ArtReview September 2024 by ArtReview

Repeatedly reframing its position since 1949

I was

Counternarratives How art makes space for those who history left behind 001_AR_OFC.indd All Pages

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Celebrating 20th Anniversary

cindychao.com

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TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ Astral Sea

September 5–21, 2024 No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London

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UGO RONDINONE the alphabet of my mothers and fathers SEPTEMBER 13 – OCTOBER 19, 2024 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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ArtReview vol 76 no 6 September 2024

OMG Can you do it to yourself? Or does someone other than you need to do it to you? What? No! ArtReview’s not talking about an enema! It’s talking about de-colon-isation! And all those museums and other types of institutions who are convinced that they can do it to themselves. Now you mention it, the decolonisation thing is supposed to relieve constipation, cleanse the passages (of history), treat an ever-increasing multitude of other issues and, generally, be good for institutional health. What? Oh yes… a bit like an enema. Perhaps we should be thinking about museums as the rectum of culture. The point, though, is not about the organs and orifices through which material (culture) passes, however. But rather whether or not correctives and cures to those organs can be self-administered. Medice, cura te ipsum as Jesus used to keep telling ArtReview. (Those of you who can still remember things will know that ArtReview ran an interview with him [via its medium Matthew Collings] back in 2008. About the patriarchy and his role in it. And imperialism. And Damien Hirst. You can probably find it on artreview.com if you want to know more. ArtReview can’t spoon-feed you everything. Except on its website. Where it can. Because everyone knows that the internet is infinite. Except those people and environments that get consumed in the process of constantly powering the internet up. They most likely don’t know that. Everything can’t come from nothing.

Archaeology

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Unless, perhaps, you’re the son of a deity.) Except Jesus said it in Aramaic, not Latin. Except when he wanted to speak to power, when it needed to be in Latin. Because there’s no point in speaking to power unless power understands you. Because if it couldn’t understand you then power wouldn’t know that you were speaking to it. And then you’d be going nowhere. Fast. Or slowly, if you had to hire a translator. Although all that – since the second except – in itself, is a capitulation to power. Which simply leaves you back where you started. Speaking in tongues. Which are not your own. Powerless. Or, to return to the point with which ArtReview began – before this really does become like a self-applied enema and goes everywhere – colonised. Which is all to say, perhaps even to demonstrate, that you can’t. Because generally speaking you’d lack the language in which to do it. And perhaps the motivation too. Because you’d always be worried that people would stop talking to you. Which they probably would if you weren’t powerful. Or pretending to be. Which probably relates to most people’s ingrained paranoias. Assuming you’re not a hermit. And assuming you think of humans as social creatures. Anyway, this issue is about some of all that. Not hermits. Power and worrying. Because art these days is about being in a state of perpetual fear. About doing the wrong thing. Saying the wrong thing. To the point at which no one says anything at all. Or if they do, they quickly deny having said anything in the first place. Which, again, puts us back to where we started. ArtReview

Archaeology

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El Misterio de La Noche, 2024 (detail) © Alejandro Piñeiro Bello 240809_PineiroBello_ArtReview_Sep.indd 1 210_AR_PACE.indd 210

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello Entre El Día Y La Noche London pacegallery.com

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Sean Scully, Landline Green Blue (detail), 2024. Oil on copper, 70.1 x 70.1 cm (27.6 x 27.6 in). © Sean Scully. Photo: Eva Herzog

Sean Scully Soul

Seoul September—November 2024

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Art Observed

The Interview Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen by Chris Fite-Wassilak 22 J. Borges and the Death of Cordel Literature by Oliver Basciano 31

Hypermasculinity in Indian Cinema by Deepa Bhasthi 32 The Films of Marguerite Duras by Helen Charman 35 Oscar Murillo’s Garden by Louise Benson 38

page 22 Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Serpent (Algebra), 2024, powder-coated rebar, Jesmonite, Atlas moth eggs, 37 × 20 × 36 cm. Courtesy the artists

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Art Featured

Historical Revisionism by Izabella Scott 42

Mire Lee by Emily McDermott 62

Françoise Vergès Interview by Sarah Jilani 50

Yoshiaki Kaihatsu by Adeline Chia 68

Bouchra Khalili by Stephanie Bailey 54

page 68 Yoshiaki Kaihatsu, Useless Panda, undated live artist experience on an ‘Examination Wall’. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 80 Widening the Lens, by Jenny Wu Yiannis Maniatakos, by Athanasios Argianas Sophia Giovannitti, by Alana Pockros Comrade Sun, by Martin Herbert Sofia Defino Leiby, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Rebecca Watson Horn, by Mitch Speed Liz Collins, by Osman Can Yerebakan Otobong Nkanga, by Tom Morton Saša Tkačenko, by Alexander Leissle Pacita Abad, by Chantal McStay Barbara Kasten, by John Quin Roksana Pirouzmand, by Hindley Wang Namedropping, by Naomi Riddle Brass Art, by Susannah Thompson Pietrina Checcacci, by Oliver Basciano Luiz Braga, by Mateus Nunes Minoru Nomata , by J.J. Charlesworth Hany Armanious, by Ben Street

The Waiting Room, by Choo Yi Feng, reviewed by Alfonse Chiu The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, by Sam Leith, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, by Roger Crowley, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Seeing Further, by Esther Kinsky, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, by Maria Balshaw, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth An Operational Account of Western Spatio-Temporality, by Miljohn Ruperto, reviewed by Mark Rappolt COMIC BY Joseph kelly 110

page 80 Dionne Lee, A Plot that Also Grounds, 2016, inkjet print, 89 × 66 cm. © the artist

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Giovanni Anselmo

Giovanni Anselmo Lato destro 1970. Collezione privata, Torino foto © Paolo Mussat Sartor Courtesy Archivio Anselmo ETS

Oltre l’orizzonte

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curated by Gloria Moure

MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo | Roma via Guido Reni, 4A | maxxi.art

An exhibition organised by Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with MAXXI.

founding members

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Art Observed

Simply born 21

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Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen Photo: Liz Seabrook

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ArtReview

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The Interview by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen

“The work often starts from an obsession with something; after that, we’ll make our way through associations that may shed light on a more emotional experience of it”

‘VIPER SNAKE, RED PAINT, HEAT WAVE.’ These words appear as subtitles towards the end of Daughter of Dog (2024), an enigmatic short video by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, shown as part of their exhibition of the same name at Mostyn, Wales, earlier this year. The unlikely sequence of images conjured up by this incongruous phrase make me think of a whimsical version of the ‘what3words’ geolocating tool, the novel mapping-app that enables any threemetre square on Earth to be located using a unique combination of three words. It’s as if the words listed in the video might lead us to some specific, unknown location. Such an imagined encounter, of nonsense poetry being used to map ourselves onto the globe, feels appropriate in the context of Cohen and Van Balen’s practice, which uses video, sculpture and performance to create expanded collages that trace the wider economic and ideological structures that hold us. Creating juxtapositions

and conceptual collisions of what seem to be unrelated things – things like a field of mustard flowers, Atlas moths flexing their wings, robot dogs getting pushed around and dancers enacting a formalised version of a mosh pit, as we see in the Daughter of Dog video – whether in a room or a film, becomes a way to trace the infrastructure of global commodities. The video continues as a fever-dream daze of quickly interspersed images, with a soundtrack of a relentless, driving drumbeat and the subtitles’ elusive, foreboding poetry: ‘Now the earth is formless and empty’; ‘how do I make pearls out of the stress’. Outside the darkened projection room stood plinths bearing pots of carnivorous pitcher plants and various iterations of snakelike sculptures, their bodies cartoonishly made up of thin steel bars, their heads more realistically cast out of resin, each embedded with the small reddish dot of an Atlas moth egg.

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These elements might be there for a reason, but my enjoyment of their work derives more from how it doesn’t quite add up, suggesting a series of layers that might be peeled back to reveal yet another problem or illusion. My first encounter with the work of the London-based duo was their film Trapped in the Dream of the Other (2017), in which a camera navigates a series of trenches and a labyrinth of rocky enclosures, while blue and pink smoke bombs and sparkling fireworks go off. As people walk by, apparently indifferent to and unengaged by the explosions taking place, it becomes evident that this is a working mine, the long single take capturing a senseless, colourful dance. The wordless spectacle of the piece is enthralling, while the exhibition text provided further context: Trapped in the Dream of the Other was shot in a coltan mine in Congo, from where 80 percent of the world’s coltan is sourced. This metallic ore, once refined, eventually ends

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up in factories in China, used in phones, laptops, cars – and fireworks. The artists describe the work as a performance: arranging for the fireworks to be made, then shipped back to Congo and set up as a sequence of explosions triggered remotely by Cohen back in the UK. Similarly, their earlier work 75 Watt (2013) involved designing a piece of useless technology, an object that looked like a rhomboid handheld vacuum cleaner that simply held a few whirring fans. But the point was to enable a ‘performance’ at the factory where the device was put together, a group of workers carrying out a series of exaggerated movements as part of its assembly line. What appears on the surface as a researchladen practice, dense with collaborations (genetic scientists, psychologists, powdercoating manufacturers), gives way to a more open exploration of how it feels to live in a world of global supply-chains, invasive species and invisible labour. There’s no moralising, more a porous set of juxtapositions that only get us more deeply entangled in the issues raised. Their earlier ceiling-projected video Heavens (2021) might have begun with research on octopuses and the panspermia theory of the nonearthly origins of life, but it becomes a fragmented meditation on our place in the cosmos. The Odds (Part 1) (2019) is ostensibly about gambling as a contemporary condition, but then the video poses a series of unlikely bedmates: a man stalks an empty bingo hall, intercut with doctors anesthetising a horse, and a dancing group of casino showgirls. It’s up to us to piece together where this leaves us. Amid the confusion, I met up with the duo to chat metaphors, horses and camel semen.

When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes ArtReview A few of your videos over the past decade, like Dissolution (I Know Nothing), Trapped in the Dream of the Other and most recently Daughter of Dog, feature moments of coloured smoke, as if signalling a warning or a call for help. As one of several recurring images – like horses, or the ouroboros – in your installations, what is the significance of smoke as a motif drifting through your work? Revital Cohen Daughter of Dog came from a period of grief. I couldn’t really make work at that moment, and I was writing an elegy of sorts without knowing what would come from it, collecting images and texts in a weird associative loop. The smoke you refer to came from a found photograph of a military training session with mustard gas. Mustard gas is something that’s lodged deep in my psyche; I grew up in Jerusalem during the Gulf War. At age ten, we were all given gas masks and told about mustard gas. My father’s family is Iraqi, and any mustard gas attack, we were told, was going to come from Iraq. Later, when my father was ill, I found out there was mustard gas in the chemotherapy he was receiving. There was something intriguing about the use of poison as cure, which I suppose is what chemotherapy is. But the fact that this particular poison – of which I was so terrified as a child and felt oddly related to – was now something with a kind of hope attached to it, felt meaningful. When I saw those training images with yellow coloured smoke, it also brought me back to our years of working with

firework manufacturers in Liuyang in China, and a film we made in the coltan mines, which included coloured smoke. There are some materials we work with for so long that when I see them again, even out of context, I feel ‘that’s mine’, that’s part of my vocabulary. Tuur Van Balen Part of the motivation of Trapped in the Dream of the Other was to activate a supply chain between a coltan mine in Congo and where the coltan ends up – in electronics mostly made in China. We were also intrigued by the history of fireworks, and the invention of gunpowder as a substance that can be so spectacular and yet so violent. A lot of the fireworks we made were more like stage pyrotechnics, because they needed to be safe enough for the miners and for me to be filming nearby.

Eight or Nine Brains AR Following on from how you’re discussing grief, your installations seem to have certain starting points – say, the theory of octopi originating from an extraterrestrial virus (in Heavens), or gambling in The Odds (Part 1) – that don’t necessarily feature directly in the work itself. How do you decide if an idea is going to be a method, rather than a subject? RC The work often starts from an obsession with something; after that, I’ll make my way backwards through words, images or associations that may shed light on a more emotional or personal experience of it – so the starting point won’t be reproduced directly in the work. It’s an arrangement of subtleties. In the end,

Trapped in the Dream of the Other (production still), 2017

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above Daughter of Dog (film stills), 2024 following pages Daughter of Dog, 2024 (installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno). Photo: Rob Battersby

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the ambition, from my side anyway, is never to tell a story but more to open up a feeling. How do I translate that feeling into words, images, sound?

RC The Thoroughbred horse was, for many years, a stand-in for my experience of being an artist – being competitive, but very performative: everyone’s commenting on you.

TVB I am more fascinated with the process. When we were making Heavens, we wanted to think about the octopus without the octopus ever being present. There was a point where we had eight or nine other people involved because the octopus has eight or nine brains; so for each work, the subject matter affects the structure and how it gets made. For me the making of the work is often just an excuse to follow my curiosities and dance within entanglements that are both personal and political.

AR So, the horse as artist.

RC There’s a beginning point, but the focus for me is the question I find hard to answer. With Daughter of Dog, although the work started from a place of grief, the question became: where can I find a balance between what appears to be very violent and aggressive, and is also, at the same time, beautiful or loving? Where is a place of ambiguity between these two opposites?

Horse As Artist AR There’s a particular use of metaphor in your work; gambling as a symbol for economy and capitalism, or minerals as a symbol for the technology they end up in. In your 2022 monograph, Not What I Meant But Anyway, you quote the anthropologist Rebecca Cassidy, who writes that the ‘Thoroughbred [horse] is essentially an expression of empire’. Is it a never-ending chain of metonymies?

RC Definitely; the racehorse. TVB Or the artist as horse. Or a gambler. RC Tuur often says I’m quite religious. I’m not, on paper, but I can’t help finding certain things to be deeply meaningful. I’m drawn to anything that holds symbolic meaning or stands in for complicated ideas, realities, histories or fantasies. TVB I’m more interested in the tension between the symbol and what it represents, and what the thing actually is. Maybe we can say, as Cassidy wrote, that the horse stands in for the empire. At the same time, when you start scratching at it, a Thoroughbred racehorse is defined through the male bloodline, which itself can be traced back to three historic stallions. The Thoroughbred is seen as an English icon, but these were Arabian and Turkish horses. If you can actually read the DNA of the horse, it cannot remain purely a symbol. Sometimes there’s a tension between what the thing is and what it somehow represents. RC None of this would be at all interesting if these were not animals, creatures that have deep relationships with people, relationships full of love, different kinds of connection, hurt, failure and success. It only becomes meaningful because the creature is meaningful.

TVB From my side more than yours, there is this interest in wider systems, and how these wider systems are experienced on a personal level: what are the contradictions? Of course, speculation is an important driver of the economic system we live in. A psychologist we spoke to explained that a gambler never feels like they’re losing: they’re always nearly winning. This constructed feeling is inherent in the architecture of casinos. It’s in how the slot machine operates. RC The body of work around gambling started from an interest in the Sands casino in Macau. It appears to be a lighthearted hall of entertainment, a place that is extravagantly ornate and openly masquerading: everything’s fake and in your face. But it’s a profoundly real place in terms of its effect on geopolitics, because so much money made from it goes to create serious realities; it was where billionaire Sheldon Adelson made most of his money, which he used to fund Netanyahu and Trump, changing politics. He’s not a rich person who just invests in, say, racehorses. AR But even from everything that springs from that horse symbology, how does that then lead to the Roan (2020–24) series, where you grind up a horse and spray it on some steel, to look like a nice abstract painting? TVB We both have a background in design and an affinity for materials, and we are also deconstructors of sorts. Powder coating is just an industrial process for coating metals; it historically used bone ash, being a ceramic process, just like bone china. You can still buy a bag of bone

The Odds (Part 1) (still), 2019, HD video, sound

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ash for ceramics, it just tends to be cow bone, and you don’t really know where it comes from. The animal remains in the industrial process – it was just this small nugget in the back of our minds, and then when we were working with the racehorses, inevitably, we… RC …were like, maybe now we do some powder coating. We became fascinated by George Stubbs, and the history of horse paintings and the arts, which is part of the gambling universe. Cassidy writes in her book on horses that Stubbs and the nineteenth-century horse painters were brand managers for the product that is a Thoroughbred racehorse. We think of the Roan series as horse paintings.

Rabbit Holes AR There is geographical distance, and emotional and historical distance, being traversed in each work; but like the weird celebration of fireworks in a mine, it’s not just moving between continents, but contexts and tones. I’m wondering about the effect of such placements and displacements on people experiencing one of your installations. How much is the experience of these cumulative dispersals the work itself? TVB With the works we made in Congo or in China, it’s like this object [points at smartphone on table] is already bringing up issues – of, say, labour and extraction – that come with their own politics and history. It doesn’t have to be technological artefacts – it could be animal breeding or family histories. Once you start to scratch at the surface of these realities you end

up in different places and different times. The work can sometimes be an excuse to go down these rabbit holes, to find these stories, follow them, document them. But sometimes it can also be used to enact a form of intervention, to short-circuit some of the connections in order to see how this network responds. RC We’ve used the term ‘apophenia’ to describe the experience of our exhibitions – the feeling of seemingly disconnected things being somehow related. I don’t mind if the connections are clear or not, it’s the alchemical outcome of these collages that matters. In recent years I’ve been more interested in how musicians make albums than in how artists make exhibitions or artworks. I found Björk’s podcast about making her albums inspiring and oddly liberating. You’re just at a stage of your life, things occupy you and you accept them as your current internal monologue: the work comes out of that. Is it clear or not? Does it matter? No, because it drove the creation of a particular thing. And in a couple of years, I’ll be in a different place and another form of work will emerge. AR There is the implicit suggestion, though, that the viewer should piece these disconnected things together. It made me think of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s diagnosis of paranoia as a leading aspect of critical theory, defined by suspicion and a negative view of the world; or Thomas Elsaesser’s writings on the ‘mind-game film’, which trains you to problemsolve and face a capitalist world. Are these mindgame installations training us to seek out global entangled conspiracies?

RC I think, ideally, the work doesn’t ask you to do anything. Or it offers an experience similar to a song you hear and suddenly feel, ‘Oh, it’s about me.’ I love to be able to find myself in somebody else’s work, not bound to the intentions of its maker. Ideally, the work can also be experienced without being interpreted.

Camel Semen AR Given the temporal and global sprawl of your work, what’s simmering right now? TVB We’ve been making more and more film recently, and we’ve just started a long research project working with choreographers, thinking of moving image as a form of choreography. RC In the films we’ve made since 2011, we would always have one shot where Tuur ends up chasing something and it would make quite a weird, unstable image. These would often be our favourite moments in the films. Slowly, we let go of the tripod, then the stabiliser. I really like it when the camera takes on the presence of Tuur as its operator. Our works can take years to make. We were going to film the breeding of camels in Dubai next, but it’s on hold. TVB Not breeding camels – better. We’ve been planning to film with a group of scientists who invented a camel semen-harvesting sex doll. There’s something in their contraption which feels sinister, yet beautiful and still full of humour. RC And we’re not nearly done with the horses.

75 Watt (still), 2013, HD video, sound, 10 min all images Courtesy the artists

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Arte Madrid App

www.artemadrid.com

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1 MIRA MADRID — ADORA CALVO — ALBARRÁN BOURDAIS — ALZUETA_GALLERY — BENVENISTE CONTEMPORARY — BLANCA BERLÍN — CAMARA OSCURA GALERIA DE ARTE — CARLIER | GEBAUER — CASADO SANTAPAU — CAYÓN — EHRHARDT FLÓREZ — ESPACIO MÍNIMO — ESPACIO VALVERDE — F2 GALERÍA FERNÁNDEZ-BRASO — FERNANDO PRADILLA — FORMATOCOMODO — FREIJO GALLERY — GALERÍA ÁLVARO ALCÁZAR — GALERÍA BAT ALBERTO CORNEJO GALERÍA DANIEL CUEVAS — GALERÍA ELBA BENÍTEZ — GALERÍA ELVIRA GONZÁLEZ — GALERÍA GUILLERMO DE OSMA — GALERÍA MARTA CERVERA GALERÍA MPA / MOISÉS PÉREZ DE ALBÉNIZ — GALERÍA RAFAEL PÉREZ HERNANDO — GALERÍA SILVESTRE — HELGA DE ALVEAR — HERRERO DE TEJADA JOSÉ DE LA MANO — JUAN SILIÓ — LA CAJA NEGRA — LA COMETA — LEANDRO NAVARRO — LUCÍA MENDOZA — MAISTERRAVALBUENA — MAX ESTRELLA MEMORIA — NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ — PARRA & ROMERO — PONCE+ROBLES — PRATS NOGUERAS BLANCHARD — SABRINA AMRANI — THE GOMA THE RYDER — TRAVESÍA CUATRO — UTOPIA PARKWAY — VETA BY FER FRANCÉS — WE COLLECT — XAVIER FIOL / XF PROYECTOS — YUSTO GINER

12 - 15 Sept.

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I was informed about José Francisco Borges’s death, appropriately enough, via the newspaper. By which I mean a physical newspaper – inky print and paper – which I’d picked up just before descending into São Paulo’s metro on a cold day at the end of July. The Brazilian poet and woodcut artist, the most famous of the literatura de cordel authors, was aged eighty-eight, the report said. Emerging back aboveground and onto the streets 20 minutes later, I thought I’d see if the banco in Praça da República had any of Borges’s folhetos de cordel – little unbound booklets of thin coloured newsprint, almost always 10.1 × 16.5 cm and pegged onto a string (like clothes drying on a line), from which the name is derived, that tell a single story in poetic form. On the front cover would be a black-and-white woodcut illustrating the folk or religious tale, comedy or occasionally, but not in Borges’s case, pornography that would spread across 8, 16, 32 or 64 pages. The kiosk owner shook his head: no, he didn’t sell cordels. You used to, I say, and remind him that I bought some here a few years back: strung down off the racks that were otherwise full of puzzle magazines, gossip and hobbyist titles. The supply dried up, the kiosk owner says; the demand too. It is hard enough selling the mainstream titles, he says, let alone something so old-fashioned. Borges was born in the countryside of Pernambuco state in 1935, long the hotspot for cordel production. His father was a farmer and José helped him on the land as soon as he could walk. He went to school aged twelve, but just for ten months: the teacher moved away and no replacement was found. “In those days, there were no newspapers, magazines or radio where we lived. All we had for distraction were cordel booklets,” Borges would recall. “Stories of romance, of legends, of love, of struggle, of suffering. The news of the region, events, accidents, catastrophes, everything becomes a cordel. It was journalism of the countryside,” he told The New York Times in 2017. Borges sold herbs, became a bricklayer, a farmhand, a carpenter and a potter, and along the way – from cordel of course – learned to read and write. He started selling the booklets himself at the weekly market – just another hustle to survive. In 1964, however, he decided to pen his own tale: The Encounter of Two Cowboys in the Petrolina Hinterland, the cover illustration provided

On the Line

Wandering the squares of São Paulo, Oliver Basciano wonders whether the death of its most celebrated exponent will lead to the demise of a once-popular vernacular artform

José Francisco Borges, A Moça Que Dançou Depois de Morta. Collection Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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by another artist. He didn’t know it at the time, but the literary history Borges was joining is as hybrid as Brazilian identity itself. Cordel, which became established in Brazil during the nineteenth century, around the time weekly markets became regularised enough to provide a concentrated public, has its roots in the Iberian romanceiro tradition as well as the corridos compositions of Spanish-speaking South America and the African oral tradition of akpalô. The cordel seller was a performer too: reading the story to potential customers as they bought their fruit and vegetables; enticing them to buy the booklets so that they could do the same at home. As a salesman, Borges turned out to be a pro, pausing to comment on the texts, interacting with passersby, often ending the story short to entice a sale from a listener anxious to know how it ended. His first attempt at writing a cordel sold well, but he nonetheless had insufficient funds to pay an artist to illustrate his second story. Consequently, Borges set about learning woodblock printing himself. The True Warning of Frei Damião tells the story of a popular Italian missionary in the northeast of Brazil, the cover emblazoned with a wonky-looking church in the colonial-architecture style. Over 200 stories followed, each selling in their thousands. His best-known, however, The Arrival of the Prostitute in Heaven, published in 1976, sold over 100,000 copies. Readers were lured by the story of a charismatic prostitute who goes to Hell, only to persuade her captors that she should be transferred to Heaven. Once through the pearly gates (the woodcut on the front shows her being given a leg-up by the Devil himself), she seduces a range of holy characters. One lyric goes: ‘One night on St John’s Day, she danced with Saint Expedito, was scorned by Saint Blaise, dated Saint Carlito and at the end of the party went to sleep with Saint Benedict.’ I try a few more kiosks in São Paulo, to no avail, returning instead to the cordels I have already collected. They remain more easily found in the northeast of the country, but elsewhere the vernacular tradition of gossip and jokes has been devoured by social media and memes, and Brazil’s insatiable appetite for these. Perhaps this is just progress – Brazilians are easily the best mememakers out there, displaying a modern-day creativity and adeptness at humour and engagement – but I hope the tactility of cordel isn’t set to die with its most famous proponent.

