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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Loves Politics and Butchers Jazz

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:01:33 GMT

The temptation to selectively build a narrative from various fragments of footage and sound ultimately patronises the era’s jazz titans

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a new documentary by Belgian filmmaker and artist Johan Grimonprez, maps a compelling history. At the film’s core is the story of Patrice Lumumba, who served as the first Prime Minister of a newly independent Republic of Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo) for just three months. In January 1961 Lumumba was murdered by firing squad, the bloody endpoint of a military coup incited by the governments of Belgium, the United States and Britain. The Republic of Congo was rich in mineral assets to which the Western states wanted access, while Lumumba was considered a destabilising presence: a proud Black leader of a former colonial state who was also a proponent of Pan-Africanism. To the Eisenhower administration in the US, unsure of how to deal with Civil Rights at home in general, and with figures like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X in particular, this set a dangerous precedent – especially as Lumumba was attracting the backing of Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. To protest his assassination, the jazz drummer Max Roach and his wife, the singer Abbey Lincoln, were part of a demonstration that aimed to disrupt proceedings at the UN Security Council in New York. It is this counterpoint, between geopolitics and jazz, that handed Grimonprez his subject.

The film opens with footage of Roach and Lincoln performing material from their then recently released album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, with Roach’s rapid-fire snare drum salvoes setting the high-velocity pace inside which the film will move, structured as a collage of archival footage and music without the glue of any underpinning spoken narration. There’s the inference, too, that given the manner of Lumumba’s brutal death, we’re supposed to hear Roach’s nifty drumming, which recurs throughout the film as an idée fixe, as an aural metaphor for gunfire. This literalist application of music to event, of sound to fury, might have served Grimonprez’s needs as a filmmaker; but too often in the film it trips up the flow of historical information, while showing scant respect to musicians as great as Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, whose music gets devoured in the process. As a director of videoworks often compiled from documentary and archive footage, advertisements, Hollywood films and home videos, Grimonprez is evidently interested in the role played by the media in the construction of both personal and political histories. He has previously dealt with the international arms trade in Shadow World (2016) and, in his 1997 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, how mainstream news reports on television make a soap-opera out of realtime footage of airplane hijacks. Yet the temptation to selectively build a narrative from the various fragments of footage and sound seems at times to get the better of Grimonprez – often at the expense of the true context of his original source material.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, dir. Johan Grimonprez, 2024, stills. Courtesy Modern Films

At two hours thirty, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey and comes packed with extended, unmediated passages of period news footage assuming a depth of knowledge likely to leave the less clued-up struggling to find their way. It is a special sort of achievement to have so much top-notch and rarely-seen footage of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, then to squander its majesty through not knowing when to leave well enough alone. Gillespie, with a big-band, toured Asia and South America in 1956, a tour sponsored by the American State Department. Armstrong had cancelled an earlier state-sponsored tour in protest against a notorious incident in Arkansas when nine black students were prevented from enrolling in school, but in 1960 he relented, flying to Congo where he played to an audience of 100,000 in the nation’s capital. Grimonprez has fun cutting between Armstrong performing and Gillespie’s uncanny impersonation of Louis, matching note-to-note. But his general reluctance to let this footage tell its own story is a wasted opportunity.

The butchering of late 1950s/early 1960s jazz in the name of film is unfortunately commonplace, clumsy editing that destroys musical syntax happens all the time; a BBC documentary notoriously showed Coltrane playing tenor saxophone with the sound of his soprano saxophone layered over the top. Bringing sound and film together, beyond music being used to ‘score’ and set the scene, is admittedly no easy task. But Grimonprez’s decision to push that already complex equation a stage further, cutting music to ‘respond’ to the action on screen, as though sounds had been made in direct emotional response to events in the Congo, is uncomfortably manipulative of both the original music and of the audience. The delicately structured and emotionally nuanced music of Coltrane, Ellington and Nina Simone can’t be pinned down to specifics in this way without reducing it to sonic wallpaper.

There’s a ‘shot heard around the world’ vibe to another piece of synchronous editing: footage of Gillespie tapping the floor with his foot to count in his band against that of Khrushchev’s notorious banging of his desk at the UN in protest to a speech by the leader of the Philippines. Khrushchev’s own speech to the UN, in which he pointed to America’s reprehensible and indefensible record on race, added its own special kind of shame for the US; when even the leader of Soviet Russia says you have a problem with racism, it’s likely you have a problem. Editing here brings a welcome moment of clarity.

Whenever Grimonprez twists music into being more of an active commentary, though, the problems accumulate. We see Thelonious Monk – who never made any public comment on politics – playing ‘Just A Gigolo’ and a characteristically Monkian juddering, splintering discord is diverted from being an exquisitely imagined sound object into being suspended in time and then drenched in reverb as a convenient transition point between scenes. Footage extracted from a considerably longer improvisation by Eric Dolphy, playing bass clarinet with Charles Mingus’ group in 1964, is dropped in out-of-musical-context, presumably because Dolphy’s solo was hitting a peak of cry-tone contortion, having already transitioned through a kaleidoscope of other moods, the sweeter and more reflective moments apparently the ‘wrong’ emotional temperament. John Coltrane, who is seen performing with his quartet, has his sonically intense solo on a live version of ‘My Favourite Things’ diced and spliced around footage of the tanks rolling through Congo at the height of the military coup. His long and digressive musical thoughts are reduced to little more than scene-setting and sound effects, and Grimonprez even has the music drop out altogether at one point, leaving Coltrane’s face – the pain and ecstasy of creation – as carrying the emotional weight of events in the Congo, a misapprehension that is misleading at best.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, dir. Johan Grimonprez, 2024, still. Courtesy Modern Films

That word ‘soundtrack’ in the film’s title gives the game away. Coltrane, Monk and Dolphy undoubtedly engaged with the world around them, dominated by the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for parity of educational and voting rights, a process that informed their music. But the chain of events between great musicians listening into their situation in the United States and the actual sound they produced on their instruments is an unfathomably complex equation of musical and social phenomena, with each musician finding a way of their own, and Grimonprez barely scratches the surface. Lumumba’s story and its aftermath, on the other hand, is related with considerable care. Grimonprez wraps up with a sombre reflection on the Congo’s contemporary legacy, especially as the source of coltan, the mineral which powers the batteries of smartphones and laptops all over the world. Once regarded as a threat by the West, Lumumba’s assassination was supposedly in the name of greater safety and stability; yet today two million children live in famine, while coltan extraction has been linked to extensive human rights violations and swathes of environmental destruction.

An argument might be made (not that Grimonprez specifies either way) that this film itself is, in essence, a grand improvisation, the energy of cutting together multiple visual and aural stimuli creating an impetus and form of its own. It’s unfortunate that the improvisational sprit of the music that inspired Grimonprez was trampled underfoot through taking soundbites to suit the film without taking care to hear the music. Jazz was an extraordinary intellectual musical achievement in its own right; its own story in sound. It was the soundtrack to nothing.

Philip Clark is a music journalist. His next book Sound and The City, a history of the sound of New York City, will be published in 2026

‘Set My Heart On Fire’ by Izumi Suzuki, Reviewed

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:19:01 GMT

Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes

‘You’re pretty fucking weird.’ That’s how the narrator of this book, twentysomething Izumi, is described by her friend Etsuko. And she is. Izumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English (the Japanese original was published posthumously in 1996, following the author’s suicide, at the age of thirty-six, in 1986) is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes during the 1970s. And it’s about a central character, only in her twenties but by midway through the novel struggling to hold on to what she perceives of as youth, whose own desires only surface gradually from a fog of casual sex, drunkenness, apathy and ennui. And a more general measuring-up of the differences between deep love and superficial attractions.

Suzuki is best known as a writer of sci-fi stories. A pop-cultural icon, she had previously been a model and actress, featuring in photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki. Her life has been the subject of novels and films but her work has lingered in the shadows, only appearing in English in recent years. The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each named after a song of the time (among them, The Moody Blues’s Nights in White Satin and Brenton Wood’s Gimme Little Sign, both 1967). She encounters rebels and oddballs who are into Western music but can’t get hard unless the girl is at least half Japanese. Indeed, in a reversal of the gender stereotypes of the time, her men are sensual, occasionally sexually freakish, but not much beyond that. ‘Most of what Landi said made little sense,’ she writes of one. ‘But so what? His penetrating, metallic voice and clear-cut pronunciation alone had a powerful enough effect.’ Izumi (the character, although there are biographical overlaps with the author) is attracted to musicians who are thin, beautiful, creative and famous, but is nevertheless conscious of wanting to be more than an appendage hidden in the shadow of their genius. ‘Who needs love if it means losing yourself inside it?’ she remarks. What follows is a remarkable quest for love and agency in a world that seems to dictate that achieving the former requires a woman to surrender the latter.

Set My Heart On Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan. Verso, £11.99 (softcover)

Nicholas Galanin wins Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:28:57 GMT

Photo: Fernando Decillis for Smithsonian Magazine. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Nicholas Galanin, a Lingít and Unangax̂ artist based in Sitka, Alaska, has won the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art – awarded by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He will receive USD$200,000 in recognition of his work’s impact.

‘Nicholas Galanin’s work is a celebration of the rich cultural heritage, spiritual beliefs, and deep connection to the land of Indigenous peoples. We are inspired by his talent and are thrilled to award him with the fifth Don Tyson Prize. He’s a bold artist who creates thought-provoking work. Nicholas has impacted the field through innovation, creative thinking, and risk-taking,’ Olivia Tyson said in a statement, on behalf of the Foundation.

Galanin learned jewellery making and carving from his father and grandfather before studying at London Guildhall University and later the Massey University in New Zealand. His work critiques colonialism and celebrates Indigenous culture.

The Don Tyson Prize, founded in 2016, is awarded biennially to living individuals or institutions in the USA ‘who have changed the way we look at, think about, or experience American art’.

When Microsoft Flight Simulator Goes Wrong

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 10:19:53 GMT

The latest iteration of the video game, first released in 1982, reveals the hubris of a company intent on dominating the digital infrastructure of the future

In the heavily branded and marketed world of modern consumer technology, every product seems intended to express the philosophy of its maker. Apple pairs high-end user experiences with sleek, minimalist design. Amazon promises cheap accessibility through its website, the Kindle and Firestick. Microsoft errs towards utilitarianism. Its suite of Office software – including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook – are straightforward and unfussy. Yet a glimmer of utopian possibility occasionally surfaces through the software that facilitates the work of over a billion users worldwide, operated by the world’s second most profitable company. This glint manifested as the harmonic rush of Brian Eno-composed music which accompanied the Windows 95 start-up screen. The video game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, which debuted in 1982 and whose most recent entry was released on PC and Xbox consoles this November, expands on this emotion of promise: It grants the player a practically endless horizon of azure-blue skies; a series of never-ending orange sunsets; a sense of unfettered, technological possibility obtainable from the comfort of a reclinable office chair.

