Àngels Miralda

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  picks July 22, 2021

  Sarah Ksieska

  In the suite of nine oil paintings that comprise Sarah Ksieska’s “Phantoms,” pigment appears to levitate on the reflective surface of industrial aluminum, a material more akin to the backlit polished screens of handheld devices than to the rough woven texture of canvas. The resulting images seem almost luminescent, shifting and flickering depending on the light and the position of the viewer. They sooner suggest a brief hallucination than a fixed tableau.

  Ksieska focuses on still lifes and quiet interiors, moments of contemplation when the privacy of solitude allows the mind to wander. In Automat

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  picks May 03, 2021

  Lucía C. Pino

  Exploring materiality through processes of sculptural modification, Lucía C. Pino creates environments where fluid bodies and planetary kinships mingle with references to ancient pasts. For their installation Makebelieve Neuromancer (all works 2021), ceiling lights hover close to the floor, creating the hermetic ambience of a laboratory within the darkened fifteenth-century chapel. The antiquated walls are covered with an artificial skin—a fiberglass membrane that both protects and obscures. Below the low-hanging lights, objects punctuate the space in an asymmetrical arrangement. For Sabiħa

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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