Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place on September 10, 2001, then extended into the morning. About 20 minutes into his edit, the sun rises, and twin images of towers clouded in smoke flank the dancers. The attacks have begun, but news hasn’t yet reached the partyers.

The work, titled Social Cohesiveness (2020), is on view in an exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. Here, for the first time in decades, footage of September 11 feels shocking again.

Smith’s work is part of an exhibition titled “Unbound: Performance as Rupture” that surveys performances, from the late 1960s to the present, that are meant for (or completed by) the camera rather than a live audience. There are no live performances, no dry documentation of works once staged before audiences. What we get instead is a grouping of works in which cameras serve as choreographic collaborators, or live pieces that are fully realized only after a visit to the editing suite.

Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982) is on view next to Smith’s Social Cohesiveness, and uses a similar editing technique. Wearing black pantyhose over her head, Iveković cuts holes in the dark membrane, then intercuts that footage with scenes sampled from Yugoslav television. As with Smith’s work, the piece resonates for the way it oscillates between the personal and the political: subjects experience their own bodies and, simultaneously, larger sociopolitical contexts. Cutting from establishing shots to close-ups and back again, Smith and Iveković emphasize and obliterate the gulf between them.

It’s one of several intergenerational pairings on view here. Another strong one is the opener, which pairs Peter Campus’s iconic Three Transitions (1973) with Sondra Perry’s Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II (2013). The former shows the artist painting his face chroma-key blue before a video camera, which causes it to disappear. Forty years later, Perry filmed two Black performers dancing frenetically in front of a white background. The blurring of the figures in this two-channel piece owes not only to the speed of their movement, but also to the use of an editing tool something like an AI eraser. The result explores the twinned hyper-surveillance and invisibility of Black people in white spaces, Perry’s gesture of opacity serving as counterpoint to Smith’s voyeuristic view.

These pairings of video art icons alongside a younger, more diverse generation of artists helps craft a lineage and a formal vocabulary. They also show how early experimental techniques are now being updated and wielded to new ends.

The youngest artist in the show is Panteha Abareshi, who in Unlearn the Body (2021) enlists assistive devices to contort their bandaged body: a walker becomes a pull-up bar; the padding of a crutch cradles their neck at an uncomfortable angle. Abareshi recorded it all on Super 8, then edited the footage in a manner that betrays the medium’s materiality: the artist has memorably likened the beautiful defunctness of analog media to the experience of being disabled. Mechanisms might work differently, or less efficiently; sometimes, there is elegance in the glitches that ensue. Near Abareshi’s work, a photograph shows Joan Jonas contorting elegantly in a hula hoop, her body illuminated by a TV monitor. Another print shows Valie Export bound around the base of a column, back arched.

All this reminded me of a helpful schema that artist Dara Birnbaum charted out in video art’s early days. She noticed that documentation of performances by the likes of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Joan Jonas, tended to be done in black-and-white. Meanwhile, works engaged with critiquing mass media—several of Birnbaum’s own, as well as those by Antoni Muntadas and Dan Graham—tended to be in color. The artists in “Unbound,” break down this binary, since soon enough, it became impossible to understand oneself as wholly separate from mass media anyway.

That might sound like a somewhat loose theoretical idea, but the show in fact assembles a tight group of works. The line of thinking is much easier to follow than MoMA’s “Signals,” last year’s sprawling intergenerational video art exhibition. What’s more, “Unbound” hosts twenty something works in video, but paces them expertly so it all feels watchable—a curatorial feat I had previously thought impossible. Seating helps.

“Unbound” also includes performances so difficult to capture with a camera that the challenge becomes a creative prompt, as in Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane’s In the Absence of Our Mothers (2018). The story behind that work begins in 2014, when Ourahmane bit into something soft and lost a troublesome tooth. The next year, she learned moving details about the life of her grandfather, who decided to pull out all his teeth in an act of self-mutilation that rendered him decidedly unfit to fight in World War II. Not long after, the artist met a man at a street market in Oran who tried to sell her a gold necklace, one he said his mother gave to him to sell to support the family. She bought it, then had it melted down into two teeth: one lives in her mouth, and the other on the wall next to a photograph of sorts—a dental X-ray the artist had taken. It’s a wild story, but here, the photograph becomes a kind of proof, all the while insisting this is more than a dental intervention: it’s a meaningful homage.

“Unbound,” then, is a show about the ways the personal and political intersect; about those places where bodies meet technology, but also ideology; and how the everyday rubs up against larger historical narratives. As we once again try to go about our daily lives while learning of relentless horrors through screens, this subject couldn’t be more timely.

But in a week that frequently encourages extreme psychic compartmentalization, feeling pulled in multiple directions is nothing new. Evenings: openings, dinners, late parties, bonhomie, party dress, the usual social minefield. (My bad karma bit me when, on the night I skipped a dinner organized for Paul McCarthy after remembering that one of my reviews, according to his gallery liaison, had “left him depressed for a fortnight,” I imitated a pompous French artist … who happened to be right behind me.) Days: scrambling from show to show, and stepping from unnervingly unseasonal linen-shirt weather into displays darkly suffused with real-world violence.

