Xenia Benivolski

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  picks November 22, 2022

  Stephanie Comilang, Simon Speiser

  For the video and virtual-reality installation Pi_ñ_a, Why is the Sky Blue?, 2021, Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser lean on the history of the pineapple as an origin myth for a spiritual entity that comes to life through present-day technology. It’s an enduring yet nuanced concept, through which the artists invoke shared commonalities in their Filipino and Ecuadorian ancestry. First cultivated by Indigenous people in South America, the pineapple, starting in the sixteenth century, was transported by the Spanish to plantations across Southeast Asia for eventual export to Europe. Within the

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  picks November 07, 2022

  Barbara Kozłowska

  A line is a line, even if it’s drawn in the sand. The exhibition “From East to West, Through the Globe, Towards the Moon” launches with selected documentation of Borderline, an epic, nine-part work by Barbara Kozłowska (1940–2008): Between 1967 and 1990, the artist drew lines across the world, designating places where land and water meet with small handmade sculptural forms. Challenging the fragile and arbitrary bounds of political self-positioning, the action reaches into the very heart of Conceptualism by enacting a temporary gesture with permanent consequences. On an adjacent wall, Nivegatywy

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  picks May 31, 2022

  James Bridle and Jonas Staal

  In this joint exhibition in collaboration with Laveronica Gallery, artists James Bridle and Jonas Staal enlist various nonhuman entities to imagine a natural world without personhood at its center. Staal’s multiform installation Comrades in Deep Future, 2019–, extends agency to extinct plants and animals that take the form of paintings and weavings, allowing them the opportunity to tell their story in an open-air tribunal. Centered around a video made with Indian academic, writer, and lawyer Radha D’Souza titled The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, 2021–, the work reframes its nonhuman

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  picks March 12, 2022

  Alanis Obomsawin

  In “The Children Have to Hear Another Story,” celebrated Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin exhibits documentary films, recordings, and ephemera that survey the history of Indigenous resistance in Canada. Working for more than half a century, the artist has seen it all—and more than once. The exhibition’s physical structure leads the viewer chronologically in a circle that starts and ends with children, underscoring the cyclical nature of systematic oppression. Obomsawin’s attentive lens captures some of the most revealingly recurring instances of colonial violence across Canada. For instance,