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In the opening scene of Anmol Sidhu’s 2022 film Jaggi (currently streaming on Mubi), we see the eponymous young man, played by Ramnish Chaudhary, try to get hard. He fails; erectile dysfunction, we later find out, is the bane of his life. Distressed, he writes a few lines in his notebook and tucks it, along with a pistol, into his waistband. ‘MACHO’, a brand name, is printed on the broad elastic of his underpants. It seems both to encapsulate Jaggi’s desperate need to be the man society wants him to be and, in retrospect, to forebode the almost banal violence he will perpetrate at the end of the film. Before that, we travel back in time to Jaggi’s throwaway remark to a friend about how he does not get aroused (and hence does not masturbate like the rest of his horny schoolmates). This unleashes its own chain of violence: Jaggi is branded a homosexual; bullied by his peers; and repeatedly sodomised by two older men. Unable to combat his abusers, he drops out of school and tends to farmland owned by his dysfunctional family: a drunken policeman father and a mother intent on pursuing a relationship with his uncle. Nevertheless, the rapes continue until a marriage is arranged to a vivacious girl. But just as a happy ending seems to come into sight, Jaggi is pushed over the edge.

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Hazardous Materials

Two films spotlight the toxic nature of South Asian definitions of masculinity, writes Deepa Bhasthi, but also reveal the ways in which they are poisoning its lands

Jaggi (still), 2022, dir Anmol Sidhu

The film is set in rural Panjab, its quaintness juxtaposed with the state’s many problems: land that has been overfarmed since the 1960s; farmer suicides; a people and their (Sikh) faith ravaged by a regional separatist movement. Drug abuse is a longstanding issue, as are border tensions resulting from the arbitrary division of the state during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Some of these are acknowledged by Sidhu, but the director’s main critique relates to the expectation that boys and men constantly, relentlessly perform mardangi, or alpha-masculinity. Certainly not restricted to Panjab or even India, patriarchy’s notion of a ‘real’ (heterosexual) man does not allow for any kind of sensitivity or tenderness in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, these expectations, as depicted in traditional songs, films and pop culture, exclude individuals like Jaggi, who is slightly built, gentle with the family cattle, something of a diary writer, un-boisterous – qualities that are deemed effeminate. In his extensively researched book Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (2019), writer and journalist Amandeep Sandhu quotes a doctor practising in the state who claims that ‘at least 20 per cent of Panjab’s males suffer from some [sexual] problem or the other’. The doctor largely attributes these dysfunctions to a crisis of confidence and a lack of sex education, as well

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as to the cultural ‘focus on masculinity measured in fertility and being soldiers and farmers’. He goes on to cite drugs and testosterone injections taken by those in pursuit of a bulkedup physique, and chemicals used in the production of food crops (the large consumption of milk products, a staple in the region, is understood to be a factor in decreased libido, according to the research Sandhu presents). The suggestion in the film that Jaggi’s mother is feeding him and his father sleeping tablets mixed in food every day so that she can spend uninterrupted nights with her paramour might be another reason for his sexual dysfunction. Panjabi culture (and South Asian culture at large) is obsessed with the male child. A son carries on the family lineage and supports parents in old age. A daughter, meanwhile, is a burden, ‘someone else’s wealth’ (to translate a traditional Hindi phrase). While reiterating gender stereotypes, this social conditioning also results in repugnant responses to any deviations from the norm; homosexuality, for example, remains taboo. It is why Jaggi’s alleged queerness makes him a ‘tempo’: a disturbing word that the doctor in Sandhu’s book, speaking about homosexual relationships in Panjab’s villages, says is a ‘gay bottom for public use’.

Faced with queerness or with men like Jaggi who do not constantly fall in line with the demands of hypermasculinity, those who never stop being suffocating caricatures of maleness seem to resort to immediate violence. This is what happens to Jaggi, as well as to Rahat Khawaja (played by Arif Hassan) in Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha (Circus of Life, 2019), which plays out in the cultural landscape of the other Panjab, the part of the region that is now in Pakistan. A devout Muslim and upstanding member of society, Khawaja entertains a group of friends at a wedding by dancing coquettishly to an old song. What was meant to be a private performance goes viral when a surreptitiously made video is shared. The backlash is immediate. Khawaja is ostracised, taunted and shunned by all but his wife, who is privately amused but feels obliged to not take sides when their daughter also condemns him. Unsurprisingly, the assumption is that he must be gay if he can dance like a woman. At a queer gathering to which he is invited, he falls back on the machismo by which he is culture-bound and betrays them, tipping off the police about those present. As it happens, Khawaja, the caregiver for his sick wife, is the antithesis of hypermasculinity, as demonstrated by the way

he combs her hair, cooks for her and feeds her, among other domestic acts. Like Jaggi, Zindagi Tamasha is about the victim-survivor and perpetrator, and the layers of toxicity that such a dynamic breeds in society. There is enough in the film about blasphemy laws (in Pakistan, this crime is punishable by death) and the hypocrisy of the clergy that does not condemn bacha bazi (a practice in which men buy and keep young boys for entertainment and sex; a custom also said to have been popular in Afghanistan and since banned by the Taliban) yet imposes narrow interpretations of religious law on society. Both films are as much a critique of airtight definitions of gender politics as they are about the cascading effects that this rigidity has on land and culture. India and Pakistan might be political rivals with little interaction allowed between their citizens, but the language and culture, of the Panjab region in particular, is common to the two nations. So too the problems of hypermasculinity and its far-reaching consequences. As such, both Jaggi and Zindagi Tamasha could well have been made in the neighbouring country; their relatability would have remained the same. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

Zindagi Tamasha (still), 2019, dir Sarmad Khoosat

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ROH

今津景

KEI IMAZU

掘ななみ

NANAMI HORI

千葉正也

M A S AYA C H I B A

南川史門

SHIMON MINAMIK AWA

今井麗

ULALA IMAI

杉戸洋

HIROSHI SUGITO

富田正宣

M A S A N O R I T O M I TA

西村有

YU NISHIMURA

八重樫ゆい

Y U I YA E G A S H I

水上恵美

EMI MIZUKAMI

福永大介

DAISUKE FUKUNAGA

杉原玲那

REINA SUGIHARA

竹﨑和征

K A Z U Y U K I TA K E Z A K I

今井俊介

SHUNSUKE IMAI

五月女哲平

TEPPEI SOUTOME

片山真妃

M A K I K ATAYA M A

佐々木健

KEN SASAKI

小西紀行

TOSHIY UKI KONISHI

並行小舟唄

T W I N B O AT S O N G S

28 September - 27 October 2024 Artspace @ HeluTrans Singapore

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Cinema ‘knows that it can never replace the written text’, wrote the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras in 1977; nevertheless, it ‘sets out to replace it’. It begins, in other words, with certain defeat and, sustained by this tension, makes its way from there. What does it mean to make a practice out of dissatisfaction, of failure? Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin, a retrospective at London’s ICA over the summer, brought together the 19 films Duras codirected, other directors’ interpretations of her work and a selection of shorts and television interviews. In doing so, it confronted Duras’s relentlessly obtuse selfreflexivity. In the programme, curator Daniella Shreir positions Duras firmly and deftly in her sociohistorical context, including her formative experiences of colonialism and world war: born in 1914 in Gia Đi̇nh, which, now Vietnam, was at the time part of French Indochina, she moved to Paris at nineteen and survived the Nazi occupation as both an employee of the Vichy government and a member of the French Resistance; her then-husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to a concentration camp in 1944. Later, she joined, then left, then was expelled from the French Communist Party (PCF), though she told The New York Times in 1991 that she remained a Communist: ‘There’s something in me that’s incurable’. Duras, who died in 1996, lived a life we can understand as chronically – incurably – political. But our understanding of her also exists, crucially, within the iterative and less legible patterns of her life’s work: not only was she frequently adapting her own writing for the screen, but she repeatedly returned to and remade her own cinematic material, as if dissatisfied with its original manifestation. In 1967 – the year she made her directorial debut, with La Musica – she declared

that a film can ‘only ever be weaker’ than a piece of writing. ‘My own “imaginary cinema” of Madame Bovary’, she observes by way of example, ‘is unparalleled.’ And yet she often declared her desire to ‘abandon’ literature for cinema. ‘I can’t read novels at all anymore,’ she said in 1968. ‘Because of the sentences.’ This is the labyrinth illustrated by Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin: constant production, self-negation, revision, ad infinitum. The ICA retrospective takes its ruinous title from a line in a piece Duras wrote to accompany the release of her 1977 film Le Camion, which stages her disillusionment with Marxism

Cinematic Ruins

For Marguerite Duras, film was failure foretold. Helen Charman looks at what drove the writer and director to persevere and her bitter falling-out with the PCF via an experimental dialogue between a hitchhiking woman and a Communist lorry driver (played by Gérard Depardieu). The piece, which is also titled ‘Joy: We Believe: We Believe in Nothing Anymore’, insists that there is: No longer any use in the make-believe of socialist hope. In the make-believe of capitalist hope. No longer any use in the make-believe of future justice, be it social or fiscal or any kind of justice. The makebelieve of work. Of merit. Of women. Of the youth. Of the Portuguese. Of the Malians. Of intellectuals. Of the Senegalese. No longer any use in the make-believe of fear. Of dictatorship over the proletariat. Of freedom. Of your nightmares. Of love. No longer any use. This litany of refusal then moves into an explicit consideration of the relationship between filmmaking and writing: ‘Cinema stops the written in its tracks and deals a death blow to its descendent: the imaginary. Indeed, this is its virtue: to switch off, to put a stop to make-believe.’ In the film itself, this is quite literally realised: rather than depict the events of the narrative, it shows instead Depardieu and Duras sitting at her table film stills, from left La Musica, 1967, dirs Marguerite Duras and Paul Séban; Duras in Le Camion, 1977, dir Duras; Agatha et les lectures illimitées, 1981, dir Duras

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reading the script for the film that would have been, interspersed with shots of the titular lorry. If the imaginary is dead, what, onscreen, replaces it? Engaging with Duras’s work ‘often involves subjecting oneself to a degree of confusion and ambiguity’, Alice Blackhurst writes in her introduction to My Cinema – a 400-page-long collection of Duras’s writing and interviews (published this year and translated by Shreir). ‘The writer’s inconsistencies can sometimes jar within the margins of a page, or even the space of a few sentences, showcasing a mind both brilliant and grappling with an ever-evolving catalogue of contradictions.’ This is certainly true, too, of Duras’s films. In Blackhurst’s words, Duras – who published her first novel a quarter of a century before she made her first film – never managed her ambition of abandoning literature by turning to cinema, but rather ‘accessed another medium through which she could generate even more text’. Neither representative or realist, her cinema dwells in experiment and abstraction – it requires interpretation – while her writings about it identify, again and again, a central paradox: she kept on making cinema and kept on denigrating it, investing the form itself with a kind of self-reflexive paralysis. The ICA season began with an ending. La Musica (1967), an adaption of her 1965 play of the same name, stages the first meeting in three years of an estranged couple (Delphine Seyrig

and Robert Hossein) whose divorce has just been formalised. Retrospectives of this size require the viewer to find their own path through them, and as I made my way through Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin, the shape that began to emerge – haphazardly and ambivalently – was an unexpectedly matrimonial one. The couple form, and its discontents appear repeatedly across Duras’s filmography as she moves towards a more experimental mode of cinematic expression. Marriage is a kind of text, too: a form that confines and defines, that needs reading and is always at risk of being overdetermined by its contexts and histories. In ‘An Inquiry into Truth’, an interview assumed to be with Jules Dassin in 1966, collected in My Cinema, Duras elaborates on her theory of matrimony: Power ‘has’ you every time, and it doesn’t matter what kind of power; marriage is an

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exercise in power over lovers. There is pressure in the institution of marriage. People say my wife, my husband; people are married by an exterior power, meaning society. The institution of marriage, in other words, is itself incurably political, as well as literally chronic: in succeeding in containing desire in a socially acceptable form, it legislates against it. In La Musica, the dissolving relationship is a relic of recurringly thwarted communication; in this way, they remain husband and wife. Even as the couple’s torturous dialogue promises cathartic revelations, truthful disclosure is problematised, and then discarded: the husband, urgently entreating his wife to tell him the truth, acknowledges he requires the form of revelation rather than the thing itself. “Make it up if you want, but still tell me,” he says. Writing about the film in Cahiers du Cinema, Duras observes that their final encounter ‘no longer bears the traces of any grievances or wrongdoings. All wrongdoings and quarrels have evaporated. With the termination of married life, at last there is no longer anything to obstruct feeling.’ This happens after both members of the couple have admitted to harbouring the desire to kill each other. Matrimony and death are equated again and again in her work: in Jeanne Moreau’s claustrophobic death drive in Moderato Cantabile (1960); in the symbolic forest of Destroy, She Said (1969); in the violence encroaching on the domestic in Nathalie Granger (1972); and, most famously, in the deferred adulterous suicide of Anne-Marie Stretter, the woman defined entirely by her role as the ambassador’s wife, in India Song (1975), whose erotic, imperial lethargy is described in the film as a leprosy of the heart and of the soul.

Marriage is also something that makes a practice out of chronic dissatisfaction. In an interview with Le Monde about La Musica, Duras asks, ‘What is infidelity if not fidelity to love?… within these endless ends, there is space for endless revival.’ Endless revival is a poisoned chalice: the marital contract, for Duras at least, transforms the novelty and spontaneity of desire – that first moment of erotic connection that both lovers in La Musica go fruitlessly in search of amid the ruins of their marriage – into routine, a kind of living death of the heart. Nowhere is

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this as stark as in Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), a mesmerisingly bleak film that takes place in an empty summer villa in which Claudine Gabay as the title character recounts her profound malaise to a stranger, played by Delphine Seyrig, uncannily soundtracked by looping party music from a neighbouring house. Baxter’s existential

crisis is at heart a marital one: in a text written for the film’s press kit, titled ‘Witches’, Duras writes of Baxter’s life as one delimited entirely by her relationship with her husband, Jean, who was friends with her brothers and whom she has known for ‘her whole life’ when she marries him aged twenty: ‘for eighteen years, nothing has happened to Vera Baxter, except for her love for her husband – except for the fact of having been faithful to her husband for eighteen years’. This fidelity makes ‘duration’ the ‘event’ of Baxter’s life, a ‘uniform duration that marches straight towards death’. Immobility and stasis: the opposite of passion. She shares her name, we learn at the end of the film, with the wife of a crusader, burned as a witch a thousand years ago – an icon of abandonment. Marriage is an economic condition – ‘Vera Baxter’s existence’, Duras writes, ‘might only be made intelligible through the rows and columns of a bank statement’ – and even during the periods in which Jean has temporarily left his wife for a new woman, he sends Vera cheques to cash: ‘he has never forgotten to send the signal that the marriage is still carrying on somewhere, somehow. Money. Money, together.’ (Those with expertise in the painful art of loving a married person know of the power of the financial structures of conjoinment that really keep the couple together. In the face of that steadfast transactional bedrock, desire doesn’t stand a chance.) The betrayal at the heart of Vera Baxter’s story demonstrates the inseparability of the conjugal and the financial: Jean becomes overcome with the desire for Vera to sleep with someone else, and so he ‘puts his wife up for sale’ for the cost of the rental of a summer villa, something Duras describes in an interview with Caroline Champetier as ‘rape’, given that Vera does not ‘go towards the freedom of desire of her own accord’. Trapped in her modernist glass house, film stills, from left India Song, 1975, dir Duras; Baxter, Vera Baxter, 1977, dir Duras; En rachâchant, 1982, dirs Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

without any form of forward propulsion, the cuts to the Atlantic Ocean offer respite for the viewer but never for Vera herself: she is enclosed in a reflective interior that never affords the possibility of submersion. The ‘freedom of desire’ exists, in Duras, only up until the point of its realisation: as soon as an encounter actually occurs, the walls start closing in. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this was the end of the story. Towards the end of the Le Camion text, the refrain ‘we believe in nothing anymore’ is defined as a form of ‘joy’. ‘No longer any use in your make-believe,’ it continues. ‘No longer any use. We must make cinema from this knowledge: from there no longer being any use in make-believe.’ Like marriage, which starts with the twin finalities of consummation and restriction, cinema, for Duras, begins with an ending, with the generative void. There are glimmers of movement, however: refusal opens as well as closes. Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin closed with a screening called ‘Duras and Children’, bringing together her last film, Les Enfants (1984), with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Duras’s children’s story En rachâchant (1982) and a short film Duras made

for French television, Les Enfants et Noël (1965). In Les Enfants, which she cowrote with Jean-Marc Turine and her own son, Jean Mascolo, sevenyear-old Ernesto (played by a thirty-eight-yearold Axel Bogousslavsky) refuses to go to school, an allegorical critique of the French education system as well as bigger, more general targets: she described it as ‘an endlessly desperate comedy whose subject has something to do with knowledge’. A desperate comedy starring an adult man reinhabiting his youth is hardly the final film we might expect from an artist who had declared that there was no longer any use in make-believe. In children we might find, as the cliché goes, a path forward into the future, away from the stasis of conjugal forms and the economic and social structures they represent. In an adult man pretending to re-enter his childhood, we find a make-believe so jarring it prevents us from suspending our disbelief even as it draws us in: we find, again, the beginning intertwined with the end. Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Cambridge

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Image: Ki Seul Ki, System_Neptune, 2022, archival pigment print, 100 x 100 cm. (C) Ki Seul Ki.

The first thing you learn when you become a parent is how to be bored. Truly, brainbreakingly bored. The second revelation is that parenting is in fact a competitive sport, with each new developmental milestone a reflection of just how far you’re willing to go in the race. Together, it’s a volatile combination, enough to fuel a vast industry of ultracolourful, hyperengaged play sessions, each promising new and better learning experiences for your little darling to flourish. Museums have taken note and got in on the fun too, with toddler tours and sketch-alongs ideally placed to appeal to parents and carers desperate for guilt-free reasons to get out of the house with their squawking babies and squabbling kids. Since 2021, London’s Tate Modern has staged wholesome family-focused installations in its cavernous Turbine Hall each summer, from doodling in an ‘ever-changing artwork’ by artist Ei Arakawa (2021) to covering a white domestic apartment in multicoloured dot stickers in Yayoi Kusama’s obliteration room (2022). It’s all part of UNIQLO Tate Play, a sponsored, free programme of participatory activities aimed at young people under the bland but dutiful ethos of ‘art is for all’. This year it’s the turn of Oscar Murillo with The flooded garden, a Claude Monetinspired interactive installation. Visitors are invited to ‘flood’ 500 square metres of raw canvas, mounted on five-metre-tall scaffolds, with watery hues of blue, pink and yellow artist-grade acrylic pigments, in a nod to the colour palette of the famous Nymphéas (Water Lilies) series (1897–1926), which the artist painted at home in his Giverny garden while gradually going blind. The curved, enclosed form is designed to echo the panoramic shape of the Water Lilies installation hung according to the artist’s plan in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, in 1927, a few months after his death, and described by critic André Masson in 1952 as ‘the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism’. Paintbrushes and unbranded tiny blue aprons are provided at Tate, which offer limited coverage but make for cute photos. It bears all the hallmarks of the previous iterations of the UNIQLO series and will undoubtedly bring the crowds during the dog days of summer.

