Eliana Willis

You can’t help but think Tove Jansson might have preferred a quieter sort of exhibition. Solitude came naturally to the Finnish cartoonist and writer, less so the celebrity delivered by her globally beloved Moomin books. This reclusive tendency was best evidenced in the summer-long pilgrimages Jansson began making in her 50s to Klovharun, a tiny island in the Finnish archipelago that offered privacy and isolation in place of electricity and running water.
Nonetheless, Jansson’s Estate has decided to stage one of the largest exhibitions exploring her oeuvre and legacy in Paris—and during the hubbub of Paris Fashion Week and Art Basel Paris to boot. The location is not entirely incidental. In her 20s, Jansson studied painting in the city, ditching the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for a small studio and then trying, and largely failing, to gain recognition as a painter.
This makes “Houses of Tove Jansson,” set to run from September 29 through October 28, a homecoming of sorts, one that presents Jansson as far more than the quirky mind behind a lovable family of fairy-tale trolls.
Tove Jansson, Landscape (c. 1930s). Photo: Tove Jansson Estate.
Across the five floors of The Community, a Parisian art institution, visitors will meet all of Jansson: an artist who followed the currents of the 20th century in her Impressionist and Abstract paintings; a writer of novels, poems, and radio plays; and perhaps most importantly, a queer woman with a pacifist bent who bucked the norms and expectations of her era. It is, as Thomas Zambra, a great nephew who manages Jansson’s legacy, puts it, her whole life story. And yes, that includes the Moomin.
“We aim to keep her work alive and relevant, ensuring that her legacy continues to inspire and delight future generations,” Zambra told Artnet News. “We believe we can offer audiences a new way of seeing and experiencing her work.”
One aspect of this new approach has involved inviting contemporary artists including Emma Kohlmann, Ida Ekblad, and Vidya Gastaldon to create new work that engage Jansson’s aesthetic universes and ethos. The artists were selected by The Community and encouraged to create whatever they saw fit, trollish or otherwise.
Tove Jansson painting. Photo: Tove Jansson Estate.
The main focus, however, is the artistic trajectory of one of the most famous cartoonists in history, one that will satisfy newbies and die-hard fans alike. Born in Helsinki in 1914 to a father who worked as a sculptor and an illustrator mother, Jansson’s creativity was evident as a young child. This proclivity is on show in Paris, with early examples of her illustrated storybooks, some of which included fledgling versions of her amorphous trolls.
The range and quantity of Jansson’s work stands out. There are illustrations for children’s books, large-scale paintings, merchandise, sketches for opera, set design pieces for theater, and more besides. For visitors needing a breather, The Community has built a reading room holding not only Jansson’s best-known titles but also a recreation of her personal Helsinki library.
Fittingly, the exhibition devotes space to the archipelago in which Jansson spent her summers and presents objects from her everyday life including the handmade Moomin flag that flew above her Klovharun cottage. This recreation of physical spaces is the thinking behind the show’s name, the show’s curators Sini Rinne-Kanto and Tuukka Laurila told Artnet News. “We address the importance of different spaces to Tove Jansson, places she felt at home, such as on the island.”
See more images from the show below.
Tove Jansson, Smoking girl (Self portrait) (1940). Photo courtesy Tove Jansson Estate.
Tove Jansson, Little My Paperdoll (undated). Photo courtesy Moomin Characters.
Tove Jansson, Summer Island (undated). Photo courtesy Moomin Characters.
Tove Jansson, Unnamed (undated). Photo courtesy Tove Jansson Estate
Tove Jansson, Lynx Boa (Self-portrait) (1942). Photo courtesy Tove Jansson Estate.
Tove Jansson, Little My Paperdoll (undated). Photo courtesy Moomin Characters.
“Houses of Tove Jansson” is on view at The Community, 16 Avenue Foch, 75016, Paris, France, through October 28.
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Latvia’s Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), which was prepared to launch the main program of its third edition in August, has been cancelled over to its links to Russia.
“It appears that the heritage of our executive members, which includes Russian among Lithuanian and Latvian nationalities, is something too significant to overcome as the Russian attack on Ukraine rekindles tensions of an occupied past,” the organizers wrote in a statement confirming the event’s suspension.
