The Taiwan pavilion at the fifty-eighth edition of the Venice Biennale is located at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, or the Prisons’ Palace, which was the city’s primary prison from the seventeenth century to 1922. Artist Shu Lea Cheang, who is representing Taiwan this year, takes up this historical context in her exhibition “3x3x6.” The title of the show refers to the standard architectural model of contemporary prisons worldwide, and her work on view examines subjects who have been incarcerated because of their gender or sexual nonconformity, beginning with the story of writer and Venetian adventurer

The Triple-Chaser—a teargas grenade banned in international warfare but routinely deployed by defense forces against civilians both stateside and abroad—is one of the many weapons manufactured by the Safariland Group, whose CEO, Warren B. Kanders, is the vice chair of the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kanders’s ties to the New York institution have fueled heated protests in the run-up to this year’s Whitney Biennial, which opens May 17, 2019 (more than half of the exhibition’s artists have called for his removal from the board). Among the dissenters is Forensic Architecture, a

That harmony, like beauty, often comes from invention within repertoire and constriction is reflected in the Tbilisi-born artist Anna K.E.’s work, which is marked by the gestures of a ballerina and the design of a choreographer. For the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, K.E. will bring together performance, video, sculpture, and hieroglyphs from Asomtavruli, the original Georgian alphabet, in a single architectural environment for the Georgian pavilion, curated by Margot Norton. Below, she discusses REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation, 2019, which will be on view

The Ghanaian American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu blends whatever she needs to make her point—including found footage, narratives, and pop culture—into films that are by turns surreal and confrontationally explicit in their meditations. Below, Owusu looks back on the first decade of her career, a milestone marked by two upcoming projects: “Between Three Worlds,” a screening of her work at REDCAT in Los Angeles on May 6, 2019, and “Welcome to the Jungle,” an exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, which will be on view from May 9 through July 27, 2019. The

FOR THIS YEAR’S WHITNEY BIENNIAL, on view from May 17 to September 22, the Philadelphia-based artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden embarked on an ambitious journey to reconcile her artistic work with the spiritual work she undertook following her initiation into Santería/Lucumí, an Afro-Cuban religious practice developed by descendants of the Yoruba. McClodden’s project both mends and shatters, spiraling across the founding breaches of modern Western culture: the Euro-American colonization and enslavement of African peoples and the alienation of art from religion. It is a reminder that sometimes activism

The materials for Ser Serpas’s latest body of work were sourced locally from the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, where they will return at the end of her first US institutional solo exhibition. For Serpas, the show serves as both a homecoming and a farewell to the city she is leaving, after living there for six years, for Switzerland. “Against Attachment” opened April 25 and is on view through June 2, 2019 at Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies, Ludlow 38, in New York.

FINDING OBJECTS AND RECOMPOSING THEM comprises a lot of my art, just going on walks and asking, “Is this anybody’s

For the show “Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings,” artist Christodoulos Panayiotou performed a role somewhere between those of a curator and a collaborating artist. Here, he speaks about his interest in Kunz’s pioneering abstract work and the questions that arose for him while participating in the exhibition’s development. The show is on view at the Serpentine Galleries in London until May 19, 2019 and will travel to the Muzeum Susch in Zernez, Switzerland, from July 26 to November 10, 2019.

I INTUITIVELY DEVELOPED a fascination with Emma Kunz’s mythology before ever seeing a single drawing. I heard

Well known for her fearless performances and wildly inventive narratives, the Los Angeles–based artist Patty Chang recently began listing her fears. This led to her soliciting other people’s lists of fears as well, which are related to other lists: One explores the range of a mother’s heightened sense of empathy; another imagines useful mechanisms designed to address, among other things, mental illness, existential distress, fear, and individual agency. These lists set the parameters for a new project that departs from Chang’s solo exhibition “The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017,” which was originally

In Zalika Azim’s recent work, layering is less an act of concealment than one of exposure. Her first solo exhibition, “In case you should forget to sweep before sunset,” features images that are physically placed atop one another or are superimposed to unlock manifold associations. Broader themes of dispersion, kinship, and survival are interleaved with intimate family histories. Below, the artist discusses images in the home and the limits and leverages of storytelling through photography. The show is on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York through April 13, 2019.

I READ SPECULATIVE

As the 2019 Katowitz Radin artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library, Kameelah Janan Rasheed has orchestrated Scoring the Stacks, a four-month-long project that fosters new dynamics between the library’s visitors and its books, between the roles of teacher and student, and between our notions of artist and artwork. Six accompanying public events invited participants to explore different ways to create, collaborate, and learn. Scoring the Stacks is on view at the library’s central location until April 7, 2019; Rasheed’s final event, This is Not an Artist Talk, will be held on April 4,

TO GET ACQUAINTED with Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work—or, better yet, his world—is to become versant in an origin story that the artist first conceived of when he was in the fourth grade. As a precocious ten-year-old, Hancock drew Me Turning into Torpedoboy, 1984, a prescient sketch of his morally indifferent alter ego/superhero. But what crisis would precipitate his superhero’s journey? What crimes would he avenge? Growing up in an evangelical Baptist church, Hancock had assimilated sermons on Black-liberation theology that spoke of a spiritual war in which Manichaean precepts on race dictated

The categories of work listed on Nina Katchadourian’s website include “uninvited collaborations with nature,” “charts and systems,” and “language/translation.” Stemming from these topics, the artist’s highly structured experiments often begin with found objects and absurd situations that she disentangles, only to find that they are part of the larger webs of identity and relationships. Her current exhibition at Fridman Gallery in New York, “Ification,” includes several of her best-known pieces in addition to The Recarcassing Ceremony, 2016, a video that revisits an old recording of a childhood