ArtReview Summer 2024 by ArtReview

Waiting to be rubbed the right way since 1949

Emeka Ogboh Joyce Joumaa Carsten Höller Ahlam Shibli

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Michaël Borremans, The Talent, 2023. © Michaël Borremans

Michaël Borremans

The Monkey

David Zwirner

6 June–26 July, 2024 24 Grafton Street, London

Jean-Michel Othoniel, Passiflora, 2023. Paint on canvas, colored inks on white gold leaf. 164 × 372 × 5 cm | 64 9/16 × 146 7/16 × 1 15/16 in. Photo : Claire Dorn. ©Jean-Michel Othoniel ADAGP Paris, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

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ART BASEL BOOTH L24 – KABINETT SECTOR JUNE 13 – 16, 2024

MAY 24 – JULY 20, 2024

JOSH SMITH LICHTENFELSGASSE, VIENNA

JUNE 7 – JULY 20, 2024

SHARA HUGHES WALDMANNSTRASSE, ZURICH

JUNE 7 – JULY 20, 2024

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JUNE 19 – JULY 2, 2024

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ArtReview vol 76 no 5 Summer 2024

Wow! Unbelievable! Look what ArtReview found in the archive! (In case you missed last month’s issue, this is where ArtReview’s ‘people’ suggest it should mention that you could go on its website, which would be artreview.com, and subscribe and thus avoid the pain of reading the recap that’s to come). ArtReview mentions this (the archive, not subscribing) because it’s fashionable, perhaps even necessary these days, for people interested in art to hang out in archives, poking around in the corners or in the long-forgotten filing cabinets that smell most strongly of mould and mildew, trying to find something that they can ‘correct’ or repurpose or subvert as some sort of general revenge on archivists and librarians – people who in the world of popular culture are called hoarders, but in the artworld are in fact gatekeepers. But, like an archivist (see how infectious it all becomes!), ArtReview digresses. Where was it… Ah! Yes! Rummaging. Poking. Anyway, look at what ArtReview found: ‘Deep down in the roots of English cultural life there is a poetic source of inspiration, and this manifests itself in many works of art. It is because of our unflinching faith in the artistic genius of the people of these islands… that the policy of this paper is to support… the work of the British artist.’ As usual, ArtReview knows what you’re thinking: who wrote that crap? You’re really not going to believe this. Really, it’s almost unbelievable… but, somewhat embarrassingly, it turns out… it was ArtReview! omg. o m g. Writing back in 1950. Yes, ArtReview found these execrable words in its own archive. A glorious cupboard that it had recently ‘opened’ to the public for their own benefit. So that

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they can sponsor its digitisation and feel art-fashionable just like ArtReview does. (ps: drop ArtReview’s secretary a line at [email protected] if you want a bit of the digitalisation action; there are still some tickets on the fashion-train available, as ArtReview’s ‘people’ tell it all the time, but hurry, that won’t be the case for long. It’s fashion after all.) Where… oh yes, back in 1950… (This is the trouble with archives – you’re always getting lost in them.) Now, you might be thinking that this archival tidbit demonstrates nothing other than the fact that ArtReview used to be a pompous, jingoistic young fool, and generally a far cry from the broadminded genius it is today. You might even be admiring the way in which ArtReview managed to make something of itself despite its all-too-obvious handicaps from back then. You might even be standing up to applaud… But, in ArtReview’s defence, it was quite common at the time to think that all good art was British and that therefore all great artists were British. (It’s called logic, dear reader.) After all, most of the world had been British not so long, and a couple of world wars, before, and Tate didn’t feel so ashamed of its British art that it had to leave it behind in the ‘old’ space so that it could embark on a global, wonderful, non-British adventure with the ‘new’. But this isn’t about that. It’s not about the ‘new’, or the shame that’s inevitably a part of being ‘British’, or the decline of ‘English cultural life’ (as if that was ever a thing in the first place), or the fact that some of that’s down to the current British government (you people need to make a change there). Nor is it about the way in which you used to be able to write ‘British’ and ‘English’ as if it were interchangeable (hey – that last sentence was just for old times’ sake). Rather it’s about how, remarkably, ArtReview still stands by some of those words: faith, people, art, support. Unglaublich! as ArtReview’s publisher likes to grunt every time it reveals its ‘plans’. ArtReview

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Camouflaged, Fig. 3, 2024, mirror-polished stainless steel, lacquer, 94 ½ × 17 ⁵⁄16 × 17 ¹¹⁄16", 240 × 44 × 44.9 cm © Elmgreen & Dragset

Martha Jungwirth, Ohne Titel, aus der Serie «Francisco de Goya, Stillleben mit Rippen und Lammkopf» (detail), 2022 © Martha Jungwirth / Bildrecht, Wien 2024. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi

Congratulations to

Martha Jungwirth on her retrospective at the

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 7 June—22 September 2024

Art Observed

The Interview Ephraim Asili by Jessica Lanay 30

Artefacts by Orit Gat 39 The Afterlives of Adjaye Associates by Anakwa Dwamena 40

page 30 Ephraim Asili, The Inheritance (production still), 2020. Photo: Mick Bello. Courtesy the artist

Art Featured

Ahlam Shibli by Sarah Jilani 46

Emeka Ogboh by Martin Herbert 64

Carsten Höller & Adam Haar Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 52

congee Artist project by Alastair Kwan 68

Joyce Joumaa by Alexander Leissle 58

page 64 Emeka Ogboh, Lagos State of Mind iii, 2017/20 (installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 80 Joan Jonas, by Cassie Packard Lisa Freeman, by Declan Long Nick Cave, by J.J. Charlesworth Yael Bartana, by Nathaniel Budzinski Adriano Costa, by Michael Kurtz Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland, by Nathalie Olah Roni Horn, by Martin Herbert Hélène Fauquet, by Yuwen Jiang Dean Sameshima, by Mark Rappolt Catalina Ouyang, by Jenny Wu Claire Lehmann, by Cat Kron Tamiko Nishimura, by Sophia Stewart After the End of History, by Oliver Basciano Yoko Terauchi, by Mark Rappolt Tim Kent, by Alex Estorick Guy Brett, by J.J. Charlesworth Nebula, by Mariacarla Molè

All That Glitters, by Orlando Whitfield, reviewed by Orit Gat The Book of Elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Art Institution of Tomorrow, by Fatoş Üstek, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Like Love, by Maggie Nelson, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak The Understory, by Saneh Sangsuk, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones George Sand, by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, reviewed by Nirmala Devi

page 96 Elaine Constantine, Steve in his kitchen, 1993–96, Courtesy the artist

aftertaste 110

GALLI ‘SO,SO,SO’ 21 JUN — 08 SEPT 2024

GOLDSMITHS CCA, LONDON SE14 IMAGE: GALLI, HOCKER, 1989/1998. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER, BERLIN.

Art Observed

To culture 29

Photo: Lou Jones

ArtReview

The Interview by Jessica Lanay

Ephraim Asili

“I am my target audience and I want to make something as compelling as I can make it for myself, and then I assume that it might be interesting to other people”

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili is often the writer, producer, cinematographer and editor, as well as director, of his projects, which include works such as the five-part Diaspora Suite (2011–17) and the feature film The Inheritance (2020). The subjects in Asili’s films, which combine documentary-style extempore with critical examinations of intimacy, question how identity is affected by history, focusing on when and to whom certain histories become

accessible. In a recent project titled Song for My Mother (2023), Asili traces his own family line through its contact with critical locations and events in Black history, creating a montage that demonstrates how individual narratives can hinge on popular collective narratives. Asili’s work is haptic and direct in its messaging; the message is the sonic echo that ties together the creative, the archival and the curious. His films have the effect of confetti: mirrored

Summer 2024

refractions of disjointed time showering the viewer in the moment. A 2023–24 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow, a former Guggenheim Fellow and a current Bard College associate professor, whose recent work includes directing a ‘cinematic prelude’ to Louis Vuitton’s ss23 Men’s fashion show in Paris, Asili speaks about staying grounded in the reality of what it takes to achieve a life dedicated to his artistic obsessions.

Three-Act Cage artreview Your work seems like a hybrid of August Wilson’s plays, with their exegesis of Black communal thought, and John Akomfrah’s experimental films, such as The Last Angel of History [1996], which question the structure of time. In a previous interview you questioned whether the Hollywood three-act structure could lead to political freedom, and I wanted to circle back to that question now that you have worked for major corporate entities like Louis Vuitton. ephraim asili Freedom is a tricky concept. Based on my experience, I don’t think there’s liberation to come from Hollywood, because the bottom line for brands and production houses is definitely money. That being said, can positive things come out of corporate entities? Absolutely, 100 percent. But overall, we’re not doing anything to make any strong changes to the status quo through these entities. I believe that I’ve been able to get a lot of positive work done. When it comes to what I think really has the opportunity to make change, to help people think through issues, maybe think differently about issues, myself included, it’s the work that I’m doing here in my studio independently. I haven’t had any situations where someone rejects my idea because it is political, but I sometimes have to tailor what I do to suit the

circumstances. Years ago, primarily coming off the influence of Moonlight [2016, dir Barry Jenkins], which had a very beautiful, open structure, we were at the beginning of a really optimistic phase where new ideas around Black cinema were gaining some mainstream traction. And we thought, ok, maybe we’re headed somewhere with this Black cinema thing. When there’s money to be made from us and by us, and from radical ideas around art, then the people with the money will make money with us. But if it’s not very profitable, the gatekeepers aren’t interested. ar Sylvia Wynter wrote about the rise of the novel during chattel slavery in the Americas, and how the three-act structure of the novel is a way to organise settler colonial space and time. Is that close to the perspective of the three-act structure you might have? That it’s like a cage? ea Exactly. In order to have that sort of structure work, there are so many assumptions that have to be brought to the cinema, and this is why we have stereotypes and clichés. If you’re able to typecast, it sets up a parallel universe to our reality that people think they can relate to. But reality is far from that. Let’s just say we made a 90-minute movie or a two- or three-hour movie about slavery and people just washed dishes

Don Cherry (centre), Moki Cherry (foreground) and Christer Bothén (out of frame) hosting a children’s workshop, location unknown, c. 1973. Courtesy the Cherry Archive, Estate of Moki Cherry

ArtReview

the whole time. That to me is getting closer to something interesting, getting closer to the reality of feeling trapped or enslaved. I recognise the difficulty in making a profit from a film like that, but that’s the issue. The pressure to turn a profit always takes precedence over the ideas and the form. The three-act structure is a proven moneymaker but often fails to help us think outside of the box. The bigger issue for me is how we are conditioned by cinema. We’re so deeply indoctrinated by Hollywood structure: in almost every movie somebody has a very clear problem, and then by the end they solve the problem, typically with some form of violence. Rarely do we see films go from bad to worse, but in reality that is often the case. Many times evil goes unchecked and unpunished. ar You’re working on a documentary about experimental jazz musicians and activists Don and Moki Cherry. And you’re also working on something about Alice Coltrane. How did you choose these projects? ea Interestingly enough, both projects chose me. I’ve been a huge fan of Don for a long time. I got into that music through Ornette Coleman when I was back in high school. Years later I went to an exhibition of Moki’s work at Blank Forms in Brooklyn, and I’m friendly with one

The Inheritance (production still), 2020. Photo: Mick Bello. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Song for My Mother, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Sebastian Bach. Courtesy the artist and Amant, New York

of the people that runs the gallery, Lawrence [Kumpf]. Lawrence actually ended up introducing me to Moki’s granddaughter, Naima Karlsson, who was interested in somebody making a film, and I was actually just consulting. After a few conversations, I realised that they wanted more of a work of art, something more in alignment with Don and Moki’s practice. Then I volunteered to make the film. She was interested in the way that I’ve been taking archival materials and activating them, and the way I play with time and linearity. For the Alice piece, Erin Christovale, a curator that I used to work with years ago, was offered the opportunity to put together a massive survey on Alice Coltrane and they asked me to put something together. And again, this is someone I had known for years that has known of my interest in Alice Coltrane’s life and music. My partner grew up in an ashram and she was kind of raised on Alice Coltrane’s devotional music, and when Alice’s ashram music started to reemerge, we were very eager to learn all that we could about that part of Alice’s life. We now have a three-year-old who’s been growing up on Alice’s music. And so, when the phone call came, it was like, wow, this is perfectly in alignment with where I’m at in life right now.

No-Style Style ar What would be the Asili method? ea Yeah, what is that? I hope I never truly find out because then I’ll have to retire. I think it’s really quite simple. I studied film as an undergrad. The first question they ask when you want to start making a film is: who is your target audience? I am my target audience and I want to make something to the best of my ability that is compelling to me, as compelling as I can make it for myself, and then I assume that it might be interesting to other people. There is no Asili style. ar If we’re thinking about the history of the avantgarde, what we’re thinking about are Europeans trying to find someone new during the collapse of their society, and doing rough translations of what they considerto be primitive in Blackness, jazz and art. But when you’re Black and you’re the kind of experimental artist that you are, you get looped back into all of the inherent problems in one-sided interpretation. ea Absolutely. I would say that was definitely the jumping-off point for the European avantgarde, but to your point, particularly for Black people in the West, our existence, our history, is avant-garde, right? It’s just a big experiment in living, and obviously all the art that comes

Song for My Mother (still), 2023. Courtesy the artist and Amant, New York

ArtReview

out of that is inherently avant-garde, because it doesn’t come from a particular tradition. It’s all sort of cobbled together. And so, once you have that moment of extracting people from Africa and putting them here, you have an avant-garde culture. It’s only when Europeans find themselves dealing with the collapse of their society, where they’re forced to a certain degree to operate like the Black people that they fucked up, that they then start to develop a sort of improvised lifestyle. I embrace both avantgardes in many ways. There is a deep relationship with Black American culture and modern avant-garde cinema, particularly between American independent cinema of the 1950s, 60s, 70s. Think of someone like Harry Smith, who was deeply influenced by people like Dizzy Gillespie. I don’t separate their art from Black art in general, because it’s influenced by Black art.

You Have to Love It ar Before we started recording, you mentioned coming from a working-class background; you also mentioned being the producer, cinematographer, editor and director for financial reasons. What do you tell a twentysomething from the projects? They can’t afford a camera, maybe they can’t afford an iPhone, right?

ea The first thing I would ask someone in that situation is: do you genuinely totally love cinema? If the answer is anything other than yes, then I would say find any other artform to fall in love with. If you’re not in love yet, anything is better than being a filmmaker, because there are never enough resources. Whether you’re Christopher Nolan or me, there never seems to be enough money for what you want to do. You’re always under tremendous amounts of pressure, and without the resources, you can’t do the work, and that’s deeply frustrating. I think that’s the scariest thing about being a filmmaker – to feel like you have this brilliant idea, but you don’t have the means to make it. If one is genuinely serious about filmmaking, one has to unfortunately become very serious about money at the same time, and I’m not necessarily talking about large sums of money. I didn’t care at all about money before I became interested in filmmaking. I was getting by, and I had enough to eat, my family had enough to eat, I was good. If I could buy a few records, I was good. But as I became a filmmaker, it was like, I needed money to pay for everything that I needed, and I had to find money to put aside for film production. Filmmaking is always costly, even if you’re shooting it with whatever mobile phone you have. You still

need to feed people, provide transportation and ideally pay your crew, if you have one. If you can save money by taking on multiple roles, I highly suggest doing so, especially if you are just getting started. When I was getting started as a filmmaker I worked at a grocery store, and I would just put something aside – even if it was $10 or $20 – to eventually be able to make very small short films. When people are getting started, everybody wants to make a feature film and be famous. But make a 30-second film, make a one-minute film, make five one-minute films, and that’s how you develop a voice. If you can learn how to make stuff without resources, then when they come, things will get easier. There were so many times when I’ve wanted to quit, tried to quit. I really do have this deep connection to the medium, and that love for what I do gets me through. And so, I think if people really genuinely feel that way, they’ll figure out some way to get something done, because it’s so important to see your ideas manifest that you’ll figure it out. I would say start off small, build from there. ar What are two or three films that you saw that made you feel like you had to go create something immediately?

ea Well, the first film that did that for me, and I can remember it like it was yesterday, was Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song [1971]. When I saw that, for a variety of reasons, I was like, I gotta make a film. That was the spark for me. The second time that it happened was when I saw Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil [1983]. I just never… I was just like, whoa, what? I didn’t know a film could have that type of form. It felt so transgressive. And then the third that really did it for me was Symbiopsychotaxiplasm [1968] by Bill Greaves, which in some ways was in between the first two, but just like way further out. And with Bill’s film, it was so intellectually philosophical, in a particular type of way. I’d never seen Black art quite like that before. I just felt completely empowered by seeing that work, which again, for me, relates to when we were talking about the avant-garde earlier. This is someone who’s totally Black but is not shying away from embracing some Western avant-garde ideas. Miles Davis did the score. After Symbio, there was no turning back from what I was doing with my life. Jessica Lanay is a writer, poet and art journalist based in Chicago

Strange Math (production still), 2023, cinematic prelude to Louis Vuitton ss23 Men’s show in Paris honouring late creative director Virgil Abloh. Photo: Nick Haymes. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

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It starts with a metronome ticking, then a record player whirs into life. Sonny & Cher’s All I Ever Need Is You (1972) plays as the lights come on in a large, empty industrial space. In the middle of the room is a huge hydraulic press with an impressive array of objects organised on it as if it were a stage. There are tubes of paint, a piano and a microphone on a stand, a bust and a globe, a full bookshelf and two mannequins – the small, wooden kind used by artists, and the fullsize one that fashion designers have. Sonny sings, “Sometimes when I’m down and all alone…” as the press begins to descend, crushing a trumpet standing atop an arcade game. ‘Game Over’ appears on the screen. The song then jumps to the familiar bridge, “All I ever need is you…” and the upbeat tune accompanies the destruction, as the hydraulic deathtrap comes for a model of one of the Angry Birds and a guitar’s strings pop under the tension. A Flushed Face emoji stress ball falls from a pyramid of other emoji balls to become the press’s final victim as the machine reaches its base and the ball’s eyes pop out before it is annihilated. When the press begins to rise again, it reveals an iPad where all those objects were. A woman’s voice says, “The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.” And Sonny sings again, “All I ever need is you.” Apple ceo Tim Cook posted the video on Twitter/X, adding, ‘Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create’. Does he mean the trumpet and piano, the paint and brushes, the guitar, the metronome, the books, the cameras with multiple lenses – are all folded into the iPad? And anyway, who even has an iPad? An iPad is so sleek, so far from the bland utility of some black, plastic laptop. But then, I remember when the first iPads came out people joked they were just big iPhones: it’s hard to tell what an iPad is really useful for – most of its functions can be just as easily achieved on a laptop, a phone or some analogue device. And so it’s been assigned to the realm of ‘creativity’, because if it’s not that useful, perhaps it’s closer to art. This slick fancy object feels more practical for a salesman flicking through images of something expensive (a flat? a car? a curated vacation?) that they’re trying to sell you on than, say, a band playing around collaboratively with Apple’s GarageBand (the name itself hinting at the creativity that Apple then appropriates, packages and sells back to us wrapped up in a glass case).

Artefacts

Orit Gat has a theory for why people hate the latest Apple iPad ad, but is it because they love art?

