interviews June 12, 2020

Alicja Kwade

Guided by scientific principles, Alicja Kwade breaks complex structures into comprehensible segments while shrouding her art in a mystery both cosmic and human. Last spring, she installed two large-scale sculptures modeling the solar system on top of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for its Roof Garden Commission series. Comprised of heavy, delicately suspended stones from around the world, the abstract orrery encouraged viewers to reflect on their own position within a massive yet fragile universe. Working under partial lockdown in Berlin, the artist discusses the nature of time under

picks March 24, 2020

Basma Alsharif

Basma Alsharif’s exhibition here centers around A Philistine (2019), a novella written by the artist that tracks a train journey down the historic Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli line that moves backwards through history at each stop. In the middle of the main gallery, a public reading space offers visitors the opportunity to situate themselves within this narrative of transience. A Philistine includes historic images of pre-1948 Palestine taken from the Library of Congress; these are also displayed on the walls surrounding the miniature library. Alsharif, herself a member of the Palestinian diaspora, has

interviews February 07, 2020

Eva Koťátková

Eva Koťátková is known for investigating societal rules and authoritarian codes via large-scale installations and collaborative workshops. While her earlier work centered on limiting performers’ physical movement with metal cages and apparatuses—bleak exercises in regimentation inspired in part by her upbringing in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic—Koťátková has begun to use textiles to reenvision how the body can function within oppressive systems. As two solo exhibitions end their run—“In the Body of a Fish Out of Water” at Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover and “Confessions of the Piping System”

picks November 26, 2019

Olivia Mihălțianu

Vines of found film hang from the walls of a nineteenth-century house in Bucharest, transforming its rooms into a jungle of negatives. The installation is part of Romanian artist Olivia Mihălțianu’s new exhibition, which she conceived of during a residency at Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou. Wandering through the institution’s gardens, Mihălțianu became entranced by the relationship between plant grafting and film cutting. She began to document these conjoined processes, her work displayed here side-by-side as a two-channel video and in a series of photographs of the garden’s grafted

Jonah Goldman Kay