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

print Summer 2019

Genti Korini

Despite its title, Genti Korini’s exhibition “Notes from the Upperground” had nothing to do with Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Here, the “upperground” refers to the remarkable headstones that memorialize the lives of everyday people laid to rest in the cemeteries of Tirana, Albania. Korini’s almost-life-size color photographs, sharing the same title as the exhibition (all works 2019), withhold the particularities of the departed by documenting the reverse side of each headstone. Filling the main space of Bazament (a literally underground project room struggling to give visibility to artists in Albania,

print December 2018

Steirischer Herbst

(Web exclusive content)

With symposia, concerts, screenings, readings, installations, and performances happening in over twenty-five venues across the city of Graz, this year’s steirischer herbst revived the specters of fascism and its dissenters while addressing important questions about the shape-shifting, contradictory nature of the contemporary commons. Curated by Ekaterina Degot and titled Volksfronten (Popular Fronts), its vast artistic program, which included almost seven hundred participants, disrupted historical and contemporary forms of universality—and their accompanying “

print May 2018

MEMORY LOSS

IN ŽILINA, a gray industrial city in northwestern Slovakia, stands the Nová Synagóga, a Neolog synagogue designed by the illustrious German architect Peter Behrens (1868–1940). Constructed between 1928 and 1931, the building blends historicism and modernism: The pronounced dome, inscribed with a golden ornamental motif of the Star of David, is reminiscent of the previous generation’s taste for Byzantine-inspired synagogues; its severe rectilinear exterior and relatively monochromatic facade, meanwhile, broadcast the building’s association with the International Style. Able to house 450 men and

print February 2018

École(S) de Nice

IN 1961, Yves Klein, one of Nice’s most famous sons, heralded the coastal metropolis’s significance in a global art landscape. Delivering a prescient conjecture about our present moment, the artist who had notoriously “signed” the azure sky of Nice as his first artwork announced: “I see a new art axis: Nice–Los Angeles–Tokyo; we will be joined by China.”

More than fifty years after this pronouncement, and only a year and a half after the Bastille Day terrorist attack on the city’s iconic Promenade des Anglais, Klein’s hometown staged an ambitious series of exhibitions across four separate venues,

previews January 2018

Judith Hopf

Judith Hopf is the first to note that her art emerges from a particular historical constellation: Nurtured in the Berlin scene of the early 1990s, she is invested in an expanded field of “post-painting” practices, collective production, and social engagement, which she infuses with a blend of comedy and critique. It is no accident that her brick and laptop sculptures, prime examples of such idiosyncratic combinations, will be central to the KW exhibition. This former margarine factory in the Mitte district became the city’s pioneering institution of

previews January 2018

“Arieh Sharon: The State’s Architect”

Born in Poland in 1900 as Ludwig Kurzmann, Arieh Sharon immigrated to Palestine in his teens, and then moved to Germany to study architecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1926. After working in the Berlin office of Hannes Meyer, Sharon went on to design more than six hundred projects before his death in 1984. Appointed by David Ben-Gurion to head the Department of Planning in 1948, the architect spearheaded the “Physical Plan for Israel,” commonly known as the Sharon Plan, which assimilated the thousands of Jewish immigrants arriving in the Middle East and contributed to

previews January 2018

“Kader Attia: The field of emotion”

For more than two decades, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has used different media—including sculpture, installation, photography, and video—to develop the concept of repair as an “endless process of intellectual, cultural, and political adjustments.” At the crux of Attia’s investigation is the strategy of reappropriation, a tactic illuminated in a wide constellation of historical references, such as the writings of Frantz Fanon. Attia’s far-reaching, intersectional practice transverses historical and cultural axes, pointing to the

print September 2017

BORDER AS FORM

INAUGURATED BY ARNOLD BODE in 1955 in the bombed-out ruins of Kassel, a formerly industrial city that ended up on the eastern fringes of what had newly become West Germany, Documenta was famously intended to heal the wounds of recent European history by affirming the continuity of (Western) modernism. At the core of this civilizing mission was abstraction, whose formal language became a symbol of individualism and artistic freedom, and a means to differentiate West from East in the early years of the Cold War. Kassel thus became the stage for the construction of the contemporary in relation to

print February 2017

Sharon Ya’ari

In the exhibition “Officers’ Pool,” Sharon Ya’ari continued his long-standing consideration of photography’s double capacity to function as both a documentary mechanism and an intervention in reality. Building on this paradoxical multivalence, the show investigated the complex relationship between image production and nation building by juxtaposing two distinct bodies of work featuring landscapes of Israel from different historical periods and geographical locations.