People don’t like the commercial. The response to the crushing and shattering of instruments of art and culture has been compared to book burning, to censorship, to dystopian visions of the future. Hugh Grant tweeted, ‘The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.’ A number of users performed the classic, here-I-fixed-itfor-you trope we all want to see: if you reverse the video, the press rises, the spilled colours

Still from ‘Crush!’, Apple Commercial, 7 May 2024. Courtesy Apple Inc./YouTube

Summer 2024

congeal, Mr Stress Ball’s eyes pop back into their rubber sockets and the artist’s mannequin slowly rises back to its legs, as if stretching in relief. One of these versions is set to the tune of I Got You Babe (1965), also by Sonny & Cher. None of this is new. Users were quick to point out a 2008 commercial for the lg Renoir phone (‘enhanced with 8gb of memory’!) looks very similar, with paint spilling and cameras being squashed into an image of the blocky early smartphone. And anyway, TikTok is full of hydraulic presses crushing things, from household objects (a decorative porcelain of a hedgehog, a stack of plates, candles) to foodstuff (eggs) and an iPhone. These videos are often tagged ‘asmr’ and classified under ‘satisfying things’, a proof that in a culture of excess there is gratification in destruction. A user crushing an iPhone feels like a result of a culture of excess, perhaps you could even argue a rejection thereof, but when Apple does the same thing, it feels telling. Advertising execs would tell you the vitriol directed at the spot means that it’s good – that it sparks a conversation, which is the goal of advertising. But the anger is exactly about this relationship to creativity; and this commercial lays its cynicism bare. Apple has branded itself the company of design and artistic sensibility – Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create – and the crushing is not a betrayal of these ideals, but proof that Apple does not think of its products as facilitating human creativity. Squashing the artefacts of creativity is a way to narrow access to it: this commercial tells us it’s time to change how we think about art, that it comes out of a shiny device, not a human mind. For Apple, ‘to create’ is a form of leisure, not of art or culture. In order to convince us that we need to pay for luxury devices, Apple made creative work aspirational. So, a band in the garage is nothing without GarageBand, and a cool urban architecture studio doesn’t need blueprint paper and drafting tables when it can have an iPad in a modernist pseudo-Scandi office. These images of how culture is made are the contemporary ima-gination of creative work, and Apple played a central part in the creation of this perception. In this world, a pen and paper (or an iPad Pro and a Magic Pencil, which alone retails for £129) cost almost £1,500 – because creativity comes at a price. Orit Gat is a writer based in London

The skyline of downtown Accra is studded with eccentric buildings, and each tells a piece of Ghana’s complicated history. The National Theatre, opened in 1992, with its Ark-like top-structure pinned to a rectangular base, is testament to an era when culture was an arena for national identity-making and architecture was the equivalent of placing meringues on pies. Much more modest, the squat, two-storey George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs from 1961 nods to Ghana’s status as a resource centre for liberation movements across the continent. And to independent-Ghana first president Kwame Nkrumah’s fever dream of a United States of Africa (cooked up by Nkrumah with Padmore at the Fifth Pan-African Conference in 1945). On that same stretch is a seven-hectare empty lot, known locally as ‘the world’s most expensive hole’. Here, historic colonial-era bungalows for top judges were knocked down for a proposed National Cathedral. First announced in 2016, the project was to be a fulfilment of the president’s personal pledge to God – though the government dipped into taxpayer money to fund it, without parliamentary consent. The final design, intended to be completed this year, was to have ‘chapels, a baptistery, a 5000-seat, two-storey auditorium, a grand central hall,

Facelift

What is the real scandal surrounding David Adjaye’s work in Ghana, asks Anakwa Dwamena, as he explores its afterlives in Accra

Site of the proposed National Cathedral of Ghana, Accra. Photo: Nipah Dennis

ArtReview

music school, choir rehearsal room, art gallery, shop and multi-use spaces’. Adjaye Associates, whose project this is, have been paid about half of the £45.5 million spent, but with nothing (save some foundation work) yet built, as far as the eye can see. Down towards the beach is another Adjaye white elephant: the redevelopment of close to 100 hectares of coastline, featuring skyscrapers, parks and promenades intended to woo tourist dollars. Now apparently stalled, Marine Drive has already led to the eviction of thousands of people, has made one of the few beaches accessible for low-income residents unreachable, and if it goes ahead promises to destroy two sites of cultural heritage: the Art Centre Accra, where Ghana’s distinct Concert Party Theatre troupes were nurtured, and the Ghana Club, a haven for Ghanaian elites during the 1940s and 50s, when parts of Accra were segregated by race. This has, for many, made David Adjaye the face of destruction. Adjaye’s public projects haven’t measured up to his own assertion to Artforum in 2017 that projects must ‘engage with the city and its context’. His completed buildings in Accra to date are private projects: including a house for former un Secretary-General Kofi Annan; the Sandbox Complex, a beachside playground for the upper class; and the dot. ateliers studio for the artist Amoako Boafo.

The context of Accra is one of rising inequality and an increasingly callous elite, obsessed with accumulating Western markers of sophistication – v8 cars, vacations in the Mediterranean and gaudy homes that have conspired to make Accra among the most expensive cities on the continent. Against this, the opening of Adjaye’s studio in Accra in 2017 set off a distinct air of Ghanaian, African and Black pride in a moment when the country was busy cultivating its global image as a home for celebrating a Pan-African vision of excellence. Adjaye had been known for calling architecture a ‘Robin Hood practice’, and a means to give the poor, through public works, the glossy things the rich already have. His work, the Yoruba-inspired National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, dc, being among the most prominent examples, is deeply steeped in African aesthetics. The prospect of his design for the W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation Complex in Accra was an exciting notion; yet it remains another project in limbo. To be sure, Ghana was no architectural backwater before Adjaye. (A current show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum highlights the country’s role in the development of ‘tropical modernism’ during the 1960s.) But perhaps, besides the sculptor El Anatsui, there are no similarly ‘big fish’ in our pond, at least not any with the kind of external recognition that Adjaye has to back him up: a knighthood, an obe and Obama’s endorsement. So, a rare announcement from Adjaye Associates this March served as a reminder of the bitter disappointment of Adjaye’s time in Ghana: the release announced a ‘fundamental change’ to the way the firm operated, pointing to the appointment of a new ceo for its Accra studio (as well as similar appointments in its London and New York outposts), and David Adjaye’s continued place as principal and head of design direction in the role of executive chair of the group. In Ghana this announcement represented the closest thing to an update, or new information, since the Financial Times revealed (in 2023) sexual-misconduct allegations against Adjaye. (Through a communications and crisis management firm, Adjaye has rejected ‘any claims of sexual misconduct, abuse or criminal wrongdoing’.) Elements of the Ghanaian press framed the accusations as ex-employees seeking to ‘extort money from Adjaye’. In other countries, he was compelled to step back from large projects in which he and his firm had been involved, as soon as the allegations became public. Here, there seems to only be silence, and a collective shrug. After a University of Ghana lecturer, Ransford Gyampo, was caught on tape in 2019 making inappropriate advances

to a reporter posing as a student, he was slapped with a six-month suspension, and returned to even more prominence as a frequent guest on national television. Adjaye could follow this reentry into public life, just like fellow architect Richard Meier, following five published allegations of sexual abuse (and one reported settlement). Back in Ghana, the presence of a starchitect seems only to have amplified preexisting negative traits in the society in general, and in architecture specifically: proximity to power leads to one becoming untouchable, even in the face of loud opposition. Darlings of the president, Adjaye and his firm were handed big projects without parliamentary approval. In one case, a project was alleged to have been taken from an architect who already had a contract and given to Adjaye. This led to consortia of architects petitioning various authorities about the lack of open and competitive bidding processes around Adjaye Associates.

Adjaye Associates model for the National Cathedral of Ghana, Accra. Photo: Rachel Royse / Alamy Stock Photo

Summer 2024

The firm’s website still tags the National Cathedral, the Du Bois Museum Complex and others as ‘current’ projects, in contrast to onthe-ground reality. In the midst of a lack of transparency, and accountability, what remains clear is the mistake we make when we expect global celebrities who have cut their teeth in the transactional corridors of the corporate world to switch to an opposite ethic in the name of local solidarity or values. ‘Architecture’, Adjaye once said, ‘can very much be a tool to bridge historical gaps between people, one that can offer disadvantaged communities a source of pride and inspiration.’ Unfortunately, this has not been the case in Ghana. Anakwa Dwamena is a writer based in Accra

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When it no longer cares 45

Controlling the Shutter

by Sarah Jilani

untitled (Occupation no. 21), al-Khalil/Hebron, Palestine, 2016–17, c-print, 27 × 40 cm. ‘Old house of the Sufyan al-Ja'abari family, al-Tullab Street, al-Khalil, January 25, 2017. Sufyan breeds pigeons and goats in his family’s old house. The settlement Giv'at Ha'avot adjoins the family house and includes the Israeli Ja'abrah prison and police station. Both are used against Palestinians as well as Israeli activists who oppose the occupation.’

ArtReview

Ahlam Shibli’s photographs bear witness for, and with, Palestinian lives under extraordinary conditions

untitled (Death no. 3), Palestine, 2011–12, c-print, 100 × 67 cm. ‘Rafediya neighborhood, Street 15, Nablus, February 22, 2012. A sit-in front of the Nablus Red Cross offices, organized by the dflp (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in support of the hunger strike of Palestinians in Israeli administrative detention protesting their confinement. On April 17, a general hunger strike was announced which terminated on May 14 when the Israeli government agreed to remove solitary confinement, to allow family visits from the Gaza Strip, and to suspend administrative detention.’

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Back in 2019, Palestinian Jewish theorist and filmmaker Ariella appear neutral or independent of its outcome when we aspire, Aïsha Azoulay proposed that we might usefully think about impe- instead, to witness ‘for and with others targeted by imperial violence’. rial violence in terms of the action of a camera shutter. ‘This brief The Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli’s genre-spanning works operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into can be understood as an exercise in doing just that. a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into Born in Shibli-Umm al-Ghanam, Palestine, in 1970, Shibli is an arta thing of the past,’ she writes in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. ist who works with lens-based mediums. Best known for her photogShe is thinking here of how technologies of knowledge production raphy (though also a filmmaker), Shibli operates an aesthetic that – imaging, naming, categorising, interpreting – can and were used to has often been associated with the documentary style. Her close render colonial violence invisible in archives. It is not necessarily the attention to the living conditions, social histories and environments camera itself that is always an appaof Palestinian communities can certainly merit the label, but the socioratus of violence, but, elsewhere in Shibli captures how a home political inflections of the word ‘docher book, Azoulay reminds us that the under occupation must cease being umentary’ sit uneasily with the ways camera often ‘made visible and accepta place and become a process in which Shibli handles themes such able imperial world destruction and leas occupation, violence, home, idengitimated the world’s reconstruction tity and displacement. Even her earliest images, like the series of six on empire’s terms’. Between that ‘individual rooted in her life-world’, and the frozen, black-and-white photographs from 1997 titled Horse Race in Jericho, photographic image of her, is an act of translation. Those dynamic evoke no sense of a documentarian’s eye behind the lens. Although social practices that sustain her life-world are translated into frozen, Shibli’s use of space, light, shape and texture shows a formal experempirical facts ready to be classified, documented and displayed by tise in her chosen medium, her eye is never that of one who stands an expert – be they historian, academic, journalist, curator or ngo apart from their subject. For example, in the third image from Horse worker – ‘who at best may not share in that same life-world, and at Race in Jericho, two racers are pictured in full gallop from a child’s eyeworst is trained to ignore or belittle what stands in the way of imperial level. This unusual compositional choice seems to place the photogviolence. Moreover, because that world can be presented as ‘a thing of rapher alongside the two Palestinian boys watching the action in the the past’, given that the action of the camera’s shutter can only capture first image of the series: one has the protective arm of an older brother what is the past once that action is over, the photograph wields the around the other, and they look to the riders in awe. This sense of power to imply that the worlds that empire destroyed were already being a participant, rather than an observer, is also reinforced by the things of the past. But to reject this narrative, second image of the series. There, Shibli turns untitled (Horse race in Jericho, no. 1), Azoulay proposes, is always possible. Nothing her back to the fierce Jericho sun to deliberately Jericho, Palestine, 1997, about the operation of a shutter can ever again cast her own shadow on the sands; torso bent, gelatin silver print, 38 × 58 cm

ArtReview

her left elbow pointing skywards to steady her shot, the photogra- is made unhomely through either unceasing violence (for those who pher’s corporeal presence turns her into a participant-spectator of the stayed) or the pain of exile (for those who left), it must, and does, transcultural practice, and the bonds it forges between landscape, animal form into a collective activity. Shibli’s series of 72 colour and blackand human. and-white photographs titled Positioning (1997–2002) is a striking Art that speaks of emplacement, participation and commitment record of what this may look like. The series features differently is a conscious and powerful representational choice when we speak of lit and composed photos that suggest some geographical distance a people and a place marked by 76 years of dispossession, erasure and between shots. ‘Home’ could be found in the traditional wedding displacement. Indeed, online biographies and exhibition brochures celebrations of a young couple, or in the Palestinian food an elderly abound with the claim that Shibli is above all a photographer who woman is dishing out of a large cooking pot. Home could be his goat destabilises the concept of home and identity. Perhaps the implica- to a young Palestinian boy in yet another image, or in the young men tion is that, given the extraordinary conditions of Palestinian life, dancing the dabke with keffiyeh tied to their waists. These all capture a Shibli is interested in the many processes people undertake, within diverse community keeping their cultural life-world alive. and without, to create a makeshift sense of home – whether via Included among these are photos that remind the viewer this liferituals, objects or words. For example, in the 24-colour-photograph world has long been under siege. Dynamic, almost photojournalseries Unrecognised (1999–2000), homemaking in the Bedouin village istic images, both in colour and black-and-white, show worldwide of 'Arab al-N'aim looks like the children’s drawings on the corrugated demonstrations in support of Palestine over three decades. These iron exteriors of homes, and the traditionally hand-embroidered overwhelmingly feature people of the Global South: Brazilian crowds shirts women wear. In Arab al-Sbaih, a 2007 series of 47 images about unfurl a banner that reads ‘All Support for the Intifada’ in Portuguese; Palestinian refugees in Jordan, it is in the carefully preserved family an African-American man runs past a kfc with a placard that reads albums, and the talk of elders. But it may be equally true to say Shibli ‘Free Our Brothers & Sisters!’ Exemplary of Shibli’s preference for a captures how a home under occupation must cease being a place and sequence of witnessed moments instead of composed, individual become a process. Discussing nation-building after colonialism in photographs, Positioning captures a world that positions its struggles The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon warns that ‘nation’ – the adjacent to those of Palestinians. collective home that is to be built in the image of its people, not in that In this sense, while not all of Shibli’s works are about her homeland, of their coloniser – must be a verb, not a noun. It is not found in ‘the her entire oeuvre is nevertheless underpinned by a transformation from flag and the palace where sits the government’, he writes, but in the spectating-observing to connecting-witnessing for and with others. ‘coherent, enlightened action’ of people working ‘to create a prospect This also extends to minority communities in a series titled Eastern lgbt that is human’. (2004/06), which challenges the Orientalist untitled (Horse race in Jericho, no. 3), lens (a whole host of visual, cultural and While place never ceases to be vitally imporJericho, Palestine, 1997, tant to the Palestinian condition, when a home spatial mythologies around Arabs and Asians gelatin silver print, 38 × 58 cm

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above untitled (Positioning no. 17), International, 1997–2002, c-print, 38 × 58 cm facing page untitled (Death, no. 48), Palestine, 2011–12, c-print, 38 × 57 cm. ‘The Old City, al-Kasaba neighborhood, Nablus, February 5, 2012.In a vegetable shop, a poster showing the martyrs 'Abd al-Rahman Shinnawi, 'Amar al-'Anabousi and Basim Abu Sariyah from the Faris al-Leil (Knight of the Night) resistance groups which belong to al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. On the margins of the poster, a picture of Naif Abu Sharkh, the head of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Nablus. The poster carries a sticker showing a raised fist with the Palestinian colors and reading, “We want the occupation to lose. Boycott Tapuzina [an Israeli soft drink]. Palestinian National Initiative.”’

ArtReview

that served the interests of colonialism). Far from depicting lives lived in a state of fear, exclusion and danger – the narrative often imagined in the West – Shibli’s camera instead roves around dressing rooms and backstage areas to capture both collectively charged and tenderly intimate moments. In one image, placards that read ‘Proud to Be Queer and Muslim’ are readied for a march; in others, we see queer folks enjoy solo moments of self-admiration in front of a mirror, and drag queens do each other’s makeup. On 6 September 2023, almost exactly a month before Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza – and Israel retaliated on a scale that has led to allegations of genocide currently under consideration at the International Court of Justice – Shibli’s photographic series Death (2011–12) was presented at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo. (Her more recent Occupation, 2016–17, is also about the destruction of Palestinian livelihoods, this time in Al-Khalil/ Hebron, while her series Heimat, 2016–17, is another interrogation of the idea of ‘home’, but within the context of German Gastarbeiter, ‘guest workers’.) In resurrecting her older series Death at São Paulo, Shibli may seem to have had a disconcerting premonition – over the next seven months over 35,000 Palestinians were killed, including over 15,000 infants and children. But if it is foremost death that the occupier has brought upon this land, it is perhaps unsurprising, following the arguments set out above, that the main preoccupation of Shibli’s Death series is life. Comprising 68 photographs, itexplores mnemonic and commemorative practices around Palestinian martyrdom in the city of Nablus in the West Bank. The location of Death is deliberate; Nablus was one bastion of resistance during the Second Intifada (2000–05), for which it was kept under curfew for over a record-breaking 100 days. Palestinian resistance has taken many forms since the 1948 Nakba: violent,

nonviolent; religious, secular; spontaneous, strategic. Death focuses on the one constant in this history: martyrdom, which is here culturally understood as a death caused by the occupation, whether directly or indirectly. Unlike the demands of photojournalism, which must find and verify cause and effect, Shibli asks her viewer to start (perhaps uncomfortably) by accepting that the lived experiences of Palestinians are justification enough for using the term to describe many manner of deaths. In several images, young men idle at the entrance of a graveyard in Balata refugee camp, watched over by commemorative posters of their fallen friends. Inside, verdantly green tombs feature stones that bear portraits of their inhabitants as they were in life: often young men, proudly posing with an automatic rifle – either in front of a cheap studio background, or alongside digitally superimposed faces and lettering that commemorates a relative whose example they followed to martyrdom. In yet other shots, the faces of young men (and some women) are displayed on rugs, posters, walls and lockets; they are carefully dusted and polished by family members in the certainty that the dead, too, will surely see the coming of freedom. Shibli’s choice of the term martyr is deliberate, requesting, in her 2013 essay titled ‘The Truth in My Photographs’, our participation in calling for ‘the end of a situation that breeds “martyrs”; it requests the end of occupation’. The Arabic word for martyr, shaheed, can also mean ‘witness’, depending on the context. Shibli’s lens points to where those contexts bitterly continue to be one and the same. ar A retrospective of Ahlam Shibli’s photographic work, Dissonant Belonging, is on view at luma Westbau, Zürich, through 8 September Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City, University of London

all images © and courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Carsten Höller & Adam Haar Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

The artist and the scientist are planning a new kind of sculpture – made of visitors’ dreams

both Pattie Maes, Adam Haar, Carsten Höller, Dream Hotel, 2023, ai sketches by Alejandro Medina

ArtReview

Carsten Höller has long toyed with the nature of human perception, behaviour and the experience of the art institution. From making his name during the 2000s with the Slide works, which allowed visitors a different take on (and way of moving between levels of) museum buildings, to training people to see upside down, to getting museum visitors to sleep in robot beds that roamed the galleries overnight, the former agricultural scientist creates dynamic works that turn galleries and museums into experimental sites. Now, collaborating with mit dream-science researcher Adam Haar, Höller is premiering the first in seven ‘dream rooms’ of his Dream Hotel project, the outcome of the artist’s 2021 mit residency, at the Fondation Beyeler. Each room is conceived to produce a certain kind of dream, from lucid dreaming to nightmares. ArtReview spoke with Höller and Haar ahead of the show, to find out what reshaping peoples’ dreams might lead to.

and then, hopefully, you will get into the dreams of flying with flying fly agarics. But having said that about people’s experiences, it also means that you can still see this as a conventional artwork. That’s important to say at the outset. It’s still a sculpture, but it’s more than a sculpture. It’s not ‘participatory’, which is not a term I like much. It’s a sculpture that has more of a toollike character. You can do something with it that is very specific, and what is required is your bodily presence. It’s not something you can do virtually. ar What do you want your user to find in this encounter with this work?

artreview Your new work, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, which you’re presenting in the Fondation Beyeler’s summer show, is the first iteration – the first ‘room’ – of the wider Dream Hotel project. Back in 2006, in an interview with ArtReview, you said that ‘the real material I’m working with is people’s experience’. How does working with ‘people’s experiences as material’ come into play in this new project? carsten höller People’s experiences, in this case, are people’s dreams. You can book Room 1 during the daytime for 45 minutes to an hour. You can take a nap, or you can also book it for the whole night. Adam is sleeping there for the first time tonight. I will sleep there for the first time tomorrow, and then we have two more guests coming. Then from then on, it will be a regular schedule, but we want to test it first because it’s a new thing. What happens is, you lay down on this round bed, and you hear a voice telling you that this is specifically created to elicit or reinforce dreams of flying. To dream of flying with fly agaric mushrooms, because while you lay in the bed you look up and you see a replica of a mushroom that literally flies around your head and is lit in a very specific way that makes the shape of the mushroom appear to change, to morph into different forms. That’s the last thing you see. The bed then starts to move in a similar fashion that the mushroom has been moving. You fall asleep

ch A sculpture that is designed to take you away – literally speaking into your dreams and to give your dreams a very specific content. This dream content-production is quite extraordinary because dreams are, of course, related to the memories and to the experiences we had before, but normally there’s very little you can do to give your dreams a direction or to remember your dreams. This is where Adam comes in, because that’s exactly what he’s been working with.