Microsoft Flight Simulator has previously offered a smaller toybox version of planet Earth; rebooted in 2020, it now offers a 1:1 recreation which players can theoretically navigate in a single, unbroken session (although they would likely run out of fuel trying to do so). Early promotional material promised the ability to ‘fly anywhere,’ and that tantalising promise, at least in ‘free flight’ mode, was duly delivered upon. It’s made possible by Microsoft’s growing stack of ‘next generation’ services, a combination of satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetry from Bing Maps transformed by the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning services into a playable 3D world.. As a product of such tech, Microsoft Flight Simulator isn’t just a video game: it almost functions as a glossy marketing tool for Microsoft’s ambitions in the realm of digital infrastructure (which has seen it already score it a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon).

As a showcase of such ambitions, Microsoft Flight Simulator captures the imagination in a matter that is frequently sublime. In first-person, I glide through the mountain pass which leads to Lake Como, peering out of the window while twiddling knobs of the immaculately rendered cockpit, all while wrestling with the wind that is buffeting against the valley’s ridges. Approaching the glistening body of water, I shift the camera to a third-person view of the glider, bringing it as close to the lake’s surface as I dare before skimming the aircraft across the water like a stone. In the background, a swelling Max Richter-esque score dares me to shed a tear.

Doug Rickard, A New American Picture (#32.700542, Dallas, TX), 2010-12

This straightforward evocation of reality lacks the subversive thrust of art projects which have interrogated images of either digital or analogue infrastructure. In manipulating Google Street View images, Doug Rickard’s 2010-12 photoseries, A New American Picture, revealed both the unbound, panoramic sense of space in the US’ impoverished hinterlands and, naturally because of the source material, the queasy voyeurism inherent to Google’s mass photography and mapping project, captured without consent. In his 1989 film, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, German filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki examined the military aerial photography used to make pinpoint bombings of German targets. Despite the Auschwitz concentration camp complex being clearly visible in some of these shots, nothing was done to destroy it and free its prisoners until the end of the war (by which time over 1.1 million Jews had been murdered at the site). Farocki seems to paradoxically suggest we see so much and, conversely, so little, when the world is mediated and abstracted by imagemaking technologies.

Microsoft Flight Simulator possesses no narrative to speak of beyond a rudimentary ‘career mode’, in which the player can take the role of anything from a private pilot to a commercial operator, yet the rawness of its satellite-derived images occasionally inspire moments of solemnity (like artillery craters in the Donbas and Uyghur camps in Xinjiang China). Elsewhere, it can be more visually cinematic, like charting a real-time flight through the volumetric clouds and plane-shaking turbulence of Hurricane Laura. Yet one of the defining emotions I find the game imparts has little to do with flying its virtual aeroplanes at all. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a comforting experience; there is something reassuring knowing that a plethora of real-world, infrastructural systems, and those of third parties like Meteoblue (which sends real-time, real-world weather data to the game), are whirring in concert to deliver this interactive experience.

The game chimes in this sense with another meteorologically-inflected work, George R. Stewart’s landmark 1941 book Storm, regarded by some as the ‘first ecological novel’. In rhapsodic literary style, Stewart delivers a cosmic view of a one-in-a-generation storm before zooming in to focus on various characters preparing and responding to it: a junior meteorologist, snowplow drivers, dam operators and airport service officers. The ecosystems Stewart is concerned with are human as much as animal, and infrastructural as much as natural. In the age of climate crisis, Stewart’s depiction of society’s (mostly hidden) cogs turning in response to a gigantic, external threat, also feels strangely comforting. The impression Stewart imparts is of a wartime marshalling of forces to keep the lights on.

But these workers can’t keep everything perfectly aligned, and Microsoft’s own infrastructure has similarly broken and buckled while rendering Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the 2020 version of the game, the opulent neoclassical design of Buckingham Palace became a drab 2000s office building; while in Melbourne, players discovered a gigantic, 212-story obelisk. The 2024 version is so glitchy that when some assets load into the game incorrectly, they are automatically replaced by a figure dubbed by the internet as ‘red error guy’ (literally a red figure holding an error sign) Players have also reported long load times, aeroplanes crashed into flight schools and teleporting helicopters.

One of the reasons the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is profoundly busted is because of a remarkable overconfidence by Microsoft in its Azure data center network. Rather than making players download most of Planet Earth to their home console or PC, developer Asobo now requires that they mostly stream it to their computers (the install size of the latest version is just 30 gigabytes compared to the 150 gigabytes of its predecessor). Microsoft’s servers cannot deal with the demand of so many wannabe pilots, nor can their increasingly dated internet connections handle streaming such a realistic facsimile of our planet’s terrain.

When it works as intended, Microsoft Flight Simulator is miraculous precisely because it is so uncannily real. But its ambitions suggest a darker desire to master the planet: dominance through mapping; subjugation through machine-assisted recreation. The game’s foundational elements diffused across the globe – a network of data centers and satellites; the extraction and refining of rare-earth minerals (at significant environmental cost) – reflect this domineering mission that is nonetheless unstable. The game’s wondrous display can be fleeting, like a spectacular mirage, concomitant on a reliable, working internet. As much as Microsoft has created a showcase for its digital infrastructure, it has inadvertently delivered a meditation on the precariousness of these services in an era when we have never been more reliant on them, nor has their potential to fail, because of climate breakdown and war, been more likely.

A world of borderless travel; aeroplanes seemingly free of environment-wrecking baggage (literally and figuratively): Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like a fantasy of the twentieth century. But now, with each glitch, bug, texture pop-in and protracted loading screen, the game feels as fragile as the real world to which it has materially tethered itself to.

Lewis Gordon is a UK-based writer on technology and culture. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, The Verge and The Nation, among others.

Artist to design contemporary Notre-Dame stained glass windows

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 17:11:28 GMT

Claire Tabouret. Photo: Amanda Charchian. Courtesy the Artist and Almine Rech

The artist Claire Tabouret will has been selected to design contemporary stained glass windows for the Notre-Dame in Paris.

Tabouret’s proposition won a competition organised by the French Ministry of Culture, judged by an artistic committee composed of 20 members. She will work with glassmaker Simon-Marq, a studio whose workshop was founded in 1640.

The stained glass windows are scheduled for install by the end of 2026.

On Naomi Beckwith and the Future of Documenta

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:51:17 GMT

Art is just about appearances, right? That’s just common sense. That might have been the truth in the past; it’s not anymore. People today expect art to say something (just as people inevitably expect ArtReview to say something about art that’s saying something). And to say something about more than aesthetic matters. To speak to issues like social or environmental justice; about how bombing people into oblivion is wrong; about inclusion, about diversity.

‘At the same time, we live in an age when saying something might get a person defunded, deplatformed or, more generally, cancelled,’ writes Mark Rappolt in a new essay on the debilitated state of debate in the artworld in 2024. Especially when that ‘something’ relates to Israel. Take the case of Ranjit Hoskoté and the entire Documenta search panel previously tasked with finding the German art-jamboree’s next artistic director, who collectively resigned at the end of 2023 following public criticism of Hoskoté for signing an open letter relating to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. The outgoing committee wrote: ‘If art is to take account of the complex cultural, political and social realities of our present day, it needs appropriate conditions that allow for its diverse perspectives, perceptions and discourses.’

Do such conditions exist in Germany right now? Today, Naomi Beckwith was announced as the artistic director of Documenta 16. Selected by a revamped organising committee, Beckwith will know exactly the task she faces. She’ll have watched her predecessor ruangrupa almost crash the car (and not necessarily by accident) in 2022. She’ll have watched the German Bundestag pass a resolution last month that effectively makes public grants for culture projects dependent on adherence to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism – in essence, silencing, or attempting to silence, any criticism of Israel, in Germany and for Germans abroad. She’ll have watched the very public debate between artist Nan Goldin and Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach, about who has the right to say what about what and in what context, at the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in November. Where the institution, as Rappolt points out, seemed intent on distinguishing between Goldin’s views (on the genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon) and her art, Goldin insisted they could not.

And she’ll be watching as Germany goes to the polls in 2025 after the traffic-light coalition’s implosion, just in time to boost an AfD buoyant from its latest triumph in European elections. If conditions allowing for ‘diverse perspectives, perceptions and discourses’ were untenable in 2024, nothing indicates to ArtReview that Beckwith will be any closer to getting them in 2027.

This is an extract from the ArtReview Newsletter, first published on 18 December 2024. Sign up here.

Naomi Beckwith to direct Documenta 16

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 12:01:33 GMT

Courtesy Guggenheim, New York

Naomi Beckwith has been announced as the artistic director of Documenta 16 in Kassel, Germany.

Unanimously chosen from a shortlist of 5 submissions to helm the upcoming quinquennial exhibition, Beckwith is the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which joined in June 2021. She has previously held various curatorial posts since 2011 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. While at the MCA, her exhibitions and publications have focused on the impact of identity and the resonance of Black culture on multidisciplinary practices within global contemporary art.

Beckwith is only the second US curator of Documenta, after the Italian-American Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012.

“This was a shock, a surprise, but also a great joy”, Beckwith said at the Kassel press conference. “I have looked at every Documenta since Documenta 12. I was obsessed with the concept of Documenta from the moment I was introduced to it. There is no other project in the world that allows such deep thought, deep research, and close work with artists. I am here as someone who is eager to learn about Kassel, eager to work with the team, eager to think about global practices from a city that is really quite global in and of itself.”

Beckwith was the selection of a six-person finding committee, including Yilmaz Dziewior, director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne; Sergio Edelsztein, a freelance curator and founder of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv; N‘Goné Fall, an independent curator, academic and former general commissioner of the Africa2020 Season in France (appointed by Emmanuel Macron); Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok and codirector of the 2023 Thailand Biennale; Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Yasmil Raymond, an independent curator and former director at Portikus and Rector of Städelschule.

After a turbulent 15th edition curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, which became mired in antisemitism controversy, the next instalment of the German quinquennial has until now faced constant turmoil. In November last year, the previous selection committee collectively resigned. Following the 7 October Hamas attack in Israel, committee member Ranjit Hoskoté in particular was targeted for signing a 2019 letter protesting a ‘Hindutva and Zionism’ event, while Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger also resigned after Documenta refused to delay the exhibition. The outgoing committee stated that: ‘In the current circumstances we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced artistic approaches that documenta artists and curators deserve.’

In May this year, the Documenta supervisory board announced that it would proceed with its 2027 edition, but without installing a code of conduct for its artistic director. This was among the recommendations set out by Documenta’s appointed expert advisory panel, following the previous iteration’s controversy. Then, before announcing the directorship, the Documenta supervisory board chair Sven Schoeller today said that a new code of conduct will in fact be instilled – and made publicly available in due course. ‘Our code of conduct is based on respect for human dignity, which itself is based on the necessary guarantee of artistic freedom and at the same time protects us from discrimination against human beings’, Schoeller said.

Documenta 16 is due to open in 2027.

