Olamiju Fajemisin

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  print November 2022

  Cinzia Ruggeri

  Three years after the death of avant-garde designer and artist Cinzia Ruggeri, the first retrospective exhibition of her oeuvre, “Cinzia says . . . ,” offered a sprawling landscape. On view were ready-to-wear and bespoke garments and art objects—as well as some pieces between categories, such as Stivali Italia (Italy Boots), 1986, a pair of wearable green-leather high-heeled boots shaped like the Italian Peninsula, accompanied by matching Sicily and Sardinia clutch bags and positioned as they would appear on a map—as if setting out the contents of some cosmopolitan eccentric’s trousseau.

  The show

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  print September 2022

  Affective Proximity

  ARTHUR JAFA REFUSES TO BOW to the needy chorus, whose tired refrain (“What are you trying to say?”) is blind to the fact that his growing oeuvre is less concerned with producing another transcribable dissertation on the condition of the so-called Black body than with manipulating intermedial tensions between objecthood and subjecthood, articulation and comprehension, and functionality and signification. “Live Evil,” at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, is the most comprehensive presentation of Jafa’s work to date, continuing his scrutiny of the oxymoron derived from Thelma Golden’s idea that

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  picks April 11, 2022

  “Closer”

  A schematic diagram of temporary walls demarcates the six axes of “CLOSER,” a group show curated by the Kunstverein’s new director, Kathrin Bentele. Scaled to fit a 16:9 image projection, the rectangular panels are installed as a series of partial enclosures, like miniature cinemas, warranting a proximate encounter with each position. The selected works orbit the idea of intimacy across interpersonal and technological dimensions, offering correspondent takes on the conditions of communication by proxy.

  James Benning honors the legacies of seven American outsider artists and an imagined prehistoric

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  print November 2021

  “War Inna Babylon”

  The undead corpse of empire—wraithlike Babylon—breeds violence and contempt. I must implore those who were keen to term “War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights” an “urgent” or “timely” exhibition to question exactly why this moment best served to accommodate such a show. Is it because the multimedia exhibition, arguably the most extensive presentation of Black British community grassroots activism produced to date, culminated in the first institutional presentation of The Killing of Mark Duggan, 2019, an investigation by Goldsmiths, University of London–based human

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  print October 2021

  Hamishi Farah

  In late July 1609, Sea Venture, an English ship transporting colonists to the New World on her maiden voyage, was steered into a coral reef in the aftermath of a tempest, just days away from her destination of Jamestown, Virginia. Somehow, all 150 passengers survived, inadvertently settling Bermuda as they waded to shore. Among them was a dog, the ship’s mascot, which, according to the press release for this exhibition, later became a symbol of collective resistance against the Virginia Company (a corporate entity seeking to establish settlements on the coast of North America) and thus, too, an