“The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time: Artistic Testimonies of War and Repression,”for example, is a transhistorical exhibition focused on state brutality; it is a collaboration between the Schinkel Pavillon and the Brücke-Museum, which is devoted to artists ostracized by the Nazis. Several such figures’ works stud a show rooted in Germany’s worst hours: Käthe Kollwitz’s 1920s woodcuts and lithos of post-WWI starvelings; Leo Breuer’s deceptively tranquil (if exhausted) watercolors of WWII internment-camp life; Hannah Höch’s unbowed 1941 canvas Berglandschaft, in which unnamable lunar flora burst through a ruined concrete landscape. But from there, “The Assault…” rumbles grimly forward through space and time, from Sung Tieu’s Subtext (2023), a jittery gathering of Cold War–era surveillance reports and vintage domestic accoutrements like a TV, radio, and typewriter, to Parastou Forouhar’s Documentation (1998–), a collection of documents relating to the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the murder of her parents for opposing the political regime in Iran. Also included: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Diary of a Sky (2023), a video detailing how the presence of drones and fighter jets above Beirut has, as a booklet text neatly puts it, “weaponized the air itself.”

There is no place in this show free, at the very least, from ambient incoming threat, and, as the inclusion of several Ukrainian artists makes clear, our wartime present chimes with and reilluminates the past. In a tiled basement antechamber in the Schinkel Pavillon, Kateryna Lysovenko’s Waiting Room (2023) presents paintings of four deceased artists—Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Charlotte Salomon, Felix Nussbaum, and Vyacheslav Mashnitsky—as if at 70, an age they never reached. Lysovenko’s work is at once a lament for the killed, an evocation of forced deportation, and an acidic critique of how looking to the future, and ignoring the unhappy present, is mobilized within totalitarian ideologies.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, for its part, offers something equally if differently in-your-face: an overdue first major retrospective for the fearless Cuban American artist/writer Coco Fusco, whose work of the last three decades, presented mostly as videos, photographs, and documentation, is marked by a wide-screen sense of—and determination to expose—humanity’s inhumanity. Consistent across her work is Fusco’s hewing to uncontrolled real-world situations, not metaphor. An examination of colonial and postcolonial exoticization, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94) was a series of collaborative performances in which Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña sardonically rebooted the centuries-old colonialist tradition of exhibiting “exotic” peoples in cages (and caught revealingly ignorant responses on video). For Sudaca Enterprises, an intervention at the 1997 ARCOmadrid contemporary art fair, Fusco and several others sold T-shirts comparing the fair prices of Latin American art, European art, and the cost of living in Spain as an undocumented Latin American.

The all-too-realistic video Operation Atropos (2006) is one of several developed from Fusco’s investigations into the weaponizing of female sexuality in the military interrogation of Muslim men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay; it follows a workshop that Fusco took on surviving the experience of interrogation as a female prisoner of war. More recently, while many artists shied away from direct engagement with the Covid-19 pandemic, Fusco took the opportunity to make Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021),filming herself in a rowboat circling Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field and America’s largest mass grave, as it filled with pandemic victims. The work addresses collective anxieties in a voiceover, as Fusco casts flowers on the water.

Some commercial galleries, in choosing artists to parade before visiting collectors, haven’t pulled their punches either (or leaned on tried-and-true names). A season highlight is Melvin Edwards’s astringently inventive “B WIRE, BEWARE, ALL WAYS ART”at Galerie Buchholz, which draws from the African American sculptor’s practice from 1970 to the present and—as the title hints—focuses on barbed wire (and chain) while commingling minimalist and readymade aesthetics with strong suggestions of containment and pain. Now’s the Time (1970–2023), predating a similar David Hammons work referencing Charlie Parker, dangles an old saxophone from a chain, segregating it behind a V-shaped barrier of barbwire lines. Set on pedestals at the artist’s height, several pieces from this year remake the signature hats from the looted Benin Bronzes in coiled chains. They sit alongside a framed series of mid-’70s semiabstractions on paper, in watercolor, ink, and spray that use more chains as stencils, needling the apolitical niceties of post-painterly abstraction popular at the time.

In her debut at Capitain Petzel, Ragen Moss projects anxiety into the immediate future in a show titled “C O N S P I R E.” Here, seven dangling steel and glass canisters hold flickering flames that collectively bump up the room temperature a fair bit; each of them accompanies one of a constellation of seven hanging polyethylene sculptures, bulbous lightweight obelisks variously decorated with patterns and figurative imagery. One image, a possible clue to the work’s latent sociopolitical intent, is a copy of a Käthe Kollwitz drawing. The show, then, feels like both an abstract campfire gathering—a conspiring, indeed, on the part of figures desiring or fearing change—and an unstable situation that might combust, for good or ill, at any moment. Its lack of specificity, and abundance of theatrical nudges, makes the viewer seeking meaning a coconspirator.

