FOR EXACTLY TWO DECADES, New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, has tried to map the country’s vexed bicultural history—a history that began with the first contact between Māori and Europeans and continues, to this day, in the complex relationships between Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent). To accomplish this task, Te Papa followed a distinctly 1990s logic, doing away with the separation between the national museum and the national art collection, and—under the shamelessly hopeful slogan “Our Place”—combining the two institutions in one grand,

The members of the creative and curatorial platform Cleopatra’s—Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, Colleen Grennan, and Erin Somerville (along with founding member Kate McNamara, who left the collective in 2011)—signed a ten-year lease on a narrow twenty-four-by-eight-foot street-level space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York, in 2008. From the project’s outset they were conscious of their long-term commitment to the space and of its mutability as a publishing house, a promotional structure, a means of archiving a local artistic community, and so much more. After a decade, the space closed this month.

Hsu Chia-Wei weaves together complex narratives of geography, history, and myth through storytelling in his films and installations. Based in Taipei, he has traveled to various locations in Asia for his work, often foraging for stories in the aftermath of war. In addition to his art practice, Hsu is a member of Open-Contemporary Art Center, an artist-run space founded in Taipei in 2001. Hsu’s art will be included in this year’s Gwangju Biennale. He is also currently participating in the Biennale of Sydney. Here, he talks about his film Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, 2015, and the related maps

Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, 2014, a durational performance that took place on her Instagram account, featured the artist playing a young ingénue with the kinds of finely calibrated displays of taste we’ve come to recognize as typical of the pageantry of aspiration many people gamely engage in across social media platforms. By virtue of the work's placement on Instagram, the artist garnered attention for being a person she wasn’t, just as the rest of us do all the time. The posts, along with public comments, were published earlier this month in a book by Prestel that also includes

Hermann Nitsch, one of Viennese Actionism’s principal and last-surviving members, has been making his visceral and ceremonious work for decades. His art dives into the heart of human history and experience, plumbing its excruciating depths while celebrating its most ecstatic heights. The artist’s show at Massimo De Carlo in London, which runs through May 25, 2018, outlines the artist’s DAS ORGIEN MYSTERIEN THEATER performances, spanning almost sixty years. Here, Nitsch talks about the London show and the core philosophy of his work.

MY LONDON SHOW, at Massimo De Carlo, features different types

Gordon Hall’s The Number of Inches Between Them, 2018, replicates a found sculptural bench and serves as a platform for choreography. It is on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through May 20, 2018. Below, Hall addresses their integrative approach to object making and performance.

THE SHOW AT THE LIST CENTER, which includes sculptures, a letter, and a performance, is quiet and slow. I think of it both as a space of grief and a space to grieve. The performance features four people in their seventies and eighties, who sit on and use a concrete bench in a variety

For “Transmissions,” his first museum solo exhibition, New York–based artist Nick Mauss juxtaposes his own works with those from public and private collections to reinterpret New York modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. On view through May 14 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show encompasses dance and visual art. Here, Mauss considers the connections to be found across artistic histories.

I CONCEIVED OF TRANSMISSIONS as a new work for the museum that is continually in process. I wanted a title that immediately signaled away from received ideas about ballet, to open

Artist Cody Critcheloe—the figurehead behind the music, video, and performance pop group SSION, which he founded in 1999 while he was in high school—is releasing O, his first album in five years, on May 11, 2018 through DERO Arcade. The thirteen-track record features collaborations with artists such as Ariel Pink, Róisín Murphy, and Contessa Stuto, and draws inspiration from musicians including Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Atari Teenage Riot, and Hole. Here, Critcheloe talks about the making of O and the magic involved in crafting the perfect song.

THERE WASN’T

AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL for Peace and Justice, which overlooks downtown Montgomery, Alabama, more than eight hundred steel monuments hang, bearing the weight of over four thousand lynchings. A few blocks away, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration chronicles the history and continued presence of racial violence in America. Opened in April, these two cultural sites were created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) under the leadership of Bryan Stevenson in order to rewrite, and set right, the narratives regarding the African American experience. EJI was founded in 1989 and

Known for her paintings, costume designs, installations, and solo performances, Suzanne Bocanegra has more recently ventured into the world of theater with her “Artist Lectures,” 2011–16, a series of three meandering, memoiristic essays that are performed by professional actors. On May 5, 2018, all three talks will be presented together at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Here, Bocanegra discusses her creative process, which involves gleaning, collaging, and plenty of collaborating. A solo show of her work will open at the Fabric Workshop

With wry wit and deceptive literalness, Alice Shaw has been making work for over twenty-five years that cleverly focuses on a few core issues: doubles, photography, and the hegemonic history of landscape photography in her native Golden State. Her current exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, “Cloned,” is on view through May 26, 2018. Here, among other things, she reveals some reasons for her current focus on sheep.

IMAGERY OF FARM ANIMALS seems somewhat unpopular these days. I was watching some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films a while back and noticed how much animals used to play

AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL for Peace and Justice, which overlooks downtown Montgomery, Alabama, more than eight hundred steel monuments hang, bearing the weight of over four thousand lynchings. A few blocks away, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration chronicles the history and continued presence of racial violence in America. Opened in April, these two cultural sites were created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) under the leadership of Bryan Stevenson in order to rewrite, and set right, the narratives regarding the African American experience. EJI was founded in 1989 and