Abhijan Toto

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  print December 2022

  Busan Biennale

  For this year’s edition of the Busan Biennale, artistic director Haeju Kim offered a deeply considered and elegantly curated exhibition that spoke both to local histories specific to the southern city and wider transnational concerns. Titled “물결 위 우리” (We, on the Rising Wave), the biennial brought together sixty-four artists and collectives across four venues: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan; Pier 1 of Busan Port; an abandoned factory on Yeongdo Island; and a house in Choryang-dong in the Dong district. The works were linked by subjects including labor, population movement, and the history

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  print September 2022

  Documenta 15

  AT THE OUTSET, we would like to express our solidarity with ruangrupa, the lumbung artists, and the staff of Documenta as they continue to be subjected to political and bureaucratic harassment. We view with great concern the upsetting discourse, particularly in Germany, playing out in a cynical game of liability management among politicians and public figures, which we fear will ultimately lead to a further precaritization of intellectual, artistic, and other forms of labor within Documenta; of Palestinian artists; and of all those who take a position against ongoing Israeli apartheid.

  But this

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  print Summer 2022

  Sung Tieu

  The first thing you noticed on entering Sung Tieu’s solo exhibition “Everything or Nothing” was the sound. It occupied the space like something physical, growing louder and louder, both drawing you in and repelling you. It was a speculative reconstruction of the sonic weapon that allegedly causes the unexplained symptoms known as Havana syndrome, reproduced for Tieu’s Moving Target Shadow Detection, 2022, a Frieze Artist Award commission. The video takes us through a meticulous 3D rendering of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, where Havana syndrome was first recorded. We hover and float through its

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  print February 2022

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul had a busy year in 2021, from the long-awaited release of Memoria, the director’s first feature film shot outside Thailand, to his receipt of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in the summer. In many ways, his exhibition “A Minor History” represents a homecoming, gathering many of the ideas he has been engaged with in the past year and offering a keen analysis of the current political situation in Thailand. Curated by Manuporn Luengaram, the show touches on the artist and filmmaker’s long-standing themes of dreaming, memory, and obscured histories, recontextualizing

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  print November 2021

  “A Life Beyond Boundaries (The Geography of Belonging)”

  What are the stakes of the “regional” now? The group show “A Life Beyond Boundaries (The Geography of Belonging)”continued curator Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani’s engagement with questions of migration, national identities, and regionalities in exhibitions such as “Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia” at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2018 and “Phantoms and Aliens” in Richard Koh’s spaces in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore last year. This presentation brought together artists from countries in the ASEAN bloc, including familiar names from the biennale