picks January 05, 2021

Maya Schweizer

By training her camera on everyday places, film essayist Maya Schweizer conjures the lingering memory of atrocities, reworking B-roll into a kind of metaphor for the diffuse yet ubiquitous nature of unofficial historical narratives. Screening eleven videos made across thirteen years, this exhibition, simply but aptly titled “Voices,” shows how the artist has persistently prevented the past from coming to rest. In Passing Down, Frame One, 2007, the earliest short on display, an audio track featuring the patchy recollections of Schweizer’s Jewish grandmother—who narrowly escaped deportation from

picks July 26, 2020

Sung Tieu

A disturbing calm emanates from Sung Tieu’s Zugzwang, 2020, an installation whose title refers to a German term used in chess when a player is forced to make a disadvantageous move. Appropriate, then, that the aura of Tieu’s space hovers between that of a registration office waiting room and penal institution. Monumental black shelves—minimally stocked with an open photo album, charms like a one-cent piece in a red case, and a small family of chocolate ladybugs—face each other at a distance. Slightly offset, they form an axis aside a huge executive desk and an imposing, ergonomic armchair and

picks April 24, 2020

Flaka Haliti

Like a vivarium, Flaka Haliti’s exhibition here sets the stage for two obscure humanoid creatures from the eternal darkness of the deep sea. Surrounded by what evokes recycled plastic or a thin membrane of water, they hang flatly, freely, like clothes on a hanger from the galvanized conduits. Light is refracted through the surface to form ripples perpendicular to gravitational pull. Underneath, small puddles of blue sand have accumulated.

Haliti’s iridescent creatures made of polyurethane resin, installed next to six snapshots of the empty sea roaring at full moon (Watchu expect me to do when I

Gürsoy Doğtaş