Documenta 13 Review, Part 2: Close to the Heterotopias

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 11:52:53 GMT

From 2012: Resonating throughout the exhibition is a belief that ideas ask for a physical form and that we always think with the help of the material world

The opening days of Documenta 13 soon created their own protocol. Instead of discussing what we had seen with friends encountered during the vast walks in one of the main exhibition sites, the Karlsaue park, we hurriedly checked what we had missed. By luck I caught an unannounced, mesmerising concert by Lebanese musician Tarek Atoui, in the legendary Finnish composer and scientist Erkki Kurenniemi’s installation (which included, among other things, his pioneering custom-built synthesisers). One of my ‘Worldly Companions’ (as it is phrased in Documenta lingo) had heard by chance about Haegue Yang’s theatrical adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novella The Malady of Death (1982). Another sneaked into a late-night screening of Reel–Unreel (2012), Francis Alÿs’s film from Kabul. In short, our various paths through this overwhelming abundance of artworks, performances, screenings and talks had created a complex, challenging multitude of experiences. And yet I left Kassel knowing I had missed much. I never found the reading woman placed outside the Orangerie by Ryan Gander. Nor did I understand that the noisy helicopter hovering over us was in fact a work by the Critical Art Ensemble. It was impossible to grasp the show, with its accumulation of knowledge about everything from art and physics to ecology and philosophy, in its entirety. This made the tour around this strong, thoughtful Documenta an imaginative adventure.

A likewise heterogeneous blend of artefacts from different cultures and historical epochs constitutes what artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev calls ‘the brain’ of her Documenta. In the rotunda of the Fridericianum, she has amassed objects as various as antique figurines from Central Asia, melted objects from the National Museum in Beirut, a photograph of Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathroom and a damaged drawing by Gustav Metzger, among many others besides. Taken together, these objects speak of themes that recur throughout the exhibition: the trauma of war and destruction, ecological concerns and a holistic vision of the world. Nevertheless, this magical wunderkammer, like its historical predecessors, is not without complications. Taken out of their context, the specific historical and cultural conditions that created these diverse objects seem to fade away, leaving room for a more generally formulated melancholic sense of fragility and loss.

Nonetheless, as the exhibition gradually unfolds through the rooms of the Fridericianum, Neue Galerie and various additional sites, it becomes more historically and culturally situated. Just to mention a few examples among so many significant works: Hannah Ryggen’s woven tapestries commenting on the rise of fascism in Europe; Kader Attia’s juxtaposition of repaired African objects with photographs of surgically reconstructed war victims; and Mario Garcia Torres’s search for Alighiero Boetti’s legendary One Hotel in Kabul. Finally reaching the neglected buildings of the Hauptbahnhof, I end up at the far end of one of the platforms, listening to Study for Strings (1943) by Pavel Haas, composed in Theresienstadt; Susan Philipsz’s sound installation reminds us that this railway station was once used for wartime deportations.

Pierre Huygue, Untitled, 2012. Photo: Ryszard Kasiewicz

Resonating throughout the exhibition is a belief that ideas ask for a physical form and that we always think with the help of the material world. This interest in the sensibility of different materials, in how perception is structured and in how we are constructed as beings through interaction with the physical conditions of our existence is convincingly expressed in sculptural works such as Geoffrey Farmer’s shadow puppets meticulously cut from magazine pages (Leaves of Grass, 2012), Gabriel Lester’s perceptually tricky curved tunnel (Transition, 2012) and Lara Favaretto’s amorphous heaps of recycled trash (Momentary Monuments IV (Kassel), 2012).

In a house originally built for the black swans in the park, Tue Greenfort has put together The Worldly House (2012), an archive in honour of renowned cultural theorist and science historian Donna Haraway. Her seminal critique of the anthropocentrism of the Western tradition is one of the most favoured ideas at Documenta, and is manifest in many of the works. The break with anthropocentrism has its obvious continuation in the questioning of how the ruling dichotomies of Western thought, such as the division between normal and abnormal, decide what is defined as human: boundaries that are challenged in Artaud’s Cave (2012), Javier Tellez’s film about Artaud’s famous trip to Mexico, realised in collaboration with patients from a psychiatric hospital.

Documenta 13 seems to aim at an exhibition experience close to the heterotopias suggested in Haraway’s thinking. She imagined a multilayered space offering, instead of sameness and unity, an otherness and difference in which a diversity of living organisms could coexist. Almost at the end of the park, suggestively placed on the compost site, Pierre Huyghe stages Untitled (2012), an uncanny tableau, coming close to Haraway’s thought, suggesting a time outside and after our cultural paradigm. A sculpted female torso with a buzzing beehive for a head rests in the muddy water. She is surrounded by weeds, psychotropic plants and an uprooted Beuysian oak. All this is overseen by a dog with one leg dyed in an oddly fluorescent pink. The work seems overdetermined by the apocalyptic sublime, but at the same time strangely and shockingly new. It is like moving through unknown territory, where life forms that we haven’t even imagined fertilise and crossbreed to generate another world.

Documenta 13 at various venues, Kassel, Kabul, Alexandria/ Cairo, Banff, 9 June – 16 September 2012

From the September 2012 issue of ArtReview – explore the archive.

Documenta 13 Review, Part 1: Concept No Concept

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 11:52:35 GMT

From 2012: Despite the lack of a theme, a core motif explored throughout is the interconnectedness of human and natural temporalities

Brain, 2012

When asked at a press conference whether Documenta 13 is held together by a coherent curatorial thread, artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev answered succinctly: ‘The concept is to have no concept’. While this Bartlebyesque refusal might strike some as flippant, it is a statement that addresses a problem at the heart of curating group exhibitions – that of epistemological ownership. Curating a thematic exhibition means proposing a body of knowledge, the rigour and complexity of which is revealed by the curator’s sense of distinction. In the case of this particular Documenta, where an overarching theme is missing, the selected artists and their works are released from a designated thematic milieu, free to be examined on their own terms as much as on those of the exhibition as a whole.

Despite the lack of a theme, a core (and humbling) motif explored throughout Documenta 13 is the interconnectedness of human and natural temporalities. Our investment in objects to narrate this relationship is crucial – they are tokens of time immemorial (as in Carol Bove’s use of petrified wood, and Guillermo Faivovich & Nicolás Goldberg’s proposal to bring the El Chaco meteorite from Argentina to Kassel), at the fissure between natural and manmade (Giuseppe Penone’s Ideas of Stone, 2004/2008/2010) or unknown artefacts, waiting to be historicised (ancient Bactrian Princess figures). The very specific identity of Documenta, born of post-Second World War trauma, catalyses much of Christov-Bakargiev’s enquiry into conflict, destruction and recovery. Objects, in all of their objectness, are vital here. This can explicitly be seen in a display she titled ‘the brain’, a mass of objects that ranges from relics, such as Hitler’s belongings taken from his apartment by photographer Lee Miller in 1945, to wounded products of conflict, such as unidentified objects damaged during the Lebanese Civil War. Documenta 13 actively admits the inherently temporary nature of bringing these objects together in Kassel, positioning them as clues or references for a number of other conceptual and physical locations in the exhibition.

Giuseppe Penone, Idea of Stone, 2004/2008/2010. Photo: Rosa Maria Rühling

Of these, the Breitenau labour camp is the closest to Kassel and one of Documenta’s key sites, along with Kabul, Alexandria/Cairo and Banff. Breitenau, once a monastery and later a concentration camp, reminds one of the history of repression and displacement that Documenta has strived to address since its inception. Here, works by Judith Hopf and Susan Philipsz directly reference these local narratives of forced labour and the deportation of Jewish families, respectively. Departing again from the exhibition’s own history, Documenta 13 also takes place in, and references, Kabul. A key work in this regard is Mario Garcia Torres’s investigation into Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel, which the artist ran in Kabul between 1971 and 1977. Stemming from Harald Szeemann’s invitation to Boetti to participate in Documenta 5, Garcia Torres’s retracing of the One Hotel questions the relevance of artistic engagement and the modes of empowering subjectivity in a war-torn context. At the same time, Garcia Torres investigates and ‘fulfils’ Documenta’s very own history – by finally bringing to Kassel Boetti’s Mappa, a work intended to be displayed in 1972. A similar link between past and present is evidenced by Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial conceit whereby the exact same work of Julio González is redisplayed in its original space within the Fridericianum, where it was shown in Documenta 2 (1959): an inclusion questioning not only the relevance of González’s work today, but the very significance of participating in Documenta.

The sterility and officiality of museological display often severs collective stories of trauma and destruction from their individual and human dimension, effectively rendering the foregrounded narratives numb and abstracted. This pitfall is avoided by a number of works on view that articulate the personal and intimate challenges faced by artistic practice, not least in responding to sociopolitical histories, but just in making art. Kai Althoff ’s letter announcing his withdrawal from participation in Documenta 13 and Ceal Floyer’s ’Til I Get It Right (2005/12), a loop of Tammy Wynette singing “So I’ll just keep on / Till I get it right”) both speak of uncertainty, vulnerability and artistic impasse, while Etel Adnan’s palette knife and objects from Giorgio Morandi’s studio, shown along with Morandi’s paintings, suggest an unfaltering commitment to refining one’s vision and cultural contribution. A particularly pertinent work here is the series of apple drawings by Korbinian Aigner, a pastor who created new strains of apples while imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. Incredible poetic licence is taken by Christov-Bakargiev in leaving the front galleries of the Fridericianum ‘empty’ – filled with Ryan Gander’s I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull) (2012), a blowing breeze – emphasising an individual, embodied and phenomenological experience of art and, especially, objects.

For Documenta 13, Christov-Bakargiev enlisted a team of ‘agents’ whose expertise helped to enrich and diversify the exhibition. While on the one hand this approach loosens the ‘curator as auteur’ complex (or, to cynics, perversely heightens it), on the other it allows highly subjective choices and decisions. While some might find works by Emily Carr or Maria Martins particularly ill-fitting, one cannot firmly argue that their inclusion was misguided. Incredibly rigorous, and at times deeply moving, Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta eschews the trap of illustrating a chosen curatorial agenda with a given work, instead pursuing displays that rest on a personal sense of affinity and resonance.

Documenta 13 at various venues, Kassel, Kabul, Alexandria/ Cairo, Banff, 9 June – 16 September 2012

From the September 2012 issue of ArtReview – explore the archive.

Angelica Mesiti Asks How We Might Realign With Nature

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:11:23 GMT

The Rites of When at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney explores the potential of seasonal celebration and communal ritual

Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When (2024), an ambitious seven-channel sound and video installation, offers a world in which we might realign with nature by revelling in seasonal celebration and communal ritual. It’s a utopic vision, filled with many lush and arresting scenes, but the broadness of its speculative approach tempers its impact. Presented in the Tank – a subterranean fuel bunker constructed during the Second World War – the 34-minute work is displayed on seven enormous screens around the edges of the space. Each screen is purported to represent one of the seven brightest stars of the constellation Pleiades (considered a sign of the changing seasons); other elements, such as the crescent-moon sofa in the centre, reference the Nebra Sky Disc, a Bronze Age artefact thought to be the earliest depiction of the constellation.

