Sabrina Mandanici

• 

  picks February 02, 2021

  Fawn Krieger

  Resistance is a manifestation of fierce hope. After Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Fawn Krieger took this notion to heart and into her studio, where she began to make a new body of work by pressing fired, underglazed pieces of clay into ceramic, frame-like troughs, filled with wet, often dyed, cement. Four years and 113 sculptures later, Krieger’s “Experiments in Resistance,” 2017–21—a series of ceramics done in vibrant Atomic Age hues (’50s-bathroom pinks, subdued yellows, and Formica greens)—reads like a record of time, tactility, and emotional perspicacity. Arranged in clusters spanning

• 

  diary October 09, 2019

  In the Wind

  ENCOUNTERS, BY DEFINITION, occur unexpectedly. Woven within the fabric of everyday life, like a tear, an encounter cracks the familiar. But how do you prompt this experience when the “encounters,” as the title of Timișoara’s current Art Encounters Biennial suggests, are expected to happen? One answer: You entwine the mystery of place. Located within the Banat, a geographical and historical region divided between Romania, Serbia, and Hungary, Timișoara has been defined by centuries of migration, both forced and voluntary, and is home to a deeply rooted, at times conflicted, ethnic diversity. (

• 

  previews January 2019

  “GRACIELA ITURBIDE’S MEXICO”

  In these times, when walls literally and symbolically epitomize a perverse, exclusionary outlook on the foreign, the work of Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide strikes with the relentless perspective of an insider. Frustrating the clichés of folklore and the picturesque, Iturbide’s sumptuous black-and-white images reach for the untold stories and overlooked narratives of her home country—its intricate religious and indigenous cultures, conflicting histories, and ever-transitional present. Covering five decades, her first major exhibition on the East Coast unites more than 125 photographs,

• 

  diary July 16, 2018

  Everything Old Is New Again

  ONE REASON I’VE ALWAYS LOVED THIS PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL is the faded splendor of the city itself. An ancient limestone gem of some fifty thousand inhabitants, Arles lies along the Rhône River, bordering the swamps of the Camargue. Should you go, mosquito repellent is a must for Arles’s nights. Roman remnants, such as the arena and the theater, silently compete with early Christian and Romanesque churches. Residential homes and nineteenth-century industrial buildings further bridge the eras. During the opening week at the beginning of July, many of these venues hosted events and workshops, book

• 

  diary April 25, 2018

  Dam It

  I HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR GRITTY CITIES. I don’t mean like Berlin used to be in the nineties (even though I wasn’t there then), but the kind of place that, unless you were born there, you most likely would never end up in, if not for a specific reason that brought you. Picture a small city—its medieval core (a castle, a cathedral, and quite a few churches) surrounded and disrupted by industrial brick buildings, working-class housing, and banal architecture from the 1980s to the mid-aughts; spread it over the banks of a river (the Shannon, to be precise) in refined shades of gray, but without the

• 

  picks September 02, 2015

  Lea Lublin

  If blurring the lines society draws between living and artmaking was a necessity to a generation of artists in the 1960s, Lea Lublin was one who made it a virtue. Displaying the most important works of her creative output of three decades, the first retrospective of this surprisingly unknown French Argentine artist opens with her pink neon sign, L’oeil alerte (The Open Eye), 1991. More than just a glossy statement, it introduces Lublin’s modus operandi of deconstructing not only art-historical imagery but the passive act of looking, when she invites viewers to experience her art via the active

• 

  picks August 04, 2015

  “The Order of Things”

  Thematically organized within three buildings, over a thousand photographs in “The Order of Things” challenge the medium’s standard typologies by interrogating portraiture and object-based inventories. Karl Blossfeldt’s iconic black-and-white botanical close-ups dialogue with J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s series capturing African women’s hairstyles from behind. These natural and human-made architectures, both rich in texture, soft shades, and minute details, set up a direct confrontation with August Sander’s Faces of Our Time, 1910–29, which documents the characteristics of Germans from various classes.

• 

  picks June 09, 2015

  “Conflict, Time, Photography”

  Not just a historical overview of war photography, but a distillation of 150 years of photojournalistic documentation, artistic reflection, and conceptual mediation, “Conflict, Time, Photography” presents the medium’s engagement with the both the physical effects and social aftermath of conflict and war, via the works of sixty-one artists.

  This exhibition’s strength lies in its organization of images not by chronology but rather by the amounts of time elapsed between conflicts and their subsequent depiction—beginning with the immediate, such as Adam Broomberg & Olivier Chanarin’s The Day Nobody

• 

  picks February 19, 2015

  “Picture/Thing”

  If the viewing of photography and sculpture—picture planes and three-dimensional objects—requires distinct sets of perceptual habits, “Picture/Thing” offers a complex investigation that merges them. Curators Sasha Rudensky and Jeffrey Schiff present works by ten artists who employ a variety of approaches to question both media, but all share a certain nostalgia for the physical encounter between subject and object.

  Addressing notions of display and memory, Erin Shirreff’s Monograph (no. 4), 2014, comprises photographs capturing digitally modified images of maquettes inspired by catalogue