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    From Outraged Poems on Bedsheets to Photos of Women Workers, How 12 Female Ukrainian Artists Capture the Experience of Conflict

    Reports from Ukraine are full of devastating photographs of smoldering ruins, destroyed villages, bloated corpses, and ravaged landscapes. It is all too easy for such images to be subsumed into a generic narrative of the horrors of war. But like all wars, this one is particular, the outcome of a set of specific historical circumstances experienced by actual individuals and groups in ways that cannot be generalized.
    “Women at War” is an exhibition of works by twelve Ukrainian women artists who have lived through the current conflict and its precipitating events. Curated by Monika Fabijanska for Fridman Gallery, the show takes us inside the psyches of a group of artists who have learned to live with what a 2018 exhibition of contemporary Ukrainian art in Budapest termed a state of “Permanent Revolution.”
    Some of the works here were created in the heat of the current war. Others emerge from previous moments in Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination in the years since the fall of communism, reminding us of the long roots of today’s crisis. Running as undercurrents through the show are the complexities of geography stemming from the tensions between a Western-leaning west and a Russia-leaning east, and the upheavals of a post-Soviet (dis)order that has seen waves of mass protests, endemic corruption, two revolutions, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the looming threat that has now erupted into full-scale war.
    Why only women? In the essay that accompanies the show, Fabijanska notes, “Women are generally absent from the historical accounts of war, but violating a woman is seen as a violation of land and nation.” Having curated well-received shows on eco-feminism and rape, Fabijanska brings both these topics to bear here. Her chosen artists suggest how Ukrainian national identity is tied both to the land and to figures of the “great mother” as personified by the Soviet Motherland and the pre-Christian goddess Berehynia. The latter has emerged in recent years as a somewhat equivocal symbol of Ukrainian nationalism, representing both strength and a return to old, pre-Soviet values. Restricting her purview to women thus allows Fabijanska to deal with fraught definitions of feminism in a post-Soviet country where putative equality under the Communist system long masked a deeply misogynist reality even as the demise of that order has given way in many parts of the country to a regressive return to “traditional” roles.
    Alla Horska, Portrait of Ivan Svitlychny (1963). Courtesy of the Ukrainian Museum in NewYork.
    A modest linocut of a man clutching what appear to be seeds or cherries serves as an entrée into the show. Created in 1963 by the Ukrainian activist and artist Alla Horska (1929-1970), it depicts Ivan Svitychny, a Ukrainian poet and fellow dissident. Inclusion of this work by Horska draws attention to the troubled history of art and politics in Ukraine. Known in the Soviet era for her murals, mosaics, and stained glass in the Donbas region (many of them now presumed destroyed by Russian bombs), as well as her protests in favor of Ukrainian human rights, Horska was murdered in 1970 while under surveillance by the KGB.
    Alena Grom, Tamara with Her Brother. Mariinka, Donbas (Wombseries) (2018). © Alena Grom. Courtesy of the artist.
    The rest of the artists in “Woman at War” belong to the post-Soviet era. Several of them assume the role of witnesses. Alena Grom presents several photographs from her “Womb” series in which women emerge from the shadows of the bunker in which they have been hiding. Clutching their children, they suggest an inversion of the classic trope of Madonna and Child as they appear enveloped not in radiant light but in a darkness that is as tomb-like as it is womb-like. Though they seem frighteningly current, Grom’s photos were taken in 2018 during earlier fighting in the eastern region of Donbas where Russian separatists have been battling Ukrainian government forces since 2014. The bunkers are in fact abandoned mine shafts, relics of the economic lifeblood which has made the area a coveted prize for Russian forces.
    Yevgenia Belorusets, Victories of the Defeated 5 (2014-2017). ©Yevgenia Belorusets. Courtesy of the artist.
    Yevgenia Belorusets presents images from the same time and location. She photographs women workers who continued to labor in the still functioning mines during the occupation of the area by separatist forces. Despite disruptions in their salaries and efforts by the occupiers to get them to join in the fighting, they kept the mine open. In the photographs their faces are smudged by coal dust but hopeful and even at times joyful, offering portraits of resistance and courage as they attempt to cling to shreds of normalcy as the world crumbles around them. Sadly, after the expulsion of the separatists, the returning Ukrainian government closed the mine, negating their efforts.
    Lesia Khomenko, Max in the Army (2022). ©Lesia Khomenko.Courtesy of the artist.
    Two artists reframe images of the war by adapting art historical traditions to the current situation. Lesia Khomenko offers a deflated version of the heroic tropes of Soviet Socialist Realism in a painting of her partner dressed in rumpled civilian garb as he volunteers for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Anna Scherbyna undermines the Romanticism inherent in the 18th century European tradition of picturesque ruins with a series of miniature paintings that depict the devastation of Donbas.
    Other artists suggest the psychic toll of life in a constant war zone. Oksana Chepelyk’s 2014 video Letter from Ukraine evokes a mother’s recurring nightmare as a frenzied woman runs with her little boy though abandoned streets as if caught in an endless and inescapable maze. Olia Fedorova’s Tablets of Rage (2022) is a cry from the current conflict. Created in March of this year as the artist shuttled between her apartment and a bomb shelter in Kharkiv that has undergone constant Russian shelling, this work comprises an anguished poem scrawled in red ink on torn bed sheets. The text channels her rage into images suggesting an identification with the forces of nature “May you choke on my soil./May you poison yourself with my air./ . . . And may you be afraid every second.”
    Kateryna Yermolaeva, Photo No. 2 (2017). ©Kateryna Yermolaeva. Courtesy of the artist.
    Kateryna Yermolaeva presents an equally personal response to trauma. In photographic self-portraits she assumes personas that combine stereotypes and aspects of her actual experiences, among them sex workers, housewives, and men in drag. With these characterizations, she suggests how the ongoing conflict has induced a splintering of consciousness.
