Annie Goodner

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  picks April 10, 2023

  Laura Ziegler

  The flexibility of wordplay and slapstick sensibility of Laura Ziegler’s solo exhibition “Kartoffel Jazz” crafts a network of historical and personal entanglements that course underground rhizomatically, like unruly filaments. Miniaturized narrative scenes, complete with theatrical lighting and simple special effects (a gurgling fountain, a spinning canvas) are placed alongside sculpture, publications, collages, and video works often made in collaboration with others, including the artist’s brother and father. Ziegler’s playful borrowing of the preindustrial and quotidian iconography of European

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  picks February 01, 2023

  Pope.L

  Pope.L’s new video installation was commissioned by De Appel and shot during the summer of 2022. The work is a continuation of a series of projects (video, sculpture, performance) that have premiered across Europe in the past half decade and that reconfigure the largely symbolic discourses surrounding processes of historical reckoning into an acerbic repertoire at once tightly managed and out of control. In Amsterdam, referred to in the video as “the city of amnesiacs,” Pope.L depicts historical memory as an identifiable set of objects and intimations (like a badge, or a mark, or a one-liner)

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  picks November 21, 2022

  “In the Shadows of Tall Necessities”

  Questions of care—as a responsibility and a right—reverberate throughout this group exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein, cocurated by the museum’s director, Fatima Hellberg, and the artist Annika Eriksson. The politics and practices of care have been central to Hellberg’s curatorial approach and what she calls “keeping something alive” that otherwise shouldn’t be. This is a vision that frames Hellberg and Eriksson’s ongoing collaboration, informed in part by their relationship as daughter and mother, respectively. Persistence and survival animate the seventeen-artist show, which unfolds in veiled

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  picks November 10, 2022

  Moshekwa Langa

  Shirley Bassey’s 1971 soul ballad “(Where Do I Begin) Love Story” echoes throughout “Omweg” (a shared Dutch and Afrikaans word meaning something akin to “detour”), Moshekwa Langa’s first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands. The artist has spliced together the song’s surging string-and-brass overture with a loop of the title refrain as part of his 2001 video work Where Do I Begin, which was shot in his birthplace of Bakenberg in South Africa’s Limpopo province. Here, passengers in floral skirts and polished shoes are filmed from the knee down as they gingerly board a regional bus. This