as a lens to tell the wider story of migration in Southeast Asia. Born in Taipei to Malay parents and second-generation Chinese migrants, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur, navigating between English and Malay at school, and Mandarin and Cantonese at home. If for a long time he thought of himself as Malay, the question of his identity became apparent through the eyes of others: immigrant ‘is something others describe you as’. Weaving together stories collected from his family members and fine observations on the fast-moving history

of modern Asia, this brief book is an introspective and inquisitive quest for an answer. It starts with Aw’s grandfathers, the titular ‘strangers on a pier’, whom he imagines on their respective journeys from Southern China to the Malay peninsula. It is a hazy, fantasised image in want of a more defined one, for, as is often the case in Asian migrant families, their past remains shrouded by ‘opacity’: silenced and erased in the name of integration, upward mobility and, as Aw’s father points out in one of their few conversations about his past, shame. The latter also a driving force in the ‘editing’ of national narratives in Southeast Asia, leaving out the ‘messy blotches’ of colonisation or civil

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wars that ‘don’t sit well with the clean lines of our reinvention’. Peppered throughout are reflections on the psychological impact of leaving the place one calls ‘home’, from the high suicide rate observed among first-generation migrants to the guilt and estrangement he experiences with his own family as the educational gap between them grows. Yet, as Aw notes, that distance is a measure of the success of social mobility, and the validation of lives defined by self-sacrifice and separation. To write about them, this poignant book suggests, becomes a way to reconcile these existences, asking us to remember them regardless of how messily they sit with one’s story. Louise Darblay

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on the cover and on pages 50–51 Torkwase Dyson, photographed by Holly Whittaker

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Before there was Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve), there was Samhain: a Celtic pagan festival that marks the end of summer and the culmination of the season for harvesting crops. In the folktale titled Tochmarc Emire, in which the famed and notorious Gaelic demigod Cú Chulainn begins his training under the warrior-woman Scáthach, Samhain is mentioned as the first of four quarter days (which fall between an equinox and solstice) – and as such, the festival was observed to welcome the new year. Time was measured differently in Gaelic Ireland: the day began and ended at sunset, and as the crops withered and died, the ‘darker half’ of the seasons represented a new cycle. Samhain, and its association with death and renewal, was a time of year that Celts believed opened a doorway into the spirit world, allowing the souls of ancestors and the aos sí (fairies and elves of the Tuatha Dé Danann – the deities of pre-Christian Gaelic Ireland) to slip across the threshold. Some made benign visits, while others were thought to harbour mischievous or malicious intent. To placate the spirits and the supernatural, families would leave offerings of food and drink outside their homes, with the hope that the aos sí would allow them and their crops to survive winter. Those observing Samhain would also disguise themselves as the aos sí and spirits after dark in order to protect themselves from supernatural attack. As well as feasting, drinking over bonfires, and carving jack-o’-lanterns out of turnips to ward off evil sprites, Samhain was celebrated with divination rituals and games. Apples, symbolic of fruitfulness, represented immortality, and hazelnuts were thought to contain wisdom; so it followed that games, including the peeling of apples to find the first letter of a future lover’s name and roasting

Aftertaste

Bairín breac by Fi Churchman

ingredients Plain flour Mixed spice Ground cinnamon Soft brown sugar Fast-action dried yeast Butter Milk Egg Mixed fruit Tea Difficulty: 2

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a pair of hazelnuts, one named for the roaster and the other the roaster’s beloved, to see whether they would make a good match, were popular activities during the celebrations. The bairín breac (or barmbrack) is a fruited loaf into which six items were normally baked, and which were believed to foretell the future of whoever received a piece containing one of them: a pea (they would remain without a partner); a ring (they would marry within the year); a stick (for an unhappy marriage); a piece of cloth (for bad luck); a coin (for good fortune or wealth); and a bean (for a future with no money). The items are no longer included in barmbracks, as they pose a health hazard, but the bread has, throughout the centuries, remained a much-loved food, appearing in popular literature including James Joyce’s short story ‘Clay’ in Dubliners (1914), which tells of a middle-aged woman who, upon playing a divination game, is confronted by the revelation that she will never find love and must instead join a convent. Speaking of which: the Christianisation of Ireland in the fifth century came with the difficulty of getting Gaelic tribes to convert, and so to enact a soft colonisation of pagan customs, the new religion absorbed elements of the old, demonising pre-Christian deities and replacing them with saints and martyrs, and eventually naming it All Hallows’ Day. And while Halloween is now a largely secular holiday, pagan festivities and customs remain the preferred form of celebration. The nights are drawing in. Best get your turnips out.