    Zhanna Kadyrova may have the biggest international profile of the artists here, having represented Ukraine in the 2013 Venice Biennale. She presents documentation of a project titled Palianytsia, the Ukrainian word for bread. “Palianytsia” is apparently unpronounceable by Russians and hence serves as a kind of password for Ukrainians in occupied territories. In her video, Kadyrova collects river stones, polishes them into semblances of bread loaves and presents them as an offering to local villagers. Kadyrova created this installation and performance as a way to re-establish a sense of place following her evacuation from Kyiv to Western Ukraine following the Russian incursion.
    Alevtina Kakhidze, Strawberry Andreevna #3 (2014). ©Alevtina Kakhidze. Courtesy of the artist.
    Among the most compelling works are several diaristic projects. Alevtina Kakhidze’s Strawberry Andreevna (2014‐2019) is a series of drawings based on texts and cell phone conversations with her mother who remained in the occupied territories in Donbas and was constantly forced to cross the border into unoccupied Ukraine to collect her pension. Kakhidze combines snippets of their conversations with childlike drawings to evoke the utter surrealism of life in a place where the only good cell reception is in the cemetery, while a trip to the border that used to take an hour and a half now takes eleven hours. The series ends in 2019 when her mother dies of cardiac arrest during a pension run.
    Vlada Ralko, Lviv Diary No. 078 (2022). ©Vlada Ralko. Courtesy of the artist.
    Vlada Ralko’s 2022 Lviv Diary is more expressionistic. Her drawings, created with overlays of ink and watercolor realized in black, red, and flesh tones, mingle such symbols of Russian imperialism as eagles and hammers and sickles with bombs, skulls, mutilated female bodies, murdered children, and weapon-like phalluses. Watery stains of red suggest pools of blood while spreading blots of black evoke an obliterating void. Symbols meld to create disturbing hybrid images that suggest the impact of abstract political ambitions on defenseless human bodies.
    Dana Kavelina, we are all tied now (Exit to the Blind Spot series) (2019). ©Dana Kavelina. Courtesy of the artist
    Something of the same commingling of flesh and inanimate objects animates Dana Kavelina’s drawings from the series “Exit from the Blind Spot.” At once delicately drawn and darkly brutal, they are reminiscent of Nancy Spero’s equally lacerating series Torture of Women. Kavelina presents female bodies enmeshed in violence: the red lines of a cat’s cradle pin them down, or real red threads drip from their mouths. They are victims who have been deformed by war.
    Fridman Gallery is also screening Kavelina’s remarkable twenty-minute video Letter to a Turtledove (2020). This kaleidoscopic collage of images, animations, video clips, and sounds of war is accompanied by a mesmerizing voiceover in which one woman addresses another in a poetic text delivered with a detached and pensive intonation. Musing on the contradictions of war, violence, and desire, she offers a communication that is both personal and universal.
    Dana Kavelina, Letter to a Turtledove (2020). ©Dana Kavelina. Courtesy of the artist.
    Throughout the video, different kinds of narratives collide: Soviet-era propaganda films heroizing the Donbas coal miners run in reverse as if to undo the rape of the earth, while raw footage from the recent war lingers over bodies of the dead. These clips are intercut with brief animations that present female-headed doves, the dismembering of a woman’s body, explosions of roses, and representations of Our Lady of the Sorrows, a devotional image of the Madonna pierced with swords.
    Running like a dream narrative over these images, the voiceover reveals the narrator’s identification with the violated land and suggests her willing submission to death and desecration. The work ends with a loop that dwells on an explosion whose gorgeous red suggests blood, roses, and fire. In an interview on the film, Kavelina remarks, “I suggest looking at all wars from the perspective of rape because every rape, even in peacetime, carries the seed of war. It shows the very capability of one human being to humiliate, and to display his anatomical power over, another human being—in this sense, the penis is the earliest weapon of war.”
    Vlada Ralko, Lviv Diary No. 030 (2022). ©Vlada Ralko. Courtesy of the artist.
    Having spent most of their adult lives in a state of political upheaval, post-Soviet era Ukrainian artists find it hard to distance themselves from politics. Many of them have been deeply involved in their country’s successive revolutions. But for the women in this exhibition, art and politics are not identical. In 2019 I interviewed a number of Ukrainian women artists for a forthcoming book on Ukrainian art. At that time Vlada Ralko told me, “From the beginning of the Ukrainian revolution, I clearly understood that civic engagement for me is not enough, that I would not be able to survive without examining the new dramatic, complex, contradictory, and sometimes bloody conflicts in the Ukrainian recent history through the eyes of an artist.” She added, “If some people view my recent work as a manifestation of patriotism or political demonstration, they are mistaken… Political changes began to tell me about my own personal things, which were hidden, sleeping, but suddenly came out to light.”
    Ralko might have been speaking for all the artists in this exhibition. Feminism in Ukraine takes a different tack than feminism in the West. It is not so much that “the personal is political,” as Western feminists have declared. It is more that “the political is personal.” Seared into their bodies and their consciousness, the current war reveals women artists reevaluating their status as women, citizens, and members of the human race.
    “Women at War” is on view at Fridman Gallery, 169 Bowery, New York, through August 26, 2022.
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    Artist Ani Liu Has Some Radical Suggestions for What Pregnancy Could Look Like. It Begins With Artificial Wombs

    In 1970, a 25-year-old radical feminist named Shulamith Firestone published an incendiary manifesto called The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In it, she identified women’s role in childbearing as the primary cause of their ongoing oppression and proclaimed that “pregnancy is barbaric!”
