picks December 16, 2016

Laurent Montaron

One encounters Laurent Montaron’s Radio (all works 2016) in the gallery’s antechamber: From a SONY CRF-230 B with three antennae, a voice speculates on the power of picking up electrical waves and hearing songs. The antennae are activated by a transmitter connected by copper thread to a yellow kite floating high in the back of the exhibition. The film Compass Experiment replicates a magic trick by media personality and self-proclaimed telepath Uri Geller. Here, a pair of hands demonstrating human magnetism moves a compass—without ever touching it—on a mirrored, translucent table: Fingers point

picks June 29, 2016

Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew’s current exhibition includes work made during a recent photo residency at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, an institution dedicated to the indigenous arts and cultures of Oceania, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. (It is not the first time Andrew has been invited to dwell on major ethnographic archives.) Though his take on what he encounters is often an unusual combination of irony and aestheticism, he is highly critical of colonialism and all of its imposed ideologies and narratives.

Cross-historical documents from the eighteenth to the twentieth century—postcards, photographs,

picks April 12, 2016

Charlotte Moth

Invited to work with the Tate Archive, Charlotte Moth chose to interrogate the museum’s holdings of documentation and ephemera related to the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Moth’s current exhibition, “Choreography of the Image,” highlights the imaginative control Hepworth exerted on photographic reproductions of her art from the 1930s until the ’70s (an aspect of the sculptor’s practice that’s received little scholarly attention). Hepworth chose certain kinds of plants, plinths on wheels, curtains, screens, and lights for the most indelible kinds of presentation—she was not only invested in

picks February 23, 2016

Eva Barto

Eva Barto’s solo exhibition “The Infinite Debt” is a fact-or-fiction whirlwind of calculating and subversive actions. Her cunning infiltration of narratives surrounding corporate and financial power systems destabilizes our notions of authorship and art objecthood. The seeming “nothingness” we encounter here involves stories of toxic riches gained and inevitably lost.

On entering the first level of this gallery, you get the impression that you’ve walked into the aftermath of a fashion event—or even a robbery—as the place is littered with clothes racks, mirrors, and cinders. A cigarette butt is

picks October 23, 2015

Younès Rahmoun

Seventy-seven translucent resin sculptures of houses, ten cubic centimeters each, are displayed here at chest level on white metal tabletops arranged diagonally throughout the space. Every piece references a different formal archetype for a building—featuring hard angles, tilted roofs, or rounded surfaces—in a conceptual rendering of architecture’s possibilities. Viewed from the street, these blocks appear to be uniformly made in one color each, ranging from pastel greens and oranges to blues and purples, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be composed of multiple horizontal sheets

picks October 12, 2015

Anne & Patrick Poirier

Awareness of the recent catastrophic destruction by DAESH, or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria haunts this exhibition by the duo Anne & Patrick Poirier. The title of the show, “Mesopotamia,” is the term for the part of the ancient Middle East referenced in their recent works. Bird’s-eye views of colonnades, amphitheaters, churches, cities, fortifications, roads, and other urban systems appear in acrylic and polyurethane relief on three large, white paintings, collectively titled “Archeology of the future,” 2012–15. A tondo of the same subject matter is realized using the ashes of Le Monde newspapers,

picks February 24, 2014

Lida Abdul

Lida Abdul’s new installation Time, Love and the Workings of Anti-Love, 2013, is given pride of place in this solo exhibition curated by Isabel Carlos, which premiered in Lisbon before heading to Paris. Over five hundred small black-and-white photo-booth-type portraits are aligned in a minimal presentation to fit the length of two long walls. Each one has been cut out by hand, with all the irregularity and humanity that that entails; the multicolored wooden street camera that produced them over the course of many years is placed in the center of the room. The artist was able to purchase these

picks June 05, 2013

Julia Rometti and Victor Costales

The title of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’s latest exhibition, “El Perspectivista,” is a nod to Amazonian perspectivism, a movement developed in the 1990s by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which posits that animals and plants possess human souls. Rometti and Costales have been working collaboratively for six years in Latin America, particularly focusing their studies on the region and its alternative terrains of thought and history. Here, they have created a body of work including conceptual installations and detailed documentation that takes up shamanistic concerns

picks April 24, 2013

Dominique Blais

Dominique Blais’s two-part work Untitled (35-39), 2012–13, features a sculpture and a video that pay homage to Jean Prouvé, Eugène Beaudouin, Marcel Lods, and Vladimir Bodiansky’s extraordinary legacy from 1935 to 1939 in Clichy, a northwestern Paris suburb. Here they designed and built the Maison du Peuple, the People’s House, the first prefabricated building in France. Lauded for its modularity and sliding partitions, the maison became a national heritage site in 1983 but these days is sorely in need of restoration. To create this work, a response to the maison’s decline, Blais first constructed

View of “A Wall of Sand Has Just Collapsed,” 2012–13.

picks January 21, 2013

Virginie Yassef

Titles tend to be highly evocative in Virginie Yassef’s work, and this solo show is a case in point. “A Wall of Sand Has Just Collapsed” puts the visitor in a general state of expectancy, as if arriving after a disruptive event. Here, the artist seems to privilege a child’s view of the world. Every work in the exhibition has a wild, narrative quality that incites imaginative thinking. The Plank, 2012, is a polystyrene sculpture fabricated to look like a wooden beam from a cartoon (perhaps The Flintstones); it is suspended precariously from the ceiling and powered by a motor so that it turns,

picks December 03, 2012

Victor Boullet

The title of this show, “Yellow Pong Monger,” sets the tone for the brilliantly insane installation by Victor Boullet at Galerie Joseph Tang. A provocatively yet playfully racist reference to the gallerist himself, the words both criticize the commercial setup into which Tang has drawn the artist and point to the smell—pong is British slang for “odor”—that will grow foul as dim sum and noodles, piled up on a tabletop and in a bucket, rot away. Supermarket meat packaging, local “Boucherie des Archives” wrapping, and blood-stained kitchen paper are some of the remnants of delightful

picks August 03, 2012

“Object Atlas”

For “Object Atlas,” the first exhibition following this ethnographic museum’s redesign, director Clémentine Deliss invited seven Europe-based artists for residencies in the institution’s research laboratory, the Labor. Each was encouraged to create new work based on the museum’s collections and archives, with all fieldwork and research occurring within the museum itself, an assignment that privileged tactility and proximity.

The resulting works have been displayed in the museum alongside the WeltKulturen objects or artworks on which they were based. The presentation is highly designed and

Caroline Hancock