Carsten Höller with Adam Haar, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, 2024 (installation view, Dance with Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel)

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ar Adam, how do you understand the practical possibility of the manipulation of dreams? At one level it sounds intrusive, a little bit creepy to enter one’s dreams and remake them or remodel them. But elsewhere you write about manipulating dreams to benefit memory, creativity and wellbeing. adam haar There’s a very practical answer, which is there are ways you can augment learning, like helping someone dream in Spanish will help them learn the language more quickly. You can help with stroke rehabilitation or limb amputation by helping somebody dream of having a cohesive whole body. You can help with depression by helping someone dream about a difficult event in the past. There are some very clinical answers, but then there’s the idea that a dream is a space where you get to experience the impossible. You get to step into a space that is made of you, but is unfamiliar to you, a space where you get to learn about yourself by inhabiting it. I can predict in an experimental sense in the lab, so it is the unpredictability of the museum that is as interesting to me. I don’t know if Carsten will have the same language for me as I do around this – but I think, in a sense, neither the artists or the museum visitor is the person in power, but it is the sculpture that gets to shape the experience most. We don’t know what particular dream this person will have, and they don’t know what particular dream they’ll have. What gets produced there is coming from some independent power of the artwork. It’s this in-between, three-agent creation. ar Carsten, I wonder if such a positivistic outcome is important, or whether you are happy to be a little bit more open or playful about what you think the role of the artwork is here. In many of your previous works, you have toyed with the vocabulary and the methods that have roots in certain kinds of therapeutic culture. But it’s not a professional therapeutic practice. It’s an art practice. ch We have to consider the fact that we are actually trying to somehow hack into your dreams. Maybe ‘hack’ is too strong a word, which sounds dangerous because dreams are the ultimate private sphere that you have. In the world we are living with, the amount of surveillance of all kinds that we experience in our daily lives, privacy is diminishing constantly. Are we not adding one more level

to this and now hacking into your night dreams, the last private sphere that you had? I think that is a legitimate question. Maybe it’s even a kind of statement we’re making with the work, asking ‘how far has this gone’? Now we are going even further and showing that even this, in theory, might be possible. It’s not just a good thing, it’s also a dangerous thing. But at the same time, we all know that dreams and art have a very strong relationship. We just don’t show it, as it has been shown before; we make it happen. ah To your question about the danger versus the benefits: Carsten and I both have this history in the sciences, and there’s so many tools, whether you think of genetic editing or brain imaging, which have so much promise and so much power, of good or bad. In the science of dream incubation, humans have a much longer history incubating their dreams than they do ignoring them. The last 80 years of ignoring our dreams is absolutely novel and insane. If you think about the deity Bes and the Saqqara necropolis in Ancient Egypt, Asklepios at Epidaurus in Ancient Greece, the onset of the Abrahamic religions. We’ve been dreaming – and not only dreaming, but waking up and sharing communally our dreams – for thousands of years. But we just decided not even a century ago that they weren’t worth our time, that this place where we’re at our most powerful, our most imaginative, our most spiritual, our most creative – we said, ‘Oh, it’s ridiculous. It’s just a dream.’ This is new, and just because something is in absence doesn’t mean it’s a danger. A presence can be dangerous, but the absence of discussion also can hold a danger. I think, of course, we’re playing with something very powerful. Carsten has played with silence and vision, whether Psycho Tank [1999] or Upside Down Goggles [1994/ 2001] because these are powerful things to play with. There’s power. ar There are a couple of questions that come out of that. One is the ethical dimension of science – what uses it can be put to. The other is how science and technology relate to some of the more manipulative aspects of the culture we’re now in: the culture of ‘immersive’ experience, of the experience economy, and how they use and exploit technology. Increasingly, we have museums thinking of themselves as experiences, and they’re withdrawing from the idea of going to a museum to contemplate a work, to have a very individual relationship

with an individual art object. I wonder how this project speaks back to where we have got to now. ch I see these works as a comment on what you call ‘experience economy’, and this new term of ‘immersive art’ installations, which I personally really dislike. I want it still to be a very personal experience. For me, there was one crucial experience, when I went to see the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1991, it was a very strong moment for me because it was really the power of art that overwhelmed me, all alone in this little chapel. Then I’ve seen a Rothko exhibition since, at the Tate, and it was similar works, but there were hundreds of people, there was audio guides and so on, and it was completely impossible to get even close to a similar feeling. So many of my works have to do with a form of specialisation. It’s you and the work. It’s not you and an exhibition and hundreds of other people.

avoid this for a certain period because I’ve been a scientist before and I didn’t want to be the scientist who makes art, but I’m still a scientist. I wanted to be an artist that makes work that has a scientific background. Now it’s really half-andhalf, and I find that a very interesting situation. We’re very curious to see what comes out of it. I call it ‘saturated’. Like a Henry Moore sculpture – poor Henry! It’s nothing negative, I love Henry Moore’s work, but it’s just an example. It’s saturated: nothing really changes. There are big bronze things positioned there. Here, with the Dream Hotel, things are not saturated. They are like a function. The function needs an object or a subject to make the function into an equation. This is a much more dynamic approach.

Something has happened in the meantime, which is that what we’re doing has become much more mainstream than it was when I started, and certainly since the 1960s or even before. And we still pretend it’s the same format, but I don’t think the format is the same. We have to think about a different format to make it into a powerful experience again, because like I said, with the Rothko show at the Tate, it’s not powerful. It’s disturbing. To bring it back to the specificity of the experience and the focus of it, we must go other ways. One of them is that you use the museum as a place where you can do experiments. I think this is a radical experiment. There is also a novelty in the sense that this is a scientific work. It’s really as scientific as it is artistic. I tried to

ah I was curious about Carsten’s comment about the uniqueness of experience. I have been thinking more about ‘perceptual homogenisation’, this idea that, say, my brother texts me and asks if I saw Joe Biden say this thing, as if we both have seen it at the same moment in different parts of the globe. This idea that we can have one eyesight and how bland that idea is for humanity. I think about the perceptual homogenisation with the internet and with Chatgpt – they call it enshittification of the internet, where it’s training on itself and on us. The process becomes so normalised until my Gmail suggests the end of a sentence that would be most average and most appealing to the person I’m sending it to. I think dreams are a real respite from the possibility of homogenisation. There is no normal dream. They are universally abnormal. That’s really wonderful for an approach for people to value again what is abnormal in themselves and in others, to encounter it and to have to deal with that. I think so much these days of what I see and hear is catered towards me not having to deal with very much that falls outside of a status quo. Dreams don’t behave. They won’t behave for us as we build this work, and they won’t behave for you when you come and lie down in the bed. There’s something really powerful about that in an age where uniqueness is being compromised.

Carsten Höller, day, 2015 (installation view, maat, Lisbon). Photo: Attilio Maranzano

ar These themes that you’re working with occur in a culture that is already in over its head with the commodification, through technology, of the conscious

ArtReview

Carsten Höller, day, 2015 (installation view, maat, Lisbon). Photo: Attilio Maranzano

Summer 2024

Carsten Höller, Psycho Tank, 1999 (installation view, Une Exposition à Marseille, 2004, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille). Photo: Attilio Maranzano

ArtReview

and even subconscious mind. With the rise of social media and its algorithms, scientists of human psychology, and human response and behaviour, are intent on seeing into us and seeing what we are about and what we want. There’s a clear relationship between the culture that we are very steadily working our way into now and such an approach to an artwork. What’s interesting when talking about homogeneity is that this is the first of a set of possible rooms. There seems to be a sense of humour to specifying and demarcating certain kinds of experiences – that I might actually choose to go to the ‘nightmare’ room as opposed to the ‘flying’ room. ch As if it would be already possible to choose exactly what you want! You want to dream about flying? Or you want a dream about being a plant? One of the things Adam said at the very beginning that really struck me: he did these dream experiments with people sleeping in the lab. He said what they dream about when they sleep in the lab is… sleeping in a lab! I can’t even tell you how much this project has influenced my own dream world. It has changed how I go through the night. How I wake up and how I carry around my dreams with me. Our idea would be to make a dream hotel which is a bit like a circus. It consists of a number of rooms, each of them designed to elicit specific dreams and maybe to make you remember your dreams better. We even want to work on a new room where you share your dreams with other people, so you dream the same dream at the same time. It should be possible for this hotel to move from city to city, spend a certain time in the city, allow people to come there, book a room and dream in specific ways, and then move on. That’s our plan. ah I think Carsten’s experience there is really revealing and it’s completely typical. You can take a hugely simple tool, something like a dream diary or something like having somebody sleep outside uncovered, or something like drinking a specific tea before bed. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as coming and sleeping in the sleep lab and people will find that their mind is much less in control or predictable than they thought it was during the day. Social media input, the barrage of attentionseeking, the perceptual homogeneity – I think these things are a thin pool cover on top of a sea of monsters and creatures. You can lift the cover a little bit with a practice as simple as paying

attention to dreams during the day, so that at night your brain records more of those dreams because you’ve made it think that they’re important. Dreams have become a huge part of the way I think and the way I see. All this is to say that I think that the pool cover is suffocating and enveloping, but very thin. If you help people lift it up, there is something that is fear-inducing and intense and very old and in you, just below the lid of perception. I think an artwork as simple as this, with a night in there, can show people a part of themselves they’ve really never seen before. ar I think in Carsten’s work there’s always a questioning of the difference between being a subject and an object. It’s playful and perverse in the sense that it exposes you to questions of choice – what you can choose and what you can’t. This also seems to be an extension of the idea of presenting people with something that we traditionally think we are not in control of, but in fact we are. To relate it to some

of Adam’s points that the twentieth century’s view of the dream world is that it’s a risky place that one enters cautiously, I wonder if we’re now starting to kind of turn to a much more practical approach to not being so scared, and to choose to have some control over things? ch It’s an old artist dream that art can influence life. We’ve been discussing this for centuries, and now we’re back to this whole topic again. If it does change your life because it makes you dream differently, and in some way you become a different person, that’s very interesting and maybe also scary, because once you’re in [the dream] there’s nothing you can do. You have to trust us that we’re not going to harm you. But we are honest, we don’t know Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Goggles, 1994–ongoing (installation view, Sunday, 2019, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City). Photo: Pierre Björk

Summer 2024

what’s going to happen. That’s why we are the first ones to sleep there. Maybe it’s a completely horrifying experience; maybe it’s the most wonderful thing in the world, we don’t know. That’s maybe the old scientist in me who’s very curious. ah It’s not only that we don’t know, and that it’s the first time this has been done in an artistic space. In the dream science space, people have been curious about flying dreams for quite a while. There’s flying dreams in traditional Chinese medicine, in old Egyptian traditions of [dream] incubation. When you talk to people, so often they’ll say, ‘Oh, I remember my flying dreams I had as a child. They were so, so full of joy and I lost them.’ For instance, my dad is in his seventies. He said, ‘Oh, they were my favourite thing in the world. I felt so free, I felt so alive, but I haven’t had them for 60 years.’ He remembers them so clearly. To give these back to people would be really beautiful. There’s the scientific question, which is that there’s been a lot of interest in dream science, but there’s been one study on incubating flying dreams, which is where we got part of our inspiration, from a scientist named Tore Nielsen – one of his students helped us make a video for dream incubation of flying dreams. This is totally new. Nobody in the world has tried a moving bed on a hexapod base! We can really ask a new scientific question, which is really exciting. When we talk about the kind of questions of where we want this to go and what kind of questions it will raise, the idea of writing a scientific paper about a piece that has been inside of a museum is interesting in terms of mixing and meshing these worlds in these languages. ch We’re both excited about what this will be. We will actually never really know, because it’s people’s dreams. Nevertheless, we have a thing that we are looking forward to, which is going to be what this does to us and to other people. ar Carsten Höller with Adam Haar, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics is on view in Dance with Daemons at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, in a partnership with luma Foundation, through 11 August

That Was Then and So Is Now In drawing out a seemingly bizarre historical immigrant experience, Lebanese artist Joyce Joumaa reminds us how little has changed today by Alexander Leissle

Memory Contours (detail), 2024, video installation. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Before Memory Contours (2024) can be seen, it can be heard. The sound of waves: a million droplets hissing as they move independently but in disordered unison. Amid that, the calls of seagulls; voices listing names and giving instructions to direct other people; the movement of chairs echoing off the hard floors of spacious halls; the rub and scratch of pencil on paper, amplified to merge with the rushing waves. This soundscape plays through speakers in the four corners of the final room in the International Pavilion, one site of Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, at the current Venice Biennale. The work is by Lebanese artist Joyce Joumaa. Raised in Tripoli and now based in Montreal, she has to date been concerned predominantly, via video and installation works, with epistemological and postcolonial understandings of Lebanon, particularly in relation to space and architecture as sites of power. More recently she has begun to explore other geographies, and Memory Contours is a testimony to us immigration procedures during the early twentieth century and the qualifications for entry to the ‘land of the free’. We might like to think that, in the century since, much of our social and political regard for migration has changed, but the reality would suggest otherwise. Recently in Italy, as Joumaa opened her show at the landmark cultural event, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was meeting with the Tunisian president Kais Saied, offering business and investment to bolster Tunisia’s control of illegal migration. In November, Meloni also signed a deal with Albania for the Balkan country to detain people intercepted by Italy in the Mediterranean Sea. And in March, human-rights groups resumed calls to close Italy’s migrant centres, labelled ‘blackholes for human-rights violations’, following the death of a man being held at a centre in Rome and a series of other suicide attempts there. None of these connections are readily apparent on one’s initial encounter with Joumaa’s work. Four metal pillars are arranged

irregularly around the middle of the space. Each supports a pair of flatscreens, installed vertically and back-to-back, with the pillar sandwiched between. In each pairing, one screen plays a video recording of a hand drawing on a piece of paper. It’s shot from the perspective of the eye of the drawer, so that we see, out of focus, the pencil’s eraserend dancing around in the foreground, while the hand that grips it appears in sharp focus, with knuckles crimping and extending like piano hammers. It’s difficult to see what’s actually being drawn. The other screen offers a series of still images of roughly drawn geometric shapes, each numbered as if for classification or record-keeping. The exhibition text tells us that these are in fact archival reproductions of responses to the ‘intelligence’ tests assigned to immigrants arriving at the Ellis Island processing station in New York; and that Joumaa lifted them from the 1914 us Public Health Service report ‘Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant’. The tests required participants (a euphemism) to draw shapes from memory, the quality of which would be used to determine their ‘mentality’ and mental proficiency, or identify their supposed lack thereof. Consequences of ‘failing’ the tests ranged from barred entrance to forced sterilisation. It’s estimated that over 12 million people were processed on the ‘Island of Tears’, as Ellis was often dubbed, throughout the roughly 60-year period of its functioning, almost three-quarters of them arriving between 1892 and 1914. For the us government, Ellis was a trial space for the aforementioned tests, to set the basis for wider adoption at immigration centres around the country. Joumaa’s primary success is the communication of a sensation before knowledge: to garner the experiential texture of another’s experience as well as a logical understanding of it. “I, for the most part, consider myself a research-based artist,” Joumaa told me over a video call a fortnight after the Biennale’s opening. And for Joumaa,

Immigrants to the us arriving at Ellis Island, New York Harbor, in 1902. Courtesy the Library of Congress. Public domain

