Murtaza Vali

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  print March 2023

  CLOSE -UP: AT FIRST LIGHT

  TAKEN AT DAWN on a large-format Linhof Technika four-by-five camera, Hrair Sarkissian’s Execution Squares, 2008, show intersections in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Damascus, and Latakia where criminals were publicly hanged; many of these sites have been used for this specific purpose since the Ottoman period. The suite of fourteen photographs was inspired by the artist’s childhood memory of encountering three suspended corpses on his way to school one morning, an image so indelibly imprinted on his psyche that it continues to haunt the ways in which he navigates his home city of Damascus.

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  print November 2022

  Natalie Ball

  Natalie Ball, an artist of Native American (both Modoc and Klamath) and African descent, is drawn to assemblage. She crafts raucous wall hangings and wily sculptures out of materials sourced in and around her home in Chiloquin, Oregon. Some of these items, such as beads, quilts, various textiles, animal hides, and bones, carry great ancestral significance. Others come from the realm of synthetic consumer kitsch, including cowboy paraphernalia, varsity letters, and images of sports mascots. All of these things present her lifeworld without necessarily explaining it. For Ball, the value of assemblage

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  print September 2022

  Tuan Andrew Nguyen

  Working primarily in film and sculpture, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, seeks to give visibility and voice to displaced and marginalized communities, often through the use of what theorist Marianne Hirsch has called “testimonial objects,” i.e., physical repositories of memory that retain the agency to narrate these recollections. Tackling the lingering trauma of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of this exhibition—which also featured a selection of sculptures and photographs—was The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022, a feature-length film shot in the

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  print April 2022

  Chitra Ganesh

  Through a practice anchored in (though not limited to) drawing, Chitra Ganesh has developed a sophisticated iconography and lively illustrative style that synthesizes myriad references to South Asian mythology and religion, comic books, pulp and science fiction, Bollywood posters, and feminist and queer history and theory. Ganesh’s exhibition here, “Nightswimmers,” processed and responded to the profound shifts experienced during the widespread lockdowns that characterized the pandemic’s early months, when life suddenly came to a terrifying and isolating standstill. In contrast to the unruliness

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  print February 2022

  Jitish Kallat

  Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat toys with scale, often collapsing the infinitesimal and the infinite, the commonplace and the cosmic, into a single object. In the past, he presented the phases of the moon as pieces of roti, a whole-wheat flatbread that is a staple across much of the Indian subcontinent, and transformed close-ups of fruit into celestial fields with lenticular lenses. Yet regardless of perspective, the human, as image and/or condition, remains a central concern, as the three distinct but interrelated series that constituted Kallat’s exhibition here demonstrated.

  The scale, format,

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  interviews January 17, 2022

  Sreshta Rit Premnath

  Sreshta Rit Premnath abstracts materials associated with the architecture and institutions of confinement and control—chain-link fencing, metal barriers, aluminum sheets, Mylar blankets, foam mattresses—into floating signifiers that he recombines into installations at once topographical and quietly theatrical. Below, Premnath discusses two related exhibitions, both titled “Grave/Grove” and currently on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center until February 13, 2022, and Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center until February 27, 2022, where his austere sculptures become unlikely hosts to various

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  print November 2021

  Hugh Hayden

  Sculptor Hugh Hayden has enjoyed quick success, his work interrogating the idea of the American dream, often symbolized through the kitchen table, to explore class, aspiration, and the African origins of American cuisine, especially in the South. Hayden’s strength lies in his skillful use of wood—specific types of which he often sources from particular places for their cultural and historical import—as both material and symbol. His exhibition here, titled after his pet name, “Huey,” drew on memories of his Texas upbringing to tackle the knotty subject of African American childhood through

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  print October 2021

  Mohammed Chabâa

  Organized by Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa for Paris-based Zamân Books & Curating as a follow-up to the traveling retrospective of Mohamed Melehi, “Visual Consciousness” was the first retrospective of Mohammed Chabâa (1935–2013) outside his native Morocco. Bringing together six decades worth of paintings, sculptures, graphic art, interior-design models, and archival material, it revealed the depth, complexity, and influence of Chabâa’s multifaceted practice as an artist, designer, and pedagogue.

  Born in Tangier, Chabâa, like Melehi, belonged to a generation of artists who grew up under colonial rule but

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  picks December 18, 2019

  Jordan Nassar

  Tatreez is a centuries-old Palestinian form of cross-stitch embroidery, most commonly practiced by women. Its motifs range from wholly abstract patterns to stylized representations of local flora and fauna. Following the Nakba, in 1948, tatreez grew in importance as a national and political symbol, its resonance heightened by the growing precarity of the Palestinian state itself.

  Jordan Nassar uses this medium to investigate the complexities of how members of a diaspora relate to the land of their origin. Rosetta, 2015, the oldest work in this show, is a white-on-white sampler of riffs on

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  print November 2019

  LIGHTNING STRIKES

  THE UNDENIABLE SHOWSTOPPER of this spring’s Sharjah Biennial was filmmaker and artist Kidlat Tahimik’s gallery-filling installation Ang Ma-bagyong Sabungan ng 2 Bathala ng Hangin, A Stormy Clash Between 2 Goddesses of the Winds (WW III–the Protracted Kultur War), 2019. Packed with gods and icons, fantastical beasts, human figures, and other sculptural elements carved out of salvaged wood or woven in rattan, the work imagines an epic standoff between the forces of indigenous resistance and American cultural imperialism, writing a mythic tale around colonial violence and the vicissitudes of

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  print November 2019

  T. C. Cannon

  The painter T. C. Cannon (1946–1978) was only thirty-one when he was killed in a car accident in Santa Fe, New Mexico, leaving behind a startlingly mature body of work that deserves wider recognition. Like that of many American Indians, his art has long been marginalized; this retrospective, curated by Karen Kramer, sought to remedy that injustice.

  Some of the show’s earliest canvases were completed near the end of Cannon’s time at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the tribal arts college established in 1962 that quickly became a hotbed for radical politics and avant-garde

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  print November 2019

  Tallur L. N.

  Tallur L. N. makes quixotic sculptures and installations that draw on India’s rich tradition of figurative sculpture, recontextualizing this almost clichéd iconography to wryly critique transformations in the country’s society and culture. This comprehensive survey includes works produced over the past thirteen years and two new works inspired by fragments of medieval sandstone sculptures from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Contemporary replicas of classical sculptures are common in India, where they serve both ceremonial and decorative purposes. Tallur frequently subjects