Theodor Ringborg

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  picks October 14, 2016

  Consensus

  Consensus is an exhibition in the middle of an uneasy break––the way someone might, midsentence, struggle to find a word. Upon entering, one comes to a kind of pause that takes the show past the limits of saying something: By not perspicuously speaking, it says volumes. Raha Raissnia filmed everyday life in East Harlem with a concealed camera to make Longing, 2015. By transferring the unsteady footage to 16 mm, then cutting it up, collaging it, and having collaborator Panagiotis Mavridis compose a deep, ambient sound track, Raissnia has created a preternatural portrait of the neighborhood.

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  print November 2014

  Sirous Namazi

  On November 15, 1978, the family home of the artist Sirous Namazi, located in Shiraz, Iran, was looted and vandalized as part of a systematic persecution of adherents of the Baha’i faith. No one was home. When the family returned to assess the damage, a friend took four snapshots—the only remaining evidence of what the house looked like. The photos show it as a wreck, as if a tornado had torn it apart. Namazi was eight years old then. What followed was years of hiding in the volatile political climate of Khomeini’s Iran until, with the help of smugglers, he and his siblings got to Pakistan

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  picks October 08, 2014

  David Larsson

  There are many hembygdsgille—or historical societies—across Sweden, each one concerned with its own particular region or town. David Larsson, for this exhibition at Haninge Kulturhus, has worked closely with the hembygdsgille in the Stockholm exurb of Haninge. Haninge isn’t a particularly special place, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence; the municipality isn’t completely devoid of intrigue. Its history lies in its development—its expansions, rebuilding, and remodeling. Along with the new, the old has accumulated, and the hembygdsgille tries to collect and preserve it all. Its

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  picks September 05, 2014

  “post-excavation”

  The exhibition “post-excavation” takes on the moment following disinterment as its subject. Each of the exhibiting artists’ works concerns an uncovering—though none are quite about discovery, they are rather about display itself. For instance, Emanuele Becheri presents two series of found objects that share the title “32a Penton Place, Southwark, London SE17 3JT, 17 September 2010,” marking where and when the materials were found. One consists of eight old, crumpled issues of Frieze and the other of five worn-out vinyl records including Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits. As artifacts of disintegration,

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  picks August 26, 2014

  Gunilla Klingberg

  Every year, the moon drifts farther away from Earth a distance equivalent to “the length of a worm,” in the lyrical words of astronomer Chris Impey. Consequently, because of a planetary tug-of-war that slows the planet down, today was fifty-four billionths of a second longer than yesterday. Inversely, calculations suggest that, four billion years ago, the moon was ten times closer than it is now. Then, a day passed in six hours.

  Gunilla Klingberg’s exhibition ponders these questions, via old and new works that reflect on the universe, its movements and, it seems perforce, on entropy, spanning

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  interviews July 14, 2014

  Jonas Dahlberg

  Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg was chosen last spring as the winner of a competition for a memorial in Norway to honor the victims of the July 22, 2011 attacks. His proposed piece, Memory Wound, is a cut across a peninsula that faces the island Utøya, where the attacks occurred. Here, Dahlberg talks about some of the concepts behind the work, such as loss, distance, and vulnerability, as well as what it means to look and remember. The work will be finalized in July 2016.

  THE PIECE IS commissioned by Public Art Norway (KORO), the government’s agency for public art under the Ministry of Culture, in

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  print January 2014

  Gülsün Karamustafa

  At a time of political instability in Turkey following the large-scale protests over the intended demolition of Gezi Park in the center of Istanbul—protests that have come to symbolize issues from gentrification to democratic rights—Gülsün Karamustafa’s “A Promised Exhibition” (curated by Duygu Demir and Merve Elveren of the SALT Research and Programs team) is timely and pertinent. The informative presentation is the artist’s most extensive to date and would be compelling even without the backdrop of recent events. Over more than four decades, Karamustafa has explored her country’s

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  picks June 10, 2013

  Karl Holmqvist

  “Give poetry a try” is the irresistible slogan chosen by Karl Holmqvist as the title of his exhibition at the Moderna Museet. It’s a slogan that Holmqvist has used before, and it is, as slogans should be, a straightforward, encouraging one. Holmqvist has dedicated much of his practice to both show that his slogan’s advice is possible and to suggest the extent of its possibilities. Almost everything he does, you can do yourself, in materials and techniques readily available.

  The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains several works, including a vitrine filled with innumerable

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  picks April 03, 2013

  “The Society Without Qualities”

  At the entrance of the exhibition “The Society Without Qualities,” two monitors and an original poster display images of another exhibition, “The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society,” organized by Palle Nielsen at Moderna Museet in 1968—which comprised a spectacular playspace for children that was endowed with a foam and rubber basin, swings, climbing ropes, paint, and costumes, among other things. But rather than treating the subject of this preamble as a historic curiosity, curator Lars Bang Larsen has returned to it as a key source of inspiration—as a setting in which children were

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  picks February 07, 2013

  Beatrice Gibson

  Gregory Treverton, the director of RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, once distinguished between puzzles and mysteries—puzzles being made out of pieces of fact while mysteries are dependent on judgments and assessments of uncertainty. Two pieces make up the exhibition “Beatrice Gibson: The Tiger’s Mind, featuring Jesse Ash”; one is a puzzle and the other a mystery.

  While artist Jesse Ash’s solo work is featured, and he’s involved in Gibson’s piece, it is her show, inasmuch as she is the instigator. Ash’s piece consists of scaled-down renditions of backdrops for political speeches (such as

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  picks August 06, 2012

  “Kirunatopia / In the Shadow of the Future”

  Freight trains reached the site of present-day Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city, for the first time in 1899, carrying with them those who proceeded to found the city, drawn there in part by a quest for the region’s abundant iron ore. Some one hundred years later, following an exploitative modernization of the Swedish north that has included heedless mining and a disregard for the indigenous nomadic Sami people, Kiruna is today dealing with mining-induced subsidence: Simply put, big holes are causing cracks in the earth where people live. And, as a countermeasure, it has been decreed that the

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  picks April 13, 2012

  Sarah Crowner

  Sarah Crowner’s latest exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and an outstanding stage curtain based on a 1956 theater backdrop by the Polish artist Maria Jarema. As in her previous output, Crowner sews pieces of painted and untreated linen together to produce taut, geometrical patchwork canvases or drapey backdrops, which are often based on specific historical compositions.

  While it is clear that Crowner deeply admires twentieth-century avant-garde artists such as Victor Vasarely and Lygia Clark—she has often adopted their vibrant colors, forms, and shapes—her new works depart from her