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The Artist is…

What’s the point, who’s it for and where is the artist in all this? Louise Benson goes looking for Oscar Murillo in his interactive summer installation at London’s Tate Modern

Oscar Murillo, The flooded garden, 2024 (installation view, Tate Modern, London). Photo: Tim Bowditch. © and courtesy the artist

So far, so uplifting. Yet it raises the question: where is Murillo in all this? Born in Colombia and raised in London since the age of ten, he previously worked as a cleaner and a teacher. In 2019 he was jointly awarded the Turner Prize, and has produced political, and at times uncomfortable work exploring migration, hidden labour and social inequalities. In A Mercantile Novel, Murillo’s first exhibition with David Zwirner in New York in 2014, he transposed a fully operational production line from the Colombina factory in his hometown of La Paila into the moneyed environs of the Upper West Side, where workers manufactured thousands of chocolate-covered marshmallows to be given away for free. While for the ongoing project Frequencies (2013–), Murillo has so far sent raw sheets of canvas to more than 100,000 school children from around the world, asking them to place these on their desks and draw freely upon them; the results were first exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and later at Murillo’s own London state school for an Artangel project in 2021. By comparison, asking young artists at Tate to unleash their inner Impressionist seems oddly flat, as if organised by a wellintentioned art teacher. It feels like a missed opportunity to inject something resembling radicalism into the gallery, whereby local and international visitors might have been challenged to consider their own privileges and prejudices stretching beyond the enclave of the museum, which happens to be situated in one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK. Instead we have an invitation to ‘dive into the joy of painting’ inspired by… Monet? On the first afternoon a long queue of parents and impatient toddlers snakes back and forth in the Turbine Hall, suggesting less an exhibition opening than a fairground ride. Which, of course, is precisely the point. The canvas has already been emblazoned with hearts and smiley faces, robots and jellyfish, abstract circles and swoops, and scrawled with platitudes and streams of consciousness: ‘Live Laugh Love’; ‘Hope’; ‘I see the sea’; ‘Blue’; ‘Swim’. Young children run back and forth while parents attempt to offer some direction. A few teenagers skulk by a paint trolley, brushes

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in hand. My own one-year-old promptly tries to ingest a crayon while I distractedly admire the sheer scale of the doodled surface – less undulating watery vision, more a giant version of those sketchpads left out in stationery shops for shoppers to test their gel pens and highlighters on. In the adjacent Tate Tanks, Murillo’s Surge (2019–24) paintings are on display, thick with oil stick blues and whites, coyly reinstating the hand of the artist amid the fray. One reviewer described these abstract works as ‘fussy’, but they seemed so perfectly cohesive that I was left wondering what friction there could be left to fuss about. It’s easy to glaze over as you look at them. Murillo has long struggled to reconcile his sensational commercial success with the politics of his work. His paintings, often produced on the floor of his studio and layered with footprints and accumulated dirt alongside his characteristic mix of oil sticks, spraypaint, found signage and wordplay, regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He has (somewhat reductively) been called ‘the twenty-first-century Basquiat’ for his faux-naive style, which (like Basquiat) appeals to a cloistered, moneyed world at odds with the marginalised communities with whom he simultaneously aligns his work. The flooded garden neatly unites these contradictions, from abstract painting to communal activation, but it also makes plain how one can be instrumentalised to feed the other. Them, a complementary exhibition at London’s Gagosian, is on view over the next month for those in the market to buy, featuring studies and works on paper smeared furiously with paint, ink, marker pens and crayons, and displayed on top of cheap plastic chairs in a direct echo of Murillo’s presentation of the Surge paintings at Tate. It is described as an exploration of the ‘simple yet radical act of mark making’, and one can assume that the association with the museum won’t hurt the prices. Is The flooded garden merely surgical filler for these price tags; an exercise in institutional

top Oscar Murillo, Mesmerizing Beauty, 2024 (installation view, Tate Modern, London). Photo: Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis. © and courtesy the artist above Oscar Murillo, The flooded garden, 2024 (installation view, Tate Modern, London). © Oli Cowling, Tate Photography

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box-ticking; a haven for harried parents and their demanding offspring; a photo op for the cultured classes? Murillo has previously railed against the instrumentalisation of culture in the UK under Tony Blair and New Labour, whereby artists and institutions were increasingly expected to demonstrate social accountability if they hoped to receive public money: ‘Our culture needed to have a purpose; it couldn’t be free for the sake of art.’ Organised by Tate’s learning department, and designed to bring in new, more diverse audiences, The flooded garden can hardly be described as diverging from this model. What is more surprising is that the UNIQLO Tate Play programme is sponsored not by the state but by a private retail company, with funding for the next five years already confirmed, revealing a more entrenched attitude towards art with a conscience. A range of T-shirts featuring works by Alexander Calder and Bob and Roberta Smith is on sale at UNIQLO stores as part of the collaboration, in an apt metaphor for this ever-more-familiar marriage of art, audience and commerce, in which galleries and museums must shape their programmes to appeal to the interests (and wallets) of large corporate sponsors. It is a blueprint we can expect to see more of in years to come. Public funding to cultural organisations in Britain (including Tate) fell by 30 percent last year, while the private fundraising income generated by these same organisations increased by 12 percent. The recent high-profile fallout over sponsorship of such institutions by investment firm Baillie Gifford and oil giant BP speaks to the ethical compromises and PR blows such deals can breed within the cultural sector, but even a benign benefactor like UNIQLO reveals the sway they can hold. In an interview with The Guardian last year, Murillo discussed his previous experience of negotiating with Tate when he and his fellow nominees requested to share the Turner Prize collectively. ‘It was a win-win for everybody in the end, because the Tate was seen as progressive,’ he said. ‘But I think they are not progressive at all.’ In a decimated cultural landscape where risk-taking is not just discouraged but can lose an institution millions in funding, this is certainly true. When the same could be said of Murillo himself, what excuse is there?

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Atlanta 2024 Art Week ®

September 30 October 6

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Art Featured

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The Certainty Principle Can there be history without facts? by Izabella Scott

Mercedes Azpilicueta, The Lieutenant-Nun Is Passing: An Autobiography of Katalina, Antonio, Alonso and More, 2021, jacquard tapestry (merino wool, cotton, metallic yarn), 160 × 400 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist

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Mercedes Azpilicueta’s jacquard tapestries trace the conquest describe ‘complicated queer people in history’ who are often left out of the Americas across the sixteenth century: a time of violence, of contemporary narratives today. uncertainty and change. The Argentinean artist often focuses on Azpilicueta is one of many South American artists, including the lives of individuals, such as the legend of Lucía Miranda, a Gê Viana and Laíza Ferreira, employing engravings, maps and other Spanish woman allegedly captured by Indigenous people, and the archival imagery as source materials to consider the way history life of Catalina de Erauso, an ambiguous folk hero, also known as is constructed in the present. ‘But how do historians discover… the Lieutenant Nun. The Lieutenant-Nun Is Passing: An Autobiography things about anyone in the past?’ asks the historian Natalie Zemon of Katalina, Antonio, Alonso, and More (2021) is a four-metre-long Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre, her 1982 book on the lives tapestry exhibited in a sculptural dressing frame, which narrates of sixteenth-century peasants. ‘We look at letters and diaries, autoErauso’s life in pastel-coloured wool: horny nuns lift up their biographies, memoirs’, she explains, before highlighting a central skirts to fuck each other, dogs are dressed in jewels and gowns, problem: these documents are penned by a literate minority. Those snakes slither, cocoa beans fly and indigo flowers drift by. In 1600, unable to write ‘have left us few documents of self-revelation’, Davis continues, pointing out that the peasants at the age of fifteen, Erauso escaped from The gap between text and image she attends to have bequeathed little in a convent in San Sebastián, in northern Spain, and hid in a chestnut grove. their own words. is thrilling, an irreverent There she took off her veil, cut her This historical bind can pose a conuninterpretation that dramatises hair and transformed her bodice into drum for historians, but also opens the a deliberate misreading of breeches. Later, Erauso boarded a ship door for other creative methods. The US disguised as a boy and travelled to the scholar Saidiya Hartman has developed the text, drawing out what is Americas, taking on new identities, inan especially inventive approach. In her dormant or hidden writing, she considers the role that our cluding Antonio de Erasco and Alonso Díaz. Erauso would spend 19 years living in the ‘New World’, his imagination can play when it comes to narrating the lives of Black life eventually recorded in an autobiographical memoir published women living in the United States after emancipation; women who have rarely left behind any such ‘documents of self-revelation’. centuries after it was written. Erauso is a dazzling, multifarious figure; a rebel who escaped Rather, Hartman discovers her subjects in a very different order of the confines of a convent and lived as a man. The swashbuckling document: the trial transcript, the prison case file and the vice invesmemoir (itself a slippery source that blends biography with fiction) tigator’s report, in which Black women are considered a problem that relays Erauso’s escapades, as he became a famous conquistador requires discipline and correction. In response to the violence that – a bloodthirsty, ruthless soldier of the Spanish empire, who relished marks these sources, Hartman crafts what she describes as ‘counterin killing Indigenous Mapuche Chileans. Indeed, Erauso’s exploits as narratives’, at times using fiction to give her subjects an interior life. Antonio were so legendary that, on return to Spain, he obtained the In an essay from 2008, she described this method as ‘critical fabulaPope’s blessing to pursue life as a man – the ultimate validation. This tion’, initiating a genre of writing. ‘I have pressed at the limits of the immersion into colonial patriarchy means that Erauso is perhaps case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, not quite the hero that queer artists and historians tend to desire in imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms’, Hartman explains subversive historical figures. Rather, Erauso qualin her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Mercedes Azpilicueta, Bondage of Passions, 2021 (2020). Her method has inspired artists, from ifies as a ‘bad gay’: a humorous moniker devised (installation view, Gasworks, London). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist the Brazilian painter Dalton Paula, who portrays by podcasters Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller to

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Mercedes Azpilicueta, Abya Yala (Tierra Madura), 2021, jacquard tapestry (merino wool, cotton, metallic yarn), 160 × 200 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist

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Dalton Paula, Tereza de Benquela, 2022, gold leaf and oil on canvas, 61 × 45 cm. Photo: Paulo Rezende. Courtesy Museu de Arte de São Paulo

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Dalton Paula, João de Deus Nascimento, 2018, oil on canvas, 61 × 45 cm. Photo: Paulo Rezende. Courtesy Museu de Arte de São Paulo

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Jamie Crewe, Adulteress (stills), 2017, video, 22 min. Courtesy the artist

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Black Brazilians who have never been visually represented, to the documents that might serve to demonstrate the mechanisms Trinidad and Tobago sculptor Shannon Alonzo, who describes of oppression, and the reasons why some stories prevail over others. archive photographs as ‘portals’ through which she communes with Azpilicueta does not seek to simplify Erauso’s life, to correct or improve the records left behind. Rather, she seems to revel in episanonymous women of the past. These artists create a missing ancestry by recovering forgotten temological uncertainty, presenting a figure who is something more lives. Other artists have gleaned traces of queer lives in literary sources. than a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ gay. Fabricated in stitches of violet yarn, The Jamie Crewe’s videowork Adulteress (2017) is one such example. Its Lieutenant-Nun Is Passing presents a tropical landscape engulfed by subject is a pornographic novel by the French writer Rachilde, titled a storm of images. The heads of white colonisers, Indigenous people Monsieur Vénus (1884). The novel tells the story of a masculine noble- and Black slaves fly across the land, at once decapitated and freed. woman who subverted her gender in the pursuit of sexual pleasure The composition speaks to violence and displacement, as well as – and is, along with her lover, eventually punished. In the video, shifts in knowledge and scale. It can also be read as a dreamscape of Crewe presents a chapter of the novel through subtitles, juxtaposing Erauso’s life, inspired by magical realist traditions, giving form to the text – an episode of sexual jealousy and suspicion – with a visual a shapeshifting body, a life of many identities. adaptation. Onscreen, the artist imagines a new scenario, in which Another peril of overediting the past can be the blotting out of the the noblewoman’s lover escapes punishment to freely explore their unfamiliar and the strange. In their book, Before We Were Trans (2022), gender; the resulting scene shows Crewe and their friends putting Kit Heyam considers the limits of current frames of interpretation on makeup, laughing and chatting. The gap between text and image when it comes to discovering queer lives. ‘[O]ur existing criteria for is thrilling, an irreverent interpretation that dramatises a deliberate inclusion in “trans history”… privilege an incredibly narrow version misreading of the text, drawing out what is dormant or hidden; of what it means to be trans,’ Heyam writes. This narrow criteria, created by a medical and legal paradigm, determines whose stories to adapt, after all, is to adjust to fit the present. In his lush historical novel about the life of an eighteenth-century get circulated by the media, and whose are left to ‘languish in the folk hero, Confessions of the Fox (2018), Jordy Rosenberg posits another, dusty corners of second-hand bookshops’. Heyam’s book is a call to more extreme method of utilising history. The novel imagines make space for messy and ambiguous histories, which can better a group of ‘radical’ librarians who break into libraries by night and reflect the variety of trans lives today. alter historical manuscripts. ‘Late at night, during school holidays, The fictions of the present might be inescapable; Azpilicueta’s a number of stacks nationwide had been infiltrated and – how to put use of a jacquard loom – a machine that revolutionised the textile this? – edited,’ the narrator reveals. These librarians ‘improve’ historical industry – points to the way that all history is in some sense manufacsources by ‘correcting’ ahistorical tendencies, such as the representa- tured. This insight, in turn, allows for possibility, because a tapestry tion of seventeenth-century London as a uniformly white city, or the of threads is ripe for unpicking and reweaving. There are two sides absence of queer lives. Confessions of the Fox poses as the lost manuscript to Azpilicueta’s tapestries. The backs are a feverish mess of knots, of a legendary thief, modified for the present: the hero reimagined as while the same images are mirrored back in a wild cacophony of tangles. There is a baroque sense of excess, with its architecture a trans man, his lover Bess as a rebel of Indian descent. Revising historical manuscripts is a fascinating and provocative of infinite folds, which allows room for convolution, accident and proposition. On the one hand, editing the past can activate histo- mess, and perhaps a widening of the window of insight – conditions ry’s gaps in representation, as Rosenberg’s that allow for revelation. ar Shannon Alonzo, Washerwoman, 2018, novel powerfully demonstrates; but, at the mixed-media installation, 107 × 137 cm. same time, there’s a danger of overwriting Izabella Scott is a writer based in London Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy Liverpool Biennial

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The Disordered Museum How to decolonise the Western museum model? Françoise Vergès advocates disordering, decentring and dispersing it Interview by Sarah Jilani

Born in Paris, the political scientist and historian Françoise Vergès grew up in Réunion (an island in the Indian Ocean that remains French territory) and Algeria. She is a descendant of a slaveowning family in Réunion and the daughter of anticolonial politicians; her father founded the Communist Party of Réunion and her mother established the Union of Women of Réunion. Following the novelist and playwright Maryse Condé as Chair of France’s National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery from 2008 to 2012, Vergès was also previously a curator of one of the largest slave trade memorials in the world: the Memorial

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to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France. Her 2019 book A Decolonial Feminism encapsulates her lifelong interest in antiracist and feminist global histories, using this intersectional position to assess contemporary issues including the #MeToo movement and hijab bans in France. She published A Feminist Theory of Violence in 2022, inviting us to look beyond feminisms that push for punitive state responses to violence against women, exploring what safety and security on antiracist feminist terms could look like instead. Now, in A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Françoise Vergès. Courtesy Pluto Press

Decolonizing the Museum (2024), Vergès turns her radical line of questioning towards the museum. She highlights the ways in which the Western museum attempts to obscure or erase from public view its own founding pillars of extermination, wealth extraction and privatisation. For Vergès, this kind of museum cannot be decolonised. It must be disordered – pulled apart in every sense, from its management hierarchy to the myths it tells itself about neutral custodianship. Only then, she argues, can we foster ways of understanding the human and nonhuman world that are no longer premised upon domination.

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Sarah Jilani There is one approach that suggests the museum can be reformed, and its structure only needs to be tweaked: with racially diverse management, and museum labels with more historical context. Is A Programme of Absolute Disorder suggesting that the museum has deeper issues? That it’s about more than merely recognising those who were/are excluded from the museum? Françoise Vergès Years ago, I organised a series of talks titled ‘Forgotten Chapters of French History’, which was about moments that were marginalised, forgotten or considered unimportant. By calling them ‘forgotten chapters’, I was implying that if they were no longer forgotten – if these chapters entered French history – it would be OK. But then neither the narrative framing, nor the way history is written, would be changed, and the forces that had justified systemic violence, exploitation and dispossession would remain unchallenged. Instead, should we not sometimes keep narratives away from the greedy gaze of the West, whose voracity had been proven so many times? Resist entering the world of bourgeois respectability, trying to find ‘our’ Mozart, Kant or de Beauvoir, so as to fit into this way of writing history? Recognition is a double-edged sword. We need it, we must fight for it, but we must be wary of it. When people in power understand that a certain form of inclusion does not threaten them, they are ready for it. So we must acknowledge that recognition is not the end of the fight. If a museum recognises those who were/are excluded, it will be an act of justice. But it is not decolonisation, because the institution itself was built on their dehumanisation, and everything they held dear or sacred – masks, toys, statues, signs of power or of the mundane – entered its halls on the condition that they become dead. SJ ‘Preservation’ often crops up in these debates – that the Western museum, however flawed, conserves objects for posterity. What are your views on this? FV As conservation requires the injection of pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals into objects, textiles, stuffed animals and furniture, they become toxic. When we enter a museum we enter a toxic space. We must question the ideology of ‘conservation’: preserving for whom, for what, how and where? Many cultures consider that objects have a finite lifespan, like humans and animals, and that conservation is about how to save seeds, knowledge or techniques. The museum espouses a different idea

of conservation that is linked to private property and capital. Sure, destroying and looting art belongs to all wars and conquest, not just those waged by the West. But what distinguishes art-looting in colonial and imperialist wars was that, quite often, conservation followed extermination. While colonial Europeans were certainly not the first to exterminate a species or a people, they were the first to invest a lot of time and energy in preserving a trace of what they had exterminated. That trace found its way into the zoo, or the museum of art or natural history: an example is the skulls of victims of genocide (African Herero women in German colonial concentration camps were forced to scrape the flesh off the skulls of their loved ones with pieces of glass, so that the skulls could be sent to museums – several are at the American Museum of Natural History in New York). At the beginning of the 1953 film Statues Also Die, commissioned by Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop,

and directed by Ghislain Cloquet, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, a voiceover says: “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.” The museum enacts a ‘botany of death’, indeed. That goddess will never again be offered flowers, that mask will never again be worn, that toy will never again be used in a game, that cup will never again hold food. SJ Representation remains a tricky buzzword in discussions around museums – how can we engage with the question of representation without turning it into the desire to be recognised by the master, as Frantz Fanon phrased it? FV We must understand why this desire continues, despite the betrayals of the master. Why is the recognition of those who are not Statues Also Die (still), 1953, dirs Ghislain Cloquet, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais

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themselves among the recognised not enough? Psychoanalysis can help us here; many among the enslaved and the colonised sought to understand how that trap works and affects the psyche. They turned to poetry, literature, manifestos, political organisations, to describe both the destructive element of endlessly searching for this recognition, and ways to be free. Representation is a vast field that is not only visual. People continue to get together to imagine alternative representations through music, dance, theatre, painting, performance and weaving, despite commodification and expropriation. Joy cannot be privatised. SJ A key point you make in A Programme of Absolute Disorder is that museums are not neutral spaces. In terms of how these institutions are funded, wealthy individuals do, and always have, wielded the power to make museums captive to their patronage. How does private funding stall attempts at transforming the museum? FV We too often forget to do a critical political-economy analysis of the museum: where does the money come from? How much capital does the museum possess within its collections? Who is making the financial decisions? Who cleans, who cooks, who guards, how much are they paid and why is their work often subcontracted? Nowadays, one proves her/his humanism by being a patron of the arts, showcasing their love of beauty so as to disprove any accusations of indifference towards the plight of others. The conditions of acquiring billions of dollars, through exploitation, extraction and participation in an unfair banking and taxation system, is made invisible. Private capital pressures museums, asking them to cancel a show or to curate one. For example, private capital has helped weaponise antisemitism against proPalestinian artists. Private capital can also consign to death heritage that it deems superfluous. Since the start of the Russian invasion, for example, museums in Ukraine have benefitted from the implementation of urgent repair, protection and digitisation measures. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) had a quick response to the open letter signed by the director of every major museum in Israel after the attack of October 7, 2023, with ICOM refusing the directors’ calls to condemn Hamas. But ICOM’s condemnation has been moderate at best of the systemic destruction of Palestinian heritage. As of February 24, 2024, according to the Palestinian culture ministry, 207 archaeological sites and buildings of cultural and historical significance out of a total of 320 in

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Gaza had been reduced to rubble or severely damaged. These include mosques, churches, cemeteries, museums, libraries and archives. SJ Although the museum – in the world of today – can only be decolonised in the process of remaking the world that sustains it. Tell me more about the kinds of work we can nevertheless do now. You evocatively call these ‘rehearsals for living’. FV I must say that I like to visit museums. When I’m somewhere new, I look for museums: not only the big ones but also the quirky ones, the ones that are neglected because they no longer serve how the city or the nation-state want to present themselves. I have seen many spaces that seek to expand the imagination, to preserve joy and life. What they share, I would say, is collective thinking. Every idea is examined: how will it work? What is needed? How to keep the cost as low as possible? How to sustain the energy, the joy in a world led by people who do not want people to have joy within the contours of spaces built for consumption? SJ Under pressure, several museums have presented themselves as having settled the colonial past. They talk of progress despite the persistence of racism within their ranks and oil or arms sponsorships, arguing that focusing on ‘the negative’ delays repair. How, in contrast, do you understand ‘repair’? FV The discourse against being ‘negative’ is a way to maintain power over the terms of the debate. It neutralises legitimate anger, and calls justified rage hysterical. We are told

we should be reasonable and adopt a better tone of voice. But demanding repair takes courage, fortitude and patience. All this is nourished by justified anger and a sadness that asks: what made this cruelty possible? How can they not see us as humans? How do they sleep at night? Why don’t they hear my anger? Should I shout? Should I use force? Power likes to turn mourning into grandiose spectacle while denying the excluded their rightful anguish and rightful anger. That said, we also have to be able to ask: what is irreparable?

“Disorder should not be thought of as chaos, but as a process of relinquishing and creating, while saving what needs to be saved” What must be forgotten – not to repress feelings, but to let them go? What can be repaired? I understand repair as a process through which every aspect of reparation is examined, where decisions may not be fully satisfactory but they allow for a new history to happen. Yes, banks, insurance companies, industries and families that have built their wealth upon devastation, crime and extraction must pay. But repair will happen because the wretched of the earth fight back; it will not come from those who are producing an uninhabitable world.

SJ You write that you eventually came around to Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe’s assertion that, ‘If [the enslaved] enter the museum, they will lose the energy required for the complete abolition of racism and exploitation’. How do museums ‘operate a new capture’, in your words, to that end? FV Many within the museum sector now realise that they can turn contestations against the museum into opportunities for expansion and profit. Sure, Western art, whatever that means, still offers endless avenues for exhibitions, but postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminism and decolonial discourse have provided new fields of extraction. This can make for decades of curatorial work; it offers an opportunity to ‘discover’. Here, I use ‘discover’ as it was understood during colonisation: it is the coloniser ‘discovering’ people, plants, animals, rivers, seas and oceans they had not known before, that no one who mattered to the colonial power had explored, named or studied. Social, political and cultural movements of the twentieth and twenty-first century similarly offer vast fields for the extraction of images, sounds and ideas. This has had some positive effects: we get to see documents, films and archives that were hidden in personal or public collections. Works by marginalised artists become available for viewing. It is often exciting: I know because I always try to see these shows. But should we not ask who profits here? What academic or curatorial careers are being made upon these ‘discoveries’? Do the artists benefit? Does it transform the way art schools teach?

Art-activist collective Libérons le Louvre stage a protest against the Louvre’s sponsorship deal with oil and gas company Total. Photo: Romain Nicolas

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SJ Here in the UK we have just seen a wave of violence on the streets against migrants, refugees and indeed any Britons who are visibly nonwhite. The mobilisations against these were effective, and the British media was quick to shift its tune from xenophobia to ‘strength in diversity’. I think this is an example of ‘multiculturalism as a pacification tool’, in your astute phrase. What frameworks for thinking about difference have you come across? FV I received my education from my anticolonial feminist and communist parents, and from the anticolonial people of Réunion Island. I saw how creolisation from below was instrumentalised when power understood that neither white supremacy nor constant repression – censorship, arrest, murder – were efficiently maintaining order. Something had to give. It happened in the 1980s, when the socialists were in power. The island could be presented as an example of republican success: Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism peacefully coexisted thanks to the state’s benevolent secularism. Racism, they said, had been overcome. How could structural racism exist in a republic where the old class of feudal white landowners was a remnant of the past? That state-sponsored narrative not only rendered invisible ongoing structural racism, but also sought to erase local anticolonialisms that had found expression in a communism from below – by replacing it with multiculturalism. The ideas, cultural practices and radical hopes of anticolonial movements were subsumed by identity politics.