    Firestone called for the abolition of pregnancy and outlined a speculative utopian future in which women would be freed from the forced labor of biological reproduction via the development of artificial wombs. The nuclear family, which she viewed as fundamentally patriarchal, would be replaced by “households”: groups of adults who would share in the communal care of children. 
    Firestone’s ideas were controversial then and remain so today, not least because she failed to develop an intersectional understanding of women’s struggles; for instance, she neglected to acknowledge the way race and class have determined which women ultimately bear the brunt of reproductive care work. Despite these shortcomings, her work has remained influential with cyberfeminists, queer theorists, and xenofeminists, who have similarly looked to technology as a means of emancipating bodies from the tyranny of nature (as it says in Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto: “if nature is unjust, change nature!”) and advocated for uncoupling kinship and care relations from purely biological definitions.
    Ani Liu was reading Firestone while pregnant with her first child in 2019. An artist-researcher who had studied body-machine hybrids, cybernetics, and cyborgs at MIT Media Lab, she was well-versed in the theoretical and political frameworks for considering gender, gender stereotypes, and ways technology could allow individuals to transcend the limitations of biology. Nevertheless, she was unprepared for the radical changes her body underwent during pregnancy. The experience marked the beginning of her personal and artistic interest in exploring the relationship between the body, society, gender, and politics.
    Ani Liu’s latest exhibition, “Ecologies of Care,” on view at Cuchifritos Gallery. Image: Brad Farwell.
    “At the time, I was reflecting on the fact that I felt like a human incubator and that society has a stake in that,” Liu told Artnet News. She cites declining birth rates in many countries and the promises those nations make to women in order to increase fertility rates, as well as the way they regulate women’s access to contraception and abortion. “I thought, why are we still doing this the old fashioned way?”
    Following Firestone’s provocation, Liu began wondering what might happen if humans outsourced baby incubation to techno-scientific processes. She found that while the research is still a ways away from the fully functioning artificial wombs Firestone envisioned, science has made considerable progress. Incubators can now accommodate premature babies born as early as 20 weeks (full term is considered 39 to 42 weeks). As she looked into this research, Liu came across the concept of interspecific pregnancy, an experimental technique wherein one animal species carries the babies of another.
    “It kind of blew my mind,” Liu recalled. “On Wikipedia, it said that we did this with cats where we impregnated them with pandas—because pandas are endangered and cute, so we feel like we want to help them. I was really fascinated by this. At the time, and recently, there was a lot of news about genetically engineering pigs for human organ transplants and so I looked immediately at a pig because it seemed like we already had a lot of research there.”
    This line of inquiry led to the first work in her current solo show, “Ecologies of Care,” on view at Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space in New York’s Essex Market (through August 6). The Surrogacy (bodies are not factories), which depicts a pig uterus inseminated with both pig and human fetuses, is the first piece that greets visitors as they walk in. Sat atop an illuminated vitrine, the sculpture glows, coiled into itself, looking slightly alien yet undeniably alluring. The bead-like bulbous forms made out of transparent, 3D-printed resin look like priceless jewels. While there is undoubtedly something anatomical about the form, it is only upon closer inspection that the milky white substance inside becomes recognizable as human and pig fetuses. 
    Ani Liu, The Surrogacy (Bodies are Not Factories). Image: Brad Farwell.
    For Liu, the work raises questions of ethics in the exploitation of both human and animal surrogates. “In using the pig as a vessel, it felt almost like equating my own body with that of livestock,” she said. “I wanted to show that we don’t actually need artificial wombs, we really need better policies.”
    The rest of the works in the show explore the materiality of maternal care work and the relentless demands of the postpartum process. In Untitled (labor of love), Liu presents a data portrait of the first 30 days following her daughter’s birth. The 60-by-24 inch acrylic sculpture is divided into 48 notches from top to bottom, each one representing a 30-minute increment. Some of these are fitted with tiny glass vials filled with breast milk, formula, and diaper fragments, representing each feeding and diaper change that took place. 
    Ani Liu, Untitled (Labor of Love). Image: Ani Liu.
    The pace is overwhelming and relentless and gives a sense of the round-the-clock labor required to keep a newborn alive. Liu started collecting the data to monitor her daughter’s health using a mobile app, a process that is likely to be familiar to most new parents. She was struck by the visualization of unrecognized labor it provided.
    “I remember there were several times when someone was like, ‘Oh, it’s so nice that you get maternity leave. It’s like a vacation!’ and I would pull up the data and be like, ‘Welcome to my vacation!’ So I knew I wanted to fold this data into my art somehow,” Liu said. “I also really wanted to bring the materiality of my life into the gallery because it was what I was experiencing and you never see breast milk and diapers in these spaces.”
    And there is plenty of (synthetic) breast milk in this show—about three gallons of it, to be exact. Shortly after giving birth to her second child during the pandemic, Liu had to return to work; she had not worked at her new job long enough to qualify for maternity leave. Since she had to be away from her child, she had to start pumping, and her symbiotic relationship with her breast pump became the inspiration for a pair of sculptures: Untitled (pumping) and Untitled (feeding through space and time). Both are made with food-grade tubing hooked up to a milky white acrylic box containing an air pump, a liquid pump, and a microcontroller. They circulate a milk-like substance Liu had to “sculpt” through months of trial and error to arrive at the right color and consistency. Untitled (pumping) sits perched on a shelf, neatly coiled, resembling a giant donut made of butter, were it not for the persistent sound of pumping and the sight of milk and air bubbles coursing through its tubes. Untitled (feeding through space and time) is arranged as a tangle of tubes on the floor, recalling the messy realities of childcare. Together, they are like the before-and-after images of the “how it started, how it’s going” meme. 
    Ani Liu, Untitled (pumping). Image: Brad Farwell.