The event’s founder, Agniya Mirgorodskaya, is not only of Russian and Lithuanian origin but has, until recently, relied on Russian funding from her father, fishing entrepreneur Gennady Mirgorodsky. This association was awkward for the formerly Soviet-occupied country even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Latvia has its own painful history with Russia, and it re-gained independence from the Soviet regime in the early 1990s as a result of the Baltic States’ Singing Revolution. Since then, it has sought to reduce its neighbor’s cultural influence.
Nikolay Smirnov, Religious Libertarians (2020). Commissioned by the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, RIBOCA. Photo by Hedi Jaansoo. Courtesy of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art.
The biennial had originally been scheduled to take place in 2022 but was postponed shortly after war broke out. Publicly, the organizers launched their Common Ground initiative, offering their venue instead as a place for Ukrainian refugees to socialize and work. Behind the scenes, though, its organizers seemed to scramble to distance themselves from their Russian roots. According to a roundtable with Latvian cultural workers in Collecteurs, as soon as the war broke out, several artists set to participate in the third edition withdrew.
“It was very clear from day one that we had to completely change our funding structure,” Mirgorodskaya told Artnet News earlier this year when the biennial attempted to reboot. A temporary solution came courtesy of her husband Robert William Pokora, a financier working in real estate in New York, who agreed to donate a fixed percentage of his earnings towards a new endowment fund for the biennial.
It now appears that these efforts were not enough to stem a rising tide of skepticism and resistance to any Russian influence within the arts and culture scene in Riga, and any real or symbolic ties with Russia proved impossible for RIBOCA to overcome. Some were also unsatisfied with the claimed financial tweaks.
Teemu Korpela Disposition 1 (2018). RIBOCA1: ‘Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More’ in Riga, Latvia, 2 June – 28 October 2018, rigabiennial.com
“The argument given by RIBOCA that money for artist fees comes from other countries, like Switzerland is a calming compromise out of an account department,” said artist Maija Kurševa in Collecteurs who withdrew from the show after the war began. “It is a legal argument but entirely unpersuasive.”
Žanete Liekīte, a curator from Riga, criticized the biennale’s organizers in a recent opinion piece published in Latvian press. Among her points, she questioned the validity of their attempts to support Ukrainian refugees while abstaining from calling out the Russian government for the war. “‘Reacting to the brutal war in Ukraine’ without directly mentioning the aggressor develops into an amusing situation, with one hand reaching out to Ukraine, while the other is held on Russia’s knee.” (The organizers specifically condemned the “Russian attack” in their most recent statement).
Liekīte also questioned the unmentioned disappearance of sanctioned Russian Pyotr Aven from a list of supporters (he had supported the first biennial with a small grant as well as another one-off event).
The main exhibition of the third edition of RIBOCA was set to open on August 10 and run through to March 2025 in a collaboration with the esteemed curator René Block. After the initial postponement post-invasion, the show reemerged with a notably different artist list and with the artist collective SUPERFLEX added as a co-curator.
The show was re-titled “There is an Elephant in the Room.” The plan was to stage works by 25 women artists across multiple venues in Riga, with each offering their own take on some urgent but thorny issue. An initial phase of the biennial’s reworked program opened at the Kunsthal 44Møen in Denmark in June.
“We have been forced to confront the difficult reality that what we are providing may simply be inappropriate or unwanted in these challenging times, no matter how benevolent our intentions may be,” said the organizers. “Furthermore, in the best interests of our team and artists’ wellbeing, we have decided to pause our efforts.”
Read the organizers’ full statement here.

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At first, they might appear innocuous: document-sized gray and white boxes, neatly stacked on shelves and organized by year. The Kunstverein Munich’s archive, stretching back to 1823, charts the activities of the city’s premier arts institution, but as it celebrates its 200-year anniversary, the institution’s leaders are working to prove that archives are anything but static.
Their existence is also not a given. The institution used a lot of time and effort to track down and structure the materials. “When I arrived four years ago, the archive as we know it now did not exist,” said director Maurin Dietrich. Rather, it was scattered between boxes in the attic, basement, and city archives.