Other artists offer similar bellwethers of tipping-point disquiet. At Sprüth Magers, Nora Turato, a rising star who also has a spoken-word installation in the Brücke-Museum show, hangs a tight graphic display of enamel panels against a background of wraparound text; the panels feature Cartesian computer-designed tunnels and abysses that contrast with overlaid typographic snippets of spiraling self-talk: not yourself? what have you done to yourself?, does that make any sense?, how many layers does this onion have? At Heidi, Mimosa Echard’s vertical, neo-Funk canvases embed consumer-capitalist detritus into their mottled plastic surfaces—remote controls, kids’ toys, pills, kitchen bowls—while larger, gridded horizontal canvases, we’re told, use anti-radiation fabric as their material; they’re like fragments of a Faraday cage. The whole, titled I Think My Cells Are Fucking Behind My Back, points to attritional attempts to ward off a world full of invasive forces that bypass rationality or control.

The show that offers the most relief from all this has, perhaps inevitably, the fewest humans in it: a retrospective for Lin May Saeed at the Georg Kolbe Museum. The German-Iraqi artist, who died at 50 just a couple weeks before the show opened, engaged with interspecies communication and empathy for animals long before it became a contemporary-art staple; she also did so not by lecturing but via a seesawing mix of fairytale charm, humor, mythological learning, and underlying grit. That’s clear from this generous presentation of her signature sculptures of autonomous animals and Arab-script-dotted reliefs in carved polystyrene, a pointedly problematic, nonbiodegradable material that is both fragile and built to last. Saeed had an empath’s eye for nonhuman facial expressions. Witness the fierce, comical determination of her forward-leaning pangolins, panthers, anteaters, and goats, individual sculptures lined up here as if at the outset of a race. Or see the calm solicitousness of her conversant lionesses in the paradisial painted relief Mureen / Lion School (2016).

Where humans appear, things could go either way. In St. Jerome and the Lion (2016), one of Saeed’s series of welded metal gates depicting figurative scenes, there’s a take on the art historical subject of the saint considerately plucking a thorn from a lion’s paw; but in Toreador Gate (2019), the gored, innocent-eyed bull is crushing a cylinder-headed, near-abstract bullfighter. If you reach this point after having traversed all the shows mentioned above, humankind going down feels like something of a win. 

This article appears under the title “Berlin Diary” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 98–102.

The exhibition rewinds to Wong’s student days in Oakland at the dawn of the ’70s, as he dived headfirst into West Coast counterculture while trying not to erase his heritage. Here are his long paper scrolls covered in Beat-esque prose poetry, their unfurling format recalling Chinese calligraphy, and the jazzy Zap Comix–like prints Wong designed to advertise San Francisco drag-performance act The Cockettes, which he joined, later becoming part of their offshoot, Angels of Light Free Theater. A through line in the show is Wong’s outsider nature and gravitation to local communities, such that, after moving in 1973 to Humboldt County, he began painting local bars, crab fishermen, and compositional stews of non-Western lore and racial stereotyping like Tibetan Porky (1975–78), a watermelon-eating, many-eyed deity perched atop a crablike creature and surrounded by skulls. During his studies, he had also traveled in Afghanistan and India, and there is a sense in canvases from this era of Wong’s patching together a cosmology to make sense of the workings of chance and destiny. In Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball (Eureka), 1978–81, a fortune-divining sphere sits amid billowing burnt-orange smoke—clay-reds, browns, and oranges had become his signature downbeat palette—against a map of constellations advertising his devotion to astrology.

In 1978 Wong moved to down-at-heel New York, working as a night porter in a waterfront hotel on South Street in exchange for lodging and painting there. From this point, his paintings addressed secrecy and things happening out of mainstream sight. Numerous canvases of this period employ the vocabulary of American Sign Language. Clones of Bruce Lee (1981), created with sign-painter fluency, features chubby hands shaped to spell out the work’s title for a Deaf audience. In My Secret World 1978–81 (1984), Wong presents his old hotel room as seen through the windows—with miniaturized versions of his own paintings and books on shelves inside—along with text identifying the site as where the “world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being.”