    The rhythms of both sculptures are programmed to correspond to the rhythms of Liu’s breast pump and contain about a week’s worth of milk volume. Because Liu started working so soon after giving birth, and pumping as a result, she wasn’t able to establish a deep breastfeeding connection with her second child. The kind of physiological responses she used to have when feeding her first child (the mere sight of her daughter was enough to cause milk to start letting down) she now began having with her breast pump. 
    “All these Donna Haraway vibes came up for me—I am an animal-human-machine complete cybernetic creature,” she recalled. “There are a lot of hormones that go through your body when you lactate and I think mine were starting to become activated by the sound of the breast pump machine. I kept thinking about the relationship between me and the pump but also between the pump and society. On the one hand, the pump liberates the lactating person to be free of their baby’s mouth. It allows them to travel, work, do all kinds of things. But on the other hand, I feel like sometimes society gloms onto certain types of technologies to be like, ‘Oh look, you can pump! So you can return to work now, right?.’ But breastfeeding isn’t necessarily ‘free’ per se, it takes a lot of time and effort.”
    During the pandemic there was a brief moment of acknowledgment that “care work is essential work,” but the return to normal has been swift and particularly ruthless, especially in light of the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing attack on women’s reproductive rights. 
    “I’ve always been an advocate of choice and abortion rights but I felt even more strongly about it after I became a mother,” Liu said. “I wanted this and it’s still so hard. No one should have to be forced into this.”
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘Neighbors Walk By, Do a Double Take, and Smile’: What Happened When Top Artists Infiltrated Community Gardens Across Manhattan’s East Village

    Art blooms all summer long across New York City’s East Village—and now in eight of its 42 community gardens.
    Anonymous Gallery teamed up with curator Lola Kramer to present “7 Gardens,” a dispersed exhibition of East Village artists on view in community gardens throughout the storied creative neighborhood. The outdoor exhibition opened on July 14 alongside a traditional showcase of all eight artists in the gallery.
    Participating artists, all based in New York, include Ivana Bašić, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Bunny Rogers, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kandis Williams, and Marianne Vitale.
    Inspired by New York City’s declining green space and the community garden movement that took shape in the 1970s, Kramer told Artnet News that she “imagined 7 Gardens as a moment for art to exist outside of the formal and conventional structure of the white cube, even working against it by proposing a more flexible, less moribund alternative.”
    “These spaces serve as mini oases where the public can venture for a moment of solitude,” she continued. “It’s an opportunity for art to happen within our community.”
    Anonymous Gallery founder Joseph Ian Henrikson said he reopened his New York space during “the midst of the pandemic, the arrival of my first child, and the loss of my sister (who adored time in her garden).”
    “It all forced me to reconsider public space, the city itself, and the way I intend to participate in the art world,” Henrikson said. He’d quietly nourished the conceptual seed of “7 Gardens” for years, compiling lists of community gardens in small bursts.
    Work by American sculptor Robert Gober, on view at Peach Tree Garden.
    “Witnessing New York City collectively respond to tragedy inspired my devotion to a project that I can personally dedicate to my sister, but that also honors these phenomenally unique spaces in the city that has been my home for almost half my life—and will be home to my children as they grow,” Henrikson said.
    He started making moves this February, asking gallery staff to contact community gardens. As they began getting responses, Henrikson approached Kramer to assemble the show. Together, they managed to secure even more sites than they’d originally intended. The title “7 Gardens” was more like a goal post.
    “We like to think of it as part of our path towards tropism and organic growth,” Kramer said.
    Henrikson said he felt like the gardens chose them. “Green Oasis, for instance, is one of the only gardens with an active beehive and an underused 10-foot raised platform,” he said. “Terence Koh came to mind immediately as someone who has created structures and shrines dedicated to bees.”
    Koh’s ongoing project at Green Oasis will culminate with community contributions and a “stained-glass light sanctuary, friendly to the humans, bees, and butterflies that inhabit the space,” Henrikson son.
    Kramer curated artists whose work would particularly resonate with the project’s unorthodox context and respect for neighborhood heritage. Tiravanija, for instance, has kept the same apartment on East 7th Street since 1982, and it appears throughout his work.
    “I was familiar with Bob Gober’s history with the neighborhood, his studio on East 10th Street, and exhibitions like the show he did at 303 Gallery in 1998 with Christopher Wool,” Kramer said. “I understood that gardening is an important part of his daily life. I imagined how powerful it would be to experience his work in this context, particularly because of his porous relationship with the world outside the studio and his channeling of this vernacular across mediums.”
    Bench by Bunny Rogers at Orchard Alley.
    She had the most fun working with Urs Fischer’s studio on his Chalk and Cheese installation. “Neighbors would walk by, do a double take and smile,” Kramer said. That installation got featured on Instagram by What Is New York, which has 1.3 million followers. Henrikson called it “A real ‘we’ve made it’ moment.”
    Local activist and Orchard Alley founder Ayo Harrington invited Bunny Rogers to make her flowered version of the Chrystie-Forsyth bench permanent. Rogers will give a poetry reading on July 27 at 7:30 p.m.
    There’s still plenty of summertime in store. “7 Gardens” and promises more programming, such as workshops, artist talks, performances, and screenings. Keep your eyes on the exhibition map as it updates, and check out the central show at 136 Baxter Street, which also functions as an information center for your adventures across the East Village.

    Participating gardens include Fireman’s Memorial Garden, 6BC Botanical Garden, Peach Tree Garden, La Plaza Cultural Garden, Green Oasis Community Garden, and Kenkeleba House Garden.