Being Réunionese no longer meant solidarity with the oppressed of the world, or with anti-imperialism or anticapitalism. Instead, the discourse of l’île de tous les métissages (the island of all mixing) became hegemonic, and the creolisation processes that the people of Réunion had put into practice through resistance to colonialism were transformed into an empty signifier. Any challenge to that vacuous discourse was met with indignation, and even accusations of racism. I do not underestimate the appeal of what was on offer: remaining under French dependency with acknowledgement of your difference; enjoying all the benefits of being French, such as a European passport. Yet pacification has its discontents. Multiculturalism alone does not stop the destruction of the planet by a bunch of billionaires, authoritarian leaders or fascist movements. This was visible in the UK, where media were quick to say that the racist violence was ‘not British’, and Keir Starmer prioritised heavy sentencing and imprisonment. In other words, this violence was seen as mere criminality, to be dealt with by the law. But what has fed this? Years of leniency towards the far right, and those fuelling antimigrant hatred. What is needed is antiracist antifascism, not vacuous multiculturalism. SJ You describe in the book how you had to resist a proposal for the Maison des Civilisations et de l’Unité Réunionnaise project – as a planned cultural centre for Réunion – as the plan sought to impose the structure and museographic model of France’s regional museums. What

is at stake in this question of method – or why does ‘how we disorder then reorder things’, as you put it, matter? FV Capitalism has shown its capacity for colonising the mind. It feeds us aspirations (goods, smartphones, speed, ‘modernity’) and encourages us to ignore the cost of these aspirations. A programme of absolute disorder takes time. Disorder should not be thought of as chaos, but as a process of relinquishing and creating, while saving what needs to be saved. Imagine small, flexible, but very seriously thought-out sites. We could start by asking what its architecture would be like: monumental, impressive or welcoming? How would its space work for all kinds of ages and bodies? Should we whisper? Can there be joy? How can we keep the cost low so that things can be fluid and changing? Imagine no more national museums pushing a political narrative that constantly needs to be revised either to affirm national unity or to include a forgotten group (even though forgetting is part of nationmaking). Imagine not art museums, but sites of custody and care, realised along the needs, desires and wishes of a group. ar A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum is out now, published by Pluto Books Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City, University of London

Visualisation by XTU Architects for the unrealised La Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise, 2022. Photo: Kazushiro Namai. Courtesy XTU Architects

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All Tomorrow’s Revolutions Bouchra Khalili’s ‘activation of history’ through film brings archival content into the present and commends it to future struggles. The artist mixes fact and informed speculation as a means of illuminating the undocumented past and the passage of those who remain undocumented in the present by Stephanie Bailey

Around the time of the 2010–12 Arab uprisings, the artist Bouchra Khalili began developing a series of projects that address the histories of emancipation and liberation in North Africa and the Middle East. Taking issue with how Western media described the uprisings as a ‘Facebook Revolution’ – “as if the Arabs needed Facebook to start a revolution”, the artist pointed out in a 2017 conversation – Khalili realised the importance of asserting the region’s history as both revolutionary and global. The video Garden Conversation (2014) illuminates that legacy by imagining a conversation between Rifian resistance leader Al Khattabi, who led a war against the French and Spanish colonial armies in Northern Morocco from 1921 to 1926, and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, who fought in the Cuban Revolution. According to oral accounts, the two men met in Cairo in 1959 but no documentation exists, so Khalili wrote a script based on their writings and interviews. Filmed in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Northern Morocco whose continued existence signals the colonial spectre of occupation, a young Moroccan man and woman (neither of them trained actors) play Khattabi and Guevara respectively, and discuss tactics of liberation. “The present time is made of struggles,” the woman says, “but the future is ours.” Khalili produced Foreign Office (2015) next. A digital video, silkscreen print and series of photographs focus on Algiers between 1962, when Algeria gained independence from France, and 1972, during which time the Algerian capital hosted liberation movements from around the world, including the Black Panther Party and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. In the film, two Algerian students, Ines and Fadi, narrate this moment of transnational solidarity based on oral accounts, texts, photographs and videos documenting the presence of figures like Nelson Mandela, who trained with the Algerian National Liberation Front, and Black

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Panthers Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, who attended the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 and established the Panthers’ international branch in the city. Black-and-white photographs of these figures, alongside others like Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, are seen assembled on a wall at the film’s start. Towards its conclusion the narrators remove the pictures from an editing table, describing how the story of this historical moment ends: some died, others gave up, some were exiled, others became dictators. That scattering of figures and movements in all directions is grounded to the diagram that emerges when the film’s narrators mark the locations where these organisations were based on a map of Algiers, and in the photographs Khalili took of these colonial-era buildings in the present day. The silkscreen print The Archipelago (2015) distils each location into flat, white shapes arranged on a sky-blue ground, like islands in the sea – a metaphor, Khalili has said, for international solidarity, as people and movements find ways to connect their struggles not only across geographies and borders, but across time, context and language. That archipelagic quality likewise reflects a creolisation and comingling of anti-imperialist movements in the twentieth century – from the establishment of the Non-Aligned and Anti-Apartheid movements to the development of political Blackness in postwar Britain – through their dissemination, as embodied in Mother Tongue (2012), the first in Khalili’s trilogy of films known as The Speeches Series (2012–13). Five migrants in Paris recite texts from memory by Aimé Césaire, Al Khattabi, Malcolm X, Mahmoud Darwish, Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. This includes Césaire’s 1950 text ‘Discourse on Colonialism’, which describes the West’s hypocritical inability to solve “the two major problems to which its existence has given rise” – “the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem” – and the refuge it has taken “in a hypocrisy which is all

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Speeches – Chapter 1: Mother Tongue (still), 2012, from The Speeches Series, 2012–13, digital video, colour, sound, 21 min 56 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

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The Mapping Journey Project, 2008–11 (installation view, Foreigners Everywhere, 2024, in the Arsenale at the 60th Venice Biennale). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive”. That each person speaks in a language, with the exception of Dari, that has no written form – Moroccan Arabic, Kabyle, Malinke and Wolof – feeds into Khalili’s interest in history as an act of living transmission and translation: multilingual, subjective, collective, fluid, global. As with all of Khalili’s films, the narrators in Foreign Office were nonprofessional actors who became involved in the project through their encounters and discussions with the artist. That Fadi and Ines were students, however, was a deliberate choice: a mechanism worked into the composition to both document and enact the transmission of a fading historical memory in Algeria to the next generation. ‘Fadi and Ines learned the historical details during the preparation phase of the film,’ Khalili told writer Thomas J. Lax in the book accompanying the project. By processing archival content as ‘living material’, the historical matrix of a scattered transnational, transcultural antiimperialism ‘entered into their present’. That activation of history – or as Khalili described it in the 2017 Creative Time Summit by quoting Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘the scandalous revolutionary force of the past’– defines the artist’s interest in alternative historiographies. That is, histories expressed not by those in power, with their monuments and books, but by ‘poems, songs and even jokes that we share and that go back to our silent history of rebellion’, as she put it at the summit. Even The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), an installation of eight videos, each showing a migrant’s hand tracing with a pen on a map the journey they took to enter Europe from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, is an expression of resistance. Whether in relation to the borders that have divided the world as a result of colonial modernity; the obfuscations that have reduced migrant lives into voiceless numbers; or the asymmetrical geopolitics that have driven people to flee their homes in the first place. Each journey recorded in The Mapping Journey Project is distilled into a silkscreen print composed of white starlike dots on Prussian blue for The Constellations Series, the minimalist aesthetic of which turns each testimony into a point of transmissive reflection. In one

case, a man’s meandering trail from Ramallah to East Jerusalem to see his fiancée – a journey that would have taken no more than 20 minutes by car had it not been for the restrictions on the movements of Palestinians – reflects both the conditions of internal displacement created by Israel’s military occupation and the force of love (for others, for life, for home, for freedom) to defy them. The hand, a crucial motif in Khalili’s films, amplifies these scales of politically charged intimacy in the context of history as a surgical assemblage of narrative fragments – words, sounds, images, objects, memories. ‘A narrative is never raw. It is always produced,’ Khalili has said, and the artist makes that production coolly visible with documentary compositions shaped by the structural grid of an editing room and its materialist poetry, which includes scripts whose quotations and interjections function as testimonies of living history. As Khalili has noted, Jean-Luc Godard once said that he would choose to lose his eyes rather than his hands, since films are made with the fingers: ‘I think at least with regards to montage, this is absolutely true: when editing, it is the hand that thinks’. The hands handling materials in Khalili’s films draw viewers into the work of piecing together a multipolar and multiscalar story. Take Mapping Journey, which responds to how migrants have been portrayed by Western media while resisting their erasure at home. Growing up in Casablanca, Khalili heard stories of people travelling illegally all the time, but they were discussed among the community rather than acknowledged by the media or state – people risking their lives to migrate illegally don’t just signal attempts to escape poverty but announce a political opposition. As Khalili has said, her conviction to return to the region’s history amid the Arab uprisings has not only been about decolonising narratives and representations in the West, but confronting the oppressive regimes that have been produced beyond it. The Magic Lantern (2020–22) amplifies this multifaceted struggle. The video installation departs from the surviving images of The Nero of Amman, a film by Carole Roussopoulos that recorded the aftermath of Black September in 1970, a conflict between the US

The Mapping Journey Project, 2008–11 (installation view, Foreigners Everywhere, 2024, in the Arsenale at the 60th Venice Biennale). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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and Israeli-backed Jordanian army and the Palestine Liberation A vocal supporter of the Palestinian liberation movement, Genet was Organization, supported by Soviet-allied Syria and Iraq. The film, among the first to enter the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982, its print having been destroyed due to how frequently and widely just after Phalangist militiamen massacred Palestinian and Lebanese it was screened, highlighted the dire situation of the Palestinian civilians under the light of the occupying Israeli army’s projectors people in the immediate years after the establishment of the United and flares – an experience he documented in his 1984 essay ‘Four Nations and the Israeli state, with refugees massacred and genera- Hours in Shatila’ and in his final book, Prisoner of Love, published posttions displaced. Roussopoulos critiqued these conditions in her later humously in 1986. film Munich (1972), where the surviving images of The Nero of Amman Khalili references Prisoner of Love in her 2018 video Twenty-Two appear, which confronted the UN’s international ‘peace’ in the context Hours, focusing on Genet’s visit to America in 1970 at the invitation of the Munich Olympics, when the Black September militant organi- of the Black Panther Party, supporters of Palestinian liberation. The film’s title derives from Khalili calculating the time Genet spent with sation took Israeli delegates hostage, killing 11. The Magic Lantern uses cinema’s alternative histories and func- a young fedayeen named Hamza, leading Khalili to ask, as she put it tions to meditate on these geopolitical textures. The video instal- in one interview: ‘Are twenty-two hours enough to dedicate oneself to lation is projected with an object modelled after the magic lantern, the struggle of other people?’ The question feels rhetorical, given the meditation on solidarity that shapes a protoprojector invented in the eighTwenty-Two Hours, as its narrators, two teenth century that Étienne-Gaspard Khalili connects the use of the magic young Black women named Quiana Robert used to summon the spectral lantern’s revolutionary technology projections of executed French revoand Vanessa, process images on phone for revolutionary purposes with lutionaries Maximilien Robespierre screens related to Genet’s American and Jean-Paul Marat, the film’s nartour while reflecting on his allyship, the Portapak in the twentieth century rator explains, “at a time of collective and by association his gaze. “Why did mourning for a collapsed revolution”. Khalili connects the use of the he write about us?” they ask, with a script mixing quotations, notamagic lantern’s revolutionary technology for revolutionary purposes tions, observations and questions. Archival footage in the piece includes Genet, shot by Roussopoulos, with the Portapak in the twentieth century, the first battery-operated individual analogue video camera-recorder that Roussopoulos and denouncing Angela Davis’s incarceration and proclaiming that the other radical filmmakers used, including to make The Nero of Amman. ideas of Davis and the Black Panthers will remain long after those That film’s surviving shots are described in The Magic Lantern as spec- maintaining what he termed the “white administration” are gone. tral images, and their haunting depictions appear like a macabre They combine with Khalili’s footage of Douglas Miranda, who resurrection today as devastating images from Palestine circulate describes his work with the Panthers, including the campaign for detained chairman Bobby Seale and party member Ericka Huggins, once again. All of which relates to what Khalili describes as the recurring of which Genet’s May Day speech was a part. Wearing a black leather ghosts in her work: artists and allies like Roussopoulos, a radical film- jacket from the Panthers, Genet spoke a few lines in French before informaker described in The Magic Lantern as a nomadic storyteller, and Jean mation minister Elbert ‘Big Man’ Howard continued in English. The Genet, at heart a revolutionary poet, who travelled together to Amman narrators describe a confused public, unable to decipher whose words in 1970 alongside Mahmoud Hamchari, the French leader of the PLO. were being spoken, before quoting lines from the text, which called

The Magic Lantern, 2020–22 (installation view, Bouchra Khalili: Between Circles and Constellations, MACBA, Barcelona, 2023). Photo: Miquel Coll. Courtesy the artist and MACBA, Barcelona

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Twenty-Two Hours, 2018, digital video, colour, sound, 43 min 4 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

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The Tempest Society, 2017, digital video, colour, sound, 58 min 54 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

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for white radicals to act with “candour” and “delicacy” in relation to the Black struggle. “The identity of the speaker did not matter,” the narrators continue. “He offered his support, he offered his presence, he offered his image and therefore he offered the words, abolishing any ownership over them.” That abolition of ownership circles back to the histories of antiimperialist struggle and transnational solidarity that Khalili maps out across her films, where historical fragments fuse into narrations anchored to the central question that Twenty-Two Hours poses: who is the witness? Khalili responds by creating a cinematic montage of witnesses across time: from Genet, “whose books speak for him”, and Miranda, “who can still speak”, to the narrators bearing witness now and their viewers tomorrow. Quiana and Vanessa perform that transtemporal encounter when they ask Miranda if the Panthers failed. “It’s a fair assessment… no shame in that,” he responds. “The fundamental nature of capitalism and white supremacy” – which includes “the extreme brutality, oppression and super exploitation of African Americans, other minorities and the American working class” – “still exists today… so we will bury our dead, learn our lessons and continue to move forward”. Cue the video The Tempest Society (2017), which resurrects the story of the agitprop theatre group Al-Assifa, or ‘The Tempest’ in Arabic, which operated in Paris from 1973 to 1978. Composed of North African factory workers, members of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA) and French students, Al-Assifa staged performances in factories and public spaces that reflected experiences of oppression in France while responding to high levels of illiteracy among migrants. Khalili sees the tradition of Al Halqa, meaning ‘The Circle’, in their efforts, a public performance in Morocco where audiences form a ring around storytellers, which Khalili situates in the history of revolutionary art and cinema, where documentary, as the artist has described it, functions as a hypothesis: an ongoing question. The more recent two-channel video installation The Circle (2023), which excavates the MTA’s establishment in 1973 in Paris and Marseille alongside that of Al-Assifa and its sister theatrical group Al Halaka,

also meaning ‘The Circle’, expands on that continuity. The work opens with the same gambit as The Tempest Society, with the latter’s three interlocutors discussing how to begin their narration – as a group or as separate individuals – before concluding that they want to tell a story together. A shot of hands arranging archival images on an editing table follows, as The Tempest Society narrators describe “a constellation of individuals, events, time and geography addressing the need for hope, the need for dignity and the need for equality”. They then take an online call with the narrators of The Circle, a young man and woman of Maghrebi descent living in Marseille tasked with extending the constellation of connections across years and cities in the present work: one of many projects shaped by research through which Khalili is mapping out another world history. “Our family album is made by the struggles for equal rights here and elsewhere, today and tomorrow,” The Tempest Society’s narrators say: it “is essentially a collective: we don’t own it. It travels and expands.” The point, they explain, is to start from where and who you are: “What is this continuous chain of resistance across time, space and people?” Khalili’s black-and-white 16mm silent film The Typographer (2019) doesn’t offer an answer so much as open up a horizon where intersecting past, present and future revolutions meet. Here, hands are seen manually typesetting Jean Genet’s final sentence in Prisoner of Love, which reads like a message in a bottle: ‘Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.’ ar Bouchra Khalili: Between Circles and Constellations is on view at Sharjah Art Foundation, 7 September – 1 December. Khalili’s solo exhibition Lanternists and Typographers can be seen at EMST / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, through 10 November as part of the exhibition cycle What If Women Ruled the World? Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11) is being shown in Foreigners Everywhere, at the 60th Venice Biennale, through 24 November Stephanie Bailey is a writer based in Hong Kong

The Typographer (stills), 2019, 16mm film transferred to video, b/w, silent, on cubic monitor, 3 min 25 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

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Uncontainable by Emily McDermott

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As instructed by a sign, I lift a piece of resin-coated burlap attached to a Over the past eight-or-so years, Lee has produced sculptures and black metal frame. Beneath the flap is the following poem: ‘Poetry that environments that are, indeed, far from containable. Her lo-fi works turns to / shit outside the / body, love that turns / to shit Look, I’m / a – pairing motors, tubes and pumps with silicone, wet and dried clay, foundation of filth / raving mad with love / Let’s sing with a face that’s and viscous liquids – often rumble, bleed, twist or turn, situating their bitten half off / That’s half bitten off / A crazed, lovestruck / song.’ It’s maker in a lineage of kinetic artists and those who have offered unsetwritten in lead. tling takes on the human body, not least fellow Korean Lee Bul (though Four other such poems hang on two freestanding red-stained Lee operates at some distance from Bul’s dark cyborg figures and takes wooden walls. The room stinks – of resin, of dust. Nearby, three concrete on utopian architecture). Indeed, Lee’s artworks can be hard to posimixers turn sporadically, raucously tumbling their contents (which in tion because they change over the course of their lives, sometimes one case include steel cable and crusty fabric; plaster rocks stuffed into deteriorating altogether. At the 2022 Busan Biennale, she erected a construction gloves in another). I jump every time they turn on. 21-metre-tall scaffolding structure, covered with holey, constructionNext to one mixer hangs Untitled (burlap body piece with many holes) site fence mesh; the voids in that mesh are outlined in black by waste Concrete version (2024), a giant looping structure made of burlap stur- oil, as if an inky parasite had been eating away at the fabric, as if the died with concrete and suspended from the ceiling by a metal chain. holes would continue to grow ever larger (Landscape with Many Holes: It’s wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, like a cow’s carcass. Untitled Skins of Young-do Sea, 2022). At the Venice Biennale that same year, Lee (burlap body piece with many holes) I (2024), a similar, smaller sculpture adorned more scaffolding with sinuous ceramic sculptures and hoses – albeit made with dried clay instead of cement – sits atop a wood from which lithium carbonate and iron-oxide glaze spurted, pushed panel. I learn that the poems are written in lead after lifting the burlap out by unseen pumps (Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022). Dripping with my bare hands; not only are the words poignantly seared into with the deep-red liquid, the ceramics and hoses appeared like disemmy brain, the sounds and smells into my body, but so too is a poten- bodied organs, bones and guts, the installation a biomorphic entity tial threat, a poison. (When I visit the gallery a second time, gloves are both beautiful and grotesque, amazing and repulsing. sitting on a windowsill next to the instructional sign.) Lee began working with kinetic sculpture in Amsterdam, where This constellation of works by the Seoul-born, Berlin- and she moved in 2018 for a residency at the Rijksakademie after receiving Amsterdam-based artist Mire Lee consumed a room at Sprüth Magers’s her BFA and MFA from Seoul National University. There, she took an gallery space in Berlin this summer. The poems are by Kim Eon Hee, who Arduino programming course and was immediately drawn to the is known for her unconventional use of language and the grotesque unpredictable results of using motors and machines in her sculptures. “I fear myself being comfortable,” she forms she describes. Lee has worked with Hee above Prayers: Poetry, 2024, lead on burlap, resin, explains, “and because a kinetic object is multiple times, and the two of them are even concrete, metal frame, 60 × 51 × 5 cm (framed). moving, it’s like a translation of that existentranslating a book of Hee’s poetry into English Photo: Timo Ohler. Courtesy the artist for the first time. “I love [her poetry] for not tial angst, of wanting to be able to be surprised and Sprüth Magers, Berlin being fully containable,” Lee says when we and to surprise myself.” facing page Carriers, 2020 (installation view, meet at her studio in Berlin, “and I admire and When beginning something new or movArt Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020). Photo: Yonje Kim. ing from one project to the next, Lee starts aspire to the type of art that is not containable.” Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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above Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022 (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Venice Biennale preceding pages Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea, 2022 (installation view, We on the Rising Wave, Busan Biennale, 2022). Photo: Sang tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Busan Biennale

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with simple associations, admitting, “I don’t really have a conscious process.” She fluidly follows one thought or material to the next, digesting and instinctively abstracting associations and any additional references as she creates, until she feels, in her gut, that a work is finished. Often, any explicit reference appears only in a work’s title: Veronica Moser (2022) is a found video-interview with the eponymous late pornography actress who specialised in scatology; the title of Lee’s exhibition at the New Museum in New York, Black Sun, was pulled from philosopher Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia; and the aforementioned title of her piece for the Venice Biennale nods to architect Friedrich Kiesler’s 1959 Endless House, an unrealised vision of an orifical building. But beyond such titular hints, references are fully abstracted, a point underlined during my conversation with the artist, when these overt allusions bleed into many others unseen. When Lee speaks about Kiesler’s house, for instance, it gives way to the ‘Josef Fritzl Haus’ (specifically, a part of the cellar that Fritzl, a notorious Austrian sex criminal, built and adjusted over time to imprison his daughter in order to repeatedly rape her, and where she eventually gave birth to seven babies), which gives way to the improvisational and layered nature of certain traditional architectures in South Asia, which then leads to musings on Lee’s own childhood bedroom. Follow the clues Lee gives in her titles (which means a little research) and similar streams of potential references can be discovered. Both the title of the work and a brief text accompanying the work in Busan, for example, indicate that she took as her starting points Yeong-do, or Yeong Island, and the abandoned Songkang Heavy Industrial Co, Ltd factory, where her piece was installed. After a quick google search, it becomes clear that the island was a home for refugees and displaced people after the 1930s, a time during which Japan ruled Korea under a strict military regime and enforced cultural assimilation. I also learn that in 1932 the Japanese military began forcing Korean women from their colonies to become sex slaves. The disused factory, meanwhile,

speaks to a history of failed industrialisation. But this information is neither explicitly detailed in relation to Lee’s work nor aesthetically part of the installation, a conscious choice by the artist to prioritise affect over didacticism. First and foremost, the work made the imposing building feel forlorn, the installation and factory itself both fragile entities on the brink of collapse; in turn, this engendered an acute awareness of the relative smallness of the human body, and of one’s own mortality. When we meet, Lee is preparing for a forthcoming commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. For it, she began with basic associations related to the space’s history as part of a power station. She then reckoned with its monumentality and what she describes as its “masculine feeling”. The details of the installation remain a secret, but broadly, as in Busan, Lee aims to undermine the scale of the location by presenting an incredibly large work that simultaneously feels fragile or small: “I really like to make sculptures look sad,” she explains. “If a sculpture is very small compared to the physical environment, or if it’s not erect but on the ground, it’s immediately a bit sad. I have always enjoyed when [a sculpture] can create a certain mood or affect but in a very simplistic way.” Regardless of a sculpture’s location or potential reference points, Lee’s work evokes raw emotion – in herself and, in turn, in the viewer. And this connects directly to her fear of being comfortable, of entering a state of stasis: “I fear that [if I were comfortable] I would become judgemental and exclusionary,” the artist further explains. “I want to feel as many things as possible,” she continues, while discussing the process of creation. In doing so, by creating works that are jarringly uncontainable and unpredictable, Lee likewise pulls the viewer out of their own ordinary – their daily – rhythms, offering instead an experience to see, to smell, to hear – to feel – anew. ar Mire Lee’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London, is on view from 8 October to 16 March

Carriers (detail), 2020 (installation view, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020). Photo: Yonje Kim. Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul

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Power Without Crowds How Japanese artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu is redefining democracy by Adeline Chia

The House of Politicians, 2012– (installation view, Minamisoma City, 2012). Courtesy MOT, Tokyo

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On 15 March 2012, one year after the Great East Japan Earthquake Kansai, as well as affiliated galleries in countries such as Canada, caused a major accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, Norway, Mexico and the United States. Japanese artist Yoshiaki Kaihatsu built a small house in Minamisoma, A major survey of Kaihatsu’s prolific practice opened at the Museum a coastal city about 20km from the nuclear reactors, siting it 400m of Contemporary Art Tokyo this summer. Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: ART IS LIVE outside the official evacuation zone, which by then was known as the – Welcome to One Person Democracy features about 50 works made over 30 exclusion zone. Kaihatsu sent invitations to about 750 members of years. ‘One Person Democracy’ is a phrase first coined by the late arts the Japanese parliament, including the prime minister, to visit the administrator Osamu Ikeda, director of the influential BankART1929 four-tatami-mat house, with its single window facing in the direc- in Yokohama City, to describe Kaihatsu’s practice. Osamu wrote: tion of the reactor, to experience the desolation of the evacuated local ‘Democracy is not the movement organised by a group of people villages. None showed up. He titled this work The House of Politicians acting under a single motto but the chain reaction where one person’s (2012–). Thirteen years later, battered by the elements and restored specific action causes other people to act.’ Hikari Odaka, a curator at the a few times, the house is continuing to host sporadic activities by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has taken up this social-action artists, activists and residents, even though post-Fukushima anti- theme and expanded it to include more personal and idiosyncratic nuclear sentiment among the Japanese public has faded with time. elements. “One of the most distinctive elements of Kaihatsu’s work is In fact in 2022 the government announced a new plan to extend the his ability to engage in solitary activities while embracing the presence lifespan of existing nuclear reactors and build new ones. But The House of others,” she tells me over email. Take his rituals of doodling every of Politicians, looking out at the uninhabited landscape, and beyond morning and evening, or attaching a receipt for a purchase he made that the damaged reactors with 880 tons of melted radioactive nuclear that day to date the drawing (Receipt Diary, 1992–): a receipt marks an fuel (projected to take an unspeciexchange, no matter how brief, with fied number of decades to clean up), another person, the private ritual of is a stark reminder that the consedrawing accompanied by a degree quences of the Fukushima disaster of sociability. “Even large projects involving a wide range of people… have not yet played out, despite polioften derive from his humble and ticians choosing to paper over that. solitary practice that creates a chain Working since the 1990s in a variety of media including drawing, effect on other people’s actions,” photography, installation and perOdaka adds. “This approach embodies the essence of democracy, where formance, Kaihatsu often directly intervenes in social issues and engages we always treasure not only the colwith local communities. His work is lective (society, community, nation) usually relational, frequently taking but also the individual.” the form of events that rely on the To me, there is another element interaction and participation of of democracy that Kaihatsu’s work other people. One of his best-known encourages: an equality of rights works is a travelling art exhibition and status among people. This may that also functioned as a fundraiser mean disrupting all sorts of proprie(Daylily Art Circus, 2011–14), which ties, such as when the artist violated he put together with other artist artworld ‘rules’ by showing his own work at Documenta 9 uninvited: he friends following the earthquake. It toured the disaster-stricken Tohoku region, featuring large inflatable walked into the exhibition hall every day with a small video screen artworks to ‘make people smile’. In 2011 he initiated another project hanging around his neck that displayed a slideshow of photographs that collected disappearing local dialects and folktales from the coastal of Performance at Documenta 9 (Petit Gallery) (1992). Otherwise, his works region evacuated by the earthquake (Cotoba Library [Library of Words], simply create a level playing-field by treating everyone in the same way. 2011–). The project is hosted on Google Maps, where viewers can click (A disavowal of status in the context of Japan is likely more significant on various pins along the Gulf Coast region running from Fukushima than in other places, as Japanese society is traditionally more rigidly in the south to Aomori in the north. In each location, different people structured.) For the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2015, he created have been filmed telling local folktales in various temporary shelters, an underground broadcasting station by digging a hole in the garden of an abandoned school and establishing a radio station. He invited such as gyms and community centres. 39 Art Day (Thank You Art Day) is another notable community- various local characters, ranging from famous actors to retirees, to focused work that the artist began in 2001 to mark 9 March as a day participate as guests on an informal talkshow, which was streamed to celebrate and promote art (the pronunciation of the numbers live on YouTube (Mole TV, 2014). The interviews were conducted by the ‘three’ and ‘nine’ in Japanese sounds like ‘thank you’). Every year on artist who dressed in character as a mole, wearing a black furry suit and this day, participating museums and galleries extend opening hours, long white claws, which added to the relaxed and kooky atmosphere, reduce ticket prices and organise special exhibitions to encourage and encouraged a looser, more free-flowing conversation. visitors. From its humble beginnings with 20 galAs Kaihatsu tells me: “Humans have built a lot leries taking part in the initiative, the project now of architecture – huge buildings and skyscrapers Yoshiaki Kaihatsu. involves more than 145 art spaces in Tokyo and are the symbols of authority. I wanted to meet Courtesy MOT, Tokyo

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people from all walks of life in a place without authority and without objects endure within the new builds. Their presence and absence can hierarchy. That’s why famous people come to this TV station, as well as be felt. Dust, another form of detritus from daily life, was also a favoured old men in the neighbourhood. I wanted to create a place where you can talk frankly without hierarchy.” material in his early days. For site-specific works, Kaihatsu likes to Born in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, in the landlocked, sweep up all of the dust from the venue and arrange it to create different mountainous Chubu region, Kaihatsu went to art school and origi- effects. In Shadow (1998), he vacuumed the dust from an abandoned nally trained to be a painter. After experiencing a crisis in confidence in house and arranged the particles onto a slanted rectangle on the floor, relation to his technical abilities, he switched to installation art. Aged which resembled a shadow emerging from a cupboard. In Tears Pond eighteen, he encountered the American sculptor Louise Nevelson’s (2002), exhibited in New York, he went to Ground Zero to collect dust works in a book and was inspired by her monochromatic boxy assem- (the area around the World Trade Center was apparently cleaned each blages made from found wood and day, but Kaihatsu found a snowdrift, behind which a lot of debris other salvaged materials. During his “Humans have built a lot of architecture remained). He arranged the dust master’s degree studies at Tama Art – huge buildings and skyscrapers are the into a raked circle, a reference to University, in Tokyo, he started ussymbols of authority. I wanted to meet Japanese karesansui gardens, which ing humble materials in his installations. In 1990 he began handling use raked gravel patterns (samon) people from all walks of life in a place Styrofoam during his part-time to represent the ripples of a pond. without authority and without hierarchy” work at a sculpture-casting comThe artist’s work took a more pany, where it was used to make maquettes for bronze sculptures. social turn in 1995, when, frustrated with the limited opportuniHe consequently turned to making things out of polystyrene foam, ties for exhibiting, he began an ambitious project to mail his sculpand his use of the material evolved into a personal trademark. tural artworks in wooden boxes to places all over Japan. As well as Some of these creations are sculptural objects, whether a centaur to museums and galleries, he sent his work to the houses of friends (Centaure 1.5 times, 2004), a space probe (2011: The Year We Make Contact, or whoever was willing to host (365 Project, 1995–96). The works were 2011) or a horse for a Hermès shop window (Barn, 2023). Others sent after the participants signed an agreement to display Kaihatsu’s are more ambitious architectures, such as a teahouse (Happô-En, artwork for a year, during which time he visited and filmed himself a Styrofoam Teahouse, 2001) and a café (Space White Cafe, 2017). Lit speaking with them about art, politics and whatever else came to from within, these assemblages exude an otherworldly glow with mind. These interactions were later edited and broadcast on the telelight escaping through the cracks between the Styrofoam pieces. vision channel NHK BS. 365 Project aimed to disrupt the usual methods The experience inside is uncanny, too. The oddly shaped blocks used of exhibition-making and expand the conversation about art from to build the architectural structures often began the confines of metropolitan Tokyo to the rest Performance at Documenta 9 (Petit Gallery), of Japan (“a rebellion against the art industry”, life as the protective buffer for boxed house1992.Photo: Kazushiro Namai. he tells me). But this work also became a turning hold appliances; the (negative) shapes of these Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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Mole TV, 2014 (production view, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2015, Niigata). Photo: Osamu Nakamura. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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above 2011: The Year We Make Contact (still), 2011, video. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo facing page Daylily Art Circus, 2011–14, installation. Courtesy Anomaly, Tokyo

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point that piqued his interest in art’s relevance to society, especially Balancing out the historical material are many interactive works because 1995 was a time of soul-searching for Japan. It was the year that explore various aspects of freedom, with recent works encourof the sarin nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed aging people to speak up and be heard. This could take the form of 13, severely injured 50 and left almost 1,000 others with temporary responding to various statements by pasting stickers (blue for ‘yes’, red impairments to their vision, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake for ‘no’) on a wall (Vote YES/NO in MOT, 2024). Such statements include: in Kansai, which killed approximately 6,300 people and displaced as ‘I don’t think we should accept immigrants’, ‘I don’t think vaccines are necessary’. Those in a more oratorial mood can stand at a lectern many as 310,000 others. At that time, Kaihatsu felt helpless and didn’t know what he could covered with faux fur to deliver a speech of up to 90 seconds ‘about anything: about your pet, about do. But over a decade later, in 2011, art, about your hobby’ (Speakers’ during the aftermath of the Great “It was an experience that made me realise East Japan Earthquake, he sprang Corner in MOT, 2024). Then there is that our [artistic] activities, which we into action with Daylily Art Circus, the space for you to demonstrate always thought were not needed by many which connected the victims of the political solidarity with Ukraine in 1995 Kansai earthquake with those Welcome to Everyday Demonstration people, were needed by someone” of the 2011 earthquake in Tohoku. (2024–). Since the Russian invasion He loaded a truck with various artworks, including inflatable ‘air began in 2022, Kaihatsu has collected images of placards from prodancers’ in the shapes of giant clowns, animals and flowers, which Ukraine demonstrations around the world and posted them on social flapped around and danced like those in front of car shops and petrol networks. In the museum, these images have been made into stickers, stations to beckon customers inside. In the Kansai region, the exhibi- and visitors can place them onto a big wall to make a gigantic collage tion also functioned as a fundraiser, with many people affected by the mural. Interestingly, the pro-Ukraine stance aligns with Japanese 1995 earthquake expressing solidarity by writing messages of hope foreign policy. The notoriously immigration-resistant Japan has so and encouragement, donating cash and other supplies. Kaihatsu far accepted 2,500 Ukrainian refugees. According to figures released then took the exhibits and donations to the Tohoku and Fukushima by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in June, Japan is in sixth region, stopping at gyms where people were sheltering, as well place in terms of countries who have provided Ukraine with finanas community centres and parks, with the straightforward mission cial aid (more than €7 billion has been allocated by the country of spreading good cheer and distributing supplies. so far). The exhibition will also be a place for conversation, exchange and Kaihatsu said the idea came to him out of “a genuine desire to help people in the affected areas in whatever way I could as a human being. fun. A new iteration of Kaihatsu’s popular 100 Teachers project will be I didn’t know if the people who had lost their homes and jobs needed included. This is a programme that he has held in various places in art, but my job was art”. One of the most touching experiences during Japan over the past ten years. During the show’s run, 100 teachers this time, he says, was a remark by a mother in the Tohoku region who who are experts in various fields are invited to give 40-minute lessons attended one of his exhibitions. Her family, which included small chil- to the general public. August’s programme includes lessons by dren, had been affected by the earthquake. Lacking internet access, Gloomy Teacher, a self-identified pessimist who wants to encourage they saw a notice for Daylily Art Circus at the library and the mother a more neutral understanding of ‘darkness’ in the human psyche; subsequently took them to the Heavy Rain Teacher is a river exhibition. The mother then told expert and meteorologist coverKaihatsu that ‘[she] felt the chiling questions such as ‘why does it rain?’, ‘are there different types of dren needed this’. Kaihatsu tells me: “It was an experience that rain?’ and ‘where does rain go?’ made me realise that our activities, Other teachers include: Turningall-Kaihatsu’s-works-into-Dance which we always thought were teacher, Nininbaori teacher (Nininnot needed by many people, were needed by someone.” baori is a Japanese comedic act where two people wear the same In Japanese contemporary art, the 2011 earthquake is often large coat and pretend to be one cited as a critical turning point hunchbacked person) and Yonaguni that brought more social urgency Teacher (Yonaguni is the westernto the sector. There was a turn most inhabited island of Japan). towards more socially engaged The programme’s motto is: ‘Everyand politically critical art, with more artists working in or near the one a teacher, everyone a student’. Indeed, by tapping into our collecregions affected by the disaster, creating experiences that combined tive knowledge and experience, 100 Teachers is yet another instance art, advocacy and disaster relief. Daylily Art Circus, rightly, is often cited of Kaihatsu’s democratic flattening of a society which is guided by as an influential work, bringing food and money to the needy and curiosity, humility and humour. ar providing a bridge between different communities linked by their common experience of disaster, death and displacement. Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: ART IS LIVE – Welcome to One Person Democracy is on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) As many of Kaihatsu’s works are temporary social interventions, through 10 November they are shown in the form of documentation in his exhibition.

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The Fire Keepers Curated by EDUARDO SARABIA ABRAHAM LACALLE El verdor terrible MACIEJ KOŚĆ Velvet Dawns

12th September - 22nd November 2024

Antoñita Jiménez, 31 28019 Madrid www.vetagaleria.com

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SAGG Napoli 26 September - 26 October 2024 Aleja Szucha 16/7, 00-582 Warsaw, Poland SOLO EXHIBITION AT IMPORT EXPORT FOR WARSAW GALLERY WEEKEND

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EL MORA

OUT OF TIME, 120x160 cm, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2024

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powering the world of art

Art is identity

Grand Palais October 18 - 20, 2024 Nina Childress, Dalida (tête) (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the Artist; Natalie Karg Gallery, New York; Art : Concept, Paris. © Nina Childress, adagp, 2024.

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Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh 11 May – 12 January A luminous photograph in the Carnegie Museum of Art shows two figures on a patch of sand. One, a child, digs with a stick, while the other, an adolescent wearing a grungy outfit, beaded choker and nose ring, minds a pig on a spit. In this inkjet print by Justine Kurland, titled The Pig Roast (Apache Junction, Arizona) (2001), there is a quietude atypical of survival scenes, as well as a staginess in the way the adolescent’s hands are gathered in her lap, the pristine condition of her shoes and the look of cautious amusement she gives the skewered animal. The image comes from Kurland’s Girl Pictures series (1997–2002), which depicts groups of young women playacting as vagabonds in wildernesses across North America, trekking through terrain like the male adventurers in a Jack Kerouac novel and injecting a convivial presence into the bleak American landscape found in, say, Robert Frank’s roadtrip photographs. Kurland’s photos hang among other subtly incongruous vistas in Widening the Lens, a 19-artist show that seeks to revise the somehow imperishable nineteenth-century notion of landscape – as an uninhabited, sublime mirror of egoistic projection – into one that better reflects the current, stressed state of the planet and the full range of lived experiences shaped by its compromised wildernesses. Acknowledging that the genre of landscape photography was, since the 1870s, coopted by American surveyors to erase nonmale, nonwhite and Indigenous subjects from the land – the catalogue notes how,

for instance, photographs of the Yellowstone River taken on an 1871 US-sponsored expedition failed to depict local Indigenous populations – the exhibition attempts to counter this erasure by presenting images in which marginalised subjects are situated in natural environments in stereotype-defying ways, marshalling incongruity, as Kurland has, to call attention to viewers’ biases about what and who belongs in a landscape and in front of a camera. Like Kurland, David O. Alekhuogie performs an act of reparative restaging in his series to live and die in LA (2021). On two inkjet-printed canvases, the blue and red waistbands of a man’s exposed underwear and low-slung pants are blurred and interposed behind palm fronds and other foliage growing in locations where, according to the wall text, Black men have had violent encounters with the Los Angeles police. Under Alekhuogie’s lens, the stacked waistbands – targets of a moral panic during the early 2000s – turn into a radiant backdrop, reframing the Black male body as a site of intimacy rather than paranoia. Elsewhere, in the three sequenced prints that make up Dionne Lee’s Casting series (2022), the artist’s hands reach in from the left of one frame and appear, in the next two frames, to drop a rock onto pebbled ground, staking a claim to the land in a magnificently opaque and noninvasive manner. Agential and expressive, they stand in for the Black citizen who was banned from American national parks, the exhibition materials inform us, until the Civil

Rights Act of 1963. A similar opacity is found in Sky Hopinka’s inkjet print Cowboy Mouth 3 (Siniwagúregina˛gere) (2022), in which two figures and a row of trees, backlit and inscrutable against a pale blue sky, are haloed with lines of poetry. In lieu of distinct markers of identity, the artist’s verses etched on the print do the work of reinscribing Indigenous subjectivity onto the tableaux of America. In ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931), Walter Benjamin observed that photographs often reveal that which eludes sense perception. Lucy Raven’s Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022), one of the show’s final works, taps into what Benjamin termed the ‘optical unconscious’ by pairing an investigative agenda with advanced image-capture technology. This 15-minute film, presented on a vertical LED screen with an immersive sound system, examines an explosives-testing site in New Mexico. Aiming a high-speed camera at a mountainside, Raven indexes blast waves created by ammunition companies and US departments as they spread in arcs over the landscape, causing disruption invisible to the naked eye. Demolition of a Wall thus calls attention to – and mounts evidence against – the private and public entities that exploit the land for their experiments. It shows what the rest of the exhibition implies: that contemporary lens-based art can be vital to climate activism when it makes visible what is wilfully obscured and makes suspect what has been unconsciously accepted. Jenny Wu

Justine Kurland, The Pig Roast (Apache Junction, Arizona), 2001, inkjet print, 76 × 102 cm. © and courtesy the artist

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David O. Alekhuogie, Avalon and 116th Street, Mom’s garden, 2021, inket print on canvas with artist’s frame, 122 × 97 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York

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Yannis Maniatakos Four Paintings Sylvia Kouvali, London 31 May – 28 September Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017), a sculptor, painter and educator who lived and worked on the marble quarry-laden Cycladic island of Tinos, had a benign addiction: whenever possible, he had to be in the sea. As recounted in the 2012 film Underwater Painting (not on show), which documents his self-concocted method of painting underwater, after spending several days out of water he would develop what his spouse called a ‘landlock[ed]’ look in his eyes. All of this was, in turn, integral to his painting. The four blurry blue landscapes in this show, dated between 1972 and 2007, were painted entirely underwater, Maniatakos studying the seabed for several hours at a time, entering his vast, quiet, benthic studio with the aid of a dinghy and air from rubber tubes, working over multiple dives, with all the processual purism and desire for direct experience of a turn-of-the-century plein-air painter. His canvases, fixed to lead weights so they’d float upright, were prepared with a hydrophobic oil-based primer (oil sticks to oil, water to water) so that his pigments adhered by pressure and occlusion: a process visible in the paintings’ slathery, spatula-laid impasto, which is nevertheless so flat as to look almost burnished, shimmering here and there.

When you’re many metres down, the volume of water is not only an excellent insulant of sound but of all wave frequencies, like visible light and colour. Speaking as someone who paints and dives (albeit not simultaneously), I know that hues change in deep water, since the water soaks up the red and yellow wavelengths of sunlight – red parrot fish can appear brown – yet your perception can retune colours to compensate, and I’m guessing this is what happened to Maniatakos. These paintings’ abundant blues, and the intricate differences between them, must have been ever so subtly unlearned, corrected and relearned, dive by dive, as his colour perception was bent by the water’s absorption of radiation. What Maniatakos was painting, meanwhile, isn’t outwardly dramatic or rich in features. These aren’t coralled crevices or dizzying depths but, rather, simple flat and fairly featureless shelves of sediment, at times framed by dark formless rocks and punctuated by patches of seaweed: the equivalent of an impressionist portraying a plain field, exotic yet quotidian, an emptyish aquatic stage set. Yet these works also reverberate with a potent mixture of freedom and deep unease, and Maniatakos says as much in the voiceover to his film: “The fear which is present in every

seabed… is a powerful feeling that draws me in like a magnet.” This mix of feelings is arguably that of being immersed in an element that may let you fly and glide but can also, as when the landscape suddenly slopes down to where light doesn’t go, overwhelm and remind you how powerless, weak and easily extinguished you are. (In the ancient seafaring Greek cultures that Maniatakos referenced heavily in his sculptural work, beneath the ocean was the underworld of Hades, god of the dead.) The tonal gradient of these paintings, from the blissful turquoise shallows of Untitled (2007) to a blue-black abyss and that ultramarine zone of permanence that sits in the middle of The deepest seabed, Hydra (1972) suggests that this boundary may be a place of wonder but also of tomblike grief. As such, Maniatakos’s canvases, made in a place where you’re only ever a fleeting guest, suggest portals and moments of reckoning; beauty, ecstatic immersive joy, alongside trepidation and the itch of wanting to know what is past your limits. They’re paintings of the seabed but they also scale up existentially: a play of contrasts, constituting the prism through which we experience the immense privilege of being alive. Athanasios Argianas

Untitled, oil on canvas, 63 × 83 cm (framed), 2007. Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Piraeus

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Sophia Giovannitti You know I got it So come and get it Blade Study, New York 6 June – 7 July Sophia Giovannitti once worked at a tech company where her boss found her body more valuable than her brain. In fact, what he wanted more than her intellectual labour was her sexual labour. After she agreed to take on extra shifts as his escort, however, he extorted her, failing to pay her appropriately for the work she performed, contorting her understanding of authority along the way. Like Judas, he broke bread with her before the eventual betrayal. This duplicity is what first threw Giovannitti into a crisis of faith, she tells us in Does it have a sincere relationship to God? (2024), a live lecture staged on Thursday and Friday nights inside her first exhibition at Blade Study (everything in You know I got it So come and get it is part of a larger work titled Crisis of Faith, 2022–2024). When there is no lecture, visitors can mingle in the gallery, where an installation titled Toby Tony Toni Me and God (2024) includes glass terrariums in which caterpillars are going through metamorphosis and a three-channel video that loops on screens around the room. The first channel displays the music video for country singer Toby Keith’s Should Have Been a Cowboy (1993), the second a clip of an episode from the first and fourth seasons of The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the third a cut of Alexandra Weltz and Andreas Pichler’s documentary, Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends (2004). But it’s only after listening to the two-hour

lecture that one comes to understand what Giovannitti wants to say. Throughout her slide presentation, Giovannitti locks eyes with viewers in her intentionally limited audience of 12 as she methodically catalogues how her faith – in humanity and in God – unravelled after her stint at the tech company. After leaving that job and deciding the nine-to-five was not for her, she published a memoir called Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023), about making art in New York while supporting herself through sex work. In her lecture, she tells us that after Working Girl came out she started wearing baggy clothes instead of revealing ones, as she found exposing her body in the everyday context, when she’d already exposed herself as someone who sells her body, redundant. To demonstrate her point, Giovannitti unhangs a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt from the gallery wall and changes, without fanfare, into the outfit in front of her audience. As the lecture progresses, we find out where Giovannitti found her faith again: in Toby Keith, whose music video plays in the periphery while the artist speaks. Keith, a country star, was characterised during his lifetime as a George W. Bush conservative . Throughout her performance, Giovannetti insists that she has a “sincere relationship” to Keith’s music, as well as to other trappings of rural America, and that

she, to borrow the musician’s lyrics, “should have been a cowboy”. This show, we begin to realise, is personal, but it attempts to situate itself within a political context. Namely, one that is interested in reframing traditional fixtures of American rightwing culture, such as country music, as radically progressive. While it certainly took tenacity and a firm sense of self for Giovannitti to continue practising a profession in which she once faced financial exploitation and precarity, one wonders if her newfound identification with the ‘cowboy’ and country music stems from a fantasy of a gendered role-reversal. Given the difficulties of being a woman in the world today, the artist seems more comfortable resigning to escapism than fighting those inclined to disrespect her. While recognising the perhaps impossible nature of the attempt, Giovannitti uses Does it have a sincere relationship to God? to try to get ahead of the critics whose both flattering and reductive reviews of her memoir she invokes in her lecture. Giovannitti’s show is ultimately an exploration of what happens when an artist purposely generates analysis and discourse around their work. Like a memoirist, an artist can manage and mould the narrative of their lived experience, but as this show suggests, the process invariably offers only one version of a story, for viewers to evaluate however they wish. Alana Pockros

Does it have a sincere relationship to God?, 2024, two-hour lecture-performance with additional mixed media. Photo: Eric Helgas. Courtesy the artist

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Comrade Sun Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 16 May – 1 September The first thing you see in this elliptically titled 14-artist exhibition is not art. It’s a wall-filling graph that correlates sunspot activity, which peaks and dips in an approximately 11-year rhythm, with events in modern history since the French Revolution. The Europe-wide revolutions in 1848? Lots of sunspots then. The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917? Ditto. Prague Spring of 1968, fall of Communism in 1989–90, Arab Spring of 2010? Sunspots. Periods of low solar activity, meanwhile, seemingly track to financial crises and, lately, tension-incubating lockdowns. This parallelistic research was developed by Soviet scientist Alexander Chizhevsky during the 1920s and 30s – Stalin later put him in a gulag for it – and has been

continued by others since. Comrade Sun’s curators, in the exhibition booklet, say that their show ‘unites the political with the poetic to evoke pleasurable, speculative associations between the revolutionary, the celestial, contemporary art, and their effects on our daily lives’. But they also note that Chizhevsky himself never claimed the sun as the sole agent of revolutions; it might be a helper, he thought – hence ‘comrade’ – but people have to do the work too. (See also: political art.) What this leads to here is a succession of artworks – mainly moving image, that most light-based of media, and often in essay-film format – in which the sun and some kind of upheaval are variably aligned.