By this point Wong had relocated to the working-class, mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood known as Loisaida in downtown New York, and was befriending (and collecting the work of) graffiti artists. His paintings, while retaining ASL elements, began focusing on tightly painted architectural facades, some with bricked-up windows. Such works pivot on precarity: The decaying area he lived in was at once prey to gentrifiers and home to immigrant communities living lives that were mostly unseen. The series of paintings of shuttered storefronts he made in the mid- to late ’80s are startlingly economical evocations of hiddenness and displacement expressed through grimy geometry. At the same time, though, Wong was walking through walls in his mind, beginning a long series of paintings set inside New York prisons—their inhabitants disproportionately POC—that soon trade melancholic images of sleeping prisoners in stacked bunks for beefcake fantasies of hunky inmates (such as Top Cat, 1990), sexualizations of corrections officers, and the power-inverting cop-taunting scenario of 1994’s Come Over Here Rockface (“and suck my dick,” the text beside a shirtless prisoner clarifies).

Whatever harsh realities surrounded him, Wong’s art asserts that, on canvas at least, he was free. There, New York’s firemen, like its policemen, couldn’t stop him from sexualizing them, and, by 1990, he’d begun folding his long-standing fascinations together in near-hallucinatory ways. Orion (1990–91) is a baroquely framed painting in which a giant phallus made of city-building bricks is framed against a night sky speckled with labeled constellations. He’d also begun what would be his art’s final movement, a series of paintings reconsidering and plasticizing his heritage, and creating a kind of pantheon-like Chinatown of the mind. See Bruce Lee in the Afterworld (1991), with the martial-arts master striking a pose amid a sea of faces suggesting stereotypical Chinese mythology, or the spectacularly phantasmagoric Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992–94), with its googly-eyed metallic dragon looming behind an intricately patterned frieze of blue and green Eastern deities.

The New York art scene in this latter period was increasingly enraptured by “slacker art,” a low-budget recession-era phenomenon with which Wong’s ambitiousness and technique had nothing in common. As for many rediscovered artists, though, his out-of-step approach has ended up paying dividends: Much of the KW show looks startlingly fresh and interesting now, especially as it resonates with present-day identitarian issues and consideration of communities of care.

Wong’s final painting, completed on the day he died, is an idiosyncratic fusion featuring a smiling, blue-skinned Patty Hearst as the Hindu goddess Kali the Destroyer. Above her is the title, Wong’s plangent and defiant final words: Did I Ever Have a Chance? Back then, given the world Wong moved through, maybe not. But the stars, since then, have realigned. 

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Julia Scher

Moving Images: Sabrina Gschwandtner at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

The Italian-German artist tinkers with the workings of things as straightforward as mechanical devices, as sublime as celestial bodies, and as elusive as poetry or space or time. “Radiant Exposures,” her show at Esther Schipper in Berlin, contains many round, spherical, and revolving objects, whether in the form of kinetic sculptures, expanded cinema, or, most often, some combination of the two. The moving sculptures all use light and film as materials, and are mesmerizing in the way of a looped animation. When she shows moving images, her analog projectors have a commanding presence in the gallery—one of them is larger than its projection screen, and its sound permeates the entire show. Elsewhere, film—whether celluloid bearing handwritten text or in-camera recordings depicting solariums or solid colors—is projected through colored glass, woven into mobiles, or pulled by mechanisms across light boxes. Rather than having all the works “play” at once, Barba chose to stagger them; some run on timers and take turns lighting up, helping choregraph a visitor’s movement through the space.

In the 6-minute, single-channel film that titles the show, Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022), Barba uses 16mm film to record an expanse of mirrored solar panels in a desert. Her framing of this unpopulated industrial landscape is reminiscent of educational or documentary footage. Yet her subjects—solar energy, the technologies we’ve designed to capture it, and the sun itself—feel more wondrously enigmatic than they do demystified. A haze that appears to be heat-induced shrouds a view of the empty road. Did Barba record a mirage, did the sun melt the celluloid, or did the artist manipulate the image herself? A time lapse where it’s never night adds to the sense that this odd place exists outside of our space-time. The work’s subtitle is a quote from a footnote in Donna Haraway’s 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” meant to update Bruno Latour’s claim that scientific facts exit the laboratory only via the paths the lab itself creates. The line suggests that Barba sees her interrogations of the apparatuses through which we perceive light, space, and time as probing reality itself.

Through disassembling these apparatuses, Barba often takes on subjects that feel too big, or too elusive, to truly “know.” Her wall-based sculpture Composition in Field (2022) shows excerpts from Charles Olson’s 1950 poetry manifesto “Projective Verse” on celluloid; the text argues that poetry was a form of “energy transferred from where the poet got it” to the reader. Black letters occupy one frame each; clear, blank frames serve as spaces. The strips are woven together and stretched around a stainless-steel frame whose bars rotate. Some strips read top to bottom, others left to right. The words are always moving and colliding, so they’re hard to follow, but the text tries to explain poetic mechanisms. Barba demonstrates curiosity as to how poetry works, but also refutes one man’s attempt at a straightforward answer. Throughout, her elegant tinkering both exhibits and induces an admirable curiosity. She doesn’t break things open to learn how to put them back together, but rather to assemble new forms, dwelling in the space of wonder and marvel that comes with brushing up against the almost graspable.