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    Manifesta’s Director Wants to Bring the Roving Biennial to Ukraine—and Have Former Host Cities ‘Adopt’ Local Museums

    Though the latest edition of Manifesta just opened this month, plans are already underway for a forthcoming iteration of the roving European biennial to take place in Ukraine. 
    Last week, at a press conference inaugurating Manifesta 14 in Pristina, Kosovo, the 18-year-old event’s founder and director Hedwig Fijen said she is proposing a 2028 iteration of the show in Kyiv. Projects supporting the future biennial may start as early as next year.
    The goal, Fijen told Artnet News, is to “help rebuild and re-strengthen the cultural ecosystem and infrastructure of Ukraine in the next six years to come.” 
    The proposed exhibition would be a joint initiative between the Manifesta Foundation and the Ukrainian Institute for Culture. Central to the Manifesta founder’s vision is the concept that past and future Manifesta host cities—such as Zürich, Rotterdam, and Palermo—would “adopt” local art and education institutions in Ukraine. 
    Fijen explained that she put the idea in motion shortly after the Russian invasion and that it “has been received with great enthusiasm both from Ukrainian and European side.”
    Manifesta Founding Director Hedwig Fijen. Courtesy of Manifesta.
    Typically, the director is only partly responsible for choosing the biennial’s host cities. Per Manifesta’s established rules, cities and regions must apply to host an edition of the show. Then, Fijen and the foundation’s board select a destination from a shortlist of candidates. 
    The Ukrainian Institute has sent a letter of intent to host Manifesta 17 in 2028, Fijen confirmed. 
    “We had a meeting in Prishtina with some delegations of former and future host cities,” she added, noting that the mayors of those places plan to write letters committing to participate in the show. 
    Kyiv has twice applied to host Manifesta, most recently for the 14th edition on view now. The foundation ultimately decided against the Ukrainian city in 2018 due to the ongoing war in Donbas following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Now, the groundswell of European support of Ukraine may have turned the tide. 
    More information on the 2028 proposal will be made available in the coming months, Fijen said.
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    in Street Art

    “Beyond Walls” by Saype in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    For the fifteenth stage of the global artwork “Beyond Walls” in Rio de Janeiro, Saype strives to bridge the impassable distance between Benin (tenth stage of the project) and Brazil. Thus allowing those who left across the ocean never to return, to feel again the desperate embrace of those who saw them drift away forever… from African origin to American destination, from light to night, from freedom to slavery.The giant eco responsible landart paintings by Saype were created on the Estàcio favela (825m2) and Copacabana beach (1.500m2). These two artworks were created using natural pigments made out of charcoal and chalk. “Beyond Walls”  global project aims to links more than 30 cities over the world to promote the message of togetherness. Beyond walls erected by people between people, Saype went to meet the local communities in the Estacìo favela.Between the postcard image of Copacabana, which nevertheless bears the tragic marks of history, and the favela, the gigantic hands of “Beyond Walls” strive to overcome the fractures of the past as well as those that are still very present. They remind us that it is only through cooperation that walls fall down and that the universal becomes a reality: “the universal is the local minus the walls” (Miguel Torga).In an increasingly polarised world, the artist chooses to paint symbolically the largest human chain in the world, inviting us to embrace kindness and togetherness, this is the “Beyond Walls” project. Pairs of hands, which intertwine and travel from town to town, and form a giant chain painted on the ground symbolising union, mutual aid, and common effort beyond walls.Check out below for more photos of “Beyond Walls” project in Rio de Janeiro. Photo credits: Saype More

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    ‘I Believe Strongly in Vulnerability’: Curator Prem Krishnamurthy on What Cleveland’s FRONT Triennial Can Teach About the Healing Power of Art

    The night the newest edition of the FRONT International opened in Cleveland, the show’s curator, Prem Krishnamurthy, could be found at karaoke bar called Tina’s, belting out a beery rendition of Britney Spears’s Toxic. Before him was a rag-tag crowd of local barflies, goth kids, rust-belt cowboys, baseball bros—as well as a cadre of the international art world there for the show. Everyone was singing along.
    Tina’s wasn’t one of the official sites of the triennial exhibition (which is funny, because seemingly every other venue in Northeast Ohio is), but Krishnamurthy called the event the “crux of the show.”
    “Karaoke,” he said, “can be such a leveling force. There, in that big room, there are all these different people you don’t know, but everybody’s cheering each other on. When somebody sings, everybody else claps for them and everybody else joins in. To me, that is beautiful.” 
    Positive are the vibes conjured by Krishnamurthy’s edition of FRONT, the second since the Cleveland-based event was founded in 2018. The show, titled “Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,” spans dozens of venues across Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, and features work by some 75 artists both local and international, alive and dead. All of it coalesces around the curatorial conceit of the show, which is about embracing “art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process.” 
    The title comes from “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams,” a 1957 poem by Langston Hughes, who spent his teen years in Cleveland and whose presence remains strong in the city: 
    I
    Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
    That without dust the rainbow would not be.
    II
    I look with awe upon the human race
    And God, Who sometimes spits right in its face.
    Turning to art for regeneration and repair feels on brand for 2022, but Krishnamurthy and his team actually settled on that theme back in 2019. After the show’s busy opening weekend, Krishnamurthy spoke with Artnet News about the evolution of that and the other ideas at the heart of his ambitious triennial.
    Jacolby Satterwhite, Dawn (2021). Photo: Cleveland Clinic. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
    Langston Hughes looms large over the exhibition. It’s from him that the show take its name, and there are several exhibitions that feature or otherwise allude to his writing, his voice, his persona. What did you find in Hughes as you were putting the show together?
    I think there are multiple things about Langston Hughes that appealed so strongly to us when we were first curating the show in 2019. Of course there’s his Cleveland connection, which is how we came to him initially. During that period, our curatorial assistant Lo Smith researched Hughes and actually presented back to the curatorial team the idea that Langston Hughes was almost a kind of contemporary artist in the way that he worked polymathically between different fields. 