Most closely tethered to the curatorial gambit is Anton Vidokle’s The Communist Revolution was Caused by the Sun (2015), which fleshes out Chizhevsky’s life and work over footage of rural Kazakhstan, where the scientist was incarcerated – some people still getting around on horses, others standing by pieces of tech intended for Soviet spaceships but given to government officials instead. The Otolith Group’s In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013) tracks back to 1964–65, a time of low solar activity. At this point, as the film documents, many African countries that had experienced a decade of burgeoning Pan-African, anticolonialist sentiment and newfound independence made pretty, hieratic commemorative stamps featuring the sun;

Comrade Sun, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

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the film emphasises the ironic disconnect between the stamps’ sunny quietude and, as the 60s went on (and sunspot numbers rose again), rising authoritarianism, unrest and regime changes. In Gwenola Wagon’s climate-collapse fable Chronicles of the Dark Sun (2023), meanwhile – one of two videos here, alongside Maha Maamoun’s 2026 (2010), that directly reference Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi short La Jetée – climate change has forced humans to somehow block the sun’s light in order to subsist on Earth. Hiding in subterranean bunkers, they develop an AI that extracts memories – which we see as snapshots and clips from adverts that Wagon herself has AI-processed – from someone who remembers daylight, and this subjective, modified take becomes humanity’s image of its collective past. There’s several hours’ more video here, connecting the sun to subjects including Mexican resistance movements and the

Lebanese Civil War, and it’s all navigated via sketchy Bluetooth headphone connections as one moves among freestanding screens in darkness. Accordingly, one initially becomes grateful to encounter variously spotlit nonmoving-image works. Sonia Leimer’s Space Junk (2020–24) sculptures advertise how humanity has extended its cavalierly despoiling attitude towards Earth to the heavens: often fragmented or damaged metal spheres, they resemble specific bits of metal detritus from ‘disused satellites and spaceships’. At the same time, in standing outside of the filmic focus, the show’s sculptural and 2D works can feel like satellites themselves, and this isn’t helped by their disparateness. Hajra Waheed’s How long does it take moonlight to reach us? Just over one second. And sunlight? Eight minutes. (2019) is a 6 × 5 grid of sheets of paper bleached in stationers’ windows, rendered unsaleable and snapped up by the then-penurious artist, here arranged into a pale pattern of different

hues. Accompanied by another sheet featuring the title phrase, it’s a pro-solar energy piece that uses the sun as a generator of abstract, minimalist beauty. This sits weirdly beside GDR painter Wolfgang Mattheuer’s The Neighbour Who Wants to Fly (1984), whose canvas of a suburban Icarus rising from allotment gardens stays tight-lipped about who, in the context of a then-divided Germany, the doomed ambitious ‘neighbour’ is. Kerstin Brätsch’s frenetic PARA PSYCHIC drawings from 2020–21, in turn, imply restiveness in lockdown but mostly seem included because one of their subtitles invokes Georges Bataille’s concept of the ‘solar anus’. Yet that reference works in context, because if you extend Comrade Sun’s thesis to consider that the sun’s periods of low activity help gestate those problems that its moments of high activity bring to a head, it’s clear that the sun is only sometimes a comrade. At other times, it’s kind of an asshole. Martin Herbert

Wolfgang Mattheuer, The Neighbour Who Wants to Fly, 1984, oil on canvas, 200 × 230 cm. Courtesy Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest

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Sofia Defino Leiby Bathos Sweetwater, Berlin 6 June – 27 July In using the title Bathos, Sofia Defino Leiby seems more than ready to set her own exhibition up for a fall. Often confused with pathos, a quality that triggers an emotional response, bathos describes a literary device conveying thwarted expectations or anticlimax – when something doesn’t turn out quite right, and when said anticlimax is put to comic effect. Using this reference to frame 11 small paintings, prints and mixed-media works, the US-born, Berlin-based Leiby seems to imply that we shouldn’t take her second exhibition at Sweetwater too seriously; that being let down is in fact the whole point. But what, specifically, is the anticlimax here? One clue lies in Bathos’s subject matter, and mode of working, which takes from the more-or-less humdrum artistic life. Across the show, Leiby points to its distinct lack of heroism. Case in point, the wry Happier than Ever (all works 2024), with its series of grey, beige and teal oil streaks converging on a central point. Painted on antique linen discoloured by time, its surface sags back to reveal the outline of the stretcher, creating another internal rectangle.

There is something quietly comical, almost slapstick, about how this framing has failed. In a number of these works, Leiby uses the 3D modelling program Blender to depict the everyday practice of painting. She does this quite directly, by creating models of the various tools traditionally involved – normal things like bottles of linseed oil alongside other clear bottles – and then printing them onto paper. In The Ground is Still Wet, but I Never See it Rain, a digital representation of these objects is overlaid atop a wider painted canvas. In other works, including Still Life with Bottles IV, the digital objects seem to arise from a grey contextless space. They have a strange relationship to light, almost appearing to emanate rather than reflect it. In their digital reconstruction, these uncanny still lifes imply the format’s ill-fit with life as it’s now lived, as if the end product could never really justify the increasingly complex process leading to it. Throughout the exhibition, Leiby frequently makes use of everyday found materials like old advertisements, images and bits of newspaper, alongside more painterly media like

oils and acrylics. The mixed-media 10.08.23, for example, combines scraps of newspaper and a photo of birds on top of a painted piece of wood. Amid this gathering is a flat shard of paper, painted in deep blues, purples and white, that seems to both sit atop and curl around one of the birds. The bird image hints at movement and a kind of natural dynamism, which seems upended by the tantalising but blunt painterly gesture on top of it. In Bathos, the painterly gesture often feels intentionally misplaced, even excessive. In Untitled, shellac, thick and syrupy atop layers of an old novel, a Dior ad and a photo of cats, crawls up the righthand side of a wooden board. Elsewhere, in what is probably the most straightforwardly figurative work, Tarts shows a hazy group of powder-pink and lilac cakes rendered in flat daubs of paint. It’s hard to determine from which angle the tarts have been painted, in what might be a nod to the wonky perspective of Cézanne’s iconic still lifes. Here, as elsewhere in Bathos, the everyday life of painting is deflated and oddly comic. But that, thankfully, doesn’t mean that it stops. Rebecca O’Dwyer

Still Life with Bottles IV, 2024, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Hemp paper, artist’s frame, 33 × 30 cm (framed), 20 × 17 cm (image). Photo: Joanna Wilk. Courtesy the artist and Sweetwater, Berlin

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Rebecca Watson Horn The Secret Life of Vowels Emanuela Campoli, Paris 31 May – 20 July According to a common artworld truism, language, useful as it may be for describing things, pales in comparison to raw, corporeal experience. The real, it is supposed, always evades illumination by the dim light of words. In her debut Paris solo exhibition, however, New York-based painter Rebecca Watson Horn recalls how language itself is every bit as mutable and mysterious as the world of material and sensory experience that it is often deployed to portray. Executed largely in oil on burlap – with the latter occasionally used to more sculptural ends – Watson’s works send calligraphic bits and pieces tumbling through atmospheres of colour and line. According to the gallery text, each painting began with a sentence or a phrase, first written in paint, and rewrought through intrusions of colour and shape into forms that seem caught in perpetual gestation. In Sigil 78 (2024), deep purple lines, suggesting the letters s, o and b, curve upward over the painting’s surface, clustering along its right edge, and expanding in three places into large blotches

recalling infilled cursive loops. Over this, another set of red lines comes in, while scrubbings of sunflower yellow, oxidised-copper green and a thinner purple fill the image’s negative spaces. Here is a shadow vision of the spoken and written word, seen as in a dark room at nightfall. In this show, as with Horn’s practice generally, a guiding technique is maintained with galling rigidity; so much the better to let polyphonic moods unfold across the resultant paintings. Sigil 83 (2024) had my mind lounging on an irradiated beach: across a ground made from powder yellow, mandarin orange and lavender, four more letter-resembling shapes jump in sequence, high and low, across the canvas. Horn’s colours are never laid down and left alone, but always layered, so that the fragmented and warped phrasings emerge from and recede into a space as deep as the murky realm from which language and thought emerge. One painting, Sigil 81 (2024), presents a coded message. Here, the letters CSFR dangle, white, yellow and purple, over ocean blue. To fill in

the gaps (and read ‘CEASEFIRE’) is to receive a reminder of the awful reality outside, in which hope strains against seemingly unstoppable tides of violence. If this is an exhibition about the mystery of what language can and cannot do, this painting is a charged reminder of the same enigma vis-à-vis art, whose capacity to trigger thought and wonder often seems swamped by incomparably more pressing matters. In this show, colour generates mood. So does a willingness to let letters float free from the contexts that generally afford them coherence and meaning. The centre of one room is filled with a forest of broad strips of hanging burlap (works from the Semaphore series, 2023), which evoke curtains or massively overgrown strips of flypaper. On each, letters – or at least the unformed beginnings of letters – appear in acrylic paint, hang in the raw material. Like cousins of Petri-dish amoeba, they have an oddly self-assured formlessness: painting in the mode of poetry, working against rules of logic and efficiency, to let us feel the vibes and forms of what we call information. Mitch Speed

The Secret Life of Vowels, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Emanuela Campoli, Paris

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Liz Collins Lightning Wheel Candice Madey, New York 20 June – 2 August There are soft explosions in Liz Collins’s textiles. From the atomic nexuses of 12 embroideries and weavings, an energy both analytic and disco blasts its rays in joyous shades. The Brooklyn-based artist refuses to hold back on hues and textures, colouring cushiony surfaces with a blissful militancy. As a result, her works on display at Candice Madey, which are at once warm, carefree and unpredictable, simultaneously invite and disarm; they enact an effortless embrace of the everyday, as well as a tightly orchestrated celebration of an oblique and open-ended personal cosmology. Like a rock anthem or even a prayer, there is a devotion to a rhythmic order – perhaps inevitable in weaving – but just as the same words can be uttered differently, her works signal subjectiveness in each thread. A largescale galactic textile, Rainbow Mountains: Storm (2024), presents a rainbow à la glam rock, a brightly hued and uncompromisingly sized banner framing a winding slab of blue, green, yellow, orange and red that renders the ubiquitous queer symbol and natural phenomenon at once familiar and obscure. Towering over the viewer at a height of three metres, the rainbow feels not only divine but also alive. The tapestry’s physical richness makes the scene almost kinetic: the woven surface seems to breathe. Like a stop on the itinerary

of a space-travelling Ziggy Stardust, Collins’s rainbow spreads its bands of colours with a glamorous, irresistible and almost sonic charm. Towards the bottom of the composition lies a mountainous land with views of what resemble snowy peaks. The land beneath the rainbow, where molten earth blends with spiky rocks, radiates a synaesthetic blast. Onto the blast site rain silver droplets: the image on the textile captures the medley of liquid and solid in a moment of both cohesion and disintegration. Smaller textiles spread around the gallery, which buttress the visual effect of Rainbow Mountains: Storm, zoom in on sharp-edged, flamboyant thunderbolts that poke at waves of bright sequins, showcasing Collins’s signature eclecticism. Fuzzy yarn pushes and pulls against Fractured Sky (2023). A rainbow zigzag composed of beadwork wedges itself between a shiny metallic surface and a matt grid in Fission (2024). Sleek blue circles hover on a stippled woven background in one of three textiles titled Lightning Wheel (2024). Collins’s disparate materials clash with such force and friction they appear at times to be engaged in an erotic dance. Serpentine fibres tug at and bleed into one another. Each sequin beams like a sweat drop and collectively manifests force like a gay army. Different practices of weaving mingle

and bond, penetrating one another and releasing. Fleshiness is not an unheard-of attribute for textile – think Sheila Hicks or Faith Ringgold. Collins’s works, however, are less like bodies themselves than like the accreted marks of a body’s rhythms and exertions; they are records of action, both product and process. Because her work invokes craft traditions and aligns with what the press release calls ‘queer feminist sensibilities’, Collins runs the risk of being pigeonholed as an ‘artist-activist’, a marcher sewing her banner for the street. However, through the roaring stillness of abstraction, Collins’s insistently utopian textiles call to mind the kind of queer open-endedness the late cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz was evoking in Cruising Utopia (2009) when he wrote, ‘Queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion.’ Numerous political positions can be distilled from Collins’s subject matter and symbology, but in the face of mounting expectations for activist declarations in queer art, Collins also dares to leave the interpretation of her works unfixed: her shapes, colours and textures invite unfettered readings and thus satiate both the mind and the heart. Osman Can Yerebakan

Rainbow Mountains: Storm, 2024, woven textile, 305 × 391 cm. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy the artist and Candice Madey, New York

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Lightning Wheel, 2024, woven textile, 152 × 101 cm. Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy the artist and Candice Madey, New York

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Otobong Nkanga We Come from Fire and Return to Fire Lisson Gallery, London 24 May – 3 August Resembling the trunks of palm trees scorched by some apocalyptic conflagration, three ceramic works rise up in the main space of Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga’s first solo exhibition at Lisson, London. Inspecting their blackened, carbonised surfaces, we get to thinking of the devastating blazes that, in our age of global heating, are razing more and more of the world’s forests, laying waste to ecologies and choking our shared skies. Perhaps what Nkanga is presenting in her Beacon works (2024) is a vision of an imminent future, in which this trio of charred forms are all that remains of Earth’s arboreal life. At the base of each of these works the artist has placed steel and ceramic vessels containing dried medicinal plants, like offerings before an idol or flowers on a tomb. Get close to Beacon – Prominence, for example, and our nostrils are met with the scent of lavender, an herb used to treat anxiety and depression. Is this enough to cure humanity of its self-destructive impulses, or is it too little, too late? In the show’s titular installation, We Come from Fire and Return to Fire (2024), a thick, hand-braided

rope, threaded with huge smoked-raku ceramic beads, descends from the high gallery ceiling and snakes across a hand-tufted rug that – with its ashy blues and purples enlivened by flashes of volcanic red – evokes a simmering pool of magma. Resting among the rug’s fibres are polished spheres and jagged fragments of semiprecious stone, among them shungite and tourmaline, which some alternative healers claim possess protective and purifying qualities (mainstream Western science strongly disagrees). It’s a work that employs the argot of tasteful, high-end domestic decor to seduce us into thinking about the millennia-long process of geological formation, and humanity’s rapacious, often environmentally devastating extraction of minerals from the earth; about different models of knowing, and valuing, the natural world. Over three metres long, Nkanga’s tapestry Sunburst (2024) is a God’s-eye view of a circular form, part heat-hazed sun, part pulsing, unstable atom, hovering above a parched and inhospitable landscape. A network of branching lines might

be read as roads, along which people and goods once travelled. Now, these are empty, nothing but scars on the face of a murdered planet. A tapestry, of course, is an object heavily invested with human labour. Is Sunburst, then, a work about how our overproductive species weaves its own, disastrous fate? Descend into the gallery’s basement space, which is illuminated with red, infernal light, and we encounter the audio installation Wetin You Go Do? Oya Na (2020) booming from a set of wall-mounted speakers. Here, the artist plays a number of characters – from a drunkard to a politician at a rally – whose often incoherent voices declaim, chant, cut across each other, occasionally harmonise and eventually swell into a crescendo. We might interpret them as noisy, disembodied shades, trapped in a hell of their own making. The work’s Nigerian Pidgin English title translates as ‘what are you going to do? It’s time.’ As the flames of ecological crisis lick ever higher, how we answer this is – as Nkanga’s stark, urgent, yet ultimately galvanising show demonstrates – a matter of life and death. Tom Morton

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Saša Tkačenko I Could Live in Hope Eugster, Belgrade 31 May – 17 August ‘Low was an American indie rock band from Duluth, Minnesota, formed in 1993 by Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker.’ This is the only information presented in Serbian artist Saša Tkačenko’s exhibition I Could Live in Hope, titled after the band’s 1994 debut album. The sentence is acetone-printed small onto a pale brown plasterboard, a poster-sized work titled The Band (all works 2024). Perhaps it’s the only information you need. After all, Tkačenko’s show is an exploration of absence, of looking at the place where nothing is, or rather, where nothing is anymore. At first glance Tkačenko’s show is spare. Including the plasterboard, there are only four works in the whole gallery, located in a metal hangar on Belgrade’s industrial outskirts. The word ‘LOW’ appears large on the far wall opposite the entrance, each letter perhaps three metres tall. The O is italicised and bright, a luminous sunset-red neon. The light shimmers in the reflection of the gallery’s metal doors, the gallery silent save for the neon, fizzing quietly like feedback from a guitar amp. The L and W appear darkened, as if suffering from an outage; look closer and they are in fact painted onto the white wall, dark blue stencils, with chips and flecks of paint left from the

tape’s peeling-off. Opposite, a plastic foldout table stands at an angle from the wall; the track list of Low’s album is scratched in capitals into the dirty surface. It takes a certain angle of the light to spot it. Duct-taped to the wall behind it is a white T-shirt with the album’s title printed in red, like the last stock remaining from a long-abandoned concert merch stand. Physically, that’s all there is. After Parker died of ovarian cancer in 2022, the group cancelled shows and has shown little sign of returning. Here Tkačenko has reconstructed the band by the bare signs of its early existence: its name adorning the back wall like a stage scrim, perhaps; its merch diligently sold at the back; its promotional poster reduced to the facts – name, place, constituent members. The performers are gone, the audience has dispersed and all this space: waiting to be filled, but by what? By their unlikely return? Or rather by a memory, of music and melody, those nonverbal signifiers of our existence and how we feel, or how we felt one day? There’s always been a spiritual element to music, and Low wrought something spiritual from their sparse, slowcore rock that often felt as at home in a chamber as in a rock club. Surrounded by the US grunge and shoegaze boom, Low’s trudging, funereal songs

– clean guitar lines that wander through melodic progressions, drumming so restrained as if played under duress, vignettes of yearning and regret delivered by Sparhawk’s anguished but raspy wails and Parker’s crystalline legato – captured an emotional ennui at the heart of 1990s rock music: a sense of longing and restlessness, but equally, and as a result, a conviction that there must be more to life, or a life beyond. There’s a politics lurking in Tkačenko’s show too: the letters, red and blue, on these vast white walls echo the colours of the Serbian flag (‘Low’ perhaps a literal comment on the mood of the nation); the album’s release date harks back to the thick of the Balkan wars, when, for a then-teenage Tkačenko, we might assume Belgrade was a city in which joy and imaginative escape were rare and to be savoured. Indeed, today Serbia’s far-right leaders face protests against electoral fraud in recent elections, and are accused of persecuting opposition leaders who express dissent, while hosting nationalist rallies in Belgrade’s main square. Liberal protest movements have splintered and petered out. On the city’s outskirts, Tkačenko’s show reaches into a tumultuous past in search of something to hold onto, and recuperate. Alexander Leissle

The Band (detail), 2024, acetone transfer on plaster board, aluminium frame, 120 × 94 × 5 cm. Photo: Ivan Zupanc. Courtesy Eugster, Belgrade

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Pacita Abad Underwater Wilderness Tina Kim Gallery, New York 27 June – 16 August In the darkened gallery, seven monumental padded canvases hang from the ceiling. Lit from below, their undulating surfaces present vibrant aquatic scenes made from paint, fabric and other decorative objects. In Sepoc Wall (1985), the sinuous zigzags of Rickrack braiding become strands of seaweed, pearlescent buttons tiny bubbles. Fish eyes glitter with shisha (mirror-work) in Anilao at its Best (1986), while soft bas-relief passages evoke thick stalks of coral in Dumaguete’s Underwater Garden (1987). On the reverse of the paintings, constellations of stitches evince the skill of an inveterate craftswoman, punctuated by the artist’s handwritten notes, including meticulous lists of materials: embroidered broken glass, lace, rhinestones. Over her 32-year career, Philippine-American artist Abad produced more than 5,000 works informed by her travels to more than 60 countries, employing a social-realist approach to depict the experiences of immigrants, refugees and others who made a life on the margins. During the 1980s, a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism dominated in the West, Abad dived in the opposite direction. Making a name for herself as an artworld ‘bad girl’, she revelled in scrappy, expressive markmaking, dense bricolage, a wide range of crafts – Indonesian batik, Malian mud cloth and Pakistani ralli quilts, to name but a few – and exuberant figuration, creating stitched and padded textile paintings she termed trapuntos.

