Nuit Banai

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  picks January 12, 2022

  “Spinning East Asia Series I: A Compass in Hand”

  Showcasing fifteen individuals and collectives working within an expanded notion of textiles, “Spinning East Asia Series I: A Compass in Hand” explores the titular region as a sociopolitical, geographic, and cultural construct.

  Locally, Lau Chi Chung’s installation The Dayspring of Eternity, 2021, gathers mementos from Hong Kong’s North Point neighborhood: A hand-embroidered panorama of Shanghai’s Bund evokes the settlers of the 1940s and ’50s who brought with them cosmopolitan mores, while photographs of the derelict State Theater Building, built by George W. Grey and Lun So-Fo in 1952 and closed

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  picks November 06, 2021

  Katie Ho and Isabella Isabella

  Katie Ho’s “Domestic Landscape” and Isabella Isabella’s “Death is the calling of a seashell witch” may be billed as dual solo exhibitions, but together these two shows offer a cohesive meditation on the disjointed and lonely search for intimacy in conditions of confinement.

  Clustered in a single custom-built room, Ho’s installation Domestic Landscape, 2021, echoes the artist’s experience “tackling endless tedious things, day and night,” after becoming a full-time mother. Rendered in acrylic on watercolor paper mounted on wood, the brightly colored compositions of tightly wound abstract forms—I

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  print October/November 2020

  Radenko Milak

  The black-and-white watercolors in Radenko Milak’s exhibition “Sideratio” were made between February and April of this year, while the artist was confined to his home in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, watching the Covid-19 pandemic unfold globally via the screen. As the exhibition’s emotional compass, the Latin title—referring to the malign influence of a particular configuration of the stars, and, more recently, as explained in the press release, a state of numbness resulting from a traumatic event—suggested a personal starting point for broader reflection. To document and potentially

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  picks July 27, 2020

  Liesl Raff

  To enter this exhibition requires crossing the physical and symbolic threshold of a steel, latex, and palm leaf structure resembling a hastily constructed cabana roof and suspended at a forty-five-degree angle to the gallery’s front facade. For this work, titled Transition 3 (all works 2020), Liesl Raff rubbed silicone oil into the tensile latex and sprinkled talcum powder onto the brittle palm fronds, taking care to modulate the materials’ hue and moisture. Framed by this mise-en-scène, the exhibition explores how a post-Minimalist lexicon might create intermediary states in daily life. 

  Take,

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  print July/August 2020

  Milica Tomić

  In her research-based practice of the past twenty years, Milica Tomić has delved into various historical and national contexts in which the suspension of laws and civic culture became a long-term strategy to manage the life and death of populations. Opening just before the Austrian government enacted strict measures to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, her exhibition “The Small Letter ‘a’” was a poignant intervention in this attenuated time.

  As a focal point, her installation The Museum in Suspension, 2020, paid tribute to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, a modernist icon designed in 1960

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  print May/June 2020

  Luisa Kasalicky

  It was difficult to approach Luisa Kasalicky’s “Tiefschlaf in der Stadt” (Deep Sleep in the City) without thinking of Adolf Loos, the preeminent Viennese architect of modernity. His polemic “Ornament and Crime,” published in 1913, was a seminal denunciation of the Secessionist idiom: the Art Nouveau style still associated with the city’s turn-of-the-century avant-gardism. Arguing on both moral and economic grounds, Loos claimed that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.” Just over a century later, in works dating from between 2014 and

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  slant April 02, 2020

  Letter from Vienna

  LAST MONTH WAS SUPPOSED TO MARK the grand opening of the Albertina Modern in Vienna. Instead, the city’s last public gathering took place just days before the museum’s scheduled opening, on March 8, when the Croatian curatorial collective What, How, and for Whom (WHW) inaugurated their exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien with nearly two thousand visitors who hugged, kissed, drank, and sang songs of solidarity with the self-organized anti-fascist polyglot choir Hor 29. Novembar. Since then, the habitually sleepy capital of the Alpine state has gone into a state of near-total social and civil hibernation.

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  print April 2020

  “Transferumbau: Liebling”

  A collaboration between the Liebling Haus in Tel Aviv and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Dessau, Germany, “Transferumbau” (Transfer Rebuild) was the outcome of a three-year research project conducted by the curator Hila Cohen-Schneiderman and the artists Ilit Azoulay, Lou Moria, Nir Shauloff, and Jonathan Touitou. The exhibition, appearing concurrently in both cities, took its cue from the Haavara Agreement, a controversial deal made in 1933 between Zionist organizations and Nazi Germany that allowed the most affluent of the country’s Jewish population to leave for Mandatory Palestine and

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  print February 2020

  Adrian Paci

  Spending time in Adrian Paci’s survey exhibition “Prova” (Test) in the days following the earthquake that shook Albania in November 2019 felt both strange and apt. The artist, who was born in the northern Albanian city of Shkodër and is now based in Milan, presented a range of works dating from 1999 to 2019. Among them were two pieces from the photographic series “Back Home,” 2001, showing individuals and families who emigrated from Albania placed before depictions of the homes they left behind; Home to Go, 2001, a white marble-dust and resin sculpture of a hunched man weighed down by the tiled

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  print January 2020

  Dina Shenhav

  Developed by the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1970s, the Merkava is a battle tank used widely in Israel’s military operations. It was recognized by the American conservative magazine The National Interest as one of the five deadliest tanks in the world. Dina Shenhav’s sculpture Merkava (Chariot), 2019, appearing in an exhibition of the same title, occupied a vast portion of the gallery space with its impressive scale and meticulously detailed surfaces. Yet this model had been hand-fabricated entirely of foam (with a wood armature) and thus deprived of its lethal force. The malleability of the

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  print December 2019

  Piotr Lakomy

  Piotr Łakomy’s conceit for his solo exhibition “Fenix” was simple: What would it be like to share a studio with Edward Krasiński? Since the renowned Conceptual artist died in 2004 and Łakomy’s studio is nearly two hundred miles away, in the Polish city of Poznań, this meant creating a provisional and highly symbolic cohabitation at the Avant-Garde Institute, which organized the show in collaboration with Warsaw’s Galeria Stereo. Established by the Foksal Gallery Foundation the year of Krasiński’s death, the Avant-Garde Institute preserves his studio apartment and makes the collection of works

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  picks October 15, 2019

  Yael Yudkovik

  In “The Annual Conference on the Prevention and Care of Pressure Ulcers,” Yael Yudkovik tries to develop a visual language through which to represent the suffering experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis in a political conflict that seems to have neither an end nor a resolution. The titular mixed-media installation includes rows of skateboards decorated with keffiyeh scarves, a totemic wooden sculpture with attached butcher knives, a concrete block facing a photographic image of its replica, a mobile blackboard with aphorisms written in Arabic script, and various figurations of Palestinian