    When he was in Cleveland, he had already been writing poetry for a long time. But as a teenager, he taught in the Karamu House art workshop and produced prints and was making visual art. He organized plays and performances and events that we might think of as happenings. That his career was so multivalent and was really fascinating. I think that in Langston’s work, and in his biography, there is a questing that happens from a very early age, but also a lot of trauma and suffering embedded in it. 
    We actually chose the title of the show while we were still formulating what it would be about, still figuring out the artists we wanted to include. So it all kind of emerged organically. And somehow then, once we had this title, “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows,” it became a thing that we could really come back to and let resonate in many different ways. 
    Moyra Davey, Still from Horse Opera (2019–22). Courtesy of the artist; Greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne, and New York.
    What did that title mean to you then and what’s your relationship to it now?
    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that poem over the last two and a half years. Every time I did, it had some different resonance for me. When we started, it was very philosophical and was also very imagistic. There was something in the idea of dust and rainbows that immediately set people’s imaginations on fire. 
    From the very beginning, we wanted to reproduce the entire poem whenever we referenced it. Because the second part has quite a different tone than the first. This idea that God sometimes spits right in man’s face—there’s something very pointed and very brutal about that which appealed to us. But I have to say that, now, from the position of having worked on this for years, having worked on it through a pandemic, through global calls for social and racial justice, through seeing the environment collapse around us and more—and a lot of personal challenges—the meaning has changed. It has begun to seem to me almost like a Buddhist sentiment, this inseparability of joy and suffering. 
    Making this exhibition—there’s been a lot of dust. It’s been really challenging to produce a show under these conditions and in this time, but then the fact that something so beautiful comes out of it on the other end—that’s really remarkable.
    Charmaine Spencer, Water (2021), installation view, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland. Courtesy of the artist.
    The show posits art as “an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process,” which of course feels very apt in 2022. But, as you mentioned, that concept was first settled on back in 2019, prior to the pandemic and other recent upheavals. What were you thinking of back then?
    In 2019, when we were intensively researching the show, we were thinking, first of all, about the context of northeast Ohio, thinking about the historical traumas that the region has faced. A hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth or sixth largest city in the U.S., I believe. People here often say, back then, there were more millionaires in Cleveland than there were in New York. The city had this incredible prosperity that was generated through things like Standard Oil, which was founded there, and the steel industry. But that same wealth that was produced in the region led to the destruction of the environment. It led to the destruction of people’s lives in terms of exploitation and the conditions of work in that moment. It set the stage for all of these issues that are problems in Cleveland today and have been over the last 50 years. 
    But something that Murtaza Vali, who is part of our artistic team, brought to the table was this realization that the industrial labor and industrial wealth had given way to a focus on health services in the region. The Cleveland Clinic is the largest employer in the city. Also Art Therapy Studio, which was one of the earliest independent organizations for art therapy, was founded there. Alcoholics Anonymous was started in Akron and the National Museum of Psychology is there too. So around 2019, we coalesced this idea and then launched the triennial with the title that it has and the focus on art and healing. 
    Then, two months later, the world shut down. 
    Nicole Eisenman, Drinks at Julius (2012). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
    How did the conversation about the curatorial conceit of the show evolve from that point on?
    When we first started talking about healing and therapy in 2019, I think both of us felt a certain reticence about it. It was something that both of us were deeply invested in our own lives and in our work, but I think we were a little embarrassed. We thought in 2019 that it could be seen as too esoteric or too hippie-dippie or somehow not serious enough for the art world. But we went with it. I believe really strongly in vulnerability and I think we went with what was really close to us and we said, ‘This is something we really care about and we’re gonna do it. Hopefully people will go with it.’ 
    Then the pandemic hit and we almost got to the other end of the spectrum where there were suddenly so many projects focused on healing. It became clear to me that we had to articulate healing as something more than an abstract concept. How can art making be healing both for the maker and for the receiver? 
    I grew up in a first-generation immigrant family where the idea of doing art was absurd. It was seen as frivolous and I always thought of it as being selfish; that if you did art, you were doing this thing that was too much for yourself, that had too much ego in it. For me, it took this moment—the pandemic and the lockdown—to really like dig into this question of how art can heal on an individual level, as a daily practice; and heal on the level of the collective, through sharing joy and through pleasure and music and dance and craft and color; and, at the same time, also create structural change. How can it actually do that in these different ways? And so for me, it’s been about testing out this proposition to see. Can we draft an idea of how art might really work in all of these ways for the individual and for the planet as a whole?
    Isabelle Andriessen, Necrotic Core (2021). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist.
    Across the exhibition are many different, and often personal, responses to those questions you just posed about art’s capacity for healing. Can you walk me through how this theme of healing through art is expressed in some of the projects included in FRONT?
    On the scale of the individual and thinking about daily practice, there’s a big spectrum of examples. I’m thinking about somebody like Julie Mehretu and the mindfulness that she brings to making art, how she paints every day. We’ve really tried to emphasize that healing-through-work approach with the show she curated at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It’s something that resonates with Theaster Gates’s film A clay Sermon, which is about his own origins as an artist. Theaster is an artist who works on the structural level, but my hunch is that he couldn’t do that unless he could also find a way to satisfy himself to an individual level. That comes through his work with clay and ceramics. That’s what this film is really about in my mind. 
    But it also uses music and joy to bring people together. There’s also Paul O’Keefe, based in Cleveland, who has used the medium of sculpture to deal with an horrific, unthinkable loss—his son’s suicide at 22. He’s using the language of sculpture as a way to process and integrate that. And Dexter Davis, who is responding to a violent trauma—a shooting that he experienced—but doing that through a daily process of collage that allows him to continue. 
