Ana Teixeira Pinto

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  picks May 03, 2022

  “Now That We Found Freedom, What Are We Gonna Do with It?”

  When most people think of imperialism, they picture political-military hegemony. Yet at present, imperialism operates not so much through warfare as through collusion between sovereign powers and commercial monopolies, via a set of readymade mechanisms that can pressurize peripheral countries financially without recourse to direct coercion. Curated by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda together with Ecuadorian-Portuguese writer Ana Sophie Salazar, the group exhibition “Now That We Found Freedom, What Are We Gonna Do with It? Narratives on Post-Independence and Decolonisation Processes” speaks to

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  print April 2022

  Vaginal Davis

  Vaginal Davis is one of those artists whose relationship with the art world seems to have ebbed and flowed over the years. Perhaps this is because the work of the queercore icon, poet, performer, and writer consists to a great extent of zines, blog posts, and ephemera that are hard to value capture. Film scholar Marc Siegel refers to the artist as an “organic intellectual” of the queer scene; the term that feels apposite to the singularity of a trajectory that extends beyond contemporary art to the social, literary, and nightlife worlds.

  “The Wicked Pavilion” was a two-venue exhibition. Galerie

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  print January 2022

  “Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing”

  “Understudies: I, Myself Will Exhibit Nothing,” curated by Egyptian-born, Berlin-based artist Iman Issa, mixes the shaped and the storied in a way that scrambles conventional readings of abstract and figurative forms. Among the works chosen are two eighteenth-century Noh masks, respectively captioned “Deigan, Nô mask of a ghost of a middle aged woman, Japan, Edo period, 18th century” and “Manbi, Nô mask of a young woman, Japan, Edo period, 18th century.” I struggle to see the age difference, but the contrast in expression is striking: The younger woman smiles welcomingly, as if the world were

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  print October 2021

  “And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?”

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  print September 2021

  Emily Wardill

  Whether a story has a happy ending, Orson Welles famously noted, depends on where you stop telling it. Isabel do Carmo, the Portuguese antifascist activist whose voice structures the narrative of Emily Wardill’s Night for Day, 2020, spent four years in jail, not during the years of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime but after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in which it was overthrown. Though the paradox of her being a dissident jailed by the parliamentary democracy she helped usher in is not addressed in Wardill’s video, I could not help but see it as the unifying thread that runs through the

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  print April 2021

  Kiluanji Kia Henda

  Othello, Shakespeare’s tragic protagonist, suffers from epileptic seizures, one of which takes place when he is told that his wife has betrayed him. The event is a foreshadowing of things to come and of his downfall. In Kiluanji Kia Henda’s exhibition “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven” (curated by Luigi Fassi), the first work that greeted the viewer, Reliquary of a Shipwrecked Dream, 2019, centers a fallen bronze head, modeled after that of Orlando Sérgio, the first Black thespian to play Othello in a Portuguese theater. Though Othello has usually been described as a tale of jealousy,

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  print July/August 2020

  Rosa Barba

  Tropical glaciers are rapidly receding, and nowhere are they thinning faster, relative to their size, than in the Andes, whose ice caps shrank by nearly a third between 2000 and 2016. Glaciers are vital resources for communities in these arid regions, and their accelerated retreat, caused by warming temperatures, threatens not only the livelihood of indigenous farmers but also the entire agricultural and hydroelectric sector from Chile to Bolivia. High-altitude lagoons risk overflow as glaciers melt, but flooding will be followed by drought in the coming years. Densely populated cities such as

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  picks December 18, 2019

  Rajkamal Kahlon

  The South-Asian American artist Rajkamal Kahlon has populated the entrance to “Are my hands clean?” with a multitude of small drawings, hung salon-style. Die Völker der Erde / People of the Earth, 2017–19, comprises three hundred pages ripped from the eponymous 1902 ethnographic tome by Dr. Kurt Lampert, whose photographs the artist altered to include a Guantánamo inmate, an American flag, and a squad of Black Panthers.

  Kahlon’s subjects are the nexus between epistemic and material violence and the difficulty of representing the subaltern—those who didn’t make it into the proletariat after