Summer 2024

research-based artists can too often get away with “providing histor- into our peripheral vision. The archival reproductions, presented as ical or archival elements that only hint to the concepts that we’re still images, are plain and flat. This source material, after all, has been trying to talk about”. In isolation, Joumaa’s installation can seem kept as a record of people’s attempted crossing, hope for acceptance benign. Her videos aren’t interested in the specifics of the drawer and the derogation of their worth to the tune of a series of rules. For – who they are or what they look like, for the people they imitate decades, Ellis Island’s immigration centres had the support of the could have been from anywhere – but their perspective is inherently Eugenics Record Office, who directed policy to promote and maintain empathetic: it’s the drawer’s point of view. There’s a delicacy to the a ‘superior race’ in the us. Arrivals would be immediately detained in visual composition of each video: in soft-focus, a brilliant light falls the facility for testing. There was a particular fixation with eyes, as across the shot, capturing a beauty almost absurdly ambivalent to the recalled in Ellis Island (1994), a book by the French writer Georges Perec more oppressive nature of the immigration centre she’s referencing. and film director Robert Bober, which makes a multilayered account Joumaa performed one of the drawings herself, and then cast three of experiences on the island through interviews with surviving subothers to reproduce by imitation jects, archival photographs and the archival drawings for the cama poem by Perec, ‘The Way to For decades, Ellis Island’s immigration era. Each video corresponds to one Ellis Island’. Any arrivals with the centres had the support of the Eugenics drawer, choreographed in syncoslightest red in their eye would Record Office, who directed policy to pation so viewers move around be hurried off to a medical unit as a trachoma risk. Such physical the room to find the videos at varypromote and maintain a ‘superior race’ ing stages. Look closer still, and and also mental ailments – ‘L’ for things grow stranger: the videos are in fact playing in reverse. Given ‘lameness’ or simply ‘X’ for ‘feeblemindedness’ – were marked in that the drawing itself is mostly obscured by the hands, which move chalk on potential immigrants’ clothes, which multiple interviewees slowly and almost uncannily, it’s as if they are working away on in Ellis Island compare to the treatment of cattle. Some passed through nothing at all. In Joumaa’s show, the test drawings are Janus-faced: fairly swiftly; others remained in this silo for days or weeks, at which they represent the experience of the oppressed and the historical point the line between immigrant and inmate blurs. recording – cataloguing, if you like – of their oppression; they are ‘How can things be described? / or talked about? / or looked at?’ significant and arbitrary in equal measure. In this sense, the archive asked Perec in ‘The Way to Ellis Island’, beyond ‘dry official statistics’ is not just a wunderkammer of tangible history but simultaneously and the ‘artificial calm’ of photographs. A common tension in researchan incubator for enacted power. based art, too, is that of documentation: what one chooses to present; In the square exhibition space, the wallpaper recalls the rot-yellow how to construct a narrative away from its original source represenpaint of the Ellis Island dormitories, which in turn match the yellowed tation; what the artist may affect that a historian cannot already. pages of the archival drawings in the videos as if colour is bleeding Does Joumaa’s artifice, reversing the videos or “undoing the drawing”,

above us inspectors examining eyes of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, New York Harbor, c.1913. Courtesy the Library of Congress. Public domain preceding pages Memory Contours, 2024 (installation view, Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale). Photo: Valentina Mori. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

as she describes it, signal some wishful desire to undo the past, Journey Project creates a tension between perspective, also placing to follow the pencil with the eraser? “I didn’t just want to replicate the the camera from a first-person vantage, and synecdoche, focalising story. Otherwise, I felt I would be engaging in the same violence that hands as actors of our interiority. But Khalili begins at the end, or at was perpetuated against these migrants,” she says. Though nothing is least the present – her subjects speak after the fact, and can formubeing undone here: her drawing videos are fictional interpretations, late events into something like a narrative; Joumaa’s are representaor imitations, of what real people were forced to do – and so are at tional, silent, suspended in a moment of transition whose passage is once redrawing and undrawing. As we listen to the gulls in the air, the beyond their control. “It’s about the process of becoming a migrant, as spray of water in rebound, the graphite scratches and orders being opposed to the point at which you have become a migrant. It is always called out, Joumaa locks us in a fixed loop, collapsing the past into a process.” the present. Given the wider cultural obsession with titles, identity and status “When you look at the photos of Ellis Island, you see the mass based on a vast nomenclature for subjective experience, there’s someof people, and in contemporary or thing satisfying in Joumaa’s spehistorical discourse, we always cific focus on Ellis Island. This was “We always treat migrants as this treat migrants as this collective,” an early locus for many contempocollective,” Joumaa explains, “it almost rary conceptions of transnational Joumaa explains. “It almost bebecomes intangible… and the gestural identities – cavernous or decrepit comes intangible.” Indeed, her buildings of grim potential, for own father had fled the Lebanese aspect was about how to dissect that” Civil War to Canada during the rejection and return on a perilous late 1970s, and didn’t return until the conflict ended in 1990. Joumaa’s journey, or acceptance into a hostile environment. It’s an old and Canadian citizenship is in part a legacy of her father’s time there, just proven trick: reaching into the past to find the first ripples of the one of the estimated one million to flee at the time. “So the idea of present. Indeed, who else in the West more generally wouldn’t recogfocusing on the one hand, and the gestural aspect of this exercise, was nise this control being enforced by their own state too? Ellis Island about how to dissect that plural rendering.” The Moroccan-French was for four out of five emigrants a brief stop-by, as Perec writes, ‘the artist Bouchra Khalili, who Joumaa cites as an influence, addresses time needed to change an emigrant to an immigrant / someone who similar concerns about homogenisation. Khalili, too, focuses on had left into someone who had arrived’. Joumaa’s work opens a portal hands and the contact of pen to paper as a kind of expressive exten- to this experience. An experience that we might like to think belongs sion for an individual. In her video series The Mapping Journey Project to the past, but its perpetual, perilous transitions persist today. ar (2008–11), a series of people narrate their journeys from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe – tracing their routes on the paper Joyce Joumaa’s installation Memory Contours is on view in as they go. Like Joumaa’s temporally elliptic installation, The Mapping Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, through 24 November

Memory Contours (detail), 2024, video installation. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Emeka Ogboh Memory and migration drive the Berlin-based Nigerian’s experiments in shared sensory abundance, which highlight the artworld’s conservatism along the way by Martin Herbert

I first encountered Emeka Ogboh’s art in 2017, at Skulptur Projekte Münster, in a grimy underground passageway adjoining the city’s train station. At his chosen site, a favoured spot for buskers, the Nigerian artist presented Passage through Moondog (2017): an audio collage of words and music by the beloved Viking-helmeted us street musician/composer/poet, who moved to Germany late in life and died in Münster in 1999. The ‘passage’ of the title implied geographic transits that carry music with them, vicariously transporting listeners in turn. At various venues nearby, Ogboh also offered a consumable artwork: Quiet Storm, a heady honey beer overseen by a local masterbrewer, infused with lime-blossom grown in Münster and ‘sonified’, as he put it, in a Belgian brewery during fermenting by proximal speakers playing soundscapes from the loud megacity of Lagos. (‘Very good,’ said one expert, in a review which also noted that adding honey broke a purity law of German brewing.) A few years later, in 2021, I’d wander my Berlin neighbourhood while feeling it similarly overlaid with metropolitan Nigeria, listening to Ogboh’s sophomore album, Beyond the Yellow Haze (2020) – pistoning dub techno enveloped in swirling field recordings of Lagos bus drivers rapping their routes, street hawkers musically plying wares. Urban melee as pulse, as palimpsest, as collectively composed and daily rewritten city-symphony. That same summer I watched the artist, who’d moved to Berlin in 2014 for a daad residency and decided to stay, play a rapturously percussive Afrobeat-flavoured dj set at another travel-associated site, on the concourse of the just-decommissioned Berlin Tegel Airport. In 2022, visiting his installation Ámà: The Gathering Place (2019/21) at the city’s Gropius Bau, I sat under a nine-metre-high sculptural tree wrapped in orange and green fabrics patterned by Nigerian graphic designers (Ogboh himself is one by training). The institution’s soaring atrium was now an ersatz

village square, typically an agora for eating and drinking, social exchange, debate, the virtues of sociality; and here it was graced by a 12-channel audiowork playing folksongs specific to Igbo people from southeast Nigeria, where Ogboh was born in 1977. Meanwhile, to add to Quiet Storm and its predecessor libation, the poky stout Sufferhead original (2016) – inspired by Afrobeat kingpin Fela Kuti, based on a taste survey of African migrants in Berlin and developed with a Wedding brewery – there was a new, locally brewed ‘conceptual craft beer’, Ámà, to sample. What connected these works was, on the one hand, their interest in intersecting one place and another; validation of public space’s multiform uses; and exploration of how memory, tradition and a sense of place are encoded, carried down migratory routes, sustained in sharable cultural products. But it’s also notable that, within the visually oriented economy of contemporary art, they all skew towards an intensely multisensory approach. Sound’s extraordinary articulacy, particularly – what it can convey, where it can put you, what connections it forges and preserves – was Ogboh’s starting point in 2008, when he attended a galvanising workshop in Tunis, Egypt, where Austrian multimedia artist Harald Scherz discussed the audible spectrum. Shortly after, back in Lagos and phoning a friend, Ogboh was surprised to have his location identified by the background ambience; since then, beginning with the sequence of audioworks Lagos Soundscapes (2008–), which emphasise the city’s rhythmic heartbeat as it’s built by speech and noise in public space, he has progressively gone all-in on the extravisual sensorium. “Typically, it’s challenging to incorporate all five senses into a single artwork or project, but I constantly try to include as many as possible,” says Ogboh via email (though we live in the same city he is, as often, on the move). “It elevates artworks beyond mere visual displays, and

ArtReview

Ámà: The Gathering Place, 2021 (installation view, Gropius Bau, Berlin). Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

Summer 2024

Boats, 2024, gin (made with a blend of Tasmanian and West African botanicals), newspaper. Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

ArtReview

there’s a heightened engagement that promotes emotional connecFood and music are universals. They’re also, while being sociably tions, deeper understanding, triggers memories. You can convey communal, potential empathetic bridges in a way that visual images meaning and narrative with greater nuance. The nonvisual world alone are not. For some, eating the food of migrants or dancing to speaks a different language, it resonates with our emotions and variations on their music is the only time that these people or the cirbypasses sight’s limitations. Plus, a multisensory approach enhances cumstances that uprooted them even begins to enter their consaccessibility, ensuring that a wider audience, including individuals ciousness. Ogboh, in, as he says, “inviting audiences to partake in sensory indulgence, immediate pleasure, bodily engagement”, with disabilities or sensory differences, can engage too.” supplies the bridge; in framing Aside from their inclusivity, that pleasure conceptually in Ogboh’s manoeuvres might illuhis exhibitions and the literaminate the conservatism of the artworld. (Relatedly, perhaps, he ture around them, as if offering didn’t deign to work with a galtasting or listening notes for the lerist until 2020, when he joined unskilled, he also insistently the select, bijou roster at Paris’s connects it to people, makers, Galerie Imane Farès.) But his pripeoples, collective makers. It’s notable that another means of mary intent appears to be to reach substantial publics in a meaningstrategic connectivity he pursues is to flip or creolise superful way, one partly influenced by the relational aesthetics of the ficially Anglo-European forms. 1990s but differing from it in its We all know, and can hum along The Way Earthly Things Are Going, 2017 (installation view, Tate Modern, London). determined and strategic polito, the melodies of national anCourtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris tics. Ogboh’s core concerns are thems or Auld Lang Syne. In musimigration and associated questions of identity, national identity, calising the streets of Lagos, Ogboh’s soundscapes involve a concepbelonging – and he literally makes them sing. At the 2015 Venice tion of sound as music that links back to American experimental Biennale, for instance, amid the European refugee crisis, he presented composers – John Cage, inevitably, but also Pauline Oliveros’s related the audio installation The Song of the Germans: a ten-channel audio work notion of ‘deep listening’ – while the idea of a city’s accidental, that replayed the German national anthem as sung in ten different collective music connects, neatly, to the early modernism of Walter African languages by African expats living in Germany. In 2021, for the Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. The inexorable Edinburgh Art Festival, the related Song of the Union featured Scotland- rhythms on Ogboh’s albums, while approximately familiar to dancemusic listeners, seemingly show their African roots all the better for based singers from the eu’s 27 member states singing Auld Lang Syne. At the Athens half of Documenta 14 in 2017, Ogboh had shown being surrounded by Nigerian voices. The Way Earthly Things Are Going, a work that, tracking back to the Ogboh has previously noted how different Berlin is to Lagos; Greek financial crisis of 2007–08, mixed a multicoloured feed of when he first moved there, he said, he couldn’t sleep because it was live numbers from global stock exchanges with a sung lament, too quiet, and added that he found it trickier to read this city through When I forget, I’m glad, by a Greek its sounds. Instead, the artist women’s vocal group. It linked who this year added spirits to his menu – Boats (2024), at the the near-abstraction of stocks and shares to real-world effects, summer festival of Tasmania’s not least economic migrancy, the Museum of Old and New Art, featured a gin pointedly made song’s title suggesting both a with both Nigerian and Tasmomentary salve and the ease manian botanicals, and referwith which a nonmigrant might enced Australian rightwinger disregard the vicissitudes shaping others’ lives. One apparent Tony Abbott’s 2013 anti-immigrant ‘stop the boats’ campaign aim of Ogboh’s emphasis on com– appears to be finding another munal making, from consulting route: through the stomach. with drinks-makers to marshalRecording sounds in Yaba, Lagos. “Gastronomy has emerged as a ling choirs to creating sociable Photo: the artist environments, is to bridge such significant source of inspiration gaps. “Migration”, he notes, “is a concept inherently rooted in com- for me,” says Ogboh. “In recent years Berlin has become a culinary munal experiences. It transcends individual narratives, encompassing hub, offering a range of tastes and flavours that allow one to travel shared journeys, struggles and aspirations – in this context, fostering the globe. It’s increasingly captured my attention and motivated connections and shared activities through collective activities becomes me to start working on an idea centred around the culinary landnot only important but integral to the essence of my work. I try to scape.” And with that he signs off and goes back to prepping a remix celebrate the richness of collective creativity, promote a sense of be- of his most recent album, 2022’s 6°30’33.372”n 3°22’0.66”e, named for longing and solidarity, the interconnectedness of human experiences, a precise location in Lagos. “I have,” says Ogboh, “a lot on my plate the power of collective action.” right now.” ar

Summer 2024

Kwan by Alastair

This is the story of my installation CONGEE, presented in three exhibitions across London over the past two years. Congee is ubiquitous across Asia. At its heart it is a simple dish, usually eaten for breakfast, made by boiling rice in an excess of water. Different ingredients are then added to this base, producing endless variations reflecting the local tastes, culture and produce.

My memories of congee are entwined with family trips back to Hong Kong. There was one stall in the wet market underneath my grandma’s flat run by two sisters, who would have long queues of people waiting for their daily congee. The wet market itself, with dozens of vendors, was always steaming full in the mornings. At the heart of the kitchen was a huge cauldron of white congee, providing the base to which different ingredients were added to make a huge variety of dishes: minced beef congee, fisherman’s congee, pork and century egg congee.

Tucked away into a small corner, every inch of space had been made use of. The countertop was full of bowls of ingredients, all within arm’s length of the chef so no time was wasted assembling each bowl. Plastic bags and cooking utensils hung down off hooks. Every movement had a purpose, cooking in a complete state of flow. She could be handling four or five bowls at once, chopping ingredients, mixing, taking congee from the main cauldron and spooning it into each one. I remember wondering how her hands were not bothered by the heat and the steam as she commanded the kitchen, dipping thumbs into the white-hot congee as each bowl was filled to the brim.

Lockdown reshaped London, forcing a rethinking of how spaces were used, what shops and services were deemed ‘essential’. I thought a lot about Hong Kong; people were moving over to the UK, and around that time my grandmas in Hong Kong both passed away within a few months of each other. In both cases my last contact with them was over video conferencing, in hospital, confused, their health quickly deteriorating from the isolation imposed by the lockdown.

It was a mixture of these thoughts that led me to congee: how resourceful it is. Its warmth and comfort. How it is associated with community and family. How it creates substantial amounts of food with very few ingredients. In particular, how it is often eaten when people are ill.

I started a blog called ‘learning to cook congee from the other side of the world’. It became a way of researching the recipe and a dumping ground for photos, references and thoughts. There isn’t a definitive recipe for cooking congee; my recipe is an amalgamation of many different sources – relatives, friends, obscure cooking blogs, vlogs and YouTube tutorials. Often, I’d pick up on little details in pictures, or pick up little tips in the footnotes or comments section.

I had tried to cook congee a few times, semi-successfully, but never to the same standard as what I remembered. I quickly found that I had to search YouTube in Cantonese in order to find recipes that seemed most similar to the kind of congee I was after, which highlighted my own personal struggle with the language – my Cantonese is relatively poor, and I grew up speaking English back to my parents.

Beyond cooking, the process brought into focus cultural differences in attitudes to sharing food. Dining experiences in the UK separate people into individual groups on smaller tables; while large round tables, promoting communal eating and sharing of space, are common in East Asia. Research also highlighted resourcefulness in Chinese cooking, such as the reusing of plastic and packaging. I saw this firsthand working in a Chinese takeaway as a teenager: cardboard doubling up as a temporary nonslip mat, ice cream tubs used as containers, plastic bags hung strategically around the kitchen as extra storage.

The project hasn’t been about creating replicas of an existing congee stall, but to make a space to consider what it could mean here in the UK, at this point in time, among mass migration from Hong Kong to the UK, when the cost of food seems to be getting worse and worse, setting up each time in temporary, itinerant locations.

Elements of CONGEE were designed to create a sense of openness; in particular the use of round banquet-style tables and stools, encouraging people to share a table. Each time, we also allocated a certain number of free bowls using a token system, which allowed people to buy-forward bowls for others to eat. We lent the canteen space in the evenings to other groups and artists to host their own events.

Menus and signs were handwritten in both Chinese and English on bright neon paper, matching the bright pastel colours of the melamine bowls and chopsticks, reminiscent of traditional Cantonese diners (茶餐廳).

The lunchtime canteen format meant there was often a mix of visitors sat around the table. Some travelled specifically to see the exhibition. Others, either working or living nearby, saw the canteen as a relatively cheap lunch option, with some visiting multiple times. Conversations around the table often highlighted how some were extremely familiar eating congee, and for others it was the first time they had ever tried it.

One man, an enthusiastic walker, after trying it for the first time commented on how it made him feel light and energised, ready for a long walk across South London that afternoon. Another person began to cry after we discussed how her late mother had made congee for her when she was poorly. I had a surprise visit from someone who had recently closed his congee restaurant in Hong Kong after 20 years, who seemed happy that a congee canteen could exist in the UK.

Some reactions were more unexpected. I had a conversation with an experimental writer from Austria comparing the significance of daffodils ( ) in both Chinese and English cultures as a symbol for spring and the new year. One comment that stuck with me was from an older Cantonese hairdresser who worked nearby. When I told him that this was a temporary art installation, he replied, “Oh I see, this isn’t a serious canteen – you are just playing.” It was almost dismissive, but seemed to come from a good place, and reminded me of similar remarks I came across in my childhood. The table became a forum for collective memories to be swapped and shared, often between complete strangers and myself.

We associate food establishments with a certain permanence that allows community to develop around it. For Chinese and Asian diaspora in the UK, eating congee is often a nostalgic memory, intertwined with a deep sense of cultural heritage. CONGEE is as much a reaction to this context, as it is also a deeply personal project about collective memory, precarity and artistic labour.