Densely embellished and colourful, the eight trapuntos that comprise Underwater Wilderness were begun in 1985. Inspired by Abad’s scuba dives off the coast of the Philippines during the 1980s, they were first exhibited in an immersive installation, Assaulting the Deep Sea, in 1986 at the Ayala Museum in Manila, the same year the People Power Revolution brought Ferdinand Marcos’s 20-year dictatorship to an end. For Abad, who led student protests of the Marcos regime before she was forced to flee the country, the exhibition in the capital marked a homecoming of sorts. She arranged the works in a playful, transportive setting replete with humble materials and found objects. The paintings hung like backdrops as visitors walked on floors lined with nets and navigated between cloth squids and coralline garlands. Abad walked around the exhibition opening in a bikini and diving gear. Underwater Wilderness dovetails with a major travelling retrospective that aims to reevaluate the artist’s legacy. While it’s natural to wonder what Abad, who died in 2004, might have made of the more traditional white-cube presentation of her work, this simplified installation of her diving paintings allows their astounding formal complexity to come to the fore. Dumaguete’s Underwater Garden, which stretches three metres across the back wall of the gallery, exemplifies the artist’s expert evocation of the play of water and light. The dry matt of Abad’s oil and acrylic might seem a counterintuitive approach to rendering a wet landscape, but it provides ideal

contrast to the glitter, gold thread and sequin accents that capture the sun’s rays hitting the reef and plant life. Seen today, Abad’s approaches appear clearly in kinship with the feminist strategies of claiming space used by other women artists during the 1970s and 80s: from working at larger-than-life scale and colour, as with Niki de Saint Phalle, to adopting a provocative persona to disrupt the elitism and exclusivity of mainstream art spaces like Lorraine O’Grady, or repositioning women-led textile and sewing traditions as fine art, as did Faith Ringgold (who was one of Abad’s admirers). In her 1986 artist statement on her Underwater Wilderness works, Abad said that when she went diving, she felt ‘like an infidel intruding into somewhere sacred’. To stand before Sepoc Wall is to be engulfed nearly floor to ceiling in one such hallowed spot under the sea. Varied brushwork, from impressionistic strokes to geometric tessellations, reveals a thriving network of heterogeneous aquatic life, punctuated by a glowing green umbrellalike shape, which hovers at the top of the heavily patterned composition. Through collage and a melding of styles, Abad paints an underwater world at once wild and interdependent. Her framing of the diver as an intruder to an existing ecosystem worthy of reverence echoes throughout the exhibition, where hybrid objects interweave elements of craft with gravity and contagious awe. Chantal McStay

Anilao at its Best (detail), 1986, oil, acrylic, mirrors, plastic buttons and rhinestones on stitched and padded canvas, 294 × 317 cm. Photo: Hyunjung Rhee. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate and Tina Kim Gallery, New York

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Hundred Islands, 1989, oil, acrylic, glitter, gold thread, buttons, lace, sequins on stitched and padded canvas, 201 × 300 cm. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate and Tina Kim Gallery, New York

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Barbara Kasten Site Lines De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea 22 June – 8 September Site Lines (2024) is an installation that occupies the entire ground floor of this modernist masterpiece by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. The building faces out to sea, liner style, with windows that extend fully from ground to ceiling, and where four (separate though similar) sculptures rest against the glass in a row. Each work comprises four or five rectangular plexiglass structures in yellow, blue and red that lean against one another like toy girders, somewhat in the manner of abandoned construction materials. The dominant vertical forms that almost reach the top of each windowpane are yellow; the sun highlights their lines, giving a near neon effect. These constructions might be imagined as a playful mashup of iconic minimalists such as Donald Judd or Dan Flavin, but one that has been rid of highfalutin claims to daunting seriousness, thanks to the sculptures’ Stickle Brick chime. Taken alone, this would be a pleasing enough intervention, given the changing nature of the South Coast sunlight, the fluctuations in cloud cover making the colours and lines of each block mutate by the minute. But what gives Kasten’s installation real heft, as regards serious stimulation of the visually

powered neurons in one’s occipital lobe, are the other fabrications in the room. A handful of large freestanding structures, like oversize dresser mirrors, are set at different angles from one another. Each mounted with reflective plastic in carmine and lilac, their surfaces are curved so that the viewer’s reflection is altered in the manner of a funhouse distorting mirror. But the self is quickly relegated, refused even, by the concave and convex sections of each plastic screen, as the eye is confronted by what appears to be a near infinity of variations in shape depending on the incline of the view. A tiny shift in balance and the patterns change, as would happen when twisting a kaleidoscope. These beg us to caress the details. The looping forms of the building itself are highlighted through the reflections – especially its famed central stairwell. Enormous stretched scarlet S-shapes bend and spiral in the plastic as your gaze shifts by millimetres; lines expand and contract, conjuring sights suggestive of racetracks, whirlpools, flames, the lapidary features of cut jewels and stones. These reflections might be interpreted as an eternally mutating group of photographs, and it comes as no surprise to learn from the handout

accompanying the show that Kasten is a great fan of Bauhaus photographer Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with photograms and plexiglass. The connections that can be made between the works of Kasten and Moholy-Nagy, as well as the Weimar-era influence on the De La Warr itself, click together with pleasing precision, like when the last piece of Lego can be fitted within some fearsome architectural model. Kasten, now in her late-eighties, delights in warping our sense of the real, as her surfaces dance with the minute-to-minute variations of light bouncing off the Channel waters outside. Kasten alters our perceptions of constructions and assembly by making sculptures with seemingly little holding them together; she plays on the paradoxes of stiffness and flexibility. As the artist comes from Chicago, you can’t help but wonder about the city’s influence on her practice: its glass towers, their reflections and inversions and through-the looking-glass worlds. There’s a determined generosity at work here that asks us, calmly, to slow down and look this way, now that. Kasten fixates on the ineluctable modality of the visible, highlighting its persistent impermanence. John Quin

Site Lines, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Oli Kellett. Courtesy the artist and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea

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Roksana Pirouzmand a land to fall asleep François Ghebaly, New York 29 June – 3 August Roksana Pirouzmand’s solo exhibition is a minimal affair that suffuses François Ghebaly’s one-room gallery with a sense of stoic reclusion and quietude. In the centre of the gallery is Pirouzmand’s sculpture A tap, a word (2024), a kneeling human figure rendered in terracotta. Its back is hunched like a hedgehog’s, with ten pairs of hands cascading, quill-like, down its spine. The figure’s broken head – the crown and face have been removed, leaving only ears and the suggestion of a jaw – is pressed to the floor in docility between two arms extending in full submission, while the hands on its back are strung up to a motor near the ceiling. Every five minutes, the motor starts to churn, pulling the strings from above. Amid ripples of squeaky percussion, the 20 hands rise and fall, tapping on the figure’s back, as if attempting to rouse it or give it a gentle massage. The body is a cast of the artist’s own, excluding her face, while the hands, according to the press release, are modelled after her mother’s. By reducing her mother’s touch to a set of proxy hands operated from a distance, the Iranian-born, Los Angelesbased artist gives form to feelings of absence, longing and displacement. All work on display is made with the same four elements of earth, water, fire and air,

yet Pirouzmand’s experimentation yields a fascinating breadth of material and emotional effect. In addition to the sculpture, the exhibition contains eight clay panels, placed sparsely on two white walls of the gallery, painted with different ratios of water and clay to achieve tonal variation, which results in heavily affective monochromes. The terracotta panels depict anonymous, yet seemingly related, figures engulfed in surreal landscapes. In under a sheet of mountains (2024), a figure is crushed beneath a corrugated landform; she has managed to extricate her head, arms and shoulders from the mass, but her long hair, which trails between her hands into a fold in the mountain, threatens to drag her back under the earth. Pirouzmand punctures her tablets with entrances and exits in a consistent and almost ritualistic fashion. In the diptych counting the days until (2023), a pair of orifices are positioned symmetrically across the two panels; figures in both panels sit precariously on one another’s shoulders as their long hair is sucked into these ominous holes. The cleaved panels and yanked hair literalise the agony of severance. A series of works titled like a pebble in a riverbed (2024) are further meditations on displacement, thickened

with desolation. In one, figures congregate around a dinner table, embroiled in an obscure conflict that has them curled in foetal positions and crouched in supplication, as two pairs of arms reach out from beneath the topography to pray. In another, a figure buries her face in her palms atop a mountain under an empty sun in a burnt-sienna sky with wrinkles in the colour of metallic residue. Notably, faces are also absent in Pirouzmand’s ceramic panels, or in fact more than absent, since they’ve been physically gouged from the clay. In the orifices that remain, one sees the underlayers of the panels, confronting a physical depth that betrays the superficiality of illusionistic depiction. There is no horizon, only holes. In this way, Pirouzmand’s images effectuate a flatness reminiscent of Persian-style miniature paintings, while the hollowed faces bring to mind the legend of the Herat miniaturists in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (1998), set in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, which depicted blindness as bliss – the highest reward for a miniaturist. Pirouzmand’s figures seem unconcerned with the idea of bliss. Instead, what they seem to seek is proof of survivance and spiritual conviction within themselves. Hindley Wang

a land to fall asleep, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Brad Farwell. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, New York & Los Angeles

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Namedropping Mona – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 15 June – 21 April Mona – Australia’s largest privately owned art museum – proffers itself as ‘a temple to secularism, rationalism and talking crap about stuff you really don’t know very much about’. Launched in 2011 by David Walsh, a professional gambler, Mona houses an immense collection of 3,200 artworks and objects, and showcases pieces from antiquity to the present day (including, notably, an installation that recreates the human digestive process – Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional, 2010). Presenting itself as the populist alternative to the po-faced worlds of hushed galleries, hallowed institutions and arts academia, it’s a place where gallerygoers can see weird, transcendent or pervy artworks, access ‘Art Wank’ or Walsh’s ‘Gonzo’ takes via an app and rate whether they ‘love’ or ‘hate’ a piece. What separates Mona from other art institutions and guides its curatorial method is a conviction that ‘art is deeply founded in human biology, rather than being purely cultural’, and Namedropping explores this overarching principle through the idea of status-seeking. Devised by

a team of curators with input from Walsh, the exhibition highlights the way art and brands are deployed as signals for garnering power, sex and reputation. When we ‘namedrop’, whether by quoting The Communist Manifesto (1848) or by flashing an autographed LP, we’re tapping into an instinct to leverage our position among our tribe. A maximalist exhibition of over 200 artworks and objects, Namedropping includes an autographed bat signed by 1980s cricket stars, an eighteenth-century Belgian tapestry, an Egyptian votive figure of Osiris and a 1977 Holden Torana. There is Darren Sylvester’s chrome-legged lounge with its Filet-O-Fish blue-wrapper upholstery (included here because pop singer Katy Perry reclined on it at the 2018 Melbourne Art Fair); Polly Borland’s photograph of Queen Elizabeth II from 2001; and Vincent Namatjira’s painting Vincent & Donald (Indulkana) (2018), a satirical depiction of former president Trump riding alongside the artist in a Dodge Ute.

In a coup for Mona, the exhibition also features one very special CD, complete with carry case and leather-bound book. The Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was recorded between 2007 and 2013, mostly in Staten Island, New York. Motivated by a desire to elevate music to the status of a singular artwork, Wu-Tang destroyed the master files, drew up a legal stipulation that the album couldn’t be used commercially for 88 years and put the only double-CD set up for sale. (The album was bought in 2015 by Martin Shkreli, the notorious American ‘pharma bro’ charged for financial crimes, seized by the US government in 2018 and sold to the global NFT collective PleasrDAO in 2021 for $4 million.) Mona’s much-hyped decision to give a select number of gallerygoers the chance to listen to a 30-minute mix of the album for free elevates Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to the realm of gilded rarity. Recorded in the style of 1990s hip-hop releases, the epic mix has all the trappings of what makes Wu-Tang unique, albeit wrapped in the

Wu-Tang Clan, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, 2015, double-CD album, case and manuscript. Courtesy PleasrDAO. Photo: Mona / Jesse Hunniford. Courtesy the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

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inflated appeal of a scarce commodity: excerpts from Kung Fu movies, soaring strings, funk guitar lines, the sounds of cop chases and references to Chinese mythology. Namedropping’s exhibition layout mimics the irreverent everything-all-together presentation of Mona more broadly, with artefacts and contemporary artworks set alongside memorabilia and letters from illustrious figures (the coffin of Egyptian priest Ankh-pefy-hery, for example, is placed opposite the helmet worn by Heath Ledger in Ned Kelly, from 2003). A multitentacled beast of all things status, from Cartier jewellery to geopolitical power plays, it’s preoccupied with the way reputation and value are intrinsically linked to an object’s aura: what can be gleaned or signalled by the hand of the maker – by a David Bowie lyric written out on paper – and what can be disrupted or challenged when there’s a lack of authenticity, such as in Juan Davila’s imitative painting Picasso Theft (1991) or Sherrie Levine’s photographed reproductions of Walker Evans’s iconic portraits. Namedropping also attempts to reckon with the ‘dark consequences’ of status-seeking. That is, how biological urges can be easily manipulated or warped in the context of colonialism, violent misogyny and racial oppression. A group

of nineteenth-century colonial portraits of Indigenous members of Archibald Meston’s ‘Wild Australia Show’ (1892–93), for example, reiterate the abhorrent racial hierarchies of Australia’s past, which were shaped by a Darwinian belief in the ‘scientific’ classification of superior civilisations. Carl Andre’s 144 Tin Square (1975), a sheet metal sculpture made up of 144 tin squares, is placed next to Jenny Holzer’s staged photographic series Lustmord (1994), a horrifying and contentious exploration of rape as an act of war, which presents the voices of perpetrator, victim and observer written in ink on human skin (the somewhat tenuous link to status being the various positions each of these voices holds and the ‘tribalism’ that underpins war). Here, Andre’s work seems to be on display as a comment on his response to his wife’s death, artist Ana Mendieta – ‘I am a very successful artist and she wasn’t’ – as much as it is for the way its floor placement, designed to be walked on, undermines the sanctity of art. The rapid-fire presentation of so many variations on status, each with differing emotional registers, makes Namedropping a dizzying experience. Its essentialist premise –‘culture gives us an excuse; biology gives us a motive’ – is a somewhat thin and unsatisfying connector,

a descriptive framework that seems to necessitate continual, almost defensive justification rather than an investigation into what might follow: why we might need, as the exhibition text claims, to ‘stop lying to ourselves about the base urges and better angels of our human nature’, whether it’s desirable or even achievable to transcend them and how other less-egotistical motivations for creativity and identity formation (sacrifice, generosity, worship, care and grief, to name but a few) might fit into the picture. This sense of disorientation is further heightened by Namedropping’s montagelike display, which, while perhaps fulfilling Mona’s overall aim to ‘de-privilege any perspective’, feels like accumulation for the sake of accumulation. What once felt innovative and distinctive in 2011 now risks mirroring the exhausting maw of social media – the online feed with its baseline requirement to toggle between LOLs, extreme violence and sponsored posts. That is, without stronger juxtaposition, without dissonance creating new meaning, Namedropping skirts dangerously close to the flat atemporal no-place of the scroll: a mode of looking where artefacts are demoted to mere objects, and artworks, losing their bearings, become simply ‘things’, bobbing in the digital stream. Naomi Riddle

Namedropping, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Mona / Jesse Hunniford. Courtesy the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

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Brass Art rock, quiver and bend Home, Manchester 1 June – 1 September As Brass Art, artists Chara Lewis, Anneké Pettican and Kristin Mojsiewicz work across sculpture, drawing, video and photography to create installations often centred around largescale projected images. Using light to cast shadow, transform materials or offer fleeting or fragmentary glimpses of interior spaces, objects and the artists’ own bodies, their works elicit a sense of doubt or unease in the viewer, reflecting their interest in how to visualise psychological states. The heart of this exhibition and the largest new work is this voice; this life; this procession (2024), the most recent chapter of Brass Art’s decadeplus examination of historic sites of literary production, following earlier works made at the Freud Museum (Sigmund Freud’s London home), in 2015, and the Brontë sisters’ museum in Haworth in 2012. this voice… takes as its subject Virginia Woolf’s writing shed at Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex. In her 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf famously asserted that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write, a statement that has become integral to feminist analyses of the relationship between material conditions and creative practice. Woolf’s shed, set apart from the house, seems to be a literal manifestation of her plea. Access to the shed is usually limited to a glimpse through a viewing window, but Brass Art were allowed to scan themselves, the shed’s interior and the surrounding garden using 3D scanners. Here, the two-channel video combines images of a 3D model of Woolf’s shed, hovering, turning and spinning in space, with movements of the artists’ bodies within the shed, captured

momentarily and fleetingly. The overlay of naturalistic or photographic imagery and more obviously digital and pixelated forms suggests a sense of crossing boundaries and thresholds. According to the artists’ accompanying notes, this reflects Woolf’s own writing strategies, of fragmented reality, stream-of-consciousness and defamiliarisation. The rustling of cellophane, recorded onsite by the artists, is the basis for an immersive soundscape by electroacoustic composer Annie Mahtani, providing an uncanny aural accompaniment to the visual material. this voice… (the title taken from a passage in Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway) acts as a thematic lynchpin for the otherwise formally disparate works gathered here. In the Apparition series (2014–24), for example, cellophane appears as a material, as do images of the artists. In these photographs and short, single-channel looped videoworks the artists appear as grotesque portrait silhouettes, hovering between human and monstrous forms (enlarged heads, distorted figures, a lack of clear delineation between human body and costume). As with this voice…, Apparition references another modernist creative practitioner, in this case the American theatre designer and poet Florine Stettheimer (1871– 1944), who used cellophane in her set designs for works such as Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s 1934 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. The link between this voice… and the works that form Apparition is clear (revisiting modernist literary history; feminist creative practice; figuration; implied narrative), but the large sculptures of the torrent of things grown so familiar (2024) seem at first arbitrary or misplaced.

Materially, we’re again faced with the crossing of thresholds or the passing-through of apparently impermeable boundaries between physical and digital space – silver Mylar sheeting creates the surface of what appear to be gigantic erratic boulders. Hung from the ceiling and grounded by cast bronze hooves, they are both absurdist and eerie, apparently solid yet, up close, flimsy and transparent. What do these mountainous forms have to do with the other works? The title is taken from a passage in Woolf’s final novel, The Waves (1931), a continuous monologue recounting the lives of six characters from childhood to middle age. These geological forms capture something of the rush and passage of time, their core illuminated by coloured lights that seem to pierce the semipermeable ‘rocky’ surface. The final area of the exhibition assembles research sources, preparatory works and models dating back to 2002, alongside a constellation of inkjet prints that make visible the artists’ processes, methods and materials used in the development of the exhibition, while the final work, Click (after Hogarth) (2018), a neon animated drawing, seems to act as a bookend to the show. Drawn from a hand gesture in William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732), the click of a woman’s fingers distracts one suitor from the departure of another in the original narrative. Here, it is as though the artists gesture to their own methods and sources. It’s a fitting symbol with which to close a show so concerned with vision, attention, misdirection and the ways in which resourceful women have found ways to claim the space and time to pursue their endeavours. Susannah Thompson

this voice; this life; this procession (still), 2024, two-channel video comprising Lidar data and Kinect capture, colour and monochrome, sound, 13 min

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Apparition, 2014–24 (installation view). Photo: Michael Pollard. Courtesy the artists and Home, Manchester

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Pietrina Checcacci Tactics of the body Galatea, São Paulo 4 June – 13 July Strands of pubic hair or wisps of grass in the landscape? Rolling breasts and plump buttocks or a stark desert drift? In Carnações (1982) the roots of the black hair poking up over the fleshy horizon are obscured by what we might guess to be a leg; a huge pale dune that falls across the middle of the canvas. Beyond are further rolls of skin in repose and finally the mound of a breast, made unambiguous only because of the nipple. In the distance, against the nightsky-blue background, some toes finally give the game away: we are looking at a nude, not a landscape. Since the 1960s the human body in Pietrina Checcacci’s hands – and there’s lots of hands and fingers and fingernails in her paintings too – has taken the appearance of a sort of sublime geography; flesh made earth in an eco-sexual fever-dream. This is a packed show for the Italian-born artist, who moved to Brazil as a teenager in 1954. The visitor to the two-room Galatea gallery finds 26 works, the majority dating from 1965 to 1986 – roughly the years of Brazil’s dictatorship – hung both on the pink-painted walls and a series of similarly hued freestanding metal racks.