The thing about existential questions, though, is that tidy answers are rarely enough to ward off gnawing doubts. To say you’ve figured out art’s best current function is like urging people to sign up for some quasi-religious cult on the basis of brochure bullet points outlining the meaning of life. There’s some wisdom in Attia’s pitch, to be sure, but life and art are never so simple.

As nice as his idea sounds, the works that most directly illustrate it are the weakest examples currently on view across six venues in the German capital. They are also the most plentiful: umpteen didactic, research-based works make their points literally and directly, taking the form of archival materials in vitrines, timelines and infographics pasted on walls, and essay films using found footage accompanied by omniscient voiceovers. The show even includes research projects by such academics as media theorist Ariella Azoulay and group dynamics analyst David Chavalarias, printed in vinyl and attached to walls as if they were artworks.

What’s wrong with that? Martin Herbert of ArtReview said the exhibition “cunningly critic-proofed itself.” He meant that the show is something of a devil’s advocate incarnate, proposing that political issues matter more than—and are wholly separate from—aesthetic ones in a manner that is hard to dispute, but also hard to agree with, given the numerous disappointing works included. The biennale, which Attia put together with a team of five women curators, centers on histories of anticolonial struggle, featuring sections devoted to decolonizing ecology and feminism, plus a number of works concerned with restituting looted art. And it’s certainly true that these are more pressing issues than any esoteric aesthetic concerns. But it’s worth pushing against this “critic-proof” show, and indeed, most critics so far—Rahel Aima in Frieze, Ben Davis of Artnet—do find Attia’s take on political art unsatisfying. I hope we can inch toward a better goal than visualization—which here, involves mostly the rather literal illustration of political issues—even as I suspect we’ll circle around defining a new one for maybe the rest of human history.

Still from Forensic Architecture’s 2-channel video Cloud Studies, 2022.

Forensic Architecture, which presents videos in three of the six venues, is often invoked to confirm the usefulness of political art. Led by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, who terms the large, evolving alliance a “multidisciplinary research group,” Forensic Architecture uses various visualization tools to investigate human rights violations and instances of state violence. The Killing of Nadeem Nawara and Mohammed Abu Daher (2014), a multimedia project that deals with two Palestinian teenagers shot by Israeli security forces, has been cited in court cases, and this clearly matters more than “art.” But the takeaway is not as simple as asking people with degrees in art and architecture to drop their paint brushes and start doing investigative reporting. The problem isn’t only that artists are rather poorly equipped to expose shocking events, despite their fear that corrupt governments and the news organizations they control will avoid doing so. It’s also that, most of the time, their investigative contributions are not necessary to share in a gallery. We already know the world is terrible, and (knock on wood) little can surprise us after Trump, Covid, climate change, and other recent disasters.

That unnecessary impulse to expose is precisely what makes Jacques Lebel’s Soluble Poison (2013) the most universally—and justly—hated work in the biennale. Lebel tries to shock viewers with a truth everyone already knows, in an installation replete with pixelated images of the prisoner abuses committed by United States soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Who hasn’t seen these gruesome photographs, and who could have forgotten them? But to drill in the horror, the French artist has blown up these pictures and installed them in a labyrinth, so that viewers are always surrounded by them and have trouble escaping. We are forced to behold them in all their cruelty, as if the only reason to look away would be an unacceptable desire to live in ignorant bliss. The most charitable reading possible is that perhaps this work felt different a decade ago, when it was first made, but its inclusion seems almost to caricature the simplicity of Attia’s goal—rendering visible imperialist abuse. We see, we (still) know, it hurts—now what?

The most thoughtful works in the show are skeptical of straightforward illustration. Take Noel W. Anderson’s digital jacquard tapestries, most of them based on a single historic photograph of anti-Black violence. Anderson warps and twists the image, then transfers it to fabric, defamiliarizing it even further. Some cloths are hung flush against the wall like paintings, while others droop from the ceiling, making the images even more difficult to apprehend. The work suggests a twinned impulse: to commemorate moments of historic violence and struggle, and to protect the subjects who have so often been dehumanized for the sake of spectacle.

View of the 12th Berlin Biennale showing Die Leitung [Line Up], 2016–21, and Downw0rd Dog, 2021-22, by Noel W. Anderson.

One standout work is This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss (2022), a haunting video by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi. In the 20-minute piece, the artist’s mother, Thuyen Hoa, recalls her experience traveling by boat from Vietnam to Thailand in the course of emigrating to Germany. Speaking to her daughter, she recalls a shipwreck she endured during the journey, and some scenes show the two working together on the film, collaborating to tell Thuyen’s story. At one point, Thuyen finds herself suspended in an endless field of blue. She soon realizes that she has to make a choice: either to drown or to seek refuge from a pirate. Recalling friends’ tales of rape at the hands of pirates, she chooses to surrender instead to the blue expanse, despite not knowing how to swim. Communing with ancestors while underwater, she says in a voiceover that she comes to feel a sense of peace. In the final scene, the ocean fades to blue screen, the action unfolding in a ceiling projection as viewers lie on a 23-by-31-foot blue plinth on which a sculptural hospital-bed-cum-boat also rests.