Alastair Kwan is an artist based in London. He is currently a residency artist at Wysing Art Centre in Cambridgeshire. CONGEE took place at SET Lewisham (2022), group show Behold, at 56 Conduit Street (2023), and the Southbank Centre (2023), all in London

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About art 79

Joan Jonas Good Night Good Morning Museum of Modern Art, New York 17 March – 6 July Good Night Good Morning beautifully charts five decades of Joan Jonas’s transmedia explorations of the contingency of perception, the mutable nature of narrative and the nonhuman actors with which we are enmeshed. The survey moves roughly chronologically from documentation of early outdoor performances to recent constellations of video, drawings, sculpture and sound that don’t expand cinema so much as explode it (perhaps a natural outgrowth of Jonas’s display strategy, introduced in 1994 and prominent here, of translating performances into installations featuring videos, sets and props). Yet, linear time doesn’t quite square with Jonas’s ethos, as suggested by the placement, at the show’s outset, of her 2006 video sculpture My New Theater vi: Good Night Good Morning ’06, which builds on her 1976 video Good Night Good Morning. Frequently modified, expanded and reprised, Jonas’s completion-resistant works even moonlight as part of other works: Good Night Good Morning was incorporated into Mirage (1976/94/2005), an installation pairing assorted footage – erupting volcanos, ‘endless drawings’ – with aluminium cones, a mask and blackboard sketches. Mirrors pervade the show, most overtly in the early works on view. There’s the mirrored kaftan that Jonas wore in Oad Lau (1968), a performance – depicted in a photograph – involving spoken sections from Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (1962), a story collection casting mirrors as passageways to alternate realities. A similar garment appears in the silent film projection Wind (1968), in which figures move against – dance with – a tempest, so the elements become fellow performers. Reflections shatter the coherence of landscapes and bodies in Mirror Piece i (1969) and Mirror Piece ii (1970). Represented by photographs, notebooks and a videotaped 2019 re-performance on a monitor, these choreographies feature simple Judson Dance

Theater-like movements executed by performers carrying full-length mirrors that produce shifting crops of their own bodies, the environment and the audience. When Rosalind Krauss argued in 1976 that the medium of video was narcissism, one of the culprits being the ‘mirror-reflection of synchronous feedback’, she noted that Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972) undermined ‘the video mechanism in order to break out of its psychological hold’. Made two years after Jonas acquired a Sony Portapak, the single-channel video shows the artist performing as her erotic masked alter ego Organic Honey. Her body is fragmented and obscured by the rolling bars of desynchronised signals, impeding its easy consumption by viewers. In the projected performance video Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), the character rhythmically thwacks a mirror with a spoon and traces objects on paper (Jonas’s hallmark drawing-as-performance), among other actions. Within the video, the self-surveilling seductress performs in dialogue with her own image through multiple live feeds, raising questions about made-forthe-screen performances of femininity and cultural feedback loops. Jonas’s interest in female archetypes, and the ways in which images change as they are repeated (or reflected), carried over into subsequent works inspired by fairytales, myths and folklore: narrative forms historically involving unstable oral transmission, collective authorship and shapeshifting retellings. Starring Tilda Swinton and Ron Vawter, the 28-minute video Volcano Saga (1989) takes on the Laxdæla saga, a medieval Icelandic folktale, believed to have been authored by a woman, involving dream interpretation and romantic turmoil. The video, which overlays the actors and the environment onto one another, is shown alongside a watercolour storyboard and photographs of the performance out of which it grew, exemplifying the exhibition’s emphasis on contextualising material.

facing page, top Moving Off the Land, 2019, (performance at Ocean Space, Venice) hd video, colour, sound, 58 min. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Also inspired by an Icelandic tale, Reanimation (2010/12/13) responds to Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier (1968), a novel about a glacier where some women have special powers. Featuring a soundtrack by jazz musician Jason Moran and Sami joik singer Ánde Somby, the dizzying installation revolves around four large Japanese shoji screens onto which is projected footage of Norwegian glaciers and tunnels, and the artist fluidly ‘drawing’ on the snow. At the centre, a sculpture of dangling crystals catches and refracts the light, casting shadows on the screens. As the world’s glaciers calve and melt, the magic won’t last, at least for us; climate grief punctures the sense that time is suspended, amberous. Ecological stewardship is taken up more explicitly in an appropriately vast multimedia installation devoted to the ocean, its inhabitants and its mythologies. Moving Off the Land ii (2019) intersperses drawings, mirrors, an aquarium and videos housed in variously scaled versions of the wooden ‘theater boxes’ she began working with during the late 1990s. In several videos Jonas – accompanied by children (standins for the future, and a child’s point of view) – performs and draws amid sweeping projections of sea creatures. The inclusion of marine biologist David Gruber’s underwater footage of bioluminescence, made using special lenses that mimic a fish’s eye, underscores Jonas’s interest in other ways of seeing. The ultimately unanswerable question of how a fish sees, paired with the piece’s unassimilable scalar, spatial and temporal confusions, calls to mind Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores’s writings, drawing on Donna Haraway, on ‘diffracted’ representations of the aquatic that acknowledge entanglement, alterity and materiality. ‘Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form,’ wrote Haraway. ‘Rather, diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness.’ Cassie Packard

facing page, bottom Mirror Piece i, 1969 (performance at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, ny), digital print, 38 × 25 cm. © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

ArtReview

Summer 2024

Lisa Freeman Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin 22 March – 19 May In Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss (2023–24), a fivechannel, 13-minute film by Dublin-based artist Lisa Freeman, almost nothing happens. As the romantic title suggests, we are in the realm of barely registered sensation, of fleeting pleasures and possibilities. But Freeman’s emphasis is less on moments of dramatic consequence and sensory fulfilment – the brief, blissful experience of that ‘sweet kiss’ – than on states of everyday longing. Four women – one featured as the central, pensive protagonist – drift through a superficially easeful world, variously sauntering along sunlit streets, drinking coffee on an outdoor terrace, lounging and dancing in an airy apartment. (Men are incidental to the film’s female-centred reveries, figuring only as extras: a waiter, passing pedestrians.) Inside and outside, the tone is insistently soft. From clothing to street furniture to architectural details, Freeman accentuates a palette of gentle pastels: lilac, peach, blush pink, baby blue. On the soundtrack, waves of hypnagogic droning and humming come and go. At times, the camera’s focus blurs, as if someone’s eyes are closing, or just beginning to open. (One of the recurring audio samples is a chopped and screwed snippet of André 3000 crooning “I woke up early this morning…”, taken from the 2003 Kelis track Millionaire.)

Watching these vaporous episodes float across the five monitors of Freeman’s installation (the main action shifts every few minutes from one to another, while slow-motion details replay on the remaining screens as hazy visual echoes), I’m reminded of Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier’s comment that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) is a two-act play ‘in which nothing happens, twice’. Freeman’s approach leans in a similar direction. Recutting and reformatting an original single-channel cinema version of Approx 1 Second, she amplifies a consciously nondramatic drama – a study of lowkey, languid interactions – into a situation of expanded emptiness, deep-diving into life’s vaguest, most uneventful times and spaces. Yet if there is, still, a sought-after something in Freeman’s film, it’s traceable in that titular allusion to human tenderness. Twice in the film, casual on-street encounters conclude with a warm embrace between apparent strangers: these are curious moments of unforced, quite ordinary kindness, expressions of unselfconscious affection that further heighten the mood of sweetly hypnotic strangeness. What would it mean, Freeman seems to ask, if such intimate acts were routine features of daily life? What would this tilt towards public tenderness do to our sense of social and personal space?

Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss (still), 2023–24, 4k video, 13 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Writing recently about director Celine Song’s beautifully restrained 2023 romance Past Lives, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane praised the film’s air of ‘cheerfully worried fragility’ while noting too the significance of its ‘flickers of severity’. In cautiously advocating for simple forms of civic compassion, Freeman’s film has some of the former – fast-fading intimations of tension as unprompted gestures of sisterly fondness are risked in public places – but not enough, perhaps, of the latter. Admittedly, the work’s display setup succeeds as a severe physical contrast to the woozy drift of the scenes themselves: individual monitors mounted on sleek, steel poles; a simple aluminium stacking chair in front of each. (Unlike the characters, we must sit up straight rather than lounge around.) But time spent at Temple Bar Gallery, with its grand windows looking out to a generally clamorous Dublin streetscape, offers up a further contrast. That is: between Freeman’s understated and hopeful urban dream-vision, and the multisensory, socially complex conditions of the living city outside. It’s a potentially productive clash. Caught between the imagined and the actual, we might be reminded, yet again, of how much each one needs the other. Declan Long

Nick Cave The Devil – A Life Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 5 April – 11 May Where his fans stand on rock musician Nick Cave’s transition – from 1980s postpunk hellraiser imagining a flyblown Southern Gothic full of brimstone and retribution, to his current persona as a sage, maybe agnostically Christian humanist, bearing witness to the depths of human tragedy and the promise of redemption – seems to depend on whether you really believe him or not. ‘I am finding your religious turn and proselytising difficult,’ grumbles one questioner on the singer’s I’ll-answer-your-questions website theredhandfiles.com. To such misgivings Cave concedes humbly that it’s tricky for him too; that his faith is intuitive, often sceptical and profoundly personal. Something of this wager with belief (his and ours) comes across in Cave’s surprise excursion into ceramic art born, apparently, on a lockdown morning, out of the urge to make a sculpture of the Devil. On a long, broad plinth in Xavier Hufkens’s skylit top-floor gallery, we’re presented with a series of 17 glazed and painted ceramic figurines and scenes, which narrate the birth, life and eventual death of Satan himself. Cave’s Devil is less Miltonian fallen angel and more a sort of everyman, all too human as he makes merry and falls in love, though still condemned to his fate as war-bringer and destroyer.

What’s oddest about these works, though, is Cave’s wry adoption of a style of ceramic art so domestic and so naive that it deflates the awesome and terrible nature of his subject. Cave borrows from the mantlepiece figurines of eighteenth-century English Derby pottery and, in particular, the ‘flatbacks’ of Victorian Staffordshire pottery – sentimental vignettes designed to be seen from one side, so that often the other was undecorated. The little child-Devil sleeping peacefully, protected by a bright red foal, is surrounded by pretty flowers (Devil Awakens, all works 2020–24). Around the feet of the happy couple of Devil Takes a Bride hop gold-glazed bunnies; the Devil is dressed in a smart white suit with a natty red cravat, she in a hat and a crinoline skirt, but topless, as her husband looks dotingly, if slightly bored, upon his betrothed. Things do not go well, of course. Devil Kills His First Child sees him (dressed in in red cloak and belted gown, looking a bit too much like a clean-cut Jehovah’s Witness Jesus) raising a knife over his blond-haired son. Devil Rides to War depicts him in military pomp on a black, red-eyed horse, fist resting on hip, as blood flows around the skulls strewn around the ceramic base (the pose is borrowed from

nineteenth-century flatbacks of Edward, Prince of Wales on horseback). But Cave’s Devil has a moral conscience, as he tips from Devil in Remorse, head in hands, through to the agony of Devil Bleeds to Death, as a grey-bearded, emaciated Devil supported by two companions, while his blood drains into the quaint rockery below, a jolly parrot as ironic witness. And then, in Devil Forgiven, a now ashen, skeletal Devil lies on a shoreline, a little blond-haired boy kneeling to caress the monster, as the sun rises. In Cave’s world, sons forgive fathers. It’s likely the case that Cave doesn’t need the artworld’s sanction, which makes his alternative Stations of the Cross strangely touching, the offerings of a humble amateur, even if famous elsewhere. Unthreatening in form, it reiterates without fuss the singer’s persistent attachment to an old-world moral universe, of flawed humanity, of vanity, desire, sin, despair and eventual redemption. Such beliefs might be anachronisms among the catastrophist orthodoxies that dominate much contemporary art. But Cave, it seems, is sticking with it, even if porcelain folk ornaments are one of the more unexpected ways to keep kicking against the pricks J.J. Charlesworth

Devil Bleeds to Death, 2020–24, glazed ceramic, 28 × 23 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Summer 2024

Yael Bartana Things to Come Gammel Strand, Copenhagen 2 February – 20 May Things to Come, featuring works from 2008 to 2023, opens with a wall of screens showing a single image: the seven-minute Zukunftsbewältigung (Overcoming the Future) (2023), whose title inverts the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, German for coming to terms with the past. Three figures dance in slow motion on a patch of grass in the dead of night, backs to each other, distant light illuminating their diaphanous white gowns and their horse, ram and donkey masks. A distorted choral chant echoes as they rise and slump, as if Bartana is choreographing some ritual – a shaking off of the past and a readying for the future. Born in Israel, Bartana studied art in Germany and since the mid-2000s has lived between Berlin and Amsterdam. Her exploration of historical

memory, and the slipperiness of nationhood and belonging, is inextricable from her background. The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection (2008) recreates photos by Herbert Sonnenfeld, who documented the influx of Jews to Palestine from the early 1930s onward. These images of ruddy young Zionists tilling the earth to establish the nation of Israel became a powerful part of its imagination; Bartana recast Sonnenfeld’s subjects with contemporary Palestinians and Mizrahim (Jews from Muslim-majority countries). She revisits this body-replacement tactic elsewhere, a trickster inhabiting others, reminding us that the narratives and iconography of history are always being rewritten and reshaped: Stalag (2014/15) sees her dressed up as an ss officer holding a film camera back at us,

Zukunftsbewältigung (Overcoming the Future), 2023, single-channel video and sound installation, 7 min. Photo: David Stjernholm Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

threatening while documenting. In Herzl (2015) she dresses up as (a quite handsome) Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, whose specious slogan ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’ anticipated the violence at the heart of present-day Israel and Palestine. Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) splices footage from Bartana’s 2019 live performance Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies!, which took place in Philadelphia during the Black Lives Matter protests, with long outtakes from the 120-minute performance What if Women Ruled the World? (2017/18). Shots of protesters carrying rifles to a cemetery, where they are buried in a ‘call to end all violence’, are intercut with a roundtable of women in a war room discussing a fictionalised imminent nuclear war with a country led

by ‘President Twittler’. Referencing Dr. Strangelove (1964), Bartana swaps Stanley Kubrick’s alpha males for an all-female cast of actors and specialists from the fields of culture, diplomacy, security and international law, who – despite hopes that a feminist world power might shift power politics away from violence – all eventually seem to agree that we should neither de-escalate nor disarm. It’s an awkwardly constructed narrative, and some ham-fisted gags feel simplistic (the woman president smokes cigars, phallic cacti and fruit sit about the roundtable, buff shirtless men serve refreshments) but Two Minutes to Midnight ably documents the bad-vibe panoptic claustrophobia of the Trump/covid-19 years, distancing the latter while suggesting how quickly they might return. In the three-channel Malka Germania (2021) – Hebrew for ‘Queen Germania’ – a slim, blonde, androgynously beautiful figure wanders contemporary Berlin, as the Israel Defense Forces conquer the German capital and replace German street signs with Hebrew ones. ‘Malka’ rides through

the Brandenburg Gate on a donkey; aerial shots track over the Berlin Victory Column to moody synth chords. Out in Strandbad Wannsee, she joins sunbathers gobsmacked by (a cgi rendering of) Nazi architect Albert Speer’s planned Volkshalle, rising from the lake. She wanders along a rail track out into a forest; on another screen, men, women and children carrying bags and suitcases tramp along the rails to the forest, where women in translucent gowns dance in the mist, recalling the work of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. These imaginings around European Jewish experience, nationhood and return, and fascist imagery are a sort of sequel to Bartana’s equally cinematic and slickly produced …And Europe Will be Stunned (2007–11, not on show), which imagined Jews returning to Poland – their ‘ancestral homeland’ – and building a fortified kibbutz on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s here that Bartana seems most at home, using cinematic language to create grandiose yet slippery scenes that undermine inherited

historical symbols and narratives of nationhood and identity. This work also contains the show’s most stunning images: seen in slow motion, domestic objects are thrown out of Berlin apartment windows. A ceramic beer mug smashes on cobblestones; plates, kitchenware, clothes, furniture follow. This image of discarding is emotionally charged and painfully ironic in a way that encapsulates Bartana’s concerns. See these events now and they suggest a wish to get rid of old baggage – a simple yet powerful dream of emancipation and looking to the future. But see them ‘then’: it’s Waffen-ss raiding Jewish homes, throwing their belongings out the windows, the lives of people who thought they were German, believed they belonged to their land and nation; an illusion that ended in the death camps. That’s the core of Bartana’s work: the painful dissonance of trying to shake off the past only to find the present repeating history, and blocking a path to the future. Nathaniel Budzinski

Herzl, 2015, photo series of six images, 60 × 40 cm. Photo: David Stjernholm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Adriano Costa ax-d. us. t Emalin, The Clerk’s House, London 12 April – 13 July Adriano Costa struggles to take off his pyjamas to a soundtrack of nonsensical chants and grunts, pausing to flex, twerk, stand on one leg and imitate a rabbit. Then he gets on his knees amid a pile of Tesco shopping bags, chewing them, stuffing them in his pants, waving one angrily at the camera, putting another over his head. Ever-present behind him is a version of Eero Aarnio’s spherical white ‘Ball Chair’, a slick late-modernist design. Clean and still among the commotion, it becomes the straight man in a strange double act. This film, The way my grandma taught me how to kill a chicken (the future) (2024), is projected in the first room of Emalin’s new space, the eighteenthcentury Clerk’s House in East London. Staged in Costa’s messy studio, it offers one image of his practice: in a passionate frenzy, he sifts through discarded materials – towelling rags, clay offcuts, a single black feather – rearranging and transforming them in ways that affirm their value and stress their expressive potential. For one series, displayed across the show, he salvaged little moulds that were scrapped at a foundry and cast them in bronze, turning ephemeral tools into precious bas-reliefs. And his carefully crafted installations are charged by the critical

tension between his scavenger sensibility and references to more refined modernist and minimalist forms: between the pyjama dance and the stylish white chair. By the front window is a large white plinth modelled, we are told by the gallery text, after the curving elevation of Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic Edifício Copan, one of Brazil’s largest residential buildings, in São Paulo, the artist’s hometown. On the plinth’s top sit dozens of small Casas (2023–24), quirky architectural mockups made from reworked household rubbish: blocks of wood and scraps of sandpaper, a takeaway box and a Heineken keg, a jerrycan and a few wilting flowers. The grand modernist ordering of social life represented by Niemeyer’s building is confronted with the chaos it cannot suppress. Here the architectural icon becomes a mere plinth and the shantytown an assortment of delicate sculptures. On the floor in a corner upstairs is Chorus (2024). Three rectangular pieces of particle board, branded ‘Eucafloor’, are propped upright by a swarm of wedges and twists of clay cast in bronze and buffed gold. Each plank is placed at a sharp angle to the next and tilts towards the lefthand wall. In this precarious formation

and animated by the florid fixings, the panels appear to waddle like a Disney candlestick up the slanted floor. Carl Andre’s grids of metal tiles – which Costa has referenced more explicitly in previous works – reject the pretensions of ‘high’ culture, of pedestals and decoration. Costa also incorporates flooring as an archetypal ‘low’ object, swapping crisp metal for battered particle board, but with strikingly different results. Andre admired mechanical production and disdained traditional cultural values, meaning and metaphor, asserting that ‘there are no ideas under those plates, those are just metal plates’. In Costa’s art, matter does seem to think, animated by some mysterious vitality, breaking free from the imperatives of human industry – the grid Andre so loved. The late minimalist created floor sculptures you can walk over; Costa makes the floor walk. Scattered with such lively things, the wonky domestic interiors of The Clerk’s House feel haunted. A bent sawblade sticks out of a rough bronze mount, a black pot lies smashed by the fireplace. These discarded objects – the marginalised of the material world – seek their revenge. Michael Kurtz

ax-d. us. t, 2024 (installation view, Emalin, The Clerk’s House, London). Photo: Stephen James. Courtesy the artist and Emalin, London

ArtReview

Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland Studio Voltaire, London 15 May – 25 August ‘There will be no Beryl Cooks in Tate Modern,’ declared then-Tate director Nicholas Serota in 1996, according to critic Julian Spalding’s recent memoir, Art Exposed. Since the 1970s, Cook, who passed away in 2008, has existed in the British popular imagination as a cartoonist of sorts, rather than as an artist worthy of critical attention. Yet while her distinctive style, including globular figures with large limbs, owes much to that of Edward Burra, the latter enjoys canonical status. Why then, does Cook remain the stuff of novelty calendars and bawdy greetings cards? Situating the English Cook alongside Tom of Finland (pseudonym of the Finnish-born Touko Laaksonen) – the great champion of homoerotica – Studio Voltaire’s refreshing exhibition seeks to correct a bias that has relegated one of Britain’s best-loved practitioners to the tradition of the quaint and the kitsch. Finland’s supercharged, sexual utopias – bikers in leather taut from containing erections, pecs so full as to resemble breasts – imagined a life without stigma. Placed alongside Cook, we are invited to see the latter as an artist who also challenged certain orthodoxies. The accompanying text details both artists’ beginnings in graphic arts, Finland starting out as a freelance commercial artist, Cook first gaining an audience via The Sunday Times Magazine.