The film itself comprises two main sections bookended by telescopic cosmic sequences. Each section appears on all seven screens, whether as an array of different camera angles or a single shot spliced between them. The first, titled ‘Hibernal Solstice: The Longest Night’, begins with aerial shots of a snow-covered forest, before cutting to a carnival procession in an anonymous urban setting, where one participant clutches a mask made of branches and another adorns themselves with a crown of wheat. The second, ‘Aestival Solstice: The Longest Day’, offers a more abstract honouring of the summer harvest – footage of a combine harvester reaping a wheatfield is followed by a single-take shot of a group of performers who lift one individual after another, surrounded by a luminous gradient background.

The Rites of When (still), 2024, seven-channel digital video installation (colour, sound), 30 min.© the artist. Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

It’s the transportive sonic world that’s the standout feature here: the polyphonic chanting of La Mòssa (an all-women musical ensemble from the South of France), which accompanies footage of the midwinter circle dance and bonfire, transforms the Tank into a pagan cathedral. A midsummer rain sequence, which a group of performers produces entirely from the percussive sounds of their bodies, makes you feel as if you’re in a torrential downpour.

The Rites of When expands on many of Mesiti’s long-standing preoccupations, particularly the collective joy of dance. The strobing finale of the second movement, for instance, with its static glimmers of dancers midflight, is a homage to the kind of cathartic release found in the nightclub or the rave. Yet, while Mesiti’s previous works are often culturally specific, the focus on ritual here is more open-ended. And although the work still draws on traditional and contemporary rituals to inform its speculation, something is lost in the transposition. In reaching for the all-embracing and the universal, The Rites of When becomes more detached.

Such generalising heightens the feeling that the rituals onscreen are performances, the scenes planned and edited. The result is luscious imagery, but it’s a gentler, almost comfortable retelling that somewhat blunts any transgressive possibilities. One appeal of collective ritual is in the thrill and danger of exceeding the self, of spinning into oblivion in the crowd. (Stravinsky’s 1913 The Rite of Spring, alluded to in Mesiti’s title, is, after all, a dance to the death, a work so filled with desire, ecstasy, sacrifice and violence that it incited a riot at its premiere.) Mesiti’s work skirts the edges of this sentiment, but it never fully arrives. If there was more of a sensation of risk in The Rites of When, then this might have added a little more heft to the installation’s beautiful flights of transcendence.

The Rites of When at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney through 11 May

From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

Gridthiya Gaweewong wins 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 22:33:47 GMT

Photo: Angkrit Ajchariyasophon

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, has announced Gridthiya Gaweewong as the winner of the 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, for which the curator will receive $25,000 USD.

After working as an English teacher and librarian in a refugee camp in Phanat Nikhom, Thailand, Gridthiya Gaweewong obtained a Master of Arts in Administrations and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. That same year, she cofounded the alternative art space Project 304 with Monthīan Bunmā, Kamol Phaosavasdi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In 2023, she was the Artistic Director of the Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai alongside Rirkrit Tiravanija. Gaweewong is currently the Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, a Guest Curator at the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, as well as an independent curator.

‘Gridthiya’s curatorial approach, which subverts institutional narratives in lieu of artist-led and personal perspectives, embodies the innovative contributions to the curatorial field CCS Bard aims to recognize with this award,’ stated Tom Eccles, the Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

The Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence was founded in 1998 to recognise groundbreaking visionaries in the curatorial field. The winner is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients of the Award include Manuel Borja-Villel (2024), Adriano Pedrosa (2023), Valerie Cassel Oliver (2022), Connie Butler (2020), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019), Lia Gangitano (2018), Nicholas Serota (2017), Thelma Golden (2016), Christine Tohmé and Martha Wilson (2015), Charles Esche (2014), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Ann Goldstein (2012), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Lucy Lippard (2010), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Catherine David (2008), Alanna Heiss (2007), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Walter Hopps (2004), Kynaston McShine (2003), Susanne Ghez (2002), Paul Schimmel (2001), Kasper König (2000), Marcia Tucker (1999), and Harald Szeemann (1998).

Som Supaparinya wins the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 16:02:49 GMT

Photo: Kornkrit Jianpinidnan

Som Supaparinya, who lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is the winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant. She will receive $15,000 USD to produce a new work (a copy of which will be acquired by Museion in Bolzano, Italy) that will be exhibited by each partner institution of the Grant: Sàn Art, Vietnam; the Jim Thompson Art Center, Thailand; Museion, Italy; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Rockbund Art Museum, China.

Supaparinya was chosen from a shortlist of eight artists including Kray Chen, Ho Rui An, Rizki Lazuardi, Puangsoi Aksornsawang, Shireen Seno, Elsa Wong and Moe Myat May Zarchi.

‘Nowadays, even if digital media has become a popular medium in the art world, the art market in the region still tends to collect object-based art works rather than digital works. This makes video art in the region challenging to develop freely without support,’ Supaparinya stated. ‘Considering these difficulties, I am really appreciative for a grant that is devoted to the development of video art.’

Born in Chiang Mai, Thailand in 1973, Supaparinya graduated from a Fine Arts degree at Chiang Mai University before studying Media Arts at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig in Germany. In 2013, she co-founded the CAC-Chiang Mai Art Conversation to help organise and consolidate information about the Chiang Mai art scene.

Writing about Supaparinya’s work for ArtReview in 2023, Max Crosbie-Jones stated that her works ‘are serene and accretive: images are layered, like so much sand or alluvium, to build a heightened atmosphere more majestic – and disquieting – than the sum of its parts.’

Now in its second iteration, the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant was established in Barcelona in 2023 to support artists working in video art in Southeast Asia who haven’t had the opportunity to exhibit widely internationally. The current edition was held in memory of the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê, founder of Sàn Art in Vietnam and one of the initiators of the Grant, who passed away in 2024.

The initial selection of artists presented to the jury was made by a panel of art critics and curators: Alfonse Chiu, Chu Hao Pei, Mayumi Hirano, May Adadol Ingawanij, Natalie Khoo, Annika Kristensen, Mary Pansanga, Russell Storer, Kazue Suzuki and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran.

The final jury was chaired by Mr. Han Nefkens and composed of Henriette Bretton-Meyer, curator at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; Mary Lou David, curator and representing Sàn Art, Vietnam; Gridthiya Gaweewong, director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Thailand; Bart van der Heide, director of Museion, Italy; Takeshi Matsuoka, curator at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Kazune Shimizu, curator at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan and X Zhu-Nowell, artistic director of Rockbund Art Museum, China in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck and Alessandra Biscaro, respectively director and coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation.

Som Supaparinya’s work is currently on view at the National Gallery of Thailand as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale through 25 February.

Why Can’t the Artworld Tell the Truth?

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:43:20 GMT

The year in art: in 2024, museums and galleries were unable to reconcile art and life, and so ended up saying nothing at all

I went to church at the beginning of the year. Not because of any moral, emotional or existential crisis. And not out of habit. I was there to hear a sermon, preached before an altar (though that bit was accidental). The preacher – Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra – was only using this pulpit because the one he’d originally intended to use, at London’s Barbican Centre, had been denied him. Mishra’s talk (part of the London Review of Books’s Winter Lecture Series) was titled ‘The Shoah After Gaza’, which seemed to form the basis for its last-minute cancellation by the Barbican’s management team. You might interpret their decision as an admission of the Barbican’s inability to deal with any discussion of complex or sensitive issues. Although, in a couple of half-hearted mea culpas after the fact, the Barbican’s management suggested that trying to deal with these issues – which it linked to a duty of care – was the reason it had been ‘forced’ to cancel the talk. It seemed like a circular type of argument: that it couldn’t deal with difficult subject matter because thinking about how to deal with difficult subject matter was too difficult. Which is, by and large, how much of the ‘debate’ in the artworld went this past year: finding more-or-less radical ways of saying nothing; all the while foregrounding the idea that it was trying to say something. Because people today do expect art to say something. And about something more than aesthetics. About issues like social or environmental justice; about how bombing people into oblivion is wrong (or even, from some perspectives, right); about the lopsided economies of visibility or attention. About inclusion, about diversity… well, I think you’re all very familiar with all that, given that you’re the ones demanding it.

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, installation view, Barbican Art Gallery. © Jo Underhill and Barbican Art Gallery

At the same time, we live in an age when saying something might get a person defunded, deplatformed or, more generally, cancelled. By the time of Mishra’s lecture that had already happened to artists such as Ai Weiwei and Candice Breitz, curators such as Ranjit Hoskoté and the entire Documenta panel tasked with finding the German art jamboree’s next artistic director. After Mishra’s lecture, a number of artists (or estates of artists, or lenders) withdrew work from the Barbican’s then-ongoing group exhibition Unravel (about the ‘power’ and ‘politics’ of fibre art) in solidarity with the ‘militant’ Indian and in protest against the Barbican’s suppression of free speech. Although such solidarity didn’t seem to extend to many of them subsequently attending the lecture itself; still, you can’t be everywhere and perhaps it’s the thought that counts. Isn’t that the ‘lesson’ of conceptual art? Nevertheless, similar themes continue to resonate around the artworld today in episodes such as the very recent, very public debate between artist Nan Goldin and Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach, about who has the right to say what about what (particularly when that second ‘what’ is Israel) and in what context, at the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in November. The institution seemed to wish to distinguish between the artist (and her views on genocides in Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon) and her art; Goldin insisted they could not. Which, if you’re into such things, might suggest a more fundamental discussion about the nature of curating. But that might risk losing sight of the fact that the real issue relates to the wrongs of bombing people into dust.

Pankaj Mishra delivering his lecture as part of the LRB’s Winter Lecture series at St James’s Church, Clerkenwell, London, February 2024

Looking back over his career after picking up the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2005, the late British playwright Harold Pinter described, in his acceptance speech, the difference between being an artist (which, for him, meant being a writer) and being a citizen. It’s a distinction that could well be applied to the Goldin–Biesenbach debate. The creation of art, Pinter said, relies on the fact that something can be both true and false at the same time; but, for the citizen, it must, necessarily, be either one thing or the other. Art seeks to come to terms with the fact that truth is elusive or malleable; while to live a purposeful life you must adhere to certain absolute truths. Or, the first describes the difficult search for what the second requires. When Indian writer Arundhati Roy picked up the Pen Pinter Prize in London this October (awarded to a writer who, as Pinter put it, shows ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’), she resolved the question of any distance between art and life by asserting much the same thing as Goldin: “I am what I write”. That, in turn, was a sentiment echoed by Glasgow-based artist Jasleen Kaur when she picked up this year’s Turner Prize at Tate Britain, complaining in her acceptance speech that she wanted “the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear.” And that she wanted “the institution to understand: if you want us inside, you need to listen to us outside”. That this was an event where the whooping and applauding seemed at times entirely orchestrated and manufactured for television audiences seemed only to enhance the point about art institutions paying lip-service to reality rather than being a part of it. Reinforcing the common-sense idea that art is mainly about appearances. And making you wonder (assuming you were at the event itself) if you were part of some terrible theatre play. Perhaps written by Pinter.