Checcacci was initially a Pop artist influenced by the censorious conditions of the military regime, making works that depicted groups of people: intellectuals, activists, the public, assembling and in conversation. In each painting of the series A novela (Espectadores) (1965/67) we see various figures doubled across the single canvas, rendered in the flat, even colour that she would stay with in the ensuing decades. Similar imagery was used in an outdoor exhibition of flags that Checcacci took part in a year later with peers including Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and Antonio Manuel, and though the specific identities of the subjects have faded into obscurity, the works still maintain their sense of agitprop. The gradual abstraction and obfuscation of the female form crept into her work from the late 1960s onwards, and it is these more interesting works that make up the majority of this show: a self-objectification of the female body made in the shadow of a deeply patriarchal government. In one of a series of works that are each made under the title Evaterra (1971), the viewer takes the point of view of the subject painted, a woman looking down at her own voluptuous body, one

hand held up to her mouth, the fingers with their scarlet-red painted nails circling the lips that dominate the extreme foreground of the canvas. It’s a view replicated in two further works: hung as a diptych, the perspective shifts slightly across each canvas. There is an erotic edge to the work, underpinned by a sense of violence in the contortion of the human body, and, perhaps because all the figures remain faceless and anonymous, a sense of voyeurism. While she picks up the refrain of politically tinged Pop feminism found in fellow female Carioca artists of the period – Wanda Pimentel and her scenes of messy domesticity, or the legs and sexiness of Regina Vater – in works such as Carne e corda (1982) and A doçura dos corpos (2011), Checcacci takes the tension further. In the former the body is trussed up in ropes, like meat strung to roast; in the latter, a panoramic landscape, at least four pairs of legs rub up against each other like sharp cliffs. Checcacci’s feminist vista is a broader one, an exploration of an ecofeminist landscape in which both body and land are conduits to pleasure and pain, spaces that bring both opportunity and portents of disaster. Oliver Basciano

Tactics of the body, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galatea, São Paulo

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Luiz Braga Colorista Galeria Leme, São Paulo 29 June – 10 August On the sober concrete walls of Galeria Leme, 20 Luiz Braga photographs, made between 1982 and 2023, erupt in vigorous colour. They portray everyday scenes of life in the Brazilian Amazon: the interiors of itinerant circus tents and modest restaurants, vibrant facades decorated with Christmas lights and drapes that cover sofas or divide house rooms as doors. Braga is the most feted photographer from the region, having spent a 50-year career depicting local life through his characteristically candid documentary photos and early black-and-white studio portraits. To promote Braga as a colourist, a term born out of Renaissance debates about painting, the exhibition stages a transgenerational – and unnecessary – dialogue with two geometric paintings, one by Alfredo Volpi, an icon of the second generation of Brazilian modernism, and one by the contemporary artist Paulo Pasta. Banquinhos no Guamá (1982) by Braga is a one-metre-square grainy Fujichrome photograph depicting the red-and-white barstools and tables ubiquitous to the region, captured arranged on a peeling blue deck leaning over – the title tells us – the Guamá River. Referencing the colours and the diagonal of the Pará state flags, it is typical of the interaction between colour, oblique perspective, repetition and rhythm foregrounded in this show. Hung alongside Volpi’s Untitled (1960), a smallscale tempera painting depicting little flags, the intention seems to demonstrate the sophistication of vernacular aesthetic

systems when confronted with the painter’s ‘high-art’ modernism. A similar juxtaposition occurs in the placement of Braga’s Rapaz e cão em Carananduba (1990) alongside Pasta’s Untitled (2021), a large vertical oil painting with minimal, geometrical shapes in pastel tones that suggest a facade with an open door and a high window. In Braga’s photograph, made with a Hasselblad camera, a boy, wearing nothing but shorts and a gold chain, is shown with a skinny dog at his bare feet, the animal resting dolefully against a wall covered in pink floral wallpaper. This intimate universe beautifully captures the languid atmosphere of Mosqueiro Island, evoking the region’s warm, humid air in the blue-painted wooden table the boy unpretentiously leans against, a palette echoing that of Pasta’s and matched by the colour fields formed by the door frame and a wall that, in the foreground, occupy half of the pictorial plane. The cross-dialogue between Braga, Volpi and Pasta reiterates the obsolescence of visualidade amazônica (Amazonian visuality), a harmful concept pushed by thinkers such as art critic Paulo Herkenhoff from 1982 until this day, in an encyclopaedic attempt to systematise Brazilian art. Despite being fundamental to the valorisation of the art production of the region between the 1970s and 80s, the concept is used to generically label the practices of Amazonian artists, crushing their multiple subjectivities and suggesting they are unable to relate to artistic

debates in other geographies. Braga’s work effortlessly proves otherwise, and yet the inclusion of the painted works suggests a lack of confidence on the part of those who conceived the exhibition – Braga is a colourist, and can prove it through photography, without the need of the crutches provided by the paintings. Despite being born and raised in Belém, a city lying at the mouth of the Amazon River, with deep local family roots, Braga has also faced criticism from regional artists and thinkers. They argue that, not being from an Indigenous community or social minority, his art exploits images of traditional and mixedheritage groups, such as the boy from Rapaz e cão em Carananduba and the melancholic woman in Amanhecer no Rio Amazonas (2022), lying in a scarlet hammock inside a boat bathed in artificial blue light. The works in Colorista underscore how portraiture of local people is far from being the primary subject of his practice, but instead his interest lies in showing the broader, formal, visual reality of his region. Despite its conceptual dead ends, the show honours the solidity of the visual traditions of the Amazon and their resistance to the fast-paced changes imposed by postcolonialism. Moreover, and perhaps in contrast to the apparent curatorial intentions, Colorista repositions Braga’s work using an urgent, fresher formal framework, reaffirming the autonomy of photography in relation to painting. Mateus Nunes

Amanhecer no Rio Amazonas, 2022, pigment print on photographic cotton paper, 70 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Leme, São Paulo

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Minoru Nomata Continuum White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 10 July – 24 August Although he began painting during the 1980s, Minoru Nomata has only recently started exhibiting outside his native Japan. To style him a painter of ‘fantasy architecture’ would be grossly to undersell the haunting effect of his coldly dreamlike views of sunlit towers, piers, bridges and factories, and other less definable but usually massive structures, often mysteriously fitted with flagstaffs, sails and weathervanes, all of which stand alone against cool blue skies and restless white clouds. Always empty of people, yet too pristine to be derelict, these architectures sometimes offer indications that they’re not quite finished, as if whoever their makers were had, for whatever reason, simply put down their tools and walked away. In these recent paintings, mostly from the series Continuum, begun in 2023, Nomura ups the architectural gargantuanism, while also markedly turning away from the building as his main subject. Some of the works are focused on views of vast, verdant landscapes (mountains, ravines, waterfalls), in which we can still pick out the edifices, but which are now small and vulnerable. In the tall, narrow canvas Continuum-4 (2023), for example, a spindly waterwheel is installed at the top of a sheer cliffside, the mechanism harnessing a stream that then plunges to a river far below, a sunlit valley plain stretching towards the horizon.

There’s a sense of ecological pessimism, not felt in earlier paintings, in which the possibility of human dwelling has been made precarious due to landscapes that are unforgiving and undomesticated; in Continuum-8 (2024), we see primitive constructions, little more than thatched awnings, sheltering the openings to caves in the side of a high crag. The enigma, here, is the large stone sphere, seen at the end of the gulch: something not formed by nature, but a strangely futile product of labour, if indeed it’s the work of the lowly crag-dwellers. The huge manmade sphere reappears elsewhere; a gaunt orb, maybe stone, perched atop a low rocky outcrop, access ramps and scaffolds at its base (Continuum-19, 2024). More absurdly, it appears as the below-the-water part of an iceberg, in Continuum-12 (2024) – the painting an impossible vertical visual cut-through that allows us to see above and below the surface of a frigid ocean – as if some odd society took pleasure in shaping these hidden ice-masses, just for fun. For while the natural environment looms over the world of Continuum, those canvases that hold onto Nomata’s more familiar architectural subjects present structures even more whimsical and absurd than previously; a salmon-pink, seventiered viewing platform (Continuum-2, 2023), or the stone tower of Continuum-3 (2023),

whose only purpose seems to be to provide stairs up to a gantry giving access to an adjacent sculptural column, again with tiered, balustraded platforms; between these span what look like rickety slides, or maybe an outsized ballrun. Either way, there’s a sense that playful futility may have overcome whatever culture built these. Nomata’s empty world has echoes of artists spanning centuries, of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings, the baroque ruins of Piranesi, the utopian neoclassical visions of Étienne-Louis Boullée or the surrealism of Magritte and M.C. Escher. But these antecedents are harnessed to produce images that are at once allegories for psychological inner-states and a bigger reflection on societies that aspired to a future that might have been, but never was. Here, though, Nomata has added a planetary dimension to his usually hermetic world, and a more tangible intimation of history; of early human societies making their first steps to shape the world to their tastes and needs. And then they are gone: in the thematically standalone Imagine-1 (2018) we see Tokyo Bay from high in the air, the coastal megalopolis rendered as a sand-coloured layer of piers, jetties and road networks, spread across the landscape like a dead coral, while Mount Fuji rises quietly in the distance. J.J. Charlesworth

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Hany Armanious Stone Soup Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 12 July – 3 November Birth of Venus (2010) is a square white pedestal large enough to display a lifesize sculpture of, say, the birth of Venus, but which supports instead only a square piece of duct tape and a patina of scrapes and scuffs. Placed in the corner of a room in Hany Armanious’s solo exhibition at the recently refurbished and relaunched Henry Moore Institute, it would be easy enough to overlook were it not for the company it keeps. This includes two plastic paint-trays bearing a residue of white paint; a semi-carved block of marble, with an empty jar beside it; and a picture frame and its pane of glass leaning separately against the wall. None of these objects is what it appears to be. All – glass, marble and duct tape included – are realistic polyurethane resin casts of existing objects. Like Vija Celmins’s painted bronze reproductions of found pebbles (To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977–82) or Robert Gober’s handmade doughnuts, guns and apples, Armanious’s work sits in a tradition of the doubletake readymade, restaging the found-object

tradition by way of the illusionism it purported to refute. Birth of Venus’s empty plinth articulates Armanious’s relationship to that history. His objects reflect upon the language of sculpture, probing at the transformative processes by which one thing becomes something else. Dried leaves spill out of a polystyrene box (Image, 2023); a frayed ping-pong bat sits on a row of corks (Moth, 2020); a cluster of crayons is swaddled in rope (Mumble, 2023). Preservation, elevation, containment. These actions, reenacted in perfect casts, articulate the basic premises of artmaking. Their holding still of small shifts in objecthood nudge their viewers’ thoughts towards the playfulness of sculptural practice, embodied in the work Want (2023). Eight objects rest on a concrete tray, each a makeshift magic wand: a rod jammed into a polystyrene ball; a nubbly stick; a wooden spoon carved into a star. The double duty of its title pares the sculptural process down to a ludic reorientation of ordinary

things. I want this to be a wand, and so it is one. Armanious’s casting process repeats this simple desire via complex means. I want a stone to be soup. I want this to be that. Titles are transformations too. Frequently Asked Questions (2015) is a cast of a cluster of extinguished candles, melted almost down to the ground, which are grouped at the edge of the exhibition space, like the residue of a séance. Frequently asked of Armanious’s work is its relationship to reality – is that glass really glass? Is it really not real? – but it also asks questions of the investment of faith we all bring to the art encounter. (The candles’ suggestion of religious ritual steers us in this direction, too.) The exhibition’s effect of abandonment invokes art spaces (studios, art schools) emptied of their makers, false starts littering the ground. Yet Armanious’s practice literally recasts failure as potential, and the act of making art as a kind of magic you have to see to (almost) believe. Ben Street

Frequently Asked Questions, 2015. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

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Books The Waiting Room by Choo Yi Feng Epigram Books, SGD20.90 (softcover) Purgatories abound in Choo Yi Feng’s distinctively fantastic take on Singapore and Southeast Asia, in which humans and nonhumans alike yearn for love in worlds that are as unbearably polluted (to apocalyptic levels) as they are banal. From a gay man’s crisis of faith when he begins to be haunted by the ghost of his hell-bound mother, to a sea witch seeking to assemble and birth a new incarnation from the dying body of an unfortunate soldier, to the struggles of a sex worker in Bangkok as she weighs the benefits of taking up with a smitten Australian suitor, the earthy tales of Choo’s short-story collection offer a cohesive, though occasionally bloated, vision of how society and the ecologies with which it is entangled are necessarily queer. Finding a certain resonance with weird fiction, the somewhat loosely defined literary genre that often crosses transgressive materials with the registers of speculative and horror fiction, Choo’s stories swap sex for scares with a surprisingly delicate touch that highlights the corporeality of desire without being vulgar or maudlin. Two main modes structure the collection’s 13 stories: character studies set within parallel but not radically different versions of Singapore and Southeast Asia, in which the same general social conservatism and liberal economic context remain; and more experimental

explorations of places and entities set after unspecified crises have altered the environment beyond recognition. In stories such as ‘Spider Hunters’, ‘The Waiting Room’ and ‘Paper Beats Stone’, regular Janes and Joes wrestle with the forces of society and crushing existentialist realisations in fantastic encounters that may be magical or mundane. In ‘Spider Hunters’, the brutal interruption of a young lesbian’s romantic and sexual encounter with her neighbour and childhood friend by her partner’s parent triggers the appearance of a mysterious, eldritch spider-figure that offers her a Faustian bargain for love; in the title story, a young man’s ghost lingers after his suicide, in order to accompany his half-brother, who is awaiting sentencing after murdering his ex-girlfriend’s current beau, and begins a journey of self-discovery and meditation on grief from beyond the grave. In ‘Paper Beats Stone’, a poignant study of the pathology of guilt and shame in the formation of queer self-identities, the relationship between two men slowly deteriorates when one of them suddenly develops a severe skin illness. Meanwhile, stories such as ‘Sentosa Forever’, ‘An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial’ and ‘Plastic Bag Girl’ wade into stranger territories, with characters less recognisably human or even organic. In the first, the mutated survivor of

a viruslike pollutant hungers to escape the quarantined police-state of Singapore island to the nearby island of Sentosa after rising sea levels and the spread of mutagens have rendered most places inhospitable; in the second, the lingering memories of errant souls who have been buried in the deep sea are interwoven with corporate sales-copy for the same burial service to create a contrasting study of what biological death and the end of consciousness could entail in the larger ecosystem; in the third, a mysterious mute busker who can manipulate and animate plastic seeks to become a fully petrochemical being. Serving as parables of the sort that challenge the primacy of human subjectivity and offer different possibilities of being, these stories highlight both Choo’s meticulous world-building capacity and the limitations (of language) when it comes to making the alien legible. A promising entry in an emergent local and regional literary landscape of strange, speculative visions that challenge traditional structures and subject matters, Choo’s debut astutely excavates the undercurrents of our collective subconscious in order to ask the simple question of what it means to be human in a world in which the boundary between what is and what is not human is dissolving more rapidly and subtly than we realise. Alfonse Chiu

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith Oneworld, £30 (hardcover) Before he gets to children’s literature, Sam Leith must grapple with what a child is, tracing the development of ‘childhood’ as a concept. This adeptly introduces a fascinating and often moving account of human fears and hopes – in the company of talking rabbits, wardrobes and looking glasses, crime-solving posh kids and boarding-school wizards. Prior to the eighteenth century, with stratospheric infant mortality rates, children ‘weren’t, as they are now, seen as something intrinsically precious’ and were told the same stories as their parents. When literature did begin to address the

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young, it was a vehicle for moral education. Adult authors were less interested in the child per se: Rousseau’s criticism that society was ‘always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man’. By the midnineteenth century, however, the child had become a precious thing, and it marked the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature. In the best stories, however, this hierarchy of the protector and protected is turned upside down: ‘relentlessly’, in the case of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which to read as an adult provides ‘a way of entering into a childlike mode of apprehending the world’.

Leith, a critic, is an archly humorous guide, sliding between biographies of the authors (Roald Dahl ‘was not an especially nice guy, [which] may have been part and parcel of what made him so effective a writer for children. He had a child’s id’) and the milieu of their young readers (mandatory schooling, the rise and fall of the British Empire, immigration and racism). The child with whom we enter Leith’s ‘Haunted Wood’ is a blank; by the end it has its own agency (from Matilda, 1988, to Sephy and Callum of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses, 2001), veracious to the absurdity of the adult world. Oliver Basciano

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Spice: The 16th-Century Contet that Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley Yale University Press, £20 (hardcover) This is a history of the rivalry between Spain and Portugal. But it is set a world away from Europe (or ‘two monsoons and 9,000 miles’, as historian Roger Crowley puts it) in the archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Today we’d characterise that rivalry as ‘colonial’, but for a long time Europe preferred to frame it in terms of ‘science’ and ‘exploration’. The book focuses on a period of 60 years, from the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Maluku Islands (at that time the only known source of cloves, nutmeg and mace – goods that would have a 1,000 percent markup when sold in Europe) in 1511, to Spain’s capture of Manila in 1571. While the book provides plenty of opportunity for displays of bravery and stupidity, curiosity and greed, it’s also about how easily the human mind can deceive itself into thinking all of those things to be the same. Such perverse logics punctuate Crowley’s narrative history. ‘Trade’, for Europeans, inevitably means conquest. As does ‘discovery’. Maps, when they are not state secrets, are designed to tell you that you can’t get to places (to protect the secret of where the ‘spice islands’ actually were, the Portuguese ignored the Pacific Ocean and surrounded the islands with imaginary reefs). The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which divided the world outside of Europe between the Iberian powers along a line drawn from pole to pole in one hemisphere, but was randomly interpreted in the other: at its most ludicrous, anything encountered while sailing west belonged to

Spain; anything encountered while sailing east to Portugal. And while the kings of Spain and Portugal issued detailed edicts about what was supposed to be happening on the other side of the world, in practice they had neither the capability nor the willpower to micromanage their remote subjects. Indeed, in 1530, needing some cash and not needing the hassle, the Spanish king sold his ‘claim’ to the Maluku Islands to the king of Portugal, although it took some time for that news to reach baffled combatants on the ground. Along the way, both sides engaged in illconsidered alliances with various local rulers that led to the Europeans’ often disastrous involvement in conflicts that they barely understood. In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan (a Portuguese in the employ of the king of Spain), having located the Pacific by circumnavigating South America, led 49 Spaniards dressed in full-plate armour in one such venture designed to destroy his ally’s arch-rival. He marched them through half a mile of tidal sea to face an army of 1,500, who constantly pelted their opponents’ unprotected legs with arrows, spears and hardenedwood stakes. Needless to say, contemporary European accounts portrayed this mode of attack as a form of cheating; equally needless to say, the Europeans never made it out of the sea and Magellan was killed. But as we all know, despite the high attrition rate of Europeans exposed to disease, starvation or their own arrogance and

stupidity, in the end it was the local peoples who generally got killed. Throughout, the author’s gripping narrative allows the boy’sown-adventure aspect of contemporary European perspectives to jostle with the often absurd reality of what Magellan & co were actually up to, relying as it did on a volatile mixture of luck and violence. Equally, Crowley never lets us forget what this was really about: money. While Europe may choose to remember Magellan as a great explorer, his contract, Crowley reminds us, granted him the right to exploit a certain proportion of any islands he ‘discovered’ on the way. Indeed, this period, he persuasively argues, marked the beginning point of globalisation and multinational corporations. Silver mined in the Bolivian Andes by tens of thousands of forced local labourers (thus guaranteeing its cheapness) was used to feed China’s endless demand for the metal (where it was worth twice its value anywhere else). In exchange, merchants could export an equal supply of manufactured goods made in China (during the sixteenth century, home to one quarter of the world’s population, so labour was cheap) that were highly valued in Europe. At the beginning of the next century the Dutch and British East India companies would be founded and the true pillaging of much of the rest of the non-European world would begin. It continues to this day. The past, it seems, isn’t a foreign country after all. Mark Rappolt

Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) For German translator and novelist Esther Kinsky, the cinema was a social space in which ‘seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression’. Her book, part meditation on cinema and its demise, part travelogue, takes us through the lowlands of southeastern Hungary and the nation’s capital, Budapest, formerly the author’s home. Cinemas were once the centre of people’s daily life: ‘market, cinema, cemetery: these were the three points of orientation in the places where I went’, the author writes.During the 1920s Budapest had over 100 cinemas, and practically every Eastern European town Kinsky visited had one up until the Soviet

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Union disintegrated during the early 1990s. Even train stations had cinemas attached to their waiting rooms, while ‘theatres on wheels’ would travel to the most distant villages. Today, cinema-going as a regular activity is in decline, as film has become – due to the economics of the industry and the abundance of personal screens – a private matter and a luxury good. An act of seeing that’s ‘withdrawn from the public, estranged from subversion’ as it retreats to isolated realms. According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, ‘a shelter with a view’ where one could see further than one’s immediate surroundings and into a vast ‘scope of possibilities’. She links this view to the Great Hungarian Plain, in whose

towns ‘you could see from one end of a street to the other and even farther, to the horizon’. But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely. Throughout Seeing Further Kinsky chronicles prolonged, painstaking gazes into the acacias, the cornfields, the rail tracks and the distant sky arching over the heat and dust. In the process, memories, vistas and speculations coalesce, and her long, meandering sentences become an enactment of a meditative vision, to the point at which you begin to believe that seeing takes time, as well as space. Ultimately, Kinsky tells us, seeing is ‘a proficiency you acquire. A competence you slowly become aware of. Should you desire.’ Yuwen Jiang

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Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter by Maria Balshaw Tate Publishing, £18.99 (hardcover) At one point in Gathering of Strangers, Maria Balshaw, now seven years into her directorship of Tate, criticises the ‘notion that our public organisations should be politically neutral’. ‘We [by which she means museum professionals] are mostly all schooled in the awareness that institutions like our national museums are institutions of state… and have always, even with the best intentions, mostly reflected the views, ideas and interests of a dominant cultural elite.’ It would be a sharp observation about the politics of cultural institutions, if it wasn’t a statement freighted with irony. Because, for the most part, Balshaw’s advocacy for the contemporary iteration of the museum, taking in its supposedly dreadful, colonial past and apparently progressive future, seems blithely unaware that its account of the current preoccupations of the artworld’s museum-professional class – decolonisation, representation and diversity, social activism and climate politics – in fact repeats views, ideas and interests that align with those of our currently dominant cultural elite. Gathering… is striking, then, for how few of its ideas seem to be distinctly Balshaw’s own. Rather, it seems to be the condensed preoccupations of a kind of progressive institutional hive-mind, which circulate through acronymned professional organisations that steer institutional groupthink – the Museums

Association, the National Museum Directors’ Council, the International Council of Museums, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, and so on. There are the solemn chapters about the difficult legacies of British museums’ roots in the periods of colonisation and empire; there is the ever-present concern with developing a more diverse audience, which, in turn, tends towards an identity politics view of how the museum should address particular groups rather than the public as a whole; there’s the enthusiasm for the idea of the ‘useful museum’, which ‘typically works with socially engaged artists to redefine the museum as a space of co-production, with the promotion of social good as their primary outcome’. And there’s the now all-encompassing commitment to environmentalism and sustainability. Balshaw celebrates the idea of the museum as ‘a site of perpetual disagreement’, which sounds inclusive and democratic, and yet as Gathering demonstrates, there are certain discourses that are privileged by the new museum elite over others. Just Stop Oil, activists who regularly mess up the experience of visiting a gallery, are approved: ‘we should not take these extreme actions as reasons for forbidding dissent’, Balshaw declares benignly, because letting protesters chuck soup around is all about engaging with a public whose ‘views we might not always agree with but who we are

bound to serve’. At the same time, since today’s artworld is one in which artists ‘let their political views be known’, they tend to hold a veto on views with which they disagree. It’s a veto with which Balshaw is happy to comply. She is certain, for example, that artist Jeremy Deller ‘would be decidedly unhappy if his “Fuck Brexit” T-shirt work was presented alongside an “I love Brexit” banner simply for sake of “balance”.’ A political decision taken by national referendum can be ignored just because an artist might object. ‘We are not always balanced, then – and nor should we be,’ Balshaw decides, sniffily. ‘We should not go back to the turn of the twentieth century and the Victorian civilising mission that motivated many museums,’ Balshaw argues, after a whole chapter insisting that the museum should be a ‘loudspeaker or a clarion call’ to educate the public about the climate crisis. What unbalances Gathering’s view of the progressive cultural institution is a basic contradiction in its understanding of institutional power. While Balshaw’s generation of museum directors and curators may believe they are continuing and fulfilling the radical programmes of 1960s and 70s social and political art, this can’t survive the reality that they are now in charge of a powerful set of institutions that are not oppositional to an establishment, but are it. J.J. Charlesworth

An Operational Account of Western Spatio-Temporality by Miljohn Ruperto X Artist’s Books, $35 (3 boxed flipbooks and a booklet) The title essay of this little box of tricks (around 12 × 8 cm), a limited-edition artist book by Los Angeles-based, Manila-born Miljohn Ruperto, is printed in an accordion-folded format. And it performs what it describes: it’s about space and time, and it unfolds (literally) across space and time. The essay itself is a discourse on how three Ancient Greek ‘types’ of time – aion (eternal time, figured as premodern), chronos (linear time, modernity) and kairos (the time of action, the emerging present) – have determined how the Western subject has historically located itself in the world. (In Ancient Greece, Aion and Chronos were personified as deities, kairos remained an idea.) And how, in locating itself, that subject shapes the world around it – the body as

measure of space, individual mortality as measure of time – as an operation of the ego, if you want to put a twentieth-century slant on it. As the world is reshaped, the process repeats itself, fuelled by the desire to stabilise a world that is inherently contingent. Ruperto can’t help but quip about how even the decision to use linear language is a form of capitulation to this impulse, while conceding that such concessions are unavoidable. And you can’t help but wonder how all this mirrors the desire to categorise and standardise that underlies both the colonial project and its decolonising corrective. Accompanying this are three flipbooks, free of language but filled with art-historical reference (obviously, art is one of the vehicles

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through which the reshaping of the word occurs) via images of disembodied heads rotating (as you flick through) in an otherwise empty space. The Baroque Is a Geometric Imposition Upon Wild Nature features the head of Medusa, snakes writhing, head rolling, tongue lolling; History Awaits Immanence presents what might be the head of John the Baptist doing something similar. The third, Western Temporalities Incline Towards a Tripartite Structure, offers a calmly rotating three-faced Christ (an embodiment of the Trinity). So, what’s the point? Like Ruperto’s work in general, there’s an intriguing play between an apparent sense of control, or purpose, and the actual lack of it. And between what’s in the mind and in the world. Mark Rappolt

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