T. J. Demos

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  print January 2017

  “Tracing the Future”/Yto Barrada

  Starting from the premise that any potential future will find its lineaments etched in the past—in contrast to mere futurist fantasies without material grounding—“Tracing the Future” drew together works with strong research or archival proclivities, though none lacking in aesthetic power. Incisively curated by Stéphane Symons, Hilde Van Gelder, and Eva Wittocx, the exhibition of five distinct presentations stretched over five locations, mining historically diverse relations to this university town. The archaeological sensibility mirrored Yto Barrada’s excavation of Morocco’s artisanal

• previews September 2014

  Akram Zaatari

  Known for his diverse photographic and video-based projects, Akram Zaatari has spent the last decade mining the charged archival materials of Lebanon’s civil wars as well as investigating the gendered cultural narratives of the Middle East. Most recently, these efforts have led the Beirut-based artist to create pieces such as Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, a video- missive addressing an Israeli fighter pilot who, during a 1982 operation in Lebanon, disobeyed his chain of command, rejecting orders to bomb a school. This work plus nine others—including 28 Nights

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  print May 2014

  Sammy Baloji and Alice Seeley Harris

  TIM AND SPACE are out of joint: This is the first sensation that confronts us when we look at an untitled work by Sammy Baloji from 2013, one of the photomontages composing that year’s series “The Album,” which was at the center of the first-ever UK show focused on the Congolese artist. In the work, three porters, photographed in black-and-white, hold up a large stork, stretching out the bird’s voluminous wings and drawing its head upright, presenting what must be a hunting trophy to the camera. The men all wear fez-like caps with long-sleeved white shirts and knee-length trousers, the defining

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  interviews October 2013

  1000 WORDS: JOHN AKOMFRAH

  FEW ARTISTS WORKING TODAY share the depth of John Akomfrah’s understanding of African diasporic culture, particularly its complex entanglements with the shifting course of global politics, postcolonial experience, and the seductive structures of popular media. As a founding member of the acclaimed Black Audio Film Collective, Akomfrah contributed to the now-disbanded group’s filmic studies of great twentieth-century intellectuals, activists, and cultural figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; of social developments such as the Black Power movement championed by Michael X in 1960s

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  print September 2013

  OPENINGS: JUSTIN BARTON AND MARK FISHER

  “MEMORY DISORDER provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism,” claimed the cultural theorist Mark Fisher in 2009. Such glitches in the current socioeconomic order are explored in On Vanishing Land, 2013, an audio essay by Fisher and the writer and sound artist Justin Barton—their second joint venture in what one hopes is a continuing collaboration. The work, largely narrated by Barton atop an electronic music sound track, offers a psychogeographical recounting of a trip to southeast England—a landscape that leads Fisher and Barton to various provocative historical

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  print May 2013

  Mark Boulos

  In his large three-channel video installation, No Permanent Address, 2010, Mark Boulos presented the rugged life and personal stories of members of the New People’s Army (NPA), a Communist guerilla movement in the Philippines designated a terrorist organization by the EU and the US. The artist spent eight weeks living among two of the group’s peripatetic squads to make the twenty-seven-minute-long video. The footage shows the company’s members trekking through dense jungle, conducting military routines, and resting on hammocks strung between trees. Short interviews with individuals shed light

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  previews January 2013

  “Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2012”

  “Inspired by Chinese films of the 1920s and ’30s, the work of Shanghai-based Yang Fudong receives its first major museum survey in the West this spring with a show jointly organized by the Kunsthalle Zürich and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.”

  Inspired by Chinese films of the 1920s and ’30s, the work of Shanghai-based Yang Fudong receives its first major museum survey in the West this spring with a show jointly organized by the Kunsthalle Zürich and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition promises a rich selection of the artist’s films, cinematic installations, and photography from 1993 to the present, offering European (and, soon, American) audiences a chance to further their understanding of his practice—including its relationship to

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  print May 2012

  Jeremy Deller

  THIS RETROSPECTIVE presented a formidable challenge: How to organize a show of an artist who has defined his practice precisely by working outside the white cube? The problem of institutionalization is hardly uncommon, of course—artists who work site-specifically confront similar challenges—but Jeremy Deller’s profound social engagement raises the stakes. With its conventional approach, however, the Hayward Gallery exhibition skates over the contradictions: It focuses on Deller’s commemoration of folkish creativity (the show is titled “Joy in People”) but invites aesthetic appreciation

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  print April 2012

  ART AFTER NATURE: THE POST-NATURAL CONDITION

  THE NIGHT SKY may never have looked as disturbingly different as it did in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, 2001/2004, for which the London-based artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway projected an array of otherworldly constellations onto a planetarium-style dome. Each astral body corresponds not to nature but to a publicly traded company, as a computer program translates the real-time financial activity of the world’s stock exchanges into glimmering stars. At Tate Britain in 2001, the piece connected to a Reuters news feed; at the Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center in 2004, it

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  print April 2012

  “Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency”

  WHAT WOULD AN ARCHITECTURE of decolonization look like? And how might it shift the terms of debate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? These are among the ambitious questions addressed by the Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency, an art and architecture collective based in Beit Sahour, a town outside Bethlehem. The group—which now has dozens of collaborators, varying from project to project—was founded in 2007 by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman, all of whom operate in the nexus of architecture, theory, and political representation. Strategic and utopian at once,

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  print February 2012

  “The City Is a Burning, Blazing Bonfire”

  This group show, curated by Fiona Parry, deftly brought together the work of three artists and one collaborative project, all linking art, energy, and ecological systems. Taking its title from Henri Lefebvre’s characterization of the city as a blazing site of powerful flows, interlinking colossal quantities of physical and human energy, it poignantly assembles various artistic dealings with the urban environment from distinct geopolitical and aesthetic approaches. A seventeen-minute video by Deimantas Narkevičius, Energy Lithuania, 2000, explores the history of Elektrènai, a town built in the

• previews January 2012

  “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity”

  This third edition of Paris’s La Triennale—tellingly titled “Intense Proximity”—is set to advance artistic director Okwui Enwezor’s important contestation of nationality and nativism by highlighting relational geographies and migrant figures. The show will unfold from the newly expanded Palais de Tokyo to neighboring institutions along La Colline des Musées, with an approach to cultural transnationalism inspired by twentieth-century ethnographers Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Griaule.