Arundhati Roy, PEN Pinter Prize 2024 winner, with a photograph of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, named Writer of Courage by Roy. Courtesy PEN. Photo: George Torode

The point of all this is that most art institutions, museums and galleries turn out to be inept at dealing with complex issues. At the Barbican Centre, this concerned the use and abuse of the Holocaust as a propaganda device, which Mishra wove together with his own upbringing within the context of a family of Hindu nationalists (more specifically, he said, a grandfather who admired the lethal way in which Israel dealt with Muslims, as an example for contemporary Indian policies). It was a reference that seemed to bring things to a more personal, relatable, less abstract level (which art people see as a good thing because it signals that you have skin in the game and are not colonising someone else’s issues). While in fact, it actually expanded the argument to implicate the actions of the contemporary nationalists who are running India today and seek to make ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ the same thing – in order, really, to insist that non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, are not the same thing. The lecture, then, was exemplary in its tactics. If a little long, and perhaps a little too selective in the ‘evidence’ it drew upon. But who doesn’t do that last?

By the end of the year (or October, also during Frieze Week) Mishra had gone from deplatformed to replatformed and was delivering a similar (if perhaps more nuanced) lecture to a whooping, ovating audience at London’s Southbank, under the auspices of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (which likes to bill itself as the Global South’s premiere art event and to big up its hometown as a communist heartland, which, of course, Kerala is) and the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (which operates in solidarity the ambitions of the former and far beyond the cartographic limits of Bangladesh). And, consequently another kind of religious experience, via a background narrative of the global majority taking centre stage in the heart of the global minority’s temples of art. That narrative taking place in the background, perhaps, made the issues that led to Mishra’s earlier lecture being cancelled altogether more tolerable now.

Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, 2022. Photo: Jacopo Salvi. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

On the subject of redemption, looking at the overlooked, giving power to the powerless, is, of course, other things that art’s supposed to be about these days. Take this year’s Venice Biennale, titled Foreigners Everywhere and curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In it, Pedrosa did his own preaching, emphasising the fact that he was picking artists who hadn’t previously been picked for the biennial as a result of (it was implied) racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, homophobia and various other prejudices. Which felt as reductive (like a salon des refuses in which the artists are connected by their shared rejection) as it was intended to be expansive. It remained unclear what truth was being driven at here: that curating was about making choices (just as much as is censorship)? That the artworld has been and is governed by prejudice? That all expression is good expression? That art is everywhere if you can just be bothered to open your eyes and look? That one people are naturally inclined to suppress the cultures of other people? That you can’t understand or connect to everyone? It was like a practice in search of a theory. Particularly during the exhibition’s opening week, when this all-inclusive exhibition launched with a series of exclusive parties, hosted by collectors, fashion brands and Western art institutions, with free drink, free food, free concerts, free shoes (sometimes) and a general freedom from any of the ideas that the biennale purported to be championing. Business as usual, then, for the artworld. Perhaps, in the end, the whole thing was a demonstration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s rather more maudlin aesthetic theory: ‘we have art in order not to die of truth’.

So is there a message that we might take away from art in 2024? The honest answer is probably no. But for those of you who can’t live with that then perhaps it might go something like this: in today’s world we don’t need art; we need truth. And only when art drives towards truth do we need it.

The ArtReview Holiday Gift Guide 2024

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:59:36 GMT

People in the artworld are hard to please. We are too. So stop trying to have original ideas and just take ours. No one will love you like you want them to anyway.

Nosferatu
Heretic Parfum, £100
‘There is a reason why all things are as they are.’ That’s what Bram Stoker’s Count tells Jonathan Harker, but it might as well be Stoker – flirtatiously – telling his reader about the Sanguinarian who came to tea. That novel was the reason for F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, loosed on the world in 1922 and almost slain from it by a copyright battle with Stoker’s estate – but for a single copy, which was smuggled to the US where, owing to an administrative error, Dracula was out of copyright. Seven decades later, a nine-year-old (which explains a lot) Robert Eggers watches Murnau and Fritz Arno Wagner’s steely, radically Expressionist cinematography on a home VHS. That is the reason we have Eggers’s upcoming remake, out this December. And of course that, dear reader, is the reason we have this parfum, containing Oud wax, Labdanum resin and Vegan Ambergris. ‘Eau de Macabre’; Eau de Nosferatu. Alexander Leissle

Karl Marx ‘Das Kapital’ Money Bank
Dundee Contemporary Arts, £17.95
Time is invented by clockmakers to sell watches, so the story goes, and Valentine’s Day to sell chocolates. Santa Claus too, I’ve just heard, was really invented in the 1930s by Coca-Cola, which explains the red costume. And before that he was often represented as an elflike figure. (Now he rules over them – another allegory of capitalism?) Consumerism under the guise of love and hospitality are obviously jokes for any sensible Marxist. The real deal is, however, that now you can buy a Karl Marx money bank (Low stock!) for someone so they can start saving up for their next round of gift giving. Yuwen Jiang

Ryan Gander, The scent of the artist’s monograph, 2024
House of Voltaire, £90
A quick scan of reviews of the best scented candles for 2024 reveal fragrances that range from the conventionally evocative to the complexly self-aware, full of subtle cultural references and in-jokes, self-consciously gaming the power of fragrance to alter our perceptions of where we are and what, if anything, it means. There are those solidly, reassuringly place-based aromas of ‘Fir Tree’ (by The White Company) and ‘Log Fire’ (by Daylesford); there’s the more unstably class-specific smell of ‘The Dorchester Spa’ (probably a nice bit of the spa, maybe not the toilets); there’s the vaguely kinky-in-a-posh-way of ‘Bridle Leather’ (by House of Swaine); the almost-certainly disappointing ‘Happiness’ (by Neom); Dior’s ‘Ambre Nuit’, which, winningly, is described simply as ‘rich-smelling’; the self-deprecating irony of ‘Bubble Bath’ by arch fashion miserablists Maison Margiela; and the ‘smell of old books’ – and no doubt borrowed intellectualism – that is Byredo’s ‘Bibliotèque’. Once you’ve got all those fired up, you might as well add whimsical conceptualist Ryan Gander’s ‘The Scent of the Artist’s Monograph’. As someone who owns Gander’s monograph, I can confirm that it smells clever, wryly reflexive and art-historically aware. But the candle is even better, because you don’t need to read anything, or own any bookshelves. Except maybe to put a candle on. J.J. Charlesworth

Pavel Büchler, Silence!
Ikon Gallery, £360 (sale price)
We all know that ‘almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience’. But asking people to shut up is often the most totally paradoxical speech act imaginable. You violate your command simply by issuing it! And what kind of example is that? You look like a fool. People will pity you. And, before you know it, the elves will be running Santa’s workshop. No one wants that. That’s why Czech-born artist Pavel Büchler came up with this sign: so you never need to come off as a hypocrite again. When you are telling people to shut up. Of course, you might still be a hypocrite in other ways. Pavel can’t fix that. Nirmala Devi

Bad Ideas / Good Ideas Notebook x Marina Abramovic
ICA Boston, £24
Why not get a present from the ‘artist is present’ artist herself? One side of this notebook has a white cover, labelled ‘Good Ideas’. Flip it over, and it’s a red cover labelled ‘Bad Ideas’. Apparently, this was one of Marina Abramovic’s ‘good ideas’ to get these made up, so that all us Abramovic acolytes can write down all the ‘bad’ gumpf that pops up in our dizzy heads to maybe get enough distance from it to decide if it can pass muster to become ‘good’. Maybe we can file this with all her other ‘good’ ideas, like restaging old works as Adidas commercials, or not heeding the call of Augmented Reality Satanism. But then as Abramovic so readily asks, how do you know when an idea is good or bad? It’s so easy to get them mixed up, and a scrawled note in the ‘bad’ side accidentally becomes another, ever more elaborate, self-aggrandising opera. And what happens when you reach the middle of the notebook? Does the fabric of reality fold in on itself? Or does everything simply become performance? Chris Fite-Wassilak

Anthea Hamilton, Joints, 2022
Chisenhale Gallery, £1245
The year is 2085. You see an elegant stranger lighting up outside a crowded private view and cross the street to bum a cheeky cigarette off them. They refuse, on account of a pack now costing well over £1000. Oh well, it was worth a try. Smoking has become the elevated pastime of the super rich, with the rest of us left to huff on infantilising cherry-flavoured vapes that look like they were designed for toddlers. Meanwhile, sculptures like this pigmented microcrystalline wax and plaster doozy created by Anthea Hamilton offer excellent value by comparison, a quiet monument to the joy of smoking in a world intent on stubbing it out. Louise Benson

Ai Weiwei, 3D Printing of My Left Hand, 2022
£15,000, Serpentine Galleries
Navigating an age when we’re now being encouraged to express how we feel more freely can be tricky. How much should we really reveal about ourselves? (‘We listen,’ they say, ‘we don’t judge,’ they say.) On the one hand, we should be able to talk about our emotions (whether they be good, bad or downright hideous). On the other, in order to have as functioning a society as possible, (or at the very least, a pleasant Christmas day lunch with family) the general consensus is that there is wisdom in knowing when to hold back. Especially when we’re talking about the uglier end of those feelings. After all, ‘How much worse are the consequences of anger than that which caused it?’ But we also all know that bottling it up isn’t the answer. This Christmas, give your loved ones the gift of self-expression. Fi Churchman

David Shrigley: Collect Records
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, £25
My brother is a musician. A very, very talented one at that. But it’s hard, almost impossible, to be a musician and an older brother without falling victim to some good-natured teasing about your vinyl bro tendencies. Bro is short for brother, after all. For Christmas, I almost bought him this David Shrigley frisbee which looks like a record and reads ‘I collect records / I am obsessed with them’. Because no one who collects records in the 2020s isn’t obsessed. Because ‘I have this on vinyl’ is a joke I make about almost I-was-there-first: you’re recommending the croissants from the bakery across from South London Gallery? Oh, I’ve been. ‘I have this pastry on vinyl’. It’s funny because it’s so clear what sort of dude you’re referencing. And he may be related to me. Orit Gat

Heroin and Cocaine Shakers
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, £47.95
Heroin and cocaine are both white powders so can be easily confused from each other. But they’re quite different, one is an opioid made from poppy flowers and tastes rather bland, while the other a stimulant from coca leaf that has a strong, bitter taste. This condiment set allows you to keep them from being mixed up and give you more control over your holiday flavours. Yuwen Jiang

Pocket can opener
Amazon, £1.51
Tired of the generally overly-priced, sub-par quality of refreshments that most museum and art gallery cafes and restaurants tend to offer? Forgo the dry-crumbed cakes, freshly wilted salads and papery tomato focaccia sandwiches and follow the recent trend: BYOT. There are so many types of tinned foods to choose from, and what’s more, with this handy pocket can opener, you won’t be limited to those tins with ring-pulls – or the cafe’s confines. Instead, you can crack open a can and wander freely through exhibitions with your soup in hand. Just be careful not to trip. Fi Churchman

Loncraine Broxton: Innovations & Executive Toys 1969-1997 by Richard Loncraine & Peter Broxton
Four Corners Books, £15
Long before editioned works of contemporary art were given as gifts, there were ‘executive toys’. Emerging in Britain back in the distant reaches of the 1970s and 80s, these were playthings for grownups, humourous tchotchkes, desk ornaments for businessmen who wanted to show they didn’t take themselves too seriously, handheld games and puzzles for those switched on to new waves in art and design, ironic consumer objects for a consumerist culture. In 1967, ex-artschool entrepreneurs Richard Loncraine and Peter Broxton released the first Ballrace, the clacking Newton’s cradle of steel balls hanging from a chrome frame. Before long shops were full of magnetic desk-sculptures, hexagonal mazes trapping blobs of sparkling mercury, and ballpoint pens in the shape of a fish. Loncraine Broxton went bust in 1997, a victim of its own long, zany success popularising the quirky gift object. This book revisits the company’s zeitgeist-making catalogue of weird and wonderful things. What it reveals, amusingly, is how the stylistic vocabulary of 1960s art – the brightly coloured steel sculptures, kinetic objects and Pop’s own consumerist surrealism – could be reclaimed and repurposed into what might be described as handheld sculptures; little design-art objects created to frustrate, delight and entertain. Now, if only all limited edition artworks were this much fun. J.J. Charlesworth

Sorry I Don’t Work Here (Blue)
IDEA Store, £40
It’s peak season but the gallery is empty. Across the space, there’s a figure dressed in black, silhouetted against the white cube: well-postured but their neck on a downward arch; hands gathered as if at Sunday mass; motionless bar an index-fingernail scraping at the thumb-cuticle; a bead of sweat obscured by a cap brim; vacant-gazed, gently disassociating. You hesitate, then approach.