And despite the Kunstverein’s two-century history—and its importance in staging the first solo European institutional exhibitions by now well-known artists, such as Liam Gillick and Andrea Fraser—none of its archives were indexed or available for the public to pick through.
Detail: Exhibition by Claude Cahun, 1998; in: “THE ARCHIVE AS…,” Kunstverein München, 2023. Photo: Maximilian Geuter.
The Kunstverein Munich, with its historic arcade that runs alongside a 17th-century garden in the center of town, has a complicated history. Its past shows how cultural venues like it were complicit in the suppressive activities of the Nazi party. (Munich was the site of the Putsch that saw Hitler begin to get a grip on power, and the Kunstverein was the exhibition venue for the infamous “Degenerate art” exhibition.) At the same time, years later, the Kunstverein was also a space for civic action during the struggle for women’s rights.
After the war, Munich was where the deadly 1972 Olympics took place. It is also where, last summer, Tony Cokes’s poignant show “Some Munich Moments” appeared, which delved into the archives and visual language used around the 1972 Olympic games. The curatorial team has also brought together critically lauded solo presentations of U.S. artists Pippa Garner and Diamond Stingily, among others. 
Curatorial team of Kunstverein München from left to right: curator Gloria Hasnay, assistant curator Gina Merz and director Maurin Dietrich, 2023. Photo: Manuel Nieberle.
Its project of late is emotional for the city. The anniversary event was celebrated last weekend with talks, music, dancing, and an impossibly long dinner table that hosted 200 guests, including former directors, curators, artists, and writers. An intergenerational public street party closed out the weekend.
Inside the venue, the institution brought its archive into the center as a malleable installation. On view until August are pieces of archival material, images, posters standing on modular shelves at the center of the exhibition space, like an open book. Put another way, there are puzzle pieces to a history, but they do not neatly fit together—nor do they need to. The transformable show, titled “The Archive As…”, asks participants to finish the phrase. It also allows the archive arrangement to be altered. (“The Archive as a Headache” is one such example, and artist Joshua Leon interjected with poignant lines of questioning in the form of notes left around the installation.)
But history and memory, and the archives, even when they’re organized, do not generate a straight line across two centuries, nor conjure easy answers. What has emerged is a story about German society, the end days of royalty, the dark period between 1930s and ’40s, the riotous 1960s and ’70s, and the contemporaneity from the 1990s to today. It also tells the story of what, exactly, a Kunstverein is—and what it might be able to become.
Exterior view of the Kunstverein Munich. Meeting of the institution’s Summer School for “The Stories We Tell Ourselves.” Courtesy Kunstverein Munich.
The Kunstverein Model
To start, some definitions. The verein model (kunstverein translates to art association) has a long history, one that is a given to most in Germany, but deserves a bit of picking apart for those based elsewhere. 
There are more than half a million vereine—associations of different kinds—in the country, and they run the gamut in concept and scale. There are sports associations that are large and nationally recognized and ones that are extremely niche (it only takes seven individuals to form such an association, and one can form a verein for just about anything so long as it is legal—and, trust me, people do).
When it comes to art associations, there are around 300 dotting the nation in major cities and towns. One of its distinguishing factors from art spaces in other countries is its members. Each Kunstverein is made up of a directorship, which is voted in by a board, which is in turn voted in by a paying membership—which usually consists of hundreds to thousands of people for each institution. The body of the membership tends to outlive the board and directors, who tend to switch over at least once a decade—as such, one could say, like an electorate, forms the core of the association. In Munich, there are around 1,900 such individuals.
Liam Gillick, Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario* Work (1988–2008) Mirrored Image: A ‘Volvo’ bar, on view November 2008. Courtesy Kunstverein Munich
“It is very democratic,” said Dietrich. “Membership is an active engagement instrument that goes beyond signing a guestbook.” Member fees give it an arm’s length from political bodies, though they do rely on state funding as well. Smaller than museums, these institutions are also able to be reactive, and as such they tend to become incubators for artists who later grow to international acclaim. “The autonomy we have gives a massive space, artistically and curatorially, to experiment. Kunstvereins can react flexibly and quickly in a rather non-bureaucratic way,” noted Dietrich. “It is quite a resilient structure.”