Sylvie Fortin

• 

  picks November 28, 2018

  Bojan Fajfrić

  Bojan Fajfrić’s exhibition “Unfinished Business” presents three related videos, weaving a story that starts on the street and defies any linear or cyclical model of time. The Confluence, 2012–18, reworks national-television footage of Belgrade’s 1988 Brotherhood and Unity Rally, its aerial views capturing people flowing into the site, forming a dense flags-and-banners-waving crowd. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’s 1976 piece “Harvest Time” serves as a soundtrack to the footage, its title underscoring The Confluence’s lesson: We may reap what we sow, but the harvest is unpredictable. The meandering

• 

  picks October 03, 2018

  Gaëlle Choisne

  Visitors to Gaëlle Choisne’s latest exhibition are greeted by a pair of black sneakers splattered with white plaster and an unplugged two-burner hot plate daubed with pink wax. These transitional objects sit together on the low concrete platform of the gallery’s welcome desk, wry emblems of mobility and of the artist’s institutional appropriation. The arrangement, Ghost Process (all works 2018), also introduces the motifs of doubling, echo, and relay present in “TEMPLE OF LOVE.”

  Choisne worked on-site for four weeks, first gesturally desacralizing the gallery’s white walls with plaster and pigment.

• 

  picks June 06, 2018

  Dave Muller

  In Dave Muller’s current solo exhibition, multicolored drips trickle down the wall from part of a mural (w+m, all works cited, 2018) that reads: “WORDS and MUSIC.” Above it hovers Red, Yellow, Blue (Sixth, Ninth and First Most Sampled Songs According to whosampled.com), a three-part tondo painting based on record labels that references the foundations of art, pop music, and politics. The artist orchestrates the show into four themed sections: “Sex,” “Death,” “Rock & Roll,” and “Ampersand.” Each area combines murals, paintings, and sculptures to build on the two-story gallery’s architecture (only

• 

  picks September 01, 2017

  Ismaïl Bahri

  Ismaïl Bahri’s first major museum exhibition features eight subtle yet epic video works. Ligne (Line), 2011, opens the show. A drop of water on a white man’s forearm trembles to the subcutaneous rhythms of the body-cum-machine. Precariously hosting two tiny air bubbles, the drop dramatizes interdependence. In Source, 2017, a pair of hands hold a sheet of white paper. A tiny dot appears in its center, growing into an incandescent circle that consumes the page. Similarly durational, Sondes (Probes), 2017, is also unexpectedly sculptural: Against terra-cotta tiles, an indeterminately gendered

• 

  picks February 17, 2017

  Tamar Guimarães

  La incorrupta (The Uncorrupted), 2016, a video by Brazil-born, Copenhagen-based artist Tamar Guimarães, revolves around a female curator’s project that explores corruption. The curator’s proposed exhibition hinges on the display of a relic, the hand of Saint Teresa of Avila. The thirty-six-minute work follows actors and amateurs, many of whom work at the Reina Sofia, as they discuss her show’s premise privately and in public. As expected power plays of institutional politics spiral out, the artist’s narrative weaves together physical and social bodies, religion and superstition, collusion and

• 

  picks December 01, 2012

  Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen

  Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s “Space Fiction & the Archives” plays on unstable symmetries, provocatively casting the viewer in the role of the titular conjunction. The exhibition looks back to 1967 and connects a monument (the state-sanctioned extraterrestrial landing pad built in St. Paul, Alberta, in celebration of Canada’s centennial) with a document (the text of Canada’s then new point-based immigration policy). Science fiction and multiculturalism are the twin engines of Canada’s new place in the world—or, rather, the universe.

  The first gallery is a silent and bright time capsule. Sourced from

• 

  picks November 10, 2012

  Matthew Deleget

  “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Matthew Deleget’s current solo show, features works made with common materials—painter’s tape, drywall screws, garbage bags, paint rollers, pushpins, and spotlights—which modulate walls, canvases, and pedestals to variously delicate, violent, and playful effects, and turn the gallery space into something of a construction zone. In the process, Deleget casts painting as a site-sensitive practice that enlists an expansive repertoire of gestures: wrapping, dipping, hammering, pushing, screwing, floating, flooding, and throwing away.

  Deleget mobilizes a restrained