Giampaolo Bianconi

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  picks July 06, 2022

  Studio for Propositional Cinema

  Since its inauguration in 2013, Studio for Propositional Cinema had produced work that might be described as paracinematic or paraphotographic—engaging with the material constraints and possibilities of both mediums without necessarily taking a photograph or making a film. For this reason, the collective’s current solo exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, “The Camera of Disaster,” presents an immediate surprise to the viewer: a series of sensuous, large-format black-and-white photographs following three characters through post-apocalyptic land- and cityscapes. 

  Contrary to facile appeals to its

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  interviews March 24, 2021

  Cory Arcangel

  Cory Arcangel’s latest exhibition, “Century 21,” continues his interest in the structural aesthetics of games, exhaustive virtual navigation, and sometimes punishing durations. Its centerpiece is a custom-built machine-learning computer that plays the mobile role-playing game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. This work is exhibited along with an array of live and recorded bot performances, prints, and paintings the artist refers to as “flatware”: high-resolution scans of pants that are printed on IKEA tabletops. Here, Arcangel discusses the four-year process of bringing this exhibition—on view online

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  print March 2021

  An-My Lê

  The photographer An-My Lê’s first American museum survey, “On Contested Terrain,” followed her most consistent subject: the United States military and its impact through both time and space. The precisely installed exhibition offered the opportunity to view each of her photographic series, arranged from newest to oldest, revealing how her works collapse the distinctions between what’s fiction and what isn’t.

  Lê uses antique, large-format wooden cameras, which give her grandly scaled pictures a sense of richness, clarity, and depth that’s worlds away from digital photography. In interviews, the

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  interviews October 08, 2020

  New Red Order

  New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that works with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures, models itself in contradistinction to an older, extant secret society: the Improved Order of the Red Men, an American organization, revived in 1934 as a whites-only fraternity, whose redface rituals and regalia are inspired by the country’s most famous, foundational act of Indigenous appropriation: the donning of Mohawk disguises by the Sons of Liberty during the Boston Tea Party. If America is premised both on desires for indigeneity and the violent

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  print September 2020

  OPENINGS: CLARA IANNI

  THIS PAST SUMMER, Clara Ianni was set to open a solo exhibition ahead of the postponed Thirty-First São Paulo Bienal—a show now lost to history. It is an unfortunate, if oddly appropriate, fate for the artist, whose work in sculpture, video, and performance focuses on episodes forgotten and repressed in Brazilian history. The video Forma livre (Free Form), 2013, for example, tells the story of a little-known episode in the construction of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, when, in 1959, state police massacred a hundred striking workers. Like much of Ianni’s work, that piece reveals the

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  interviews June 22, 2020

  Faith Holland

  In Faith Holland’s work, one is always attuned to the erotics of technology and virtual space: the sensation of stroking a trackpad, tapping a keyboard, or cradling a cell phone are revealed as genuinely intimate acts. Her exhibition “Soft/Hard,” now online and installed in the physical space of Los Angeles’s TRANSFER Gallery, has two parts: “The Most Beautiful Dicks Pics of All Time,” a series of GIFs hosted on Pornhub.com, and “Soft Computing,” a collection of plush sculptures featured in collaborative performances and a vanitas livestream. Here, Holland—who also recently cocurated an ongoing

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  picks May 06, 2020

  Jac Leirner

  Jac Leirner is the consummate accumulator. For decades, the artist has assembled sculptures that gather currency, cigarette packs, shopping bags, business cards, airplane tickets, and more into dense, puckish installations at once corporeal and cerebral. Leirner’s button, 2020, her first work made for the internet, draws on a vast collection of images taken on her cell phone while watching movies and television subtitled in Portuguese. After photographing the frames, the artist arranges them into various subsets—usually based on an element mentioned in the closed captioning—and then fragments

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  interviews April 20, 2020

  Petra Cortright

  Petra Cortright is known for her webcam videos, paintings, and other screen-based works, which—simultaneously cool, playful, and errantly feminist—often toy with the vocabulary of online imagery and self-presentation. Her first webcam video, VVEBCAM, 2007, shows Cortright distractedly cycling through preset video effects and is included in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. An exhibition of new digital paintings, “borderline aurora borealis,” opened at Team Gallery in New York City on March 5 before closing early due to the coronavirus pandemic. Below, the artist discusses webcam cinematography, the