picks January 18, 2021

“From the Volcano to the Sea. The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples”

This display of archival material from the Italian feminist collective Le Nemesiache, curated by If I Can't Dance Fellow Giulia Damiani with the support of Sara Giannini and Arnisa Zeqo, situates the group’s practice in Naples, where iconic landscapes—Vesuvius, the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman temples in Campagna, and the city’s bay—render mythology omnipresent.

Sequined costumes and flamboyant sunglasses from the 1989 theatre production Elagabulus, paraphernalia sourced from the collective’s founder Lina Mangiacapre, adorn the exhibition’s entrance. Though the group foresaw, in political

picks November 02, 2020

Rosalind Nashashibi

Rosalind Nashashibi’s newest series of paintings grew out of a residency at London’s National Gallery. Given a year with an on-site studio and invited to engage directly with the institution’s holdings of more than 2,300 objects, she has responded with nuanced interpretations not of central motifs of famous paintings, but of their marginalia. Here, under-considered details from the collection are remixed into nine of Nashashibi’s own small and vivid oil works, each a snippet from history always rendered intimately in uncannily recognizable and sometimes startling scenes. At a time in which the

picks October 15, 2020

“The total scab-free solidarity...”

During lockdown, curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto picked up the notoriously difficult 1996 novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The result is “The total scab-free solidarity and performative silence that struck floor-shows and soundstages from Desert to NJ coast for over half a year,” a group exhibition titled after a passage that describes the hippie past of the morally vacant Johnny Gentle, a crooner-turned-right-wing-US-president whom de Abreu Pinto sees as personifying our global political reality and its widening precarity. Here, six artists channel that economic vulnerability into

picks August 28, 2020

Irene Solà

A narrative circulates from ear to mouth, mutating into varied contexts, sometimes traversing continents. It can become a myth—more diffuse and powerful than a piece of text, an engraved image, or a whispered folktale. As it moves across the earth, it picks up new adaptations.

In both her artistic and literary practice, Irene Solà traces these meandering paths, some of which proliferate and others of which die. In her current solo exhibition, “There is a story about a woman who / Hi ha una història d'una dona que / Hay una historia de una mujer que,” she focuses on a provocative image that has

picks March 25, 2020

Rosana Antolí

Bolstered by its continuous, hypnotic soundtrack, Rosana Antolí’s solo exhibition gesturally regresses to humanity’s primordial origins. Lining the exposed corridors of Madrid’s Cybele Palace, the show—an exploration of our shifting oceans, which are slowly being eclipsed by rising sea levels and expanding populations of poisonous jellyfish—winds through the baroque edifice in a tentacular circuit. Though the films, paintings, and sculptures on display, Antolí proposes that understanding these gelatinous organisms might be key to human adaptation and survival.

Antolí’s previous works have considered

Àngels Miralda