“Hi, sorry, do- … does the gallery have a toilet?”

“Sorry,” the critic replies. “I don’t work here.” Alexander Leissle

Southwest China High Speed Rail Network
PC Download, £19.99
Over 570km of fun with this classic train simulator. Not only is it Train Simulator’s fastest route – that ten-hour chug from Chengdu to Chongqing now takes just one (but you’ll need to download the CRH380A or 480D High Speed Train to really feel the power); it’s also a chance to check out 22 Chinese stations, the beautiful scenery of the Sichuan Basin area and the magic of the CTCS-3 signalling system. It’s also handy for being fully prepared should you have to take over the operations of a high-speed train when you visit the real thing. Although the whole real/not real thing is really a bit of an anachronistic distinction in today’s world, one that’s best left buried along with René Descartes. These days it’s all about being in harmony with the dao. Although, naturally, you arty types are probably thinking that it’s more like a chance to recreate Doug Aitken’s Station to Station (2015). Sad. Liven it up with a side order of Toto’s Gypsy Train (1992): ‘All aboard/now don’t you be afraid/let’s ride…’. Nirmala Devi

Looseleaf Unisex Classic Tee
E For Effort, $50
Some writers say that there’s nothing more fear-inducing than a blank page. Writer’s block, blank page syndrome, whatever you want to call the hollowed-out lottery of successfully not getting a single word down. Well, if you can’t beat it, wear it. Made by artists, who understand the weight of emptiness, there’s lined paper T-shirts or tote bags, depending on your levels of frustration. And nothing quite says stunted creativity like harking back to your school days, as the fat red margin running down these beauts reminds you to stay in line. Just in time for those family chats when they ask ‘how it’s all going’, while they have little to no idea of what ‘it’ actually is, now you can simply point to the shirt to share how much you’ve actually achieved. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Yayoi Toesama socks
Chatty Feet, £9
Ninety-five-year-old Yayoi Kusama, with her blunt red bob and red lipstick, is just as recognisable as her polka-dot-covered, pumpkin-shaped work. Take her recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton, for which the brand took it upon themselves to roll out a series of lifesize animatronic robots of Kusama herself. Creepy, uncanny and, seemingly, catnip for the Instagram hordes eager for a selfie with the artist’s gloomily gormless likeness. Perhaps the crowds were just eager for a piece of Kusama they could afford amid the frenzied prices of the Vuitton accessories themselves, with bags starting from upwards of £3,000, while this September a limited-edition Kusama handbag sold for $151,200 at Christie’s in New York. One accessory overlooked by both the brand and the artist, however, is the humble sock (an underrated classic in the Christmas present pantheon). This is where a pair designed to look like Kusama herself comes in. Just as gimmicky for a fraction of the price; and less creepy to boot (no pun intended). Go on: it’s what Kusama would want. Louise Benson

Or you could just, ahem, buy… us.

‘The Use of Photography’ by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, Reviewed

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:31:23 GMT

Ernaux’s recently translated memoir meditates on photographs as material traces of love and endurance

‘I realize that I am fascinated by photos in the same way I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses, discarded on pavements; by the stains of wine or food embedded in the wood of sideboards, the stains of coffee or greasy fingers on old letters – the most material and organic kinds of stains.’ So writes Annie Ernaux in her recently translated memoir, The Use of Photography, coauthored with her then lover Marc Marie in 2003 (and first published in French in 2005), when Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Comprising 14 analogue photographs of thrown-off clothes in the different places where the couple met during their affair, along with their written reflections on each image, the resulting book meditates on the material traces of love and endurance.

In the snapshots, clothes are metonyms for bodies. At times, they encode and narrate the actions and movements of desires: a photograph of a crushed cigarette and a pair of glasses on the kitchen counter preserves ‘the first gestures of a myopic smoker who is about to make love’; the distance between a pair of overturned boots reflects ‘the force with which they were flung off’. In others, clothes are eerily human. When the couple went to clear the house of Marie’s late mother, it was her clothes that ‘remained suffused with the smell of the eau de cologne she used to excess’ and preserved the humanity that was otherwise lost. Shed from the bodies on whose shapes it is modelled, an item of clothing lingers between phantom and carcass, an artefact of impermanence, a memento mori to our vulnerable, corporeal being.

‘I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but rather unknown structures for writing,’ Ernaux writes. The book’s format is informed by a period of time in which passion and mortality are like two sides of the same coin – or the positive and negative of a photograph. Here, taking a photograph feels like an aspiration to preserve, and, written retrospectively, the text bears witness to that act of preservation – the time bracketed in between the two kinds of record-keeping is a testament to her survival, when death loiters just around the corner.

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover)

The First Power 100

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:55:52 GMT

Looking back at the introduction to the original Power 100 in 2002, ArtReview editors annotate the justifications of their predecessors

The art/power AXIS constantly changes. [Shorthand for saying that the list needs to be published every year. Though it’s not instantly obvious what is meant by ‘the art/power axis’: whether or not it means the relationship of art to actual (in the world) power, or the axis of how power operates within the artworld. Keeping it open allows for the possibility of the former (optimism) and the reality of the latter (pragmatism), thus pleasing everyone. Which, when you’re about to issue a list like this – one that no one is going to agree on – is no mean feat.] Artists, patrons, dealers, directors, curators and collectors are always JOCKEYING for position [By deploying a horse-racing metaphor, the editor subtly suggests that there is in fact a competition for top spot on a list that until then did not exist. So no one knew that there was an official, judged top spot to be had. At the same time she displays her art-historical acumen, given that horses are traditionally associated with displays of power. One immediately thinks of Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 portrait of a triumphant Napoleon crossing the Alps, conquering a beast and the natural elements in the process. A true triumph of man. Or, perhaps a little less helpfully, but certainly much more of the moment, of Maurizio Cattelan’s series of dangling taxidermied horses, suspended impotently from the ceiling (Novecento, 1997, or The Ballad of Trotsky, 1996). It got worse of course, when the Italian artist began siting the horses so that their heads disappeared into the walls, such that they functioned as trophies of the rear end rather than the head. That’s not what the editor was trying to conjure here though. At the time she wrote this, that was yet to come. She probably wanted us to think of Napoleon. At his moment of triumph; not his downfall], just as art movements shift and markets fluctuate. [These days we’d probably suggest that the movements change rather than shift, though the editor here is obviously trying to conjure the image of a digestive process as work as a canny metaphor for the process of constructing the Power list. Subtle, but effective.] It’s not entirely a question of wallet power [This is an era before digital transactions, Apple Pay and touch cards were ubiquitous, when people had to carry their cash with them in order to spend it]; IDEA POWER can also shake the artworld to its core. [Here the editor alludes to the popular idea of the time that the global artworld was divided into a core and peripheries. And that some bits of it were shaken more violently and more frequently than others. Today we like to think that the core is utterly dispersed and utterly everywhere, although the Power list from this year would suggest that this is still as much of a delusion as is thinking that there was ever a core in the first place.] Some choose to wield their power publicly, others very PRIVATELY. [The last involved being part of a specialist ‘club’ or a world before the MeToo movement.]

Editorial introducing ArtReview’s first Power 100 issue, December 2002

This special supplement sponsored by leading art insurers AXA Art [Whatever happened to them…], the first of an annual series [That early promise of constant change finds its apotheosis!], freezes the international contemporary art scene at a KEY MOMENT in its evolution, albeit viewed through London-tinted lenses. Even our own panel of passionate and informed experts, including Godfrey Barker, Louisa Buck, David D’Arcy and Ossian Ward, found it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to agree on who should be where – or whether or not they should be on the list at all. [Still the case with today’s panel! Although they find it actually rather than virtually impossible. Even if they are meeting on Zoom.] Only one thing is certain; next year it all will have CHANGED. [It has in fact never ‘all changed’; for many years in fact it is the same power players shuffling position or not even that. Proof perhaps that it is in the nature of power to not behave as you wish it to. Or that the artworld is not the fast- paced environment that everyone makes it out to be. Or desires it to be. There’s little room for desire on the list today btw.] So the big question is, where are YOU? [ArtReview had a very small but very powerful readership in those days.] Flip the pages and find out. [What she said!]

Meredith Etherington-Smith, 2002 [& ArtReview, 2024]

Explore the current Power 100 list in full

Lorraine O’Grady, American conceptual artist, 1934–2024

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 19:26:40 GMT

Lorraine O’Grady as Mademoiselle Bourgeois Noire, New Museum performance, 1981. Photo: Itsjoshporter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Artist Lorraine O’Grady has died at the age of ninety. Born in Boston in 1934, the American artist and writer was known for her conceptual use of performance and photography, including the influential Art is…(1983), where attendees to an African-American parade in Harlem were photographed posing with elaborate painting frames, and her performance persona Mademoiselle Bourgeois Noire.

Reviewing Both/And, her first retrospective in 2021, ArtReview wrote, ‘O’Grady is never completely satisfied with her own answers but instead frequently returns to her pieces to revise, reinterpret or make new critical interventions…. An artist whose oeuvre remains both vibrant and timely.’

Carsten Höller Likes to Play Games

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:19:53 GMT

A newly expanded edition of the artist’s antidotes to boredom offers relief from family gatherings and gallery dinners alike

Perhaps you’re bored, waiting at the bus stop. ‘Bring your two outstretched index fingers together in front of your eyes until the fingertips touch. Focus on the background. You will see a sausage between your fingertips. Make the sausage float by moving your fingers apart.’ The sausage does indeed float.

