Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

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  slant April 07, 2015

  Neverending Story

  A TRAUMATIC EVENT is one that defies our ability to tell what happened and at the same time sets off the desperate compulsion to do so, or at least to try, over and over, however awkward, until a story begins to take hold. A sharp, sudden eruption of violence—a war, an explosion, an attack—both does damage and repairs, by triggering the impulse to explain it, assign it meaning, and make it fit within the wider story we tell ourselves about the worlds in which we live.

  In the months that have passed since three young men, two of them ex-convicts, gunned down the staff of a satirical magazine and

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  print April 2015

  Taysir Batniji and Anna Boghiguian

  Anna Boghiguian is an artist with a wild style and singular vision, yet her dense, visceral drawings and scattershot installations play surprisingly well with others. In 2012, she shared a room with Charlotte Salomon at Documenta 13 in Kassel. The next year, she joined Goshka Macuga for an exhibition at Iniva in London. For her first major show in Beirut, Boghiguian (an Armenian-Egyptian nomad presently based in Cairo) was paired up with Taysir Batniji, a Gaza-born, Paris-based artist who might seem diametrically opposed to her in every way.

  Along the south side of the gallery, Boghiguian’s messy,

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  film January 14, 2015

  Price of Freedom

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, the Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh took a dangerous journey from the rebel-held city of Douma to his hometown of Raqqa, now the headquarters of the so-called Islamic State, across the border to southern Turkey and on to Istanbul. One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation and widely considered the sage of the Syrian revolution (hakim al-thawra), Haj Saleh had been in hiding for two years. When he won a Prince Claus Award in 2012, he delivered his acceptance speech—an eloquent response to the twinned questions: why revolt and why write—from an undisclosed location

• previews January 2015

  “Ahmet Öğüt: Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating”

  In recent years, Ahmet Öğüt has auctioned off a self-portrait titled Punch This Painting, 2010; created a school for (and taught by) asylum seekers (the Silent University); legally exchanged the letters of his name with artist Nina Katchadourian; and twinned himself to his colleague Cevdet Erek. For this exhibition, Öğüt will revisit nearly a decade of his comical yet critical collaborations by constructing a television studio as a single, durational work. In it, he will stage a public debate among people he has worked with—all from non-art

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  picks July 09, 2014

  “A Museum of Immortality”

  Rounding out the third edition of Ashkal Alwan’s experimental art school, “A Museum of Immortality” is the last in a series of exhibitions anchoring a curriculum developed by the artists Anton Vidokle and Jalal Toufic. The show is based on a concept by Boris Groys, and actually tries to realize the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov’s wild notion of “The Common Task,” whereby a heady, hallucinatory mix of science, technology, political circumstance, and spiritual fervor reimagines the museum as a space for resurrecting the dead and immortalizing all mankind.

  With the help of more than fifty

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  print Summer 2014

  Rasheed Araeen

  Rasheed Araeen’s “Before and After Minimalism” pulls viewers through the initial twenty years of his career, with drawings, paintings, and sculptures from 1953 through 1973; it also includes a new work, Sharjah Blues, 2014, which was commissioned especially for the show. Araeen’s first major exhibition in the Middle East is thus neither a dutiful retrospective nor a comprehensive survey. Rather, the show reads like a highly compelling story hinging, by necessity, on spare language and a dramatically pared-down plot.

  Born in Karachi, Pakistan, and based in London, Araeen is now seventy-nine years

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  diary April 27, 2014

  Truth and Consequence

  IN HIS BLISTERING critique of colonialism in Africa, the revolutionary Martinican writer Frantz Fanon made a curious if counterintuitive observation about the Arab world: For all the appeal of Arab nationalism and the renaissance in arts and letters that were accruing political currency in Fanon’s time, the region was, and remains, deeply divided by its experience of occupation, independence, state formation, and trade.

  “The political regimes of certain Arab states are so different,” wrote Fanon, two-thirds of the way through The Wretched of the Earth, “and so far away from each other in their

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  diary March 27, 2014

  Global Affair

  A FRIEND WHO goes to far more art fairs than I do once told me the atmosphere of Art Dubai was so gauche and ostentatious that it made the flash of Art Basel Miami Beach look as bookish as Documenta. A curator for a mainstream American museum, he meant it in a disparaging way, of course, and for a good long decade, Dubai has inspired exactly that animosity and ill will. It is in many ways a fake and wretched place, and Dubai bashing is not only easy but also self-evident. The rest of my friends—including those who live there, grew up there, and have gone there for work, autonomy, or escape—tend

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  diary March 17, 2014

  Everyone’s a Critic

  ALTHOUGH IT SLIPPED into the same week as the Whitney Biennial, the Armory Show, a fistful of ancillary fairs, and the start of the spring season for virtually all of New York’s galleries and museums, the opening of “Critical Machines,” an exhibition and conference on the future of art magazines (in print and online), faced its toughest competition from none of those mainstream art-world monoliths. What pulled people away from an otherwise erudite encounter with the editors of October, Cabinet, Bidoun, e-flux, Ibraaz, and Red Thread, among others, was a single political protest, which brought

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  print March 2014

  OPENINGS: JUMANA MANNA

  FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, Jerusalem has been known as a site of religious fervor: a place revered, set apart as sacred. Yet this rarefied status has also made the city vulnerable. An object of desire throughout history, Jerusalem has repeatedly fallen to conquerors, crusaders, and colonial attacks. Sundered and rebuilt over and over, it inspires passionate beliefs but also entrenched superstitions, wild fantasies, and hysterical delusions. These layered mythologies and pathologies are the chosen subject of the artist Jumana Manna, who has fearlessly used the videos, photographs, and sculptures

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  print March 2014

  Stan Douglas

  In the spring of 1974, a coup d’état in Portugal sent the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar tumbling from power. Salazar himself had died some years earlier, having suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1968, when he reportedly fell from a chair. His colleagues in the Estado Novo party were not only right-wing and repressive but were also increasingly unable to manage Portugal’s far-flung colonies. When the junta finally seized hold of the state, it simply cut those colonies loose. And so, like the dominoes of Arab autocracies in a more recent season of supposed reawakening and rebirth,

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  print February 2014

  Malerie Marder

  Fifteen years ago this spring, a group show opened at a little uptown gallery with a very long name. “Another Girl, Another Planet,” at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art, featured the work of thirteen photographers—twelve of them young women—who were disregarding the documentary functions of photography to create more cinematic constructions exploring drama, seduction, and sexual desire. Organized by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and accompanied by a short story from the novelist A. M. Homes, it was a lightning bolt of an exhibition, one that struck something