    Healing is embedded within some of the exhibition relationships as well. For example, at Spaces om Cleveland, we present the work of Isabelle Andriessen with her father Juriaan Andriessen, who died quite tragically when she was young. To put that work together and try to look at what connections might come out can be healing too. 
    Those are some examples on the level of the individual, but on the level of the collective or the group, there are so many projects that come to mind. Maybe one of the most obvious is Asad Raza’s project Delegation. Raza brought a group of musicians on a boat from his hometown of Buffalo to Cleveland. They spent three days on the water—an extremely challenging trip—composing a piece. Then they played that piece once in the old stone church. On the level of performance, it broke so many things down and was just about being together. 
    Paul O’Keeffe, Screaming Voicelessly to a Distant Silence, installation view, the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, 2017. Photo: Jacob Koestler. Courtesy of the artist.
    And then, on the level of the structural and speaking with power, there are examples like Jacolby Satterwhite who has engaged in a long-term collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, a major organization that has a historically fraught relationship with its black neighbors and community. What emerged out of it is something that’s challenging to everybody involved, but I think it also changed them. 
    And then there’s Cooking Sections’s project on lake Erie and their work that will unfold over the next three years with local farmers that is about changing the farming practices in the region to make them regenerative. It’s about using art, which has certain funding structures, has a certain visibility, to be able to incur change
    Finally, I wanted to ask you about karaoke, which struck me as a very fitting end to the show’s kick-off, even if it wasn’t officially part of the show. There was a lot of healing happening in that room.
    I think of karaoke is probably the best metaphor for all of this. Where is the art in it? The art in it is not only in what you’re seeing, but it’s in what you bring to it, how you sing it, and whether you’re all in or not. 

    “Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows” is on view at various venues across northeast Ohio now through October 2, 2022.
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    in Exhibitions

    Mexico City’s Frida Kahlo Experience Takes ‘Frida-Mania’ to Its Logical Final Form: Dreamy Animation and Inspirational Quotes

    Would Frida Kahlo have liked “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva,” the snappy immersive-art experience currently at the Foro Polanco in Mexico City? I can’t definitely say no. Kahlo was a complicated person, obsessed with promoting a personal legend but also passionately politically concerned.
    What does Kahlo’s leap to immersive-art status suggests about contemporary “Frida-mania?” “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” has the stamp of approval of the Kahlo family itself (as does “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” another Frida attraction open at cities across North America). Keep in mind, though, that that’s the same arm of the family that announced last year it was planning a Frida Kahlo and Family Metaverse (supposed to launch in Q2 of this year, but so far quiet).
    About 45 minutes in length, this immersive Frida experience fills two large chambers (there is also a side chamber with extra selfie ops, kids activities, and interactive, Frida-themed games). The walls are animated with high-res, super-scaled projections featuring swirling images culled from Kahlo’s Greatest Hits, from the Two Fridas (1939) to the Broken Column (1944) to her funny final painting, a still life of a watermelon with the words “Viva la Vida” (Live Life!) carved into it.
    Images are animated and repeated so that crowds can enjoy versions of the same show wherever they roam in the galleries. Foliage sprouts and moves. The atmospheres of her paintings change from day to night.
    The giant central figures are occasionally overrun by tides of paintbrushes, human hearts, chairs, or nails. Sometimes these animated swarms leave only the eyes of Frida or Diego Rivera peeking out, unintentionally evoking that meme of a frozen Homer Simpson sinking backwards into a hedge in embarrassment. Warm, twinkly music plays.
    Frida Kahlo’s Portrait of Diego Rivera (1938) projected within Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    A smattering of Kahlo quotes on the soundtrack provide an atmosphere of biographical communion. These hit the familiar, big beats of Frida lore: the accident that left her in pain for life, her all-consuming passion for Diego, her shame at his affairs. It ends with a quote, spoken in the tone of a wise and mischievous grandmother: “No vale la pena irse de este mundo sin haberle dado tantito gusto a la vida” (something like: “It’s not worth leaving this world without getting a little pleasure from life.”)
    Like “Immersive Van Gogh,” which it closely echoes in style, “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” does the job it sets out to do just fine—providing an efficiently spectacular version of visual art mythology and a family-friendly break in the air conditioning. Just as Vincent Van Gogh has been refined by media culture into his most marketably simple idea of “tortured genius,” so Frida Kahlo has been refined down to “passionate woman.”
    An animation of Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer (1947) in Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    This particular immersive Frida doesn’t really make much of an effort to tell Frida Kahlo’s actual story—but then, the new Batman movie doesn’t bother to re-tell Bruce Wayne’s origin story either. The whole point of contemporary IP-driven blockbuster media is to feed you stuff that’s so familiar that you don’t have to do the work of learning about it. Instead you can just enjoy watching it creatively re-interpreted.
    In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo is more than familiar, of course. Dolls and tchotchkes with her likeness are sold everywhere; she gazes out from murals and T-shirts, in cutesy cartoon form. But there’s also plenty of Frida easily available that gives a sense of the tougher, less marketable political side that almost every modern-day version of “Frida-mania” seems hellbent on burying in kitsch.
    Go to see Diego Rivera’s famous mural cycle at the Secretariat of Public Education. In it, there’s an image called In the Arsenal, from 1929, centered on the image on Frida in a red worker’s shirt, with a Communist red star on it, handing out guns to the workers. The Soviet flag flaps behind her.
