Leora Maltz-Leca
“Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist”
May 2013
Curated by Salah Hassan Perhaps more than any institution of its ilk,Tate Modern has made a commitment to expanding—or even exploding—the Euro-American canon of postwar art. This initiative underpins its staging of “Ibrahim El-Salahi: … READ ON
PREVIEWS
Alfred Kumalo (1930–2012)
November 2012
IN 2012, awash in images, it is hard to conceive of a time when a photograph of someone like Nelson Mandela could be a rarity. But in the last decades of South Africa’s apartheid, leaders like Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Robert Sobukwe were… READ ON
SLANT
“Alfredo Jaar: The Way It Is. An Aesthetics of Resistance”
May 2012
Curated by Frank Wagner/NGBK Realismus Studio This summer, Berlin will host the first German retrospective of Alfredo Jaar’s four-decade career. Spanning three venues, the initiative is anchored by the NGBK, which, in presenting documentation… READ ON
PREVIEWS
Santu Mofokeng
December 2011
“DAVID GOLDBLATT IS CONCERNED with the is-ness of things,” Santu Mofokeng said of his onetime mentor earlier this year. “I’m interested in their isn’t-ness.” It is this negative metaphysics that largely shapes the South African … READ ON
IN PRINT December 2011 [TOC]
“Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now”
June 2011
Inexpensive to produce and reproduce, easy to transport and diffuse, prints have long flourished as a medium of political disaffection. This was certainly the case in South Africa, whose restless history of papery protest is charted in this… READ ON
PICKS
Howard Hodgkin
March 2011
Although one of Howard Hodgkin’s pictures bears the mawkish title Home, Home on the Range, 2001–2007, his paintings of the past decade suggest that home—broadly conceived as the ground of painting itself—is squarely in exile. To this… READ ON
PICKS
Gerhard Marx
February 2011
Tenuously trapped in veils of glue, Gerhard Marx’s spindly weeds and other dregs of the Johannesburg veld outline piles of excavated bones in his “Cumulus” series (all works 2011). Invoking the construction and aesthetic of the Hortus… READ ON
PICKS
Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres
January 2011
From spiraling shots of urban blight in Kiev to the Caribbean jungle nibbling at an erstwhile grand hotel, the dystopic landscapes of Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres free-fall into decay. Both artists catch modernist utopian architecture… READ ON
PICKS
Mark Leckey
December 2010
GreenScreenRefrigerator, the title work in Mark Leckey’s latest exhibition, is an ode to the hulking black mass of a Samsung refrigerator. In a rollicking twenty-minute lyric poem, Leckey addresses the Darth Vader of his kitchen: extolling… READ ON
PICKS
“Living in Evolution”
November 2010
Modeled around the notion of “Living in Evolution,” the latest iteration of the Busan Biennale, directed by Takashi Azumaya, features a range of art exploring themes of biological development, circulatory systems, and genetic fusions. … READ ON