The calendar was a priestly invention, a way of coordinating human and natural cycles, but in modern cultures it's mainly a tool for keeping track of the workaday routine. For Rivane Neuenschwander, however, it becomes something else again: a poetic artifice, an unexpected, offbeat accent to the daily round. To make Found Calendar (all works 2002), the Brazilian artist, who attended London's Royal College of Art, simply collected bits of paper (tickets, ads, bits of packaging—just about anything but an actual calendar page), each bearing a printed or handwritten number from one to thirty-one.

A mere decade ago, according to UK art-world legend, a well-known London gallerist explained that he avoided representing women artists because their work always seemed to be “about problems.” My, how things change. Ann-Sofi Sidén's Warte Mal!: Prostitution after the Velvet Revolution, 1999, a kaleidoscopic video work documenting the post-Communist sex industry in Dubi, a Czech border town, must surely qualify as “problem art” with bells on—but it's been launched at the Wiener Secession and shown at the Hayward without anyone in the art business raising an eyebrow. Indeed, catalogue essayist