In the main space, the artist exhibited a series of photographs that originated as slides taken by anonymous amateur photographers,

print December 2016

Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada’s video Faux départ (False Start), 2015—an investigation of the artisanal production of fake fossils—served as something like an establishing shot for her recent exhibition “The Sample Book.” The film follows the exacting methods used to fabricate historical specimens in a location somewhere “between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara desert,” and considers why specific modes of labor have cropped up to meet the needs of particular capitalist markets. Though we do not witness a single transaction—the camera is closely focused on the physical strain and remarkable skill

previews September 2016

“Conditions of Political Choreography”

Mining the current intensification of nationalism in Germany and Israel, this collaboration between Tel Aviv’s CCA and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein explores the political and formal limits of belonging, artistic disciplines, and imposed structures through performative interventions. Each iteration of this show will include an arena (built by architect Markus Miessen for the CCA and by artist Ohad Meromi for the NBK) delineating the spatial parameters in which a multigenerational cast of artists, theorists, dancers, and

previews May 2016

“Ragnar Kjartansson: Architecture and Morality”

For this solo exhibition, Ragnar Kjartansson will take up plein air painting, producing one work each day as he did at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Depicting Israeli homes in the West Bank, Kjartansson inserts a methodology inscribed with nineteenth-century European male privilege into the context of the contemporary Middle East. His intervention raises the question of whether a historic practice that entangles landscape and subjectivity might help clarify a political situation in which the pictured territory is the contested site of national identification for both Israelis

print April 2016

Anna Jermolaewa

Is it possible to preserve the collective memories of Communism in Russia after its transition to turbocapitalism? And what about in a conflict-ridden Ukraine caught between allegiances to East and West? While Anna Jermolaewa is not alone in posing such questions about the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, her most compelling work brings to the fore the role that monuments—both heroic and commonplace—play in constructing and safeguarding a sociohistorical and cultural public sphere that has been rapidly disappearing since the 1990s.

Jermolaewa’s recent installation Leninopad

print February 2016

Natalia Załuska

Some populist North American critics have used the moniker “zombie formalism” to describe recent abstract painting. This begs the question: Does that venerable modernist mode still have critical potential in a moment of extreme financialization of art production? Natalia Załuska’s response is an attempt to reclaim abstraction’s historical mandate as a material intervention into collectively organized perceptual processes and techniques. The works in her recent exhibition, all Untitled, 2015, are constructed from pieces of cardboard of various thickness and dimensions affixed to canvases or

print Summer 2015

Carola Dertnig

In Vienna, the ghost of Actionism appears at regular intervals—whether in the form of pride in this homegrown avant-garde or disdain for its phallocentric ways. The iconic films and photographs of bodily aggressions and transgressions—both real and fictive—that defined this movement are vividly inscribed into the collective artistic unconscious in a country still contending with its wartime complicity with National Socialism and its deeply entrenched patriarchal structures. Carola Dertnig’s recent exhibition “. . . at least I did not rob a bank . . .” tried to move away from this

print April 2015

Wilfredo Prieto and Ariel Schlesinger

Wilfredo Prieto and Ariel Schlesinger’s double billing of new sculptures and installations marked a fascinating development in the articulation of Conceptual art. Reframing the conversation surrounding the so-called dematerialization of the art object within contemporary debates on labor, the exhibition “Hiding Wood in Trees” presented works by two artists of the same generation, showing together for the first time, who strategically harness humor to decontextualize common objects or estrange an audience’s perceptions of quotidian acts.

Ascension (all works 2014) was the first work to greet the

print February 2015

Cosima von Bonin

Was there a critical entry point into Cosima von Bonin’s reference-laden retrospective, or have we reached a historical condition in which the “handmade readymade”—a couture item especially manufactured for the museological context that also refers to the stream of mass-produced commodities—is all we have at our disposal? The exhibition’s title, “Hippies Use the Side Door. The Year 2014 Has Lost the Plot,” offered a heavy-handed hint. Since, for a time, only the side doors to the museum were open, anyone who accessed the building during this period was automatically branded a

print May 2014

Suara Welitoff

Since the visual devices in Suara Welitoff’s photographs and video—subtle shades of gray and muddled focal points—are often employed to signal nostalgia, the artist’s recent exhibition “Sometimes Time Trembles” can all too hastily be reduced to an “elegy” for time passed. And while the dreaminess of Welitoff’s images may inspire a meditation on the elusiveness of duration, we should be wary of pigeonholing them as operating in the register of melancholy. Instead, imbricating incompatible data systems that code, capture, and transmit tenuous sensory experience, her images reveal points

print March 2014

Carlos Jiménez Cahua

In his witty Boston solo debut, Carlos Jiménez Cahua added a new twist to a long-standing philosophical quandary: Can art capture and communicate sensations, images, and systems that are normally imperceptible? That the artist answered in the affirmative is perhaps less remarkable than the way in which his compendium of simple gestures was wedded to some of the building blocks of globalization to produce surprising visual effects.

Identified by the gallery as a digital video, Untitled #102 (all works cited, 2013) might be better described as a three-and-a-half-hour durational performance by a

Nuit Banai