The forces of imperialism and patriarchy have rendered this protagonist wholly powerless, but they hardly need to be named in the video—you already know them, and besides, this is Thuyen Hoa’s story and not theirs. Because our narrator recalls all this in the first person and past tense, it’s implied that she survives, but we are never told how—just left suspended in blue. Anyway, we’re prompted not to root for her survival and triumph, but to empathize with her desire to abandon this world of violence and war.

This certainly moved me more than any timeline or data ever could. This is not to say that emotions matter more than facts—it isn’t a question of either/or. It just highlights the gulf between the models that Forensic Architecture and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi propose. Somewhere between them sits a compelling 19-minute, two-channel video by Tuan Andrew Nguyen: My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires, 2017. (The biennale, if you haven’t noticed, is video-heavy.)

Still from Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s 2-channel video My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires, 2017.

In this work, footage showing human-animal relations in Vietnam—at slaughterhouses, in natural history museums, in the wild—is paired with a dialogic voiceover. That Nguyen’s audio is not a monologue distinguishes his video from the show’s many essay films in a simple but crucial way. One voice belongs to the last Javan rhinoceros, poached in 2010 in an incident that rendered the species extinct. The rhino debates revenging or repairing human-animal relations with the turtle that is said to have ended Chinese rule of Vietnam in the 15th century. Their complicated conversation is full of points and counterpoints: While the rhinoceros wants to lead a fight against humankind, the turtle maintains that to combat humans is to be like them. When the turtle points out that there are more species being discovered each week in Vietnam than anywhere else in the world, the rhino replies that Vietnam also has the world’s highest extinction rate, arguing that the two may in fact go hand-in-hand: “discovery” is an anthropocentric way of looking at beings who’ve been there all along.

Recalling other fables featuring wise animals, Nguyen’s video reminds me of how art and literature have passed down crucial messages for centuries—not with ham-fisted didacticism, but by imagining some alternative route, and subtly inviting the viewer along. Fables provide audiences multiple perspectives on a moral situation, gently inviting viewers to make their own wise choices. Without skimping on clarity or facts, Nguyen’s work allows room for viewers to draw personal conclusions, and gives vent to complexity instead of buttoning it up.

This article appears under the title “Berlin Biennale” in the September 2022 issue, pp. 20–21.

Two months later, on Valentine’s Day of 1955, Picasso completed his series, designating the versions A through O. As he had worked on them, the Spaniard’s captivating canvases had grown larger, the compositions more robust, and his forms increasingly fragmented. Although blues, reds, and greens predominate throughout the series, five are in grisaille, a monochromatic palette he favored during his Analytic Cubist period, some forty-five years earlier.

One of those grisaille pieces, Version L, completed on February 9, depicts only the woman at the left of the other compositions, who sits cross-legged and holds a hookah. Her ringlets swirl beneath a head covering, while her nipples double as the eyes of an owl spread across her chest like a warrior’s embossed breastplate. For many, the owl is a symbol of death more than of wisdom. Significantly, this ghostly figure was painted two days before Picasso’s estranged wife, Olga Khokhlova, whom he had been supporting since their separation in 1935, died of cancer in Cannes. As a performer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Khokhlova had worn an array of costumes; she was, in fact, photographed in similar attire in 1916. Within this series, until he painted Version K, Picasso had paired this seated figure with the recumbent nude in the scene. With Version L, Picasso made her the regal, principal protagonist, perhaps closing a chapter of his own life.

Throughout his work, Artschwager favored the tactile, and these drawings, despite the luminous, airy qualities of their imagery, are no exception. You sense the weight of his hand in the application of the pastel, which he laid down in deliberate marks that he left alone in some places and rubbed out to create hazy sfumato effects in others, such as the ocher and emerald fields in Bushes with Blue Sky (2011), where sporadic blurring evokes heat’s optical distortions. The coarse paper that serves as the drawings’ support participates just as actively in the images’ making as the hand does, the fibers breaking up the marks and giving the clear New Mexican air an irregular texture. In this way, the paper calls to mind Celotex—the compressed, industrial fiberboard that Artschwager began using as a painting support in the 1960s and whose pockmarked surface would weave itself into his images, lending them a certain eeriness. About Celotex, he once explained: “One could say it is paper on a grand scale, large in format and with a coarse tooth, looking something like newsprint under magnification.”

Richard Artschwager: Horizontal Landscape with Blue Mountains, 2010, pastel on handmade paper, 18 by 23 5/8 inches.

