Sanford Biggers’s video BAM (For Michael), 2015, ostensibly documents a series of mediations to a new series of bronze figurines based on colorful wooden statuettes that the artist originally purchased from street vendors in Harlem. The figures were dipped in wax, shot repeatedly with a rifle and a shotgun, and then cast in bronze and given a black patina. The video captures the bullets hitting a male figurine, sending shards of wood flying into the air. Shot in the leg, the figure inevitably falls over. Each crack of the gun elicits a cut—shot for shot, as it were—and a shift in

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev stages unorthodox discussions about art and its place in the world. Consider the fact that she organized last year’s Istanbul Biennial around the notion of the “thought form,” a concept that was mostly sidestepped by the critics who attended the show. They can be forgiven. After all, this esoteric term coined by members of the Theosophical movement in the late nineteenth century doesn’t figure in the critical vocabularies we learn in graduate school, unless perhaps we are studying comparative religion. But however uninformed or skeptical of it we may be today, theosophy

Sanford Biggers’s video BAM (For Michael), 2015, ostensibly documents a series of mediations to a new series of bronze figurines based on colorful wooden statuettes that the artist originally purchased from street vendors in Harlem. The figures were dipped in wax, shot repeatedly with a rifle and a shotgun, and then cast in bronze and given a black patina. The video captures the bullets hitting a male figurine, sending shards of wood flying into the air. Shot in the leg, the figure inevitably falls over. Each crack of the gun elicits a cut—shot for shot, as it were—and a shift in

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev stages unorthodox discussions about art and its place in the world. Consider the fact that she organized last year’s Istanbul Biennial around the notion of the “thought form,” a concept that was mostly sidestepped by the critics who attended the show. They can be forgiven. After all, this esoteric term coined by members of the Theosophical movement in the late nineteenth century doesn’t figure in the critical vocabularies we learn in graduate school, unless perhaps we are studying comparative religion. But however uninformed or skeptical of it we may be today, theosophy