In his exhibition “Matière grise” (Gray Matter), Mohssin Harraki’s Débat imaginaire (Imaginary Debate), 2017, covered an entire wall with an enlarged fourteenth-century illustration of the twelfth-century Andalusian thinker Averroes in conversation with Porphyry, the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher. Manfredus de Monte Imperiali, working in what is today Italy, originally fixed this imaginary dialogue between the two Mediterranean intellects on parchment, seating the wide-eyed men, clothed in colored robes, in stiffly foreshortened chairs. The phrases in ornate Latin calligraphy that extend

For the better part of the past decade, Mel O’Callaghan has produced large-scale performances and installations for venues including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2016 and 2017) and the Sydney Biennale (2014), all the while quietly making paintings in the privacy of her studio. The artist’s recent exhibition at Galerie Allen (which she cofounded in 2013 with curator Joseph Allen Shea) marked the first public glimpse of this heretofore unseen body of work. While representing a significant material departure for the Paris-based Australian—whose better-known work typically combines elements