But while certain qualities of the New Mexico drawings recall Artschwager’s other work, there are also departures—most notably, in terms of color. The drawings venture into a fuller palette than one is used to with Artschwager’s works, which, though sometimes bearing pops of color, are often dominated by neutrals—the grays of his acrylic paintings that transpose black-and-white photographs, for example, or the faux-wood tones of the Formica he incorporated into his most iconic sculptures. The palette here, by contrast, cycles through greens, grays, golds, and cerulean, and even plunges into a deep, moody ultramarine in the depiction of a night sky in Reflection (2010), a drawing on velvet. Artschwager generally used the pastels’ colors in unmodulated form, though at times he laid them atop gray or brown tones that unsettle or intensify the hues.

View of the Richard Artschwager exhibition “New Mexico,” 2020.

One wall displays a sequence of six drawings composed of stacked horizontal fields of color that suggest plains receding into the distance, some with grids of planted shrubs. These works have a panning quality to them, making the experience of the group nearly filmic, an effect enhanced by the graininess the paper provides.

Back home, I pulled out my copy of Agnes Martin’s collected writings to see what one of New Mexico’s most famous modernist residents (and proponents of the grid) might have had to say about the qualities of that landscape. I landed on a 1972 text (based on notes for a lecture), in which Martin shares an insight concerning the plains:

I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought

my mountains looked like ant hills

I saw the plains driving out of New Mexico and I thought

the plain had it

just the plane

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

When I draw horizontals

you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like

you’re expanding over the plane

Although influenced by the New Mexican plains, Martin did not aim to depict them. She wanted to distill their qualities, as seen in her shift from “plain” to “plane,” from geography to geometry, in the passage above. “Anything can be painted without representation,” she asserts a few lines further down the page.

While Martin courted a sense of transcendence at the outer limits of painting, Artschwager reveled in the messy, contaminated spaces between categories. In the aforementioned sequence of horizontally structured drawings, he, at once, depicted the New Mexican landscape, collapsed and abstracted that space, and motioned toward film. Unlike Martin, Artschwager did not make works “without representation,” but, instead, showed representation to be permeable to many other ways of seeing. That kind of fluidity, never forced but simply given in these drawings, carries its own kind of transcendence.

Originally trained as an engineer, Ferrari began his artistic career working with ceramics in Italy. Having settled back in Buenos Aires by 1955, he pursued sculpture in a variety of materials before experimenting with the ink drawings and collages that would define his oeuvre and its ever more ideological preoccupations. Ferrari’s work is not often nuanced. For a series he began in 1985, Ferrari had caged pigeons shit on reproductions of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco from the Sistine Chapel. In the collage Final Judgment (2005), he covered the apse of a church with an image of Jews wearing Star of David patches during the Holocaust so that a crowd of seated cardinals appears to be gazing raptly at a horrific spectacle–turned–Catholic rite. 

View of León Ferrari’s exhibition “Toasted Angels, Sounds of Steel,” 2020, at KOW.

To be sure, the events to which Ferrari’s work reacted hardly called for understated responses. Between the 1960s and ’80s, Argentina was rocked by coups d’état, currency devaluation, and student and labor unrest. The metaphorical transgressions in his work paled in comparison to Argentina’s actual political violence. With his safety increasingly at risk, Ferrari fled to São Paulo in 1976, returning to Buenos Aires only in 1991. Some of his later efforts lack the proverbial teeth of his early work. His 2004 model fighter jet adorned with feathers and his 2002 blender filled with Virgin Mary figurines, for instance, reprise the impudence of La Civilización Occidental y Cristiana to repetitive and even gimmicky effect. 

Ferrari’s critiques of Christianity (and of Catholicism more particularly) are not mere caprice, however. They form part of a larger assault on deeply ingrained origin stories and founding narratives that have served both nationalist hegemony and political repression. The irreverence of a collage like Angels (1986)—in which images of ceramic putti hover beside a camouflaged tank—draws on the legacy of Dada. In turn, Ferrari’s assemblages echo (however obliquely) in a range of contemporary practices. The works in Rachel Harrison’s recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, for instance, brought to mind many of Ferrari’s pieces and their wry humor. 

Perhaps more important, his provocations take on new inflections in the current political atmosphere, in which polemics, self-righteousness, and tribal allegiances reign supreme. Ferrari is widely known as an “iconoclastic” artist. Yet he obsessively invokes Christian icons in his work, calling to mind the old adage that only a theist can be a sinner. His work shows that to transgress the propriety of Christian iconography, one must possess a degree of aesthetic respect for that canon, even while channeling its images into new, less repressive meanings.

This article appears under the title “León Ferrari” in the April 2020 issue, p. 89.

