Gürsoy Doğtaş

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  picks January 12, 2023

  Belkis Ayón

  “Ya Estamos Aquí” (We’re Here Already), the first survey exhibition in Germany by the Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967–1999), features nearly seventy works from the mid-1980s to the late ’90s illustrating the characters and legends related to Abakuá, a magical and religious male secret society that originated in Nigeria and Cameroon and was brought to Cuba in the nineteenth century by enslaved people. For years Ayón was preoccupied by the story of Sikán, a mythological princess and the only female figure in Abakuá lore, according to which she discovered a worshipped spirit in the form of a fish

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  picks May 14, 2021

  Dilşad Aladağ and Eda Aslan

  In 2015, forgoing any kind of public consultation, the Turkish government allocated the botanical garden of Istanbul University, a supposedly protected object of cultural heritage, to the Directorate for Religious Affairs, which in turn ceded the property to the Office of the Mufti, the country’s highest Islamic legal authority. By the time these developments became public in 2017, officials had already decided to raze the garden and use its site to reconstruct the Ottoman-era building of the Bâb-ı Meşîhat, the residence of the highest Islamic religious scholar. At this point, artists and

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  picks April 30, 2021

  Patricia L. Boyd

  In “Hold,” Patricia L. Boyd turns the white cube inside out. For “Minutes, hours, or days,” 2021, the artist exposed large sheets of photosensitive paper to ambient light from her apartment windows, installing the results beneath the high windows of the main hall so as to suggest a kind of ghost architecture, one whose visibility fluctuates with the play of sun and shadow in the gallery, devoid of artificial light. Other interventions rely on spatial caesurae, as in Incubator, 2021, for which the artist has installed floor-to-ceiling panes rendering part of the Kunstverein inaccessible. Together,

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  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

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  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

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  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