    Diego Rivera, In the Arsenal (1929). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Even at the underwhelming, over-touristed Frida shrine that is the Casa Azul, where they sell all manner of inoffensive Frida merch, they still preserve her bed complete with the five photos that looked down on her at night, like saints watching over her sleep: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. When I was there for my timed-ticket slot, the American tourist in front of me was loudly angry to discover that Frida was a Marxist. “You know, I read this shit in college—but I’m a grown man now, and it’s not cute anymore!” he snapped at his girlfriend.
    No one is going to have any similar unwanted epiphanies during “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva,” which is sponsored by a bank, Citibanamex.
    Defending the “political Frida” from the “commercial Frida” is by now its own critical trope. But the subject of Frida’s politics is also a knotty one, and I wouldn’t trust Citibanamex or its immersive art engineers with its intricacies. Usually, it runs in the direction of a simple heroization of the “political Frida.” But her politics were complex and contradictory. For instance, Frida was an anti-Stalinist, and then an ardent Stalinist by her final days. (She returned to the Mexican Communist Party, Hayden Herrera argues, because its vision of a muscular, actually existing world Communism offered an image of strength that served a psychic function for her as her own body failed.)
    Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944), animated in Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    You might actually be able to create an immersive show that gave a sense of Kahlo’s complexity—but this would require some creativity and thoughtful engagement with history, which would risk harshing the audience’s mellow. It would also require breaking with some of the emerging “immersive art” clichés, which favor free-floating atmosphere and pre-digested storytelling.
    The intro text that greets you outside “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” all but says that it expects its audience to mainly come to the show primed by the 2002 Salma Hayek movie, Frida (which, incidentally, some Mexican critics criticized at the time for its glammed-up Hollywood treatment of the artist). It states:
    There are many paths that lead to the world-renowned Frida Kahlo: the medical path, the scientific path, the historical path, the biographical path, and the emotional path. Ever since the Hollywood movie came out, it is this last path that has led the largest number of people from around the world to Frida Kahlo: it has moved them and awakened them to great empathy.
    And now, this multimedia immersive experience is here…
    What does this mean—taking the “emotional path” into Frida, as opposed to the “biographical” or “historical” paths?
    Maybe because we’re already talking about how present-day Hollywood processes art, my immersive Frida experience made me think of an article by critic Alison Willmore, who asked recently in Vulture: “is Jane Austen just a vibe now?” Willmore looks at the contemporary “Jane Austen industrial complex” (but specifically the new Netflix Persuasion) and how a set of tropes—“bonnets, walks in the countryside, sessions of piano playing in the parlor, a vague sense of a stuffy British accent”—have come to crowd out the intricate psychological and social observations that have made Austen’s actual books so lasting.
    “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” in Mexico City makes me think that immersive experiences are possibly best understood as agents of a similar process—or maybe what happens when this process takes its final form. They are a preeminent contemporary technology of vibe-ification.
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  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Street Art

    “Street Chronicles” Group Exhibition at UrbanBreak, Seoul, South Korea

    Urban & Street Art Fair, URBAN BREAK 2022, marks its third anniversary this year. URBAN BREAK drew attention with 15,000 people attending in 2020, the first year alone. Last year, despite COVID-19 at its peak, 40,000 people visited the fair, thereby solidifying its status as one of the most prominent fairs.Rom Levy, director of StreetArtNews, co-planned the Special Exhibition of International Street Artists. Entitled Street Chronicles, the exhibition is showcasing the works of artists who were the pillars of street art techniques, concepts and different styles.STREET CHRONICLES retraces a side of Urban Art history bringing the streets of NYC and London to Seoul.Street art was considered vandalism when protesters during wars and political corruptions used the walls of their cities to comment on political and social issues with slogans and graffitis. What was initially regarded as vandalism has since become a significant art form. Murals and other forms of street art are renowned for their beautification of cities, raising awareness, and standing as witnesses to history.This proposal includes Banksy, whose identity remains anonymous to the day. His politically charged works provoke alternative viewpoints, encouraging revolution in the art world, making him one of the most controversial street artists. Banksy’s work has been breaking down the boundaries and expectations of street art critics, using many different street art mediums and styles. Banksy began his graffiti practice inspired by Blek Le Rat, one of the most prominent artists in Street Art. Inspired by what he saw in New York during his visit in 1971, Blek Le Rat started creating artworks across the streets of Paris in 1981. He primarily used stencils in his practice. His first stencils were black rats running along the walls throughout Paris. In 1983 he began to paint life-sized stencils, which became his trademark alongside his rats and have influenced generations of street artists worldwide.Also included are other notable Urban artists such as D*Face, Shepard Fairey and Invader, who all contributed to the development of the art styles and mediums. Alongside artists from the newer generation who weave the connection between street art and the wave of the new contemporary, such as Roby Dwi Antono, Andrew Hem, Lonac and Andrew Schoultz. Their work bridges contemporary art aesthetics with illustrative figuration. For example, Andrew Hem incorporates atmospheric and richly textured narratives in a vivid palette of twilight blues invigorated by fields of deep red and specks of golden light. Spirits are evoked through the visionary presentation of remembrances and dreams of his haunting impressions of civilisation and landscapes. While Andrew Schoultz’s work has a visual approach to social and political commentary. His enormous murals, paintings, installations and sculptures are heavily patterned, creating an intense and mesmerising vision of current events.Street art is dedicated to bringing art to the people, raising awareness about political and social issues, and portraying the truth of reality.‘I want the characters of the paintings to walk out of the museums to give them back to the people of the city.’ -Blek Le Rat.Tickets for URBAN BREAK 2022 are sold at KRW 20,000 for general admission and at KRW 100,000 for VIP admission. Those who have purchased VIP tickets can enter early from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm prior to the exhibition to be open on July 21st, 2022, at 3:00 pm. Venue will be at COEX Hall B, Seoul, South Korea.You can book your tickets to this year’s Urban Break at their website. More