Susanne Pfeffer is the director of the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. She recently curated the group exhibition “Crip Time” (with Anna Sailer).
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BROTHERS SICK (EZRA & NOAH BENUS), PAREIDOLIA (VACCINATE NOW) (PRATT MANHATTAN GALLERY)
vaccinate now, real-life brothers Ezra and Noah Benus write on one of their posters. In light of their other demands—STOP RATIONING CARE and STOP MEDICAL APARTHEID—it becomes clear how their political poster art critiques the unequal distribution of vaccines as a “eugenic apparatus” barring all bodies from receiving the same protection and care.
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MARYLÈNE PATOU-MATHIS, WEIBLICHE UNSICHTBARKEIT: WIE ALLES BEGANN (FEMININE INVISIBILITY: HOW IT ALL BEGAN) (HANSER VERLAG)
“No! the prehistoric women did not spend all their time sweeping the cave!” The French prehistorian Marylène Patou-Mathis prefaces her study of the early history of human societies and cultures with the same tenacity she applies to reviewing archaeological texts and finds (such as bones). Translated into German this year, her book demonstrates that women were actively involved in hunting and that they likely contributed to the famous paintings in the Lascaux caves.
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ANNE IMHOF (PALAIS DE TOKYO, PARIS; CURATED BY EMMA LAVIGNE AND VITTORIA MATARRESE)
“Attention! Attention! I am an animal, and I will always be displaced until I die,” the artist Eliza Douglas announced at the beginning of Imhof’s performance Natures Mortes this past October. The setting was the Palais de Tokyo, stripped to its skeleton for Imhof’s exhibition of the same name. Between reflective panes of glass, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s ruins, Rosemarie Trockel’s slab of glazed-ceramic meat, Théodore Géricault’s dead animals, and Sturtevant’s perpetual loop of a running dog, the ideology of progress was ruthlessly negated. And yet, in the dancers’ crawling, kneeling, and withering, united in procession, the message was clear: We must change!
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KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE (KUNSTVEREIN BRAUNSCHWEIG, GERMANY; CURATED BY JULE HILLGÄRTNER AND NELE KACZMAREK)
Founded in 2008, the Karrabing Film Collective counts among it some fifty members of the Belyuen community from Australia’s Northern Territory, as well as the anthropologist and critical theorist Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Their films portray Indigenous people wandering through their present-day societies and landscapes. Again and again, they come up against the rude boundaries of Australian colonialism, which credits itself, for example, with taking Indigenous people out of their self-chosen living environments and putting them in “safe camps.” We see what life in those camps is like and how the Indigenous activists, also in dialogue with their dogs, try to win back their world.
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FRANK B. WILDERSON III, AFROPESSIMISMUS (MATTHES & SEITZ, 2021)
The radical hypothesis of Afropessimism is, briefly, that to be Black is to exist in a state of “social death.” For Wilderson, “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness”; it describes not a “narrative arc,” but rather a “flat line.” Yet on the basis of this provocation, the author, as he characterizes his project in the introduction, “weaves the abstract thinking of critical theory with blood-and-guts stories of life as it’s lived”—his childhood in suburban Minneapolis, his stint as a waiter in Johannesburg at the end of apartheid, his professorship at the University of California, Irvine. The resulting hybrid of philosophy and personal memoir levels categories of intellectual production to create an unsparing narrative of political formation and lived experience that is anything but flat.
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CRITICS COMPANY, TIMOTHEÉ (ATHENS BIENNALE)
The Critics Company, a group of nine young sci-fi filmmakers in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, ranging in age from seven to twenty-seven, shot their debut film on a cell phone in 2016 and have since gathered thousands of fans. Their recent short film chronicles the tribulations of Timotheé, a humanoid alien who is beamed down from a spaceship into the West African landscape. Exiled from his home planet, he attempts to survive on petty crime and soon loses his leg in a minefield while fleeing a man he robbed. “Nothing can exist without a cause,” Timotheé says. But nearly everything in the short film happens for reasons he cannot control and is not responsible for.
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HERVÉ TÉLÉMAQUE (SERPENTINE GALLERIES, LONDON; CURATED BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST, JOSEPH CONSTABLE, AND ELIZABETH DE BERTIER)
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1937, Télémaque arrived in New York in 1957, landing amid the din of Abstract Expressionism. When he moved to Paris in 1961, he came into contact with the Surrealists, eventually cofounding the Narrative Figuration movement. Monsters, shoes, underpants, and sundry consumer goods proliferate across the works in “A Hopscotch of the Mind,” Télémaque’s first institutional survey in the UK. Despite his light, Pop-inflected touch, the octogenarian artist’s comic-grotesque mode limns the realities of diasporic experience and the social and psychic tolls of colonialism.
On view through January 30, 2022.
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STÉPHANE MANDELBAUM (GALERIE ZŁOTOWKSI, ART BASEL)
In ink, ballpoint pen, and graphite and colored pencil, Mandelbaum drew, wrote, and scribbled his immediate surroundings, dreams, and fears in teeming, explosive images. Murdered in 1986 at the age of twenty-five, the artist was fascinated by the poètes maudits of modernism, from Francis Bacon to Pier Paolo Pasolini to Arthur Rimbaud. In his drawings on view in Galerie Złotowski’s booth at Art Basel, he seemed to have slipped into these multiple personalities and temporarily fused their passions with his own.
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“LES FLAMMES: L’ÂGE DE LA CÉRAMIQUE” (THE FLAMES: THE AGE OF CERAMICS) (MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS; CURATED BY ANNE DRESSEN WITH MARGOT NGUYEN)
“Les Flammes” draws connections between the ceramics of modern and contemporary artists such as Simone Fattal, Simone Leigh, Magdalene Odundo, Meret Oppenheim, and prehistoric Venus figurines, ancient Greek vases, Nok terracotta sculpture, Tang-dynasty tomb statues, and Japanese raku pottery. The show’s title invokes fire—the technical unpredictability of burning and kilns. Contingency—a force very much at play in the history of ceramics—takes on material form.
On view through February 6, 2022.
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“‘DIVINELY GIFTED’: NATIONAL SOCIALISM’S FAVOURED ARTISTS IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC” (DEUTSCHES HISTORISCHES MUSEUM, BERLIN; CURATED BY WOLFGANG BRAUNEIS)
Compiled on behalf of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in September 1944, the list of the “divinely gifted” comprised 378 artists considered “indispensable” to National Socialism and thus exempted from military service. This exhibition was the first to document in detail the postwar fortunes of these Nazi artists in the Federal Republic of Germany. The superstar Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, who would later portray Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s social market economy, was not the only artist on the roster to enjoy an uninterrupted career. Works by many of the “divinely gifted” are unfortunately still on display in zoos, municipal parks, and city centers throughout Germany today.