This is the sort of brief – if to others slightly nutty-looking – respite from the tedium of the everyday that this second, expanded edition of Carsten Höller’s Book of Games offers. (The first, a pocket-sized book, was published 25 years ago as a result of the artist having to attend his own gallery dinner, which turned out to be terribly dull.) The compact tome comprises 336 games that are accompanied by images from varying sources including the artist himself and works by other artists such as Rachel Rose, Julien Creuzet and Wolfgang Tillmans. The book is divided into six sections featuring games to play alone and to play with others, games for two to play and two to play with others, and games for multiple players and multiple players to play with others. The ‘others’, here, are the unwitting participants and observers of a series of games that might variously be considered pranks, or ‘sport’, or performance, etc. So, while with one other player you might decide to ‘without touching each other make your shadows interact in sexual positions,’ you may also choose, with that same person, to streak through a crowded public space. And see what happens. You might also read the entire book as a series of social experiments, perhaps guided by the fact that that Höller’s work frequently explores how people think, behave and interact with their surroundings. Book of Games continues this enquiry by inviting players to explore their everyday experiences via sensory and psychological manipulation.

A personal favourite, a game for one, ‘Dead Beetle’ (or, how to escape from an excruciating social interaction or event such as post-Christmas family lunch, once safe topics of conversation have run dry and intrusive questioning begins): ‘Play dead. Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t blink.’

Book of Games by Carsten Höller. Taschen, £40 (hardcover)

From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

How Thailand Became a Refuge for Displaced Myanmar Creatives

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:03:52 GMT

Artists at risk back home are finding solace and relative safety in Thailand’s remote corners and art communities

Within the field of responsible exhibition-making and ethical art programming, risk management typically revolves around the elimination of health and safety hazards, background checks on sources of external funding, or perhaps, if the show at hand touches on sensitive topics, strategies to mitigate potential offence. In Thailand, however, another consideration is regularly factored in: the safety of any Myanmar citizens involved and of those close to, or affiliated with them.

Since the 1 February 2021 coup in Myanmar created a new generation of fugitive political activists – among them artists, filmmakers, musicians and creative workers – a calculated sense of curatorial care has underpinned numerous shows. In January 2022, the group exhibition Defiant Art: A Year of Resistance to the Myanmar Coup in Images featured several unattributed posters and memes, on the grounds that many artists ‘cannot be named for security reasons’. And, more recently, Trails of Absence & Symbols of Presence: Loss & Protest in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution comprised works by two artists using aliases: ‘Sai’ and ‘Ta Mwe’. Both exhibitions were hung along the curved wall on level four of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) – an unassuming yet high-footfall space – and staged by SEA Junction, a nonprofit that aims to make regional sociocultural and development issues accessible through talks as well as art. At the Trails of Absence panel talk, where speakers including James Rodehaver, the head of the UN human-rights team monitoring the situation in Myanmar, appeared in person, Sai joined via Zoom but kept his camera off – his pseudonym appeared in white font on a black screen as he spoke.

Other safeguards are subtler still, yet potentially no less impactful at mitigating conceivable harms. At Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center in late September, a prominent Yangon-based curator gave a talk about the post-COVID-19 and post-coup realities of Yangon’s art market and Myanmar’s contemporary art scene: a period during which, the blurb teased, ‘the smallest string between the country and the international community was once again torn apart’. But instead of being broadcast live on Facebook, the talk was recorded, the centre’s director Gridthiya Gaweewong revealed in her closing remarks, so it could be edited – expunged of statements that might land him in trouble back in Myanmar – before being uploaded to YouTube. “I appreciate that,” said the curator.

Richie Nath, Bitch Better Have My Democracy, 2021, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist

Such concessions to the welfare of the Myanmar creative are happening worldwide – post-coup exhibitions and panel discussions of a similarly empathic and circumspect nature have been staged everywhere from Oslo to Sydney and London. But Thailand, which shares a porous 2,416km jungle border with Myanmar, itself has a history of popular uprisings and artivism in response to cycles of thwarted democracy and unchecked dictatorship. A refuge for Burmese migrants and refugees for decades (despite its not being a signatory to the 1951 UN refugee convention), Thailand is proving a hotbed of post-coup responses and solidarity.

Some Thai artists have responded to recent events in Myanmar in the way that feels most natural: the painter Ubatsat, for example, has recreated Guernica, Picasso’s cacophonous depiction of Hitler’s 1937 bombing of a village in northern Spain, but infused it with his own uncontained sense of horror and dread. Currently on prominent display at MAIIAM Museum of Contemporary Art in Chiang Mai, as part of the exhibition Living Another Future, Burmica (2022) overlays visual elements drawn from across Burmese political history – such as a sheet of corrugated iron in a bombed out village, and the ‘pro-democracy martyr’ Kyal Sin kneeling on the front lines of the 2021 protests – with mirrored inversions of Picasso’s abstracted cubist forms and figures. Meanwhile, a handful of Thai curators are collaborating with, or training, young Burmese artists with a view to helping them bypass the Thai art scene’s gatekeepers, gain exposure or better conceptualise their practices. Yet, above all, Thailand is offering space for Myanmar creatives of all stripes to self-organise, share experiences, forge connections and, to a degree, make art that speaks to the Myanmar military’s assault on their fledgling democracy and dreams – something that can’t, tragically, be said of the art scene in Yangon, where self-censorship is now pervasive.

Nuntana Wongtawee, Border Shipping, Sawasdee Ka, 2024 (performance view, Limbo, Some Space Gallery, Chiang Mai), performance and installation. Photo: Kaung Kaung

An August 2021 post by Myanm/art, a leading Yangon gallery, offers a blunt reminder of the double whammy that hit Yangon’s contemporary art scene hard. While the relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions in January 2021 meant that art spaces could reopen, and spurred a sense of cautious excitement about the future, ‘Relief was not to come,’ Myanm/art’s directors wrote. ‘On 1 February 2021, the military of Myanmar staged a coup, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested, along with several elected officials, activists, filmmakers and musicians. The result was army personnel entering Yangon in force for the first time in nearly a decade. Courageous, stunning, and unifying protests turned deadly after several weeks and Yangon – along with the rest of the country – descended into chaos.’

The net effect of this military crackdown was a hollowing out of the creative sphere, as artists involved in the protests and Civil Disobedience Movement fled. ‘Some left the country, finding residency opportunities abroad,’ Myanm/art’s post continues. ‘Others left Yangon to shelter in their hometowns and villages, some of which are safer than the larger cities. Many more were imprisoned or disappeared.’ Meanwhile, scores of Myanmar’s cultural luminaries, including artists, writers, poets, cartoonists and film stars died in the third wave of the pandemic.

Nearly four years on from the coup, Yangon’s art scene remains active, even frothy in certain respects. “Everyone thinks that, with the military coup and COVID, the local art market is gone,” explained the Yangon-based curator during his talk. “No, the money is there, it’s just not in the contemporary market. It’s in all the traditional paintings, old master’s works, auctions.” But any buzz has dissipated. In a March 2020 opinion piece for ArtReview Asia, Myanm/art’s founder, Nathalie Johnston, hailed the many works being produced that probe the country’s complex historical layers, including ‘legacies of colonialism, military dictatorship, the quest for freedom and democracy, the problematic relations between the Burmese Buddhist majority and the numerous ethnic minorities in the country’. Yet works of this nature swiftly disappeared from Yangon galleries after the coup. And for good reason. “There are and has always been those who consciously create political art and those who wish to go beyond or work outside of the purely political,” she explains to me. “But they seem to be on opposite sides of the border now, with those inside Myanmar unable to make politicised art for fear of their safety and that of their families, and those outside who have the fearlessness to speak out.”

Limbo event ‘Playing With Fire’ at The Goodcery, Chiang Mai, 2024. Photo: Kaung Kaung

This climate of fear has been exacerbated by the introduction, in February this year, of a military conscription law that requires men aged eighteen to thirty-five years and women aged eighteen to twenty-seven to serve a minimum of two years in the military. “The conscription law has changed everything,” says Johnston. “Now it seems it’s not safe for young people to even gather.” Myanm/art is still hosting exhibitions, she adds, but “is not what it used to be: an active meeting place for young people, artists, researchers and visitors.”

In contrast, Thailand, whilst presenting its own latent risks (especially for undocumented immigrants, of which there are a growing number due to the conscription law), offers pro-resistance, antiauthoritarian Myanmar creatives more room for free expression – something that Limbo, a festival of ‘Thai-Myanmar creative and cultural events’ held in Chiang Mai in September, proved with aplomb. Activities during its three-week duration included a poetry and acoustic music evening, and a buffet where fire-grilled Burmese and Thai food was served, all of which seemed purpose-built to bring disparate groups of people together. But each event was framed by trauma-informed discussions, themes, narratives – or, in the case of those held at Some Space Gallery, art.

Maung Phoe, from the series Portrait of Detention: Drawings of Insein Prison. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and A New Burma

Documentary photographer Khin Sandar Nyut, for example, used mortar-round shells, recovered by her friends fighting in an armed insurgent group, the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, to create sculptures and a printed runway carpet (Mortars: Junta’s residuals, 2024). Even the most joyous of Limbo’s activities – a display of Thangyat, a Burmese performance art that blends traditional drums with satirical verses often directed at the authorities – cut deep, contrasting comical asides with digs at corrupt Thai transport police and snarky commentary about Chiang Mai’s changing demographics. “Burmans coming waves by waves,” they chanted over a driving beat. “Here comes next batch, next batch / To the place of better survival / Let’s keep strong / We must go back home one day.”

Limbo was forged in exactly this pragmatic spirit: in the hope of fostering better connections between the exiled Myanmar artist- activist and the Thai equivalent, nurturing new connections and keeping strong. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be here,” says cocurator Ma Hnin, who runs the Chiang Mai-based collective A New Burma – an ‘ad-hoc community of loosely-connected creatives’ – and also organises a festival of music, food, art and film from Myanmar, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, each February. “As I see things, we’re not just guests. We need to also be growing with the community.” For her, this responsibility entails balancing out the parties and high jinks with serious issues-based exhibitions, such as When We See the Planes, a group show first staged in Bangkok in June, which brought to light the junta’s indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian targets (this highly controversial subject matter wasn’t flagged in the title, to minimise the chance of attracting unwelcome attention). Often documented online, such projects constitute “an archive of our revolution,” she says, as well as advocacy tools.

Sai, ‘She is left behind alone, fighting for my father as his attorney. The junta could kill her at any time. The whole compound is surrounded by soldiers’ from the series Traces of Absence, wallpaper installation, 119 × 84 cm. Courtesy the artist

An Australian citizen, Hnin emigrated to Melbourne aged fourteen (following Myanmar’s brutally suppressed ‘8888 Uprising’ in 1988, her parents fled to a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border and eventually gained asylum in Australia). But she moved to Yangon to run a bar and art space in the mid-2010s, at a time when the country was experiencing waves of investment amid democratic reform. Then, after fleeing in the wake of events of 2021, travelling aimlessly and spending time in Bangkok, she eventually settled in Chiang Mai – a city that has historically been a refuge for political exiles and economic migrants from Myanmar, especially nearby Shan State. “The beauty of Chiang Mai is it’s not like Bangkok,” she says. “Here we see each other everywhere – when there is an event the whole of Chiang Mai goes. And now, Thai artists are interacting more with Burmese artists.”