Examples of her work for the latter are included in the show, along with one of the aforementioned calendars, seemingly to impress upon new audiences Cook’s centrality to, but also somewhat benign place within British popculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s . Institutions slowly came to accept that Tom of Finland’s hyperreal, plasticky Americana offered a critique of homophobia. Cook enjoyed no such reappraisal. Certainly, Finland pursued a riskier course than Cook ever did, prolifically circulating works in pornographic magazines as early as the late 1950s. The show glosses over this disparity: the queer men who enjoyed cruising constituted a minority more persecuted than the albeit trampled and neglected working-class subjects of Cook’s paintings. By focussing on works that show scenes of deviance from mainstream conservative values, such as those that celebrate sex workers, for example, the curators challenge the prejudice of many decades that Cook’s style was purely reflective of mainstream mores. For instance, 1987’s Personal Services (a title it shares with a comedy film released the same year) – a jolly depiction of a middle-aged man wearing an underwear set and stilettos being whipped by what might be madame Cynthia Payne – mocks the prurient responses of the tabloid media to

Payne’s trial, following the police raid during a sex party the previous year. A highlight is Lady of Marseille (c.1990), of a woman, so oblivious to the judgement of others as to be presented with her back to us, dressed head-to-toe in leopard print and accompanied by her three terrier dogs. Mundanity, illustrated by the stack of bin bags piled in front of her, is overwhelmed by the glowing spectacle of her two buttocks tucked barely into a pair of leopard print shorts, painted with a precision that verges on the devotional. In Big Shoes (2006), high street purchases are made monumental, strappy shoes occupying the foreground of the image, idealised and shapely. A manicured hand grasps a cigarette, another a pint, in two gestures that are deft and undeniably elegant. Here is a yearning – less overt, more innocent perhaps than Tom of Finland’s, but no less intense – for the vein of puritanism and shame that stifled joy and fulfilment to be lifted, and to refocus our attention on the desire that runs through working life. This show makes the case that it was a distaste towards the humour and intellect of the working woman, rather than any supposed triviality in the work itself, that was really driving the naysayers and those, who until now, had succeeded in keeping Cook down. Nathalie Olah

Tom of Finland, Untitled, c.1964, graphite on paper, 29 × 24 cm; Beryl Cook, Lady of Marseille, silkscreen, 70 × 60 cm. Courtesy Studio Voltaire, London

Summer 2024

Roni Horn Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death Museum Ludwig, Cologne 23 March – 11 August One advantage of a practice that emphasises the instability of everything – from individual identity to the world’s weather – is that even your retrospectives, in momentarily unmooring familiar works through recombining them, can function as conceptual acts. In Roni Horn’s Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, which features some 100 works by the American artist, dating from the 1970s to the present, flux begins with the title, which replaces the word ‘liberty’ in American-independence advocate Patrick Henry’s famous 1775 statement with ‘paradox’. The phrase now feints, wobbles; a bit poetic, a hard-to-grasp mission statement. If there’s an overarching paradox in Horn’s work, though, it’s that while her art is almost always technically still, it seems somehow in quivering motion. The show begins on firm(ish) ground with the well-known This is Me, This is You (1997–2000): two grids, 48 photographs each, of Horn’s bigeyed niece Georgia Loy Horn. The groupings sit on facing walls so that you must pivot to compare them, and it takes time to register – or try, imperfectly, to hold in memory – the minute differences in these apparently identical groupings of a girl growing three years older; photos here that resemble each other aren’t twins but cousins, taken seconds apart, change layered on change. A few rooms later, in a.k.a. (2008–09), 15 paired photographs of Horn herself from different periods of her life – often, almost spookily if in a stage-managed way, wearing the same expression decades apart – you might think you’re seeing Georgia again, such is the family resemblance. There’s no permanence

in solid objects, either. Nearby is Soft Rubber Wedge (1977), a slim 3m-long floor-based minimalist sculpture whose title describes it, delicate enough to pick up imprints of the various floors it has sat on over the decades. When next shown, it’ll change and accommodate again. In context, this entity, shaped by its environment, feels almost humanised. Perhaps in keeping with change’s heedless inexorability, some things you’d expect from a Horn survey don’t show up, like her lovely paired metal sculptures (cylinders, globes, cones) whose geometry is faintly off, generally placed apart, foxing comparison; but maybe This is Me already covered that base somewhat. Instead the exhibition leans, perhaps too heavily, on works on paper. These range from small 1980s pigment-and-graphite images of plangent, slightly dissimilar coupled blobby forms – which oddly posit Robert Rauschenberg as a possible influence – to her epic, virtuosic linear abstractions, begun during the early 1990s, scissored up and neatly puzzled back together to incorporate myriad visual stutters, and accompanied by tiny, scribbly addenda recording places and names, suggesting former homes, former relationships, undone by time and halfway recomposed in the mind. A yearlong series of diaristic collages from March 2019–20 finds Horn at her most improvisatory, slapping together found texts from literature and newspapers, old film stills, weather reports (‘heat wave broke’, for 2 July 2019) – the latter a reminder, perhaps, that one big existential subject ghosting Horn’s interest in the unfixed

a.k.a. (detail), 2008–2009, pigment prints on rag paper, 30 units, each 38 × 33 cm. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn

ArtReview

is climate change. (‘I’m not sure what I could do that wouldn’t be about the climate,’ she’s quoted as saying in the exhibition guide.) The sequence ends as the immobilising pandemic starts; on the last entry, she’s written, paradoxically, ‘I am paralyzed with hope’. While the show’s layout is a bit squirrely and labyrinthine, veering unexpectedly into annexes, it seems to end – and peak – with a time-spanning pairing. In a big, high-ceilinged room, Horn has dotted the floor with recent examples of her characteristic glass sculptures, like giant hockey pucks in shades of blue, icy white, mauve, purple. They stand still while light and reflections bounce off their tops, whose high polish suggest these objects are shallow jars filled with water. Among the reflections are a series of quintets of photographs, placed high on the walls: the modular series Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005–06). Here, the French actress beloved for her emotional scope acts out (or displays) all kinds of moods, each grouping offering five variations; a skilled actress doing this complicating, of course, notions of selfhood even as she renders the fact of containing multitudes. While anchored in Horn’s emphatic thematics, the specific combination of sculpture and imagery is insistently beautiful and makes an abstract kind of sense, but it’s hard to say why. Right and wrong at once, it gives you, or at least me, paradox. And even if Horn repeats it, you’re reminded, it’ll be somewhere else, another time, another audience, and won’t be the same. Martin Herbert

Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give me Death, 2024 (installation view, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © Roni Horn

Summer 2024

Hélène Fauquet Phenomena Rodeo, London 25 April – 25 May Rodeo’s London space, a single rectangular room of white-painted brickwork and cracked, unevenly coloured tiles, looks simultaneously like a shrine and a dungeon. Four tables are arranged around the gallery, onto which Paris- and Vienna-based artist Hélène Fauquet has placed groups of photographs depicting bubbles, water drops and, in some, photos and film stills of animals, all of which are housed in gaudy, mass-produced picture frames decorated with silver roses, crystals and bronze ribbons. The images look like those dummy photographs one might find in the frames’ original packaging. These arrangements resemble a votive offering, a home-decor section at a cheap department store or a kitschy display at a grandparent’s house. They are at once paranormal and ultramundane. In the group Delicate and sensitive (all works 2023), closeups of hemispherical bubbles delicately nudging together trigger a sense of touch, reminding us how they might pop if we were to prod at them. The array of bubbles and water drops, seen against greyish, neutral backgrounds, invites us to meditate on the

textures of these fragile, transient entities. This haptic evocation is echoed in its baroquelooking frame. Studded with plastic ornaments and fake pearls that look light and sleek, they are meant to contain pictures of loved ones, but these contextually ambiguous bubbles and their vanitaslike ephemerality only hint at the absence of any intimate associations, as well as the futility of expecting the bubbles to last. The results are terribly nostalgic, but ultimately indifferent and cold. The exhibition’s title, Phenomena, references Italian movie-director Dario Argento’s eponymous cult 1985 psychological horror film, set in Switzerland. In Argento’s work, a teenage girl capable of telepathically communicating with insects stumbles upon a murder-inprogress while sleepwalking. A general atmosphere of conspiracy prevails amid the film’s intermittent closeups of bugs and its constant gesturing towards what’s unknown and unknowable. Arranged like a domestic collection where memories of precious moments are displayed, Fauquet’s installations are haunted by a similar unease, as if what’s being

life-world, 2023, prints, frames, table, 75 × 85 × 135 cm. Photo: Gina Foly. Courtesy Kunsthaus Glarus

ArtReview

shown obscures stories with some larger conceit. In Mechanica, one frame holds a still from Argento’s film depicting one of the killer’s victims pitching head-backward through a window, shards of glass flying away from the impact. An adjacent, translucent frame is filled with a swarm of flies. Amid the water bubbles of the other frames, these suggest an anxious chaos waiting behind what’s seemingly placid and contained. life-world gathers pictures of a sitting mandrill, a slithering blue-tailed skink and two mating nautili – illustrative photographs such as those you might find in a science magazine – among other framed images of clusters of bubbles and clouds. Framed in glistening metallic and cut-glass frames, the indifferent wildlife at once disrupts the homeliness of the setting and starts to produce an eerie sense of inhuman subjectivity and attentiveness. As one circles around Fauquet’s tables, the apparently transparent bubbles and picture frames become more and more opaque in meaning, meshed in a melancholy that seems only to evade and suppress what’s not being said. Yuwen Jiang

Dean Sameshima being alone Soft Opening, London 26 April – 8 June I was when I went into the gallery on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And it’s hard to imagine seeing this work in anything like a group or a crowd. It would feel rude. In a way, unfaithful to what’s on show. The exhibition features 25 inkjet prints featuring individuals (in the main) who are seated (for the most part) in various small, shabby cinemas, with their backs to us, facing luminous, but blank, screens. Some of the spaces are more like domestic rooms; others fit more closely with what you’d imagine a cinema to be. None of the individuals present are identifiable, which makes you look at them all the more closely, in case something slipped. The screen in each image that is overexposed (both in the photographic sense, and in terms of the investment that it is given) is the centre of their attention in any case. As a viewer you can’t help but be aware that you’re projecting onto a space of projection. Which, judging by the number of tissue boxes in the shots, is what those who are seated are doing too.

Each of the photographs is titled being alone and numbered (1–25), although they are not sequenced in numerical order as they flow, in linear fashion, around the walls of the gallery. As a group, the images look as though they’re the product of an obsession or compulsion: each one is generally the same as those neighbouring it, just different in the details. Similarly, as a viewer, you start to obsess a little over these differences (an abandoned drink can, fancier seating, chairs bolted to the floor, someone standing up) that distinguish one photo from the next. It’s not long before you think that ‘an excess’ would be the true collective noun for this show. The leaflet that accompanies the exhibition states that each of the cinemas ‘offer the kind of encounter that has been described as an “anonymous being-together”, a space wherein an individual can project not only his own desire and sexual fantasy… but disidentify with the external world’. It brings to mind a tortoise in its carapace. A hunchback in a cathedral.

A Ukrainian or Palestinian hiding in a bunker. But although the synapses fire and these types of associations flash past, what’s on show is a little more perverse than that. And not just because we can imagine what kind of porn the people depicted might be watching. Or how they might be showing their appreciation of it. The true perversity actually lies in Sameshima’s decision to show us something, again and again, that shows us nothing: neither details of the bodies that occupy the cinema, nor the bodies that they are, presumably, looking at onscreen. On the one hand, it’s like a line from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1987 satire, The Rules of Attraction: ‘No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other.’ On the other, you can’t help but be conscious that ‘we’, the viewers in the gallery, are reenacting what ‘they’, the viewers in the photographs, are doing. And then the mind drifts to wonder whether ‘they’ are enjoying their experience, while ‘we’ are worrying about what it all means. Mark Rappolt

being alone (No. 12), 2022, archival inkjet print, 60 × 42 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London

Summer 2024

Catalina Ouyang Trick Lyles & King, New York 10 May – 15 June Among the 16 sculptures and paintings in Trick is a tall assemblage that seems to be operating under the guise of home decor. Untitled (all works 2024) is composed of a metal shelving-unit and a wooden post. Palm-sized alabaster and soapstone trinkets line the shelves, and what appears to be a grimy stuffed animal is wedged in a niche in the wood. Between other elements in this sculpture, however, one observes a subtle show of force characteristic of Catalina Ouyang’s visual language: affixed to the post on a rust-coloured nail is a brittle piece of papier-mâché, roughly triangular, the size of a person’s face and coated in flesh-pink

goop. This shell, suspended from a hole in its centre at the end of the unnecessarily long nail, is not so much secured to the wood as it is impaled in midair. Like a wayward disciple of the sculptor Yeni Mao, whose diagrammatic assemblages often feature ceramics, volcanic rocks and stacked metal plates pierced by rods and chains, Ouyang displays natural and industrial specimens as if they were fetish objects. Unlike Mao’s antiseptic apparatuses, however, Ouyang’s metal implements are unclean and menacing. In a series of paintings titled Deed, for instance, a three-pronged rake looms over a nude, prone woman in

Untitled, 2024, found wood, projection scrim, ink, acrylic, textile, steel, glass, soapstone, alabaster, 151 × 69 × 25 cm. Photo: Jacob Holler. Courtesy the artist and Lyles & King, New York

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a dark room. Elsewhere, the threat of violence is sublimated into erotic tension. In another untitled assemblage, on the floor at the centre of the gallery, an antler-shaped segment of apple wood cradling a two-pronged steel fork abuts a canvas bolster pillow. Standing on the pillow is a pair of cement-filled black boots, which are in turn bound together with twine and horsehair. When, in Trick, the occasional human body appears alongside these ominous details, it evokes a narrative at once indelicate and introspective: as part of a third untitled assemblage that occupies the length of a wall in the gallery, a papier-mâché mannequin

with an unformed face and a crudely textured, splotchy pink body lies supine over a wooden pallet. Across her chest, the dummy – vaguely female, adolescent – wears a bandeau, which the exhibition materials describe as a ‘training bra’ made from the T-shirts of the artist’s past partners. A cylindrical stump protruding from the figure’s left heel suggests dishevelment following a Cinderella-style flight; a hole in her hollow head alludes to injury as well as surgery. The same childlike character appears in Heads, another quasi-domestic assemblage composed of a midcentury display case stacked on a plywood box and a concrete plinth. Ouyang’s pink and pitted proxy hangs from the side of the wooden box with her knees tucked and her head inverted. Seven scythes protrude from oblong holes in the plywood, narrowly sparing the figure’s

bare feet and white miniskirt. What is depicted in Heads, the exhibition suggests, is another brush with death in the plot of a hellish bildungsroman. Ouyang’s assemblages are rivalled by her contribution to the gallery’s courtyard, Brank, a five-metre-tall steel sculpture shaped like a ‘scold’s bridle’, a seventeenth-century muzzle with a spiked bridle-bit used to gag and humiliate women, thus enforcing their subordination. With its smooth, soaring arches, Brank gestures vaguely to systemic oppression and kink in an equally noncommittal manner; noticeably, the spiked bridle-bit that once pressed on unruly tongues has been reduced to a small, blunt protrusion at the base of the colossus, hardly visible from afar. Whereas Ouyang’s pierced and bound assemblages possess complex formal tensions that convey anger and

unease, her outdoor sculpture, forged from a single, uniform material, defangs a harrowing artefact in the process of monumentalising an obscure example of patriarchal violence. Trick’s conceptual rigour, despite the diffuseness of its anchor piece, remains buttressed by the hand-me-down clothes and domestic wreckage of Ouyang’s assemblages, which lay bare the contentious personal and social narratives at the heart of her exhibition. Ultimately, the alchemical catharsis in these works is palpable even without reference to historical particulars. The friction generated between their broken and weathered parts offers a glimmer of unbridled rage, a resource too vital in the struggle for bodily autonomy for viewers to forget. Jenny Wu

Heads, 2024, mid-century display case, plywood, concrete, deconstructed scythes, papier-mâché, plaster, handmade eye, found textiles, artist’s skirt, shaving mirror, 193 × 180 × 81 cm. Photo: Jacob Holler. Courtesy the artist and Lyles & King, New York

Summer 2024

Claire Lehmann The Understudy Bel Ami, Los Angeles 20 April – 25 May In a new series of eight small, deft paintings on linen, canvas and panel, Claire Lehmann merges the visual language of late-capitalist imaging with that of Early Renaissance painting. Along with the printed instructional imagery – taken from medical textbooks, industrial diagrams and other scientific and technical imaging – she has worked from for decades, here Lehmann burrows into early experiments in 3d imaging technology. Perhaps inevitably, these works depict failed renderings of bodily flesh. Melancholy hisses through her depictions of fissured tissue, as humans and animals appear to fragment and dissolve in mid-motion. The largest of these paintings (at the still relatively diminutive scale of 76 × 61 cm), Leaven (2023–24), depicts a still life with a cake in the shape of a Paschal lamb. A slice of the animal’s flank is presented, as if in offering, on a plate near the edge of the table, closest to our point of view. Its ‘sacrifice’ is in tension with the spare domesticity of its surroundings: a draped cloth, Delft-style blue-and-white pottery, a carved

wooden butter knife. The linear perspective signalled by the slanted chequered floor visible below the table – suggestive of the perspectival devices of fifteenth-century European paintings – allows the composition to snap visually into the logic of Renaissance-era representation, even as its religious symbolism suggests less ‘rational’ antecedents. The influence of religious iconography is present as well in Lehmann’s Fontanel (2023–24), in which a composition suggesting Early Renaissance devotional portraiture of the Madonna and Child is recast, with an obstetric mannequin laid atop the Virgin’s blue robe in place of her head and trunk. The dummy in this work was directly copied from a photograph of one used to train doctors; these teaching objects are suggestively termed ‘phantoms’ within the medical establishment. Above the mannequin, a pair of upturned tiny legs sprouts, as if they have cracked through the titular ‘fontanel’ (the soft place in an infant’s not-yet-fused skull) of this torso-cum-head. Lehmann has previously

Fontanel, 2023–24, oil on panel, 70 × 51 cm. Photo Jason Mandella. Courtesy the artist; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; and Page, New York

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used images of other medical devices in her works, including ‘tissue-equivalent phantoms’ used to train radiologists to detect hidden tumours, and she is attuned to the wrenching humanity of these objects and the maladies of their proxies. Lehmann’s paintings work to bridge the tension between human flesh – soft, undulating, mottled – and the crisply rendered diagrams that instruct us in the business of how to enhance and extend our human capacities. When the latter aspect is absent in this work, we miss it, as in Perruque (2024), an abstracted matrix of hair strands loosely evocative of a wig, and Diviner (2023–24), a headless robed figure whose garments are shot through by indiscriminate rays of light. As the artist observed in an interview with Frieze in 2021, oil paintings are essentially pigment suspended in a kind of amber, and if not preserved for all eternity, they will certainly outlast other attempts to map the visual world, as these diagrams, like our own bodies, deteriorate or are phased out. Cat Kron

Tamiko Nishimura Journeys Alison Bradley Projects, New York 25 April – 29 June Few legible faces appear in the grainy blackand-white photographs of Tamiko Nishimura. The subjects in Journeys, her first us solo exhibition – mostly women, captured in quotidian moments – tend to escape the camera’s gaze. Most of them turn away from us. Some are simply silhouettes. The faces we do see are often partitioned, obscured: in Eternal Chase – Hakodate, Hokkaido (1970–72), a cloche hat covers the eyes of a young citywalker; in a garden in Shikishima — Okunakayama, Iwate Pref. (#016) (1972), a mother burrows her nose into her baby’s hair. And then, in other photographs, there are the visages rendered so faintly as to appear spectral: an infant peeking over her mother’s shoulder at the beach; a woman trudging up a snowy hill. Even Nishimura’s most sensual portraits, like those in her 1970 series Kittenish…, contain only closeups of bent knees, splayed thighs, languid hands. Nishimura, who was born in Tokyo in 1948, is often overshadowed by male counterparts such as Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, both of whom she assisted in the darkroom as she began developing her own images at higher temperatures and with longer exposures. The photographs on display in Journeys – largely taken between 1969 and 1978, spanning six

series and displayed as gelatin silver prints – typify the subversive style she found through these darkroom experiments: granular and high-contrast; understated, spontaneous and subtly haunting. Her images evoke hazy memories – just barely out of focus, and out of reach. Taken together, her unidentifiable women become half-recalled figures, the particulars of their faces the casualties of time. Yet in simulating the tenuousness of memory, Nishimura firmly immortalises her subjects. Nishimura’s practice was facilitated by her peripatetic lifestyle. During the 1970s, at the start of the Japanese women’s liberation movement, she travelled throughout Japan, photographing scenes of impermanence across its distinct geographies, from the dark, foamy waters of the Tsugaru Strait to the still, snowcoated tableaux of Kodomari and Ōmagari (both towns would later be redistricted out of existence). A quintessential flâneuse, she also found quiet enchantment in unpeopled urban landscapes, which she captures with her signature fuzzy, memory-warped tone: the shadow of a utility pole in Osaka; a leggy mural in Kanagawa; gently sloping trolley tracks in Hokkaido. Each photograph here is a tacitly feminist ode to her own freedom of movement.

