When astronomers in fifth-century India conceptualized the zero, they gave the idea of nothing a figurative reality. When negative numbers were conceived in China circa 200 BCE, for the first time a presence could be made of an absence. At first, both ideas were taboo, but an imagination of the negative number gave voice to the clandestine, the underrepresented, the minus, the before. In the same way, the artist Isaac Julien, in making photographs from negatives of his 1989 film Looking for Langston, reasserts the voice of the silenced, homoerotic desire of black men.

Shot in 16 millimeter, the

Born in the small Romanian city of Ias¸i in 1933, Sorel Etrog rose to fame in his adoptive country of Canada, though he remains too little known abroad. To some audiences there, he is above all the author of somewhat cheeky public sculptures; to others, the director of the critically acclaimed experimental film Spiral, 1974, which led to a collaboration with Marshall McLuhan on the 1987 book Images from the Film Spiral. But no matter from what angle Etrog’s life and career are examined, they reveal the artist’s remarkable tenacity. Having survived the Holocaust, Etrog moved with his family to

In a 2014 diary entry, Geta Brătescu compares the artist to an acrobat, reasoning that the two face a shared obstacle, daunting enough to name in uppercase letters: “SPACE.” The ninety-one-year-old Romanian artist has dedicated much of her seven-decade career to negotiating enclosures ranging from the confines of a blank page to the mutable gap between her thumb and her index finger. Her maneuvers frequently draw on the recurring motif of the studio—another concept that looms large for Brătescu. 

“The Studio: A Tireless, Ongoing Space” explored a place of possibility, suspended in a constant