Cultivating these interactions for the purposes of Limbo wasn’t easy, for sociopolitical as well as logistical reasons. “What’s happening in Myanmar and what’s happening in Thailand are very different, even though we share and live under the same feelings of frustration,” says Hnin. To create co-understanding, she and two Thai curators, Somrak Sila (Limbo’s project director) and Thawiphat Praengoen, held workshops that sought to break down barriers and build trust. According to young Thai filmmaker and actor Jakkrapan Sriwichai (who collaborated with a Myanmar artist-activist who goes by the moniker Ants are Always Busy), these exercises – especially the playing of an activist-strategy card game called ‘Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution’ – spurred the participants to think hard “about how to make art that is not just an aesthetic thing, but has a hidden function”.

Not everyone is complimentary about such developments. One anonymous observer believes the 2021 coup gave an opening to anyone from Myanmar who wanted to bill themselves as a protest artist, resulting in “some fairly mediocre artists” being “taken seriously for the first time”. Comparing the pre-coup literature on Myanmar contemporary art with the tenor of post-coup international shows, it is also patently clear that efforts to push back against foreign curators’ pigeonholing of Myanmar artists as inherently political have fallen by the wayside. (Arguably, Burmese artists still remain, to quote a 2018 piece by art historian Yin Ker in Afterall, ‘an exhibit of “Myanmar” and a detainee of orientalism 2.0 couched in politicised rhetoric.’)

But even for those who voiced such complaints in the past, using art to speak out against the coup and hosting events like Limbo are important. “At this point, it is about finding a place where artists can express, as a group ideally, the conditions and historical context of Myanmar on their own terms,” says Johnston, who is now based in Sri Lanka. “Thailand is providing a safe haven for that practice. The crowd in Chiang Mai especially is creating their own platforms and keeping the artistic spirit of Myanmar alive.” She also points to the tense Thai border city of Mae Sot, where filmmakers, poets, artists and musicians number among the many thousands of Myanmar refugees, and where Artist’s Shelter, a filmmaker-run nonprofit that seeks to empower them to continue working safely, is active.

Look closely, and you’ll also see an evolution: the protest motifs and slogans widely exhibited in the wake of the 2021 coup have made way for more nuanced, biographical and honest works that tap into the personal perspectives, diasporic journeys and emotional responses of the displaced. This is art rooted in the realisation that the junta were not toppled by street protests, three-finger salutes or civil disobedience, and that there are new battles now being waged both inside and outside the country (including literal ones: much of Myanmar is today at war, a broad alliance of ethnic armed groups and a ‘People’s Defence Force’ seeking to overthrow the military regime). And in the realisation that psychological pain can, in fact, be generative.

Sai, ‘Portraits of arrested President U Win Myint (left) now held in Taungoo Prison, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Father, General Aung San (right), This is what the living room looks like after Father was taken hostage. Mother started to packwhile under house arrest’, from the series Trails of Absence, fabric installation, 142 × 213 cm. Courtesy the artist

At one extreme, this realisation has resulted in works as blunt and blistering as Annt Hmue Mahr’s Goodbye Rebel! (2024), a photoseries documenting the Mae Sot funeral of FL3XX, a rapper who died from kidney failure last January. Shown at Limbo, these stark black-and- white images of his friends huddling around his coffin and raising three fingers in tribute were accompanied by captions explaining how the young rapper had, prior to his fleeing to Mae Sot, jumped from a five-storey building to escape Myanmar’s military police (he survived, but some of his friends didn’t). And at the other extreme, it has resulted in series as subdued and evocative as Sai’s Trails of Absence (2021–, exhibited at the BACC twice this year), which comprises mixed-media photographs of he and his mother taken while he was in hiding. In them, they hold pieces of tape between them to denote the resilience of their strained bond. Fabrics smuggled out from Myanmar’s prisons, woven together in the style of Shan carpets, mask their identities.

Sai’s trajectory as a contemporary artist, with its origins in persecution, global ties and strong links to Thailand, is illustrative – doubly so given that he never set out to be one. Prior to the coup, he had been working as a curator alongside his wife, and preparing to stage Kalaw Contemporary Arts Festival, a biennale in the hillside town of Kalaw, Shan State, focusing on marginalised artists. “The international community don’t know much about the narratives, cultures or experiences of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. We intended to fill that gap,” he says. These plans were shelved, however, when the coup happened. Soon Sai was contributing to the protest movement in Yangon by making riot shields and creating infographics about how best to deal with teargas and gunshot wounds. And then came a daring move: he headed back to Taunggyi, the capital of Shan state, where his father – the state’s chief minister – was in prison on trumped-up charges, and his mother under house arrest. The images that comprise Trails of Absence were shot in the spacious rooms of the colonial-era house where his mother was being held – and, to this day, remains.

Since he fled the country (after 244 days in hiding), Sai has been using his autobiographical art as a tool to raise international awareness about political prisoners at large, and the horrors of an often-overlooked conflict. Thus far, this advocacy work – which dovetails with a wider interest in peacebuilding and transitional justice (processes likely to be invaluable if and when a future democratic Myanmar becomes a reality) – has brought him into contact with numerous sympathetic politicians, such as Tulip Saddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate in the UK, and members of the US Congress, where he recently appeared at a congressional briefing about arbitrary detention in Myanmar. But many of his most fruitful connec- tions were forged in Thailand. Forthcoming is a new chapter of Trails of Absence, based on his recent dialogues with survivors of abduction and torture in the border regions. And whilst Sai has encountered prejudice in Thailand (such as a landlord who refused to rent to him simply because he is from Myanmar), and has firm red lines governing what he will and won’t do here (“I choose not to take part in exhibitions where lots of Myanmar people gather, as there’s a risk that Myanmar intelligence could monitor them,” he says), he has felt welcomed by the country’s art community and civil society. “When Thai artists and activists reached out to me, in the form of programming and solidarity, I was touched,” he says. “That was the first step to my feeling closer to this country. Now Thailand is, in a way, the next best thing to home.”

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop Festival will take place 20–22 February 2025

From the Winter 2024 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

The Optical Illusions of the Digital Age

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:08:02 GMT

How the history of Op art offers a tangled reflection of the technological reality we face today

In 1965 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum) opened the landmark exhibition Art Today: Kinetic and Op Art, and has since staged exhibitions such as The Eye’s Pop (1998) and Op Art Revisited (2008). Now, Electric Op repositions this movement in relation to current digital culture. Amid arguments over nature of the embodied human spectator versus the objective gaze of machine vision, the exhibition troubles these oppositions by exposing the systems that mediate how we see in the digital age.

Presenting over 90 works spanning six decades, the exhibition opens with the perceptual impact of Op art: the moiré effect (when overlapping lines create interference patterns that make a work seem to tremble) is mobilised by Yaacov Agam’s three-dimensional Free Standing Painting (1971), whose alternating, brightly coloured vertical slats create an effect that feels like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a game of Tetris. As audiences walk around it, it establishes the role of the body in perception. Martha Boto’s wall sculpture Interférences Optiques (Optical Interferences) (1965) broadens this effect to kinetic and electric media: points of light seem to move within a four-by-four array of loosely shuttered cylinders inserted into a black wooden square, as if riffing on vintage camera boxes and lenses.

Francis Michael Celentano, Kinetic Painting III, 1967, acrylic on Masonite with motor, 122 cm (diameter). © Estate of Francis Michael Celentano. Photo: Brenda Bieger. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Elsewhere, Op art’s flair for manipulating depth perception is highlighted in works by artists ranging from computer-art pioneer Georg Nees and kinetic art trailblazer Carlos Cruz-Diez to colour theorist Josef Albers, represented here by an engraving on black laminated plastic of an unfolding origamilike structure (Structural Constellation F.M.E. #3, 1962). Al Held’s canvas Piero’s Piazza (1982) startles with a lurid, neon green upright grid moving through a fever-dream space of colour-clashing hoops, grids and cuboids, which nevertheless pays homage to Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca’s use of single-point perspective.

Many works suggest genealogical affinities between Op art and contemporary digital art. Casey Reas’s METASOTO (2022) responds to Jesús Rafael Soto’s Bois-tiges de Fer (1964) on an adjacent wall. Soto’s work, a rectangular piece of painted Masonite, has been inserted with metal rods from which hang translucent nylon threads that barely move and cast faint shadows, glimpsed as the viewer moves past the work. Though a computer screen might not seem endowed with a similar visual subtlety, Reas’s work shows how an algorithm can produce delicate distinctions in simple white lines against a black background, discovered as visitors use a mouse to click through its permutations.

François Morellet, Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 1960, oil on canvas, 103 × 103 cm. © Estate of François Morellet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

If Pop art recognised the media image as our new ‘nature’ and Minimalism was an art of phenomenological sensibility, Electric Op proposes perception as an artifact of relations among biological, material, technological and intellectual systems. More challenging yet are our relations with that which we cannot see, or don’t yet know how to see. A wall installation presents Rosa Menkman’s strange web-based work The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021). She invited physicists and others to posit an image that cannot actually exist, which she then generated as various abstractions, located within a black and white immersive online space that is unexpectedly entrancing. Popup windows provide some sense of what prompted the particular abstractions, but the project emphasises the challenges of visualising conceivable but unavailable phenomena as we reconcile ourselves with advances in contemporary physics and computer science.

Electric Op suggests we recognise patterns of interference in the material as well as social conditions of bodies, software and hardware. Laura Splan’s Squint (2016) is a greyscale Jacquard-loom tapestry of abstract wave forms that are based on her own facial expressions, recorded via facial electrodes. The data appeared as wave patterns that she then used as the basis for her weaving process. The loom’s historic relevance to computing gets woven into a narrative of developments linking body and technology.

Rafaël Rozendaal, Abstract Browsing, 2014, Chrome browser extension shown on interactive computer. Courtesy the artist © Rafaël Rozendaal. Photo: Rafaël Rozendaal

Software quite literally programmes how we see. Rafaël Rozendaal’s net art project Abstract Browsing (2014) here presented on a large screen, where audiences can observe a scroll of vivid rectangular forms. The result of Rozendaal’s web browser plug-in, free for anyone to download, it represents the effect of losing all text and symbols in a website and reveals that the loss of text doesn’t impact a user’s recognition or navigation of the website, reinforcing the importance of design. Jason Salavon’s real-time animation Everything, All At Once (Part III) (2005) is a technical feat: local live broadcast television, shown on a monitor in the corner of the room, is also processed through Salavon’s own software, the colour palette and sounds of the TV image coded into concentric coloured rings that shift in hue and distribution as they are projected on the gallery wall.

The performativity of such works, reactivating our generally pacified interactions with media, calls for an awareness of the myriad forces that impact how we see, think and move. Electric Op presents a genealogy for digital art distinct from the art, design or new-media lineages that are now well established. The show’s cybernetic phenomenology challenges a Newtonian cause-and-effect worldview, proposing a more complex system of relations and perspectives increasingly relevant to the tangled ecological, political and technological situations we face globally.

Electric Op at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, through 27 January

From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.