Chief among the show’s achievements was its ability to suggest such links without diluting Ramberg’s own potency. From the mid-1960s on, Ramberg cultivated a brand of figuration that combined a Pop sensibility with graphic, mechanistic forms (one can sense a range of influences, but Léger is particularly present) that she deployed, rigorously and pointedly, in somber renderings of cropped female bodies. The show crescendoed from a scattering of early pieces to a succession of paintings from the mid- to late ’70s installed in the final, expansive room. The central motif in the latter work is the disarticulated female torso. Instead of flesh, Ramberg gives us hardness: ultra-flat masonite surfaces, closed shapes edged with precise shadows, and tight, symmetrically derived compositions. In paintings such as Tight Hipped (1974) and Glimpsed (1975), the body has stiffened into constructions that resemble padded dress forms, whose parts are squeezed further by locks of hair wrapping around them. Others, such as the diptych Sleeve Mountain #1 and #2 (1973), allow the same formal vocabulary to drift away from the figure proper, though they are haunted by it nonetheless. Within the installation’s sweep, the sense of binding and constraint conveyed in each image gave way to flux as the paintings’ parts appeared to morph and be redistributed from one picture to the next.

Christina Ramberg: Glimpsed, 1975, acrylic on masonite; at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

The meat of Ramberg’s thinking became most apparent in a selection of small drawings made in pen on notebook pages or scrap paper. In these images, we witness the artist working through possible permutations of the same form—arrangements of fabric bustier components, bending knees, hair-braiding patterns. Flexing and folding across the page, these parts begin to assume qualities of the whole bodies to which they refer, even as they remain eerily other to them. Indeed, throughout the works on display, bondage, repetition, and reconfigurability fused in a trenchant vision of gender and the technologies that regulate it, one in which the tools of constriction are reconstrued as the basis of an energetic variability.

Works by an eclectic group of thirteen additional artists were interjected throughout, building a context for Ramberg’s practice that was generally thematic rather than historical, though a handful of pieces by her Midwestern contemporaries suggested a sense of a local conversation in which her work participated. For instance, Diane Simpson’s Box Pleats (1989), a sculpture resembling a free-standing skirt composed of wooden slats, might have walked out of one of Ramberg’s paintings. Most of the additional works picked up on the themes of gender, mass production, and embodiment that Ramberg’s work explores, yet aimed their focus in slightly different directions. Especially compelling in this regard were pieces by Gaylen Gerber and Ghislaine Leung that extended Ramberg’s dissection of bodies and their accoutrements to the apparatus of the institutional exhibition itself. A painter of Ramberg’s caliber doesn’t need the company, but her work nonetheless benefited from being in the constellation this exhibition provided, which, by bringing her into a range of dialogues, exposed the richness at the base of her strict endeavor. 

This article appears under the title “’The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue’” in the January 2020 issue, p. 86.

Most of the other works on view were made after Daučiková returned to Bratislava in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There, she began creating performance-based video works alongside her photographs, and cofounded the feminist journal Aspekt. A recurring motif in these works is the interaction between glass and the body, with the artist treating the frictions produced by their contact as potential sources of dysphoria and pleasure alike. In the stunning black-and-white photographs comprising the series “Upbringing by Exercise” (1996), displayed at the exhibition’s entrance, the artist presses her breasts up against a sheet of glass in order to flatten them. Another work, the video Queen’s Finger (1998), shows a close-up of the artist’s hands rubbing a drinking glass as she washes it in repeated, circular motions, eliciting an erotic charge as well as awkward squeaks. In the video We Care for Your Eyes II (2002), Daučiková is seen slowly dancing in a room with her fly unzipped. A mirror is placed behind her zipper, obscuring a view of her genitals and thwarting invasive attempts to identify her biological sex. It also recalls the wearable reflective surfaces in her early jewelry works, which Daučiková made as a student. A selection of six examples (1977–78), housed in a vitrine, included large, rectangular pins and pendants consisting of reflective planes of glass and steel. One pendant has a concave glass piece resembling a camera lens.

The exhibition’s final room housed the newly commissioned three-channel video installation Expedition of Four Hands and Accompaniment (2019). The center channel offers a view of a cave overlaid with drawings of hands illustrating poses from Caucasian folk dances. The two flanking channels each show a pair of aging hands: one cutting glass, and the other bearing painted nails and folding women’s clothes. This juxtaposition at once set up and called into question a gender binary: according to the gallery booklet, the hands cutting glass belong to Daučíková, and the nail-polished ones to a man. Accompanying the projections was an array of glass panels engraved with text—poetic musings about bodies, references to the work of Judith Butler, and a tally of trans people attacked and murdered since 2000—placed on the floor throughout the room, along with a takeaway newsprint publication dedicated to Greek drag queen and HIV activist Zak Kostopoulos (Zackie Oh), who was murdered by police officers in Athens last year. The installation, Daučiková’s largest work to date, represents a distinct formal and conceptual departure from her early, privately oriented work: adopting an explicitly public mode of address, it frames expressions of gender and sexuality as political acts as much as personal ones.

This article appears under the title “Anna Daučíková” in the November 2019 issue, pp. 108–109.