One can picture the twenty-something photographer, clutching her camera, alone and alert to the world. One can also picture a seventy-something Nishimura doing the same: the most recent work in the exhibition – an exultant portrait of a firework display titled My Journey iii — Tokorozawa, Saitama Pref. – is from 2022. Despite the poignancy of her landscape photography, Nishimura’s faceless, citydwelling women are her most indelible subjects. This is especially true of the women she photographs in Tokyo: the stylish grocery shopper at an outdoor produce stand, midstep and turned away, her skirt swirling around her as a bag dangles from her forearm; a pair of sandaled women walking swiftly down a sun-dappled sidewalk, their backs to us. In these images – tender, candid and shot through with empathy – women refuse to pose for the camera. Or they simply don’t see it: their obscured faces, more than just an aesthetic conceit, suggest they are too preoccupied to be bothered. Tracking them with her subtly feminist gaze, Nishimura captured the fullness of their lives in a way that feels just as fresh today as it did half a century ago. Sophia Stewart

My Journey – Tokyo (#13), 1979, vintage gelatin silver print, 16 × 24 cm. Courtesy the artist and Alison Bradley Projects, New York

Summer 2024

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024 Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry 29 March – 16 June There was a time when ‘British working class photography’, the subtitle of this exhibition of works by approximately two dozen artists, might call to mind either black-and-white social realism by the likes of Tish Murtha and the work Nick Hedges did for charity Shelter during the 1960s or the kitsch, exploitative camp of the dreadful Martin Parr. Kids would play in postwar bombsites, flat caps would be worn. There would be whippets, closed mines and kiss-me-quick hats on a dismal beach. In these vintage careers it was rare to see a nonwhite face. Curator Johny Pitts, best known for Afropean, his 2019 book exploring Europe’s relationship with Blackness, shows instead a British working class transformed by first-, second- and thirdgeneration immigration; a society not of twentieth-century decline – the works all date from 1989 onwards, the main title, Pitts notes in his introductory wall text, invoking Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal consensus-championing book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – but enriched with renewed confidence, despite years of austerity politics. This is most obvious in those photographs that document the local fashion, music and nightlife scenes. Eight prints hung friezelike of photographs by Ewen Spencer dominate one wall, profiling the dancefloors of uk garage nights at the turn of the millennium. The frenetic sweaty bodies of dancers have ‘the lean’, a wall text by Pitts informs us, which is Spencer’s term for a cocksure attitude. The same might be said of British-Yemeni boxer ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed, shown in a triptych by Trevor Smith,

photographed topless at the height of his fame in 1994 with mirrored sunglasses and glamorous leopard-print shorts. There is swagger too in the grittier photography of Josh Cole, in which stars of his local rap-scene are shown posing on top of cars or in the milieu of inner-city housing estates. Of these cultural documents, Elaine Constantine’s portraits of the Northern Soul music-scene rise most above Dazed and Confusedstyle editorial work. Steve in his kitchen (1993–96), in which a young dancing man jumps so high he almost knocks his head on the low ceiling, is an electrifying image, the subject caught in a moment of transcendental ecstasy that lifts him far beyond the mundanity of his surroundings. This is the working class of the big cities, in which grassroots culture sits in close-enough proximity to power brokers (be it hipster media outfits or record labels that are gatekeepers to wider success) that it becomes commodified. With this in mind (and perhaps apt given I saw this touring show in the smaller town of Coventry), the stronger moments are the more intimate glimpses of provincial life Pitts provides: not glamourous boxers, but Rob Clayton’s Resident, Wilson House, Saturday Afternoon (1990– 91), in which a man watches the boxing on his television, enjoying a cigarette (an arrangement of vibrantly dyed indoor pampas grass providing a pop of colour to the otherwise muted palette of the scene); not cool kids out clubbing, but the woman and her two children pictured by Jim Mortram, watching ‘2012s Hottest Dancefloor Hits’ on a music-video channel (the title, Emergency Housing, 2012, provides

ArtReview

a clue to the sparsely furnished circumstances). The teenage boy sits on the windowsill, either by necessity, with the small sofa occupied, or by desire for escape. There are moments of cliché in the choices Pitts has made, no more so than when the curator turns his attention to rural life, represented by sheep farmers (in a series by Richard Grassick), fishermen and pigeon fanciers (in work by Joanne Coates). This seems a limited view of employment outside urbanity: where are the Amazon warehouses? Where are the call centres? But these are outweighed by the range of lived experience to which Pitts is keen to give space, a range that’s embodied in the contrast between the emo Asian kid, with blue dyed hair and holding a peacock feather, in Kavi Pujara’s Talitha, Ross Walk (2020), and Rob Clayton’s Shop Proprietors (1990–91), a portrait of the proud Asian owners of a corner shop. Pitt’s choice of title, though useful for signalling the date range of the work, doesn’t point us to any great interrogation of Fukuyama’s thesis. Chris Shaw’s evocative imagery from his time as a night porter – photos of his colleagues, in the shabby backrooms of hotels, scattered with magazines and half-drunk cups of coffee, catching moments of uncomfortable sleep in cramped positions that belie the blackand-white romance of his film stock – offers a stark rejoinder though. They are the standout works here, portraits of exhausting exploitation and graft of a capitalist consensus that, by now, no longer has anywhere to go. Oliver Basciano

Chris Shaw, The Auditor Figures, 1999. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Yoko Terauchi One is Many Many is One Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo 1 November – 2 December At first glance it appears simple. The white walls of the gallery are decorated by a continuous, head-height, friezelike red band. It’s a roll of paper, bulldog-clipped to the wall. We know it’s a roll of paper because there’s more to it than what’s unfurled, to which a still-rolled section at either end testifies. It’s as if the artist intends to bury any sense of illusion (which is what art is supposed to do) beneath a veneer of honesty (normally the domain of real life). The frieze is decorated by an undulating line of alternating smaller and larger holes that have been cut into the paper and through which the gallery’s whitewashed wall shines. It looks like a chart of the elliptical motion of a star or planet across the night sky, swooping up and down as the paper band traverses the gallery space. Gently suggestive of something without definitively expressing anything. An interior designer’s wet dream.

But it also has the kind of beauty we’re used to associating with minimalist artworks. Assuming you’re into Minimalism, that is. While indisputably elegant, Yoko Terauchi’s art has a way of leaving you feeling slightly off balance. In fact, the multiple ‘holes’ are the product of a single cone cut into the rolled paper. You can see how it works if you stare at the rolled end. And the evidence is in front of you in the form of the cone that was cut out from the roll and that’s also attached to the wall. Like the work of a magician intent on revealing their trick. Except this cone isn’t made up of the discarded paper; rather it’s cast from that but made of plaster. You start to get the feeling that nothing is as it appears even though everything appears to be so straightforward and simple. The truth is that the installation, One is Many Many is One (2023), is at one and the same time

One is Many Many is One, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Ken Kato. Courtesy the artist and Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo

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even more simple than it appears to be, and even more complex. Everything you need to know is in the title. And before that it was already in the construction of the work. And yet it makes you rethink the operations of your perception. The installation comes with a poem by the artist just to make absolutely sure: ‘One is Many Many is One / When we count something as “one” / This is the beginning of dividing the world / Which in fact One as a Whole But, can we see whole / of the universe? Can we count one?’ Which, in its apparent contradictions on the subject of oneness, might suggest connections with certain teachings of the Buddha. And yet, what’s in the gallery is material not spiritual. So to veer towards the latter might smack of folly. And it would be fair to say that this extraordinary installation also tests your proclivities for overthinking too. Mark Rappolt

Tim Kent Histories in Flux jd Malat Gallery, London 2 May – 1 June As a painter who seeks, in his own words, ‘to make sense of the things we can’t see’, Tim Kent is well suited to a world in which many images are invisible to the unassisted human eye. Nonhuman vision, exemplified by qr codes, is the same world in which drone technology and ‘intelligent’ weapons use operational images to fulfil military objectives. By injecting his new series with the visual grammar of military targeting programs, Kent acknowledges that Western paintings have also been vehicles for regimes of oversight. The paintings in Histories in Flux fuse neoclassical canons and contemporary circuits of surveillance by subjecting art-historical tropes – reclining nudes and equestrian monuments – to forms of digital visualisation. A trio of paintings, Odalisque (2023), Inclinations (2024) and The Reproduction’s Gaze (2024), integrate the figure from Ingres’s famous La Grande Odalisque (1814) into a painted dot-matrix, whose machinic precision elides seamlessly with the works’ slick surfaces. Elsewhere, Kent’s tiled pavement – more vector graphic than Renaissance grid –

congeals with thick currents of oil that seem to disrupt any sense of coherent time or space. Procession (2024) halts the march of its headless spectre-courtiers via a controlled explosion of dark pigment, while the irradiated landscape of Past Again and Again (2024) reprises the humanoid figures and towering arcades of Giorgio de Chirico, whose shadows seemed always out of step with time. Much like the ‘Metaphysical Painting’ developed by de Chirico and others over a century ago, these works are palimpsests of interpenetrating artefacts and contrasting styles held in irreverent suspension. Menagerie (2024) is a case in point: set in the hallowed halls of the Baroque English country house Castle Howard, the statue of a Winged Victory of Samothrace is out of place, while the walls are not so much structural frames as dissolving skins. In turn, Archive II (2023) renders its central sculpture of a falling horse as simultaneously plastic and transparent. The sculpture’s reappearance in other paintings, seen from different viewpoints, is evidence of the artist’s rotation of sculpted

modelli as though with a cad program. The result is a series of paintings that absorb both analogue and digital modes of observation while challenging the reduction of life to a sequence of data points. It was during the 1970s that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky established that people’s memory of the past warps their judgement of the future. The same applies to algorithms that rely on incomplete or biased datasets to ‘optimise’ online experience. For Kent, if history is to teach us anything, it must be ‘assaulted’ – dismantled and reconfigured in order to explode the cult of progress on which neoliberalism depends. By retrofitting painting with forms of digital calculation, these works challenge the antiquated terms by which we imagine the future. As By Careful Design (2024) reminds us – with its besuited figures seated around a neoclassical boardroom’s table, their faces smeared into sinister anonymity – the results of painting’s controlled calculations have tended to be the same: a white cube and a faceless corporate regime. Alex Estorick

Past Again and Again, 2024, oil on linen, 149 × 196 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2024

Angel with a Gun: Homage to Guy Brett Alison Jacques, London 10 May – 15 June The contemporary artworld is so defined by its internationalism – the circulation of art, artists and information – that it’s hard to imagine a time when artistic scenes struggled to know what might be happening on the other side of the world. In the postwar world pre-internet, it took personal contacts and the ability to travel to connect what was happening in London to that in, say, New York, or Athens, or Rio de Janeiro. The English critic and curator Guy Brett, who died in 2021, was that kind of connector: who, from the 1960s enthusiastically supported artists from Europe and, more consequentially, Latin America. Angel with a Gun is assembled from Brett’s collection, consigned to the gallery by his widow, but its deft selection and

arrangement opens an interesting dialogue with the present artworld and its curatorial engagement with non-Western artistic and political history. The show’s three sections run roughly chronologically, starting with works mostly from the 1960s, mostly associated with the Kinetic art movement, moving then to works from the 1970s and 80s, focused on Latin American politics, and finishing in the basement gallery devoted to a large group of works by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, with whom Brett maintained a lifelong friendship. With hindsight, these three groupings appear to replay the question of how political or apolitical an artwork might be, vividly the case in the contrast between the first room of abstract

Cildo Meireles, Zero Cruzeiro, 1978, offset print on paper, 34 × 35 × 4 cm (framed). Courtesy Alison Jacques, London

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Op and Kinetic works and the more militant political works that follow. Still remarkable over half a century later are works such as the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto’s dizzying wall reliefs Physichromie 127 (Plates 58 a-c) (1964) and Vibration (1965); the latter a seemingly simple hanging mobile of thin yellow arcs, suspended in front of a panel subdivided into a white and yellow quarter, and a grey lower half marked with horizontal parallels. It’s completely unmysterious in its fabrication and yet visually dizzying and spatially enigmatic in its effect, and embodies something of Kinetic art’s heady, utopian idealisation of art as an integrated, more-than-visual and implicitly social form. Nearby are works by fellow Brazilian ‘Neo-Concrete’ artists Clark and Hélio Oiticica,

by now famed for having pursued a more interactive, quasi-social rethinking of art objects – Clark’s articulated sheet-aluminium sculpture Bicho (Monument in all situations) (1964), and Oiticica’s primary-coloured box, disgorging a vinyl bag of pure blue pigment (B 30 Box Bólide 17 [Poem Box], 1965–66 ) both signal the turn they pioneered away from abstraction (though still steeped in its vocabulary) towards an idea of human participation beyond mere spectatorship. It was Brett, of course, who organised Oiticica’s first solo show in Britain, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1969. That Oiticica showed in Britain by then was less to do with the breezy internationalism that had marked the 60s, and more to do with escaping the brutal political repression that was gathering pace across Latin America, in Argentina, Brazil and later Chile, forcing many artists into exile. It’s that history that underpins the subsequent room of works, dominated by Oiticica’s

protest banner Seja marginal seja herói (Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero) (1968), with its gunneddown protester screenprinted in black on red cloth, surrounded by works by Cildo Meireles, variously from 1978, 1984 and 2013, in which variously fake banknotes – us dollars, old Brazilian cruzieros – are doctored to show a ‘zero’ value, while depicting, in place of various official figures, portraits of Indigenous people (Zero Cruzeiro, 1978). The reality of political violence is similarly taken up in Eugenio Dittborn’s Mail-art piece airmail painting, no. 48 – ‘9 survivors’ (1986), memorialising, through its fictionalised female subjects, those ‘disappeared’ by Chile’s dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. These political works are both of their time and are now comfortably accommodated by an artworld more accustomed to platforming politics. During the 1970s and 80s, art as political protest still carried a degree of risk. Here they seem a little inert,

compared to the compact energy that still inhabits the earlier Neo-Concretist works. Brett, appointed chief art critic of The Times in 1964, aged twenty-two, had been an active supporter of exiled Latin American artists in London. He was finally sacked from The Times in 1975 for the increasingly political content of his criticism. Downstairs, presented like relics, are cabinets of Clark’s tactile, haptic interactive works: instructions to fill polythene bags with stones and air; elastic bands to be assembled in skeins; and the little Estruturas de Caixa de Fósforos (1964) sculptures, glued-together matchboxes, painted in red, gold and white (along with the black untitled, 1976), which seem to invoke architecture and monuments, and the memory of utopian art of the earlier century from across the Atlantic; De Stijl, Suprematism… art always in fragile, quixotic relation to the possibility of social transformation. J.J. Charlesworth

Lygia Clark, Estruturas de Caixa de Fósforos (Dourado) / Matchbox Structure (Gold), 1964, gouache paint, matchboxes, dimensions variable. © O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy Alison Jacques, London

Summer 2024

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Nebula Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice 17 April – 24 November The word Nebula is Latin for ‘fog’ or ‘cloud’, but in the case of this show it embraces eight newly commissioned, site-specific video installations totalling over three hours of screening time. All eight productions explore the poetic associations of fog, an atmospheric phenomenon characteristic of Venice; the works revolve around incomplete visibility, disorientation – a condition that, in many ways, characterises the present – and resistance to it. The exhibition is housed within a sprawling venue that, during the sixteenth century, housed the sick, pilgrims and orphans, later a church, a pharmacy, a concert room, and in more recent times a wing of a retirement home. There is a lot to take in. And yet, despite its name, Nebula lingers in the mind, while also engendering a very Venetian sense of labyrinthitis. The organisers, Fondazione in Between Art Film, have achieved this through a sophisticated use of the space, which makes elements of the works’ content seem to spill over into the rooms in which they are screened. This is palpable in the opening installation. Basir Mahmood’s Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating (2024) shares a glimmering lighting with its site, the monumental church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti. The threechannel video, its format inspired by altarpieces, is shot across day as it turns to night, with sequences of actors lost in a vast landscape, and is based on video taken by migrants travelling from South Asia to Europe. The scenes are shot from below, recalling how church architecture is conceived to make you to look up. Meanwhile,

the soundtrack underscores a contrast between what we see and hear, generating a state of acoustic nebulosity. You might hear pens writing on paper, or the sound of lips moving while people speak into megaphones, but not the words they utter. The geopolitical associations of this work, with its focus on instability, are doubled in Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Until we became fire and fire us (2023–), which consists of slanted projections haunting different rooms entered via the squalid upstairs corridors of the retirement home. The result of this makeover is a dizzying and fragmented accumulation of images of drawings (made by Abou-Rahme’s father during the 1970s and 80s in Jerusalem), pulsating sounds, words and found video clips. For the latter, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have drawn on an extensive video archive that primarily comprises people singing and dancing, people from Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Yemen who are mostly from communities under threat of being erased. These scenes are juxtaposed with footage of indigenous plants; both elements, it seems, play the role of witnesses to the experience of colonisation and possession. From the outset, Nebula’s atmosphere is mesmerising. The corridors are muffled by sound-absorbing materials – dark fabric, white quilts and an unexpectedly soundless aluminium floor – which reset visitors’ perceptions between one film and the next. Both the white cube and black box formats are obliterated in this encompassing, distorted spatial experience; it’s like floating in a zero-gravity spaceship.

Appropriately, in English ‘nebula’ is the medical term for a cloudy speck or film on the eye that would blur one’s vision, as well as being used since the early 1700s as an astrological term for dust and gas cloud in space. Yet despite its deliberate disorientations, the show imprints certain images in one’s memory. In Christian Nyampeta’s When Rain Clouds Gather (2024), two little girls jump on a trampoline, while a radio in the distance broadcasts news of genocides in Rwanda, Palestine and Ukraine. In Diego Marcon’s digital animation Fritz (2024) – presented in a room where, during the eighteenth century, patients found relief in music – a cartoonish boy hangs by a rope who, just when he seems to have died, kicks the wall and continues swinging from the noose, resuming the unlikely yodelling that connects him with a distant choir of voices. Playing in a loop, the video’s incessant rhythm has a ferocious irony. Sound lingers in the ear, too: in Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Nebula (2024), a bell seems to guide a sheep into and through the Complesso, as it moves from room to room in apparent response. We follow it from a sheepfold to its apparent awakening in Santa Maria dei Derelitti; it then wanders through the spaces of the Ospedaletto, before a thick fog rises from the helical staircase and swallows everything up. You, the viewer, are evidently another sheep, led through Nebula’s exploration of how space might be haunted by moving images, and throughout which moments of quiet reprieve might be found amid abundant perceptual and political upheaval. Mariacarla Molè

Basir Mahmood, Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating, 2024, three-channel video, colour, 5.1 sound, 25 min. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film, Rome

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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Until we became fire and fire us, 2023–ongoing (installation view, Nebula, 2024, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film, Rome

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Books All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield Profile, £20 (hardcover) Orlando Whitfield met Inigo Philbrick when they were both studying art history at Goldsmiths, part of the University of London. They quickly formed a close friendship, staying up late talking about art and ideas. But Philbrick had big designs, bigger than getting a ba – he didn’t want to just study art, he wanted to sell it. While at Goldsmiths, Philbrick was working part-time at White Cube gallery, and he and Whitfield formed a youthful partnership dealing independently in secondary-market artworks. After they finished their degrees, Philbrick went on to set up a gallery, Modern Collections, with White Cube owner Jay Jopling. Whitfield worked for his friend for a while, then moved on to start his own gallery. Whitfield and Philbrick’s first sale as students was a Paula Rego drawing. When Philbrick began dealing as Modern Collections, he sold very different kinds of works, primarily large easel paintings by white male painters – Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Christopher Wool. Whitfield’s gallery, Hunter / Whitfield, opened with his friend Ben Hunter, represented emerging artists – painter Christopher Page, just a few years out of an mfa at Yale, whose paintings, studio and ideas Whitfield describes in attentive detail; they staged Rebecca Ackroyd’s first show; showed an installation by American artist Adam Gordon, which blocked most of the gallery space with a glass partition.

That Goldsmiths education remains: Whitfield describes the art beautifully and complexly (and sometimes casually, referring to a Stingel as a ‘stunner’, which is quite a nice way to describe a few million dollars’ worth of canvas shifting on the secondary market). But he discusses the artworld with remove and mistrust – the art fairs, the dinners, the yacht in Venice owned by arms dealers, the way Inigo can sell 220 percent of a painting, ‘which is, of course, 120 per cent more painting than existed’, Whitfield writes. Inigo is charming. Inigo ‘is a brilliant raconteur’. Inigo eats at fancy restaurants that he refers to as ‘canteens’. Inigo and Orlando still go bowling once in a while, which feeds Orlando’s desire to sustain something of the spontaneous, heady (and perhaps naive) early days of their friendship. Inigo has a ‘loose standard of truthfulness’. Inigo sells the same pictures over and over to multiple people, pocketing the commission and at least once sending blank canvases to collectors’ storage spaces, assuming they won’t open the crates (they don’t). By the time he is caught, having attempted to escape his debtors to the Pacific island of Vanuatu, Philbrick had embezzled an estimated $86 million. Whitfield earnestly and honestly describes the two men’s lives. As was the case with the artworks they each dealt in, their trajectories split. Whitfield had a nervous breakdown and

left his gallery (he went on to work with a conservator, Pierce Townshend, who he describes in loving detail in one of the book’s highlight chapters). Philbrick moved to Miami, opened another gallery, made millions. It sounds like one of them was on an upwards course and the other headed the opposite way, but that’s not how things ended up. Throughout the book, Philbrick and Whitfield sustain an increasingly erratic relationship. Whitfield writes about their interactions, from meetings at the Plaza to phone calls from Vanuatu, with great tenderness. At its core, All That Glitters is a story about friendship. The numbers and details of Philbrick’s infractions may be based on emails and business documents Philbrick shared with Whitfield (there was a moment Philbrick thought his old pal would write an article that told his side of the affair, so he provided him with evidence), but this is Whitfield’s story, not Philbrick’s. It’s a story about art, the art market and disillusionment. Our relationships – to other people, to objects and, in this specific case, to money – can make and break us. The sentiment Whitfield affords his shared past with Philbrick never fully dies out, but it is Philbrick’s demise that makes Whitfield see their friendship for what it was: ‘I thought I’d known him better than anyone else. It slowly became apparent that I knew him just as little as everyone.’ Orit Gat

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville Del Rey, £22 (hardcover) Keanu Reeves has, over the last 20 years, managed to create a sort of ur-character that has become his only product: the stoic everyman (but with mysterious depths), dragged reluctantly into ultraviolent conflicts that never really seem to end. Maybe now, heading into his sixties, Reeves is finding that it’s getting a bit much. So he created an avatar, in the form of the brzrkr comic series: about a seventythousand-year-old warrior who can’t die without being reborn and who happens to look exactly like Reeves.

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There’s going to be a Netflix anime adaptation. And a live-action movie. In the interim, acclaimed British ‘weird fiction’ author China Miéville has stepped in to spin off his take on Reeves’s unstoppable (but inevitably sensitive, world-weary and introspective) killing machine. Miéville has clearly enjoyed the challenge, exploiting the comic’s dilated historical space between our hero’s current gig with a us ultrasecret special-ops unit and his earlier lives. Ladling in his own erudite predilections for occult lore and gnostic historical knowledge,

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Miéville ruminates on science, magic, the possibility of gods and the meaning of life and death. All the while conjuring characteristically vivid scenes of gore-drenched battle and grotesque biotech horror.It’s a breathless ride, even if Miéville seems content to pastiche styles of sci-fi prose. It’s the compromise of working to another’s brief. And there’s more than a hint of the sense that this is more about Reeves than anything else: the actor comfortably typecast forever. He kills, he dies, he comes back. J.J. Charlesworth

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The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model by Fatoş Üstek Lund Humphries, £19.99 (hardcover) Irrelevant, impotent and imperialist; closeted, colonial, canonical and unchanging. Elitist too. There’s no doubt that today’s art institutions are fucked. Although in this short polemic against how such organisations organise and position themselves, independent curator Fatoş Üstek puts their plight in more elegant terms. She points out that, given the fact that societies today are being endlessly buffeted by the climate emergency, identity crises, mass migration, war, financial meltdowns, the effects of digital and other new(ish) technologies, and that these all now impact on the stuff that falls within the category of contemporary art, it’s little wonder that our cultural institutions are struggling to keep up. They’re trying to do too much: to be spaces for aesthetic display, social outreach, education and technological innovation, as well as being commercial enterprises scrabbling to cover increased costs and decreased funding. In the face of these multiple ailments Üstek attempts to offer a cure: ‘new ideas to develop institutional models and directorial and curatorial positions’, as she markets it. Although these ideas are not necessarily all Üstek’s own (the book is loaded with interviews with the artworld’s curatorati class), they reflect a synthesis of best-practice models from around the world. Well, mainly from the Global North. There’s no mention, for example, of the institutional questions raised by Indonesian

collective ruangrupa when they were directing the recent Documenta 15, or of the ways in which similarly alternative models are forged in the rest of Asia or in Africa. Some biases, it seems, are harder to overcome than others. Üstek is forensic through the first part of the book as she maps out the reasons behind institutional failure. With their imposing architectures, negligible artist fees, reliance on old centralised power structures, consequent unhealthy working environments for staff, dependence on the whims of government arts policies and funders’ interests, and inability to grasp the fact that ‘culture today is not limited to public institutions but is a product of global society, with everyone contributing to culture in their own way’, she leaves you wondering: why should anyone bother preserving these lumbering institutional dinosaurs? Indeed, the question of why we shouldn’t start with a clean slate – whether or not any institutional model is worth saving – is a question that haunts this study throughout. In this respect, Üstek’s defence of institutions as a model is a little weak: we should care because art and artists allow institutions to ‘be more attuned to the changes in society’. The thesis here is somewhat circular – we need institutions to make artists important to society, because they are important to society. Similarly, the fact that most of the people she talks to are invested in institutions, because

they direct them or work with or within them, means that the question of whether we need them at all never gets fully addressed. Ironically then, it’s when Üstek ventures outside of art to explore alternative business models – such as decentralised autonomous organisations (a member-owned business model in which governance and finance are handled via blockchain technology), or the more general potential of digital technologies to allow institutions to operate beyond the constraints of their site – that her thesis becomes more interesting. In the push for an answer, Üstek is impressively if bureaucratically thorough, exploring all aspects of the art institution: mission, management, finance, audience engagement and collective empowerment. She persuasively argues that horizontal and networked styles of management represent the only reasonable way in which institutions can respond to our current complexity. Institutions must (her concluding chapter is a mantra of imperatives) have a clear purpose and an empowered workforce, be financially self-reliant to be programmatically self-reliant, be committed to risk and continual learning, be resistant to received wisdom when it comes to exhibition-making and always produce critical reactions rather than parroting society’s questions. If you’re committed to art’s infrastructures and want to save your job, then the learning starts here. Mark Rappolt

Like Love by Maggie Nelson Fern Press, £20 (hardcover) Is writing in the writing itself, or in the sharing, and discussion, of that writing? Different versions of this question arise while reading this collection of 30 texts, written (whatever that means) between 2006 and 2023. It includes introductions to other people’s books, reviews, commissioned essays for art catalogues and interviews with other writers. It doesn’t represent Maggie Nelson’s ‘main’ writing. ‘You never really know what’s the main thing and what’s a digression,’ Nelson admits in a discussion with poet and writer Eileen Myles. ‘We just have the pretend idea that the real work is somewhere, and it never is. There’s no there there.’ This book, then, is the decidedly elsewhere, with Nelson’s responses to the writings of Ben Lerner, Natalia Ginzburg, Fred Moten and Judith Butler, a bit of

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music (crediting good teenage sex to Prince) and a hefty chunk of contemporary artists such as Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Carolee Schneemann and Sarah Lucas, among others. That most of these texts, in their original form, acted as prefaces and introductions gives the book a dislocated feel, in which Nelson’s obligation to avoid spoilers means that the action feels absent, also somewhere else. On page, the tone is friendly, academic, probing but semiformal; the writing often doesn’t feel as lively or as searching as Nelson’s essay collections – in part because most of the texts gathered here are responses to a given prompt, whether a book or film or sculpture: the answers, in a sense, are already there. At its best, this book is a conscious performance of community: gathering moments of

ArtReview

thinking out loud, generously sharing influences and readings. In other places, it is a conscious performance of writing that community: circular, name-droppy. Perhaps appropriately, then, some of the most pointed insights included here are those of Nelson’s collaborators and interlocutors. In the exchange between Nelson and Björk, the musician closes by musing about what the future philosopher, in the Nelson model, should be: not someone who produces an extended pontificating ‘guitar solo’ but ‘someone like you who collects the writings of our species, merges it and distils it into a human form adding diaries and emotional responsibility’. Perhaps Like Love is best viewed as a test drive for where the writing will be. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk, translated by Mui Poopoksakul Peirene, £12.99 (softcover) The ninety-three-year-old protagonist of The Understory is both a raconteur and a Buddhist abbot. Its opening pages introduce us to Luang Paw Tien and his talent for spinning yarn after yarn – as well as the ambivalence with which the inhabitants of Praeknamdang, a Thai village from a bygone past teetering on the precipice of modernisation, treat both storytellers and monks. ‘To the serious-minded adults’, writes Saneh Sangsuk, ‘he was a teller of tall tales who breached the precept concerning monks and untruthful speech, but to the children he was a trove of magical stories.’ After learning the full, obsessive extent of the latter group’s love for his storytelling – they ‘mimicked all his mannerisms: the way he sipped his bael juice, the raspy sound he made when he cleared his throat, the way he paused intermittently to scan his audience’ – the reader then gets to judge for themselves when Luang Paw Tien launches into the astonishing story of his own life. ‘This land has changed so much. The people, too, have changed so much,’ he begins. According to the book’s translator, Sangsuk has likewise been on quite a journey. In her translator’s note for Venom – an awardwinning novella also recently published in English by Peirene – Mui Poopoksakul sketches his emergence as a ‘literary renegade back in 1994 when

his debut, White Shadow, incensed conservatives because it ‘ran counter to Thailand’s propagandaimposed self-image as a good and beautiful society’. But while that novel drew on his experiences of living in Bangkok from the late 1970s to mid-1990s, Sangsuk’s followups are bound up with the exploration of oral storytelling traditions that dovetailed with his subsequent physical and literary return to his rural birthplace. ‘The self-absorbedness of youth has given way to something more communal, more connected to his heritage,’ Poopoksakul writes. What unfurls over the course of the monk’s narration is part parable, part paean to the ‘forest ethics’ and natural world of Sangsuk’s youth – a world of latent threats as well as promise. Luang Paw Tien, his young wife, and Old Man Junpa, his perpetually inebriated hunter father, leave Praeknamdang behind with a view to building a new outpost in the middle of the jungle. ‘I’d become a well-to-do farmer,’ he reminisces, ‘the owner of a twin pair of Thaistyle houses built from timber, a big barn full of rice, a large herd of cattle, a fine dugout dory and a handsome ox-cart.’ But a ravenous tiger with emerald eyes has other plans. First to vanish into the night is Din (the working buffalo have both names and personalities), and then… well, you can guess where this is heading.

Steeped in redolent detail (the hunting guns have names too!), the story draws on a trove of supernatural folk legends, a samut khoi (foldingbook manuscript) listing medicinal herbs, even the bloodlust of Greek tragedy. And with both the predatory tiger and Praeknamdang – a village ‘falling into the hands of people from elsewhere’ – occupying a liminal space, each threatened by extinction, it also has an environmental, and perhaps anticapitalist, moral to impart. But the overriding sense is that Sangsuk is less a master of colour or allegory than he is a disciple of atmosphere and delivery; Poopoksakul must be commended for preserving his style and panache in a grammatically alien language. The prosody of the English prose – and mood and tension it creates – is consistently arresting, right from the smarting opening lines: ‘The season’s chilly winds had arrived, but were yet to launch a full assault; for now, they were only a persistent trickle, a constant waft, chappingdry and soundless, an insinuation of the coming brutality, a nascent harshness lurking in the cool air that slithered through the trees.’ Like the jungle encircling Praeknamdang, The Understory’s finest sentences quiver with sensual menace and beauty, and draw us in, vigilantly, ever deeper. Max Crosbie-Jones

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, translated by Edward Gauvin Self Made Hero, £18.99 (softcover) Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil is someone about whom you’ve most likely never heard. Her pseudonym, George Sand, is another case altogether. Assuming you’re into bestselling nineteenth-century European literature. Or women who fought the social conventions of gender. As this graphic biography (Consigny is the illustrator) makes clear, Dupin/Sand was pioneering in relation to both. Although these days there’s more interest in the second. Particularly here, where the visible signs of her play with gender norms (tying up or hiding her hair, smoking and wearing men’s clothes in public – the last, at the time, illegal – and generally living like a man) are most easily reproduced. But despite that, and to its credit, this book suggests that we shouldn’t separate the writer from the writing in this way. Sand’s written works appear or are referenced almost

as often as her lovers (of which there were so many, it at times seems as if Consigny has run out of sufficiently distinct male types to easily separate one from the next; although such confusions in turn might simply reflect how things were at the time). Sand’s politics are formed at an early age. Her father died when she was young and consequently she was raised by the females of the family. Her father’s family was rich; her mother’s poor. She was brought up by her paternal grandmother, who believed in education; her mother, despite her poverty, believed in fashion. They, for the most part, hated each other. Sand’s belief in equal rights began at an early age and survived (or perhaps blossomed as result of) both a convent education and an abusive marriage. Life, for Sands, was lived physically (riding, travelling)

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and intellectually, just as love was always physical as much as intellectual. Even Charles Baudelaire, a poet and contemporary whose life was famously dedicated to intoxication and pleasure, found Sand shocking: ‘that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation’, he wrote. Writers like Proper Meerimée and musicians such as Frédéric Chopin, on the other hand, chose to be enamoured and to become Sand’s lovers; as, according to this biography, did the actress Marie Dorval. At least they did until Sand moved on to the next thing, which might not mean the end of the old thing. Whether that thing was a lover, a text or a political cause. Given this mix, the graphic format proves particularly appropriate to capturing this unusual, revolutionary life. Nirmala Devi

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Emeka Ogboh, Boats, 2024, gin (made with a blend of Tasmanian and West African botanicals), newspaper. Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

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Congee, called ‘jook’ in Cantonese, is most widely known as a savoury rice porridge that’s normally a breakfast meal, but also the food to nourish and heal you when you are sad, or sick, or hungover. The English name, congee, is a transliteration/transformation of the Tamil ‘kanji’, meaning ‘boilings’, which is not a particularly romantic translation given that many

Aftertaste

Congee by Fi Churchman

of us who grew up with the dish feel an intense sense of comfort with each mouthful. But it is what it is: a simple food. Congee is eaten throughout Asia in various forms that can also be made using, as the primary porridge material, legumes, pulses, seeds, beans, etc. It’s a poor food, and a cup of rice can go a long way. And this is pretty much it: rice boiled in a large amount of water until it reaches your preferred consistency. Though if you ask an expert, congee – in its Cantonese form – really should be silky and not gloopy, and the rice should still hold some of its shape, but also be fluffy and broken, and it shouldn’t be too viscous, which is tricky because rice is starchy, but it shouldn’t be too thin either because we’re not looking for gruel. And don’t forget the toppings. serves 4 1 cup white rice 10 cups water 1 tsp chicken powder Sesame oil for seasoning Toppings can include and are not limited to: century egg, various meats, coriander, spring onion, ginger, peanuts, seafood, pickles and preserved vegetables, pork floss, chilli, fried dough, shellfish, salted duck egg, sesame seeds, mushroom, garlic chives etc. 1 Wash the rice. It’s important to wash rice because it removes any impurities, but also any excess starch. Don’t be lazy and skip this step, otherwise you’ll be cooking up glue. 2 Boil the water. Add the washed rice and chicken powder. Stir briefly. Partially cover the pot with a lid. Turn hob down to medium heat. 3 Do not stir again. Let simmer for 25 minutes. If the water looks like it’s getting low, add a small amount until it looks about right. 4 After 25 minutes, turn off heat. Whisk the rice vigorously to break up the grains and achieve the preferred texture. 5 Transfer to bowls, add a drizzle of sesame oil, seasoning and toppings.

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COLLECTION MÉTIERS D’ART 2023/24