Kinga Bartis

It is hard to fully perceive Kinga Bartis’s large-scale mixed media drawing WhileAway, 2023. Both the exact material and the subject seem willfully elusive. Perhaps paradoxically, this is what absorbs the spectator. Spending time in front of this piece makes it feel like we, too, are melting into this universe of blended bodies, vegetation, water, and earth.

With multiple eyes, faces, and gestures overlapping like small waves on water, WhileAway captures an imperceptible moment and location that the artist does not strive to represent in exact detail but, rather, gives the freedom to evolve

picks February 12, 2023

Jane Jin Kaisen

Transmitted, embodied knowledge is central to the underwater harvesting of the haenyeo, the women divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island. This practice of knowledge sharing allowed the women to be at the forefront of liberation movement during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Jane Jin Kaisen takes up this history in her exhibition “Currents,” in which her newest work, Offering—Coil Embrace, 2023, a four-channel video, commemorates the resistance. Set to the hum of the submarine singing technique used by the fisherwomen, each screen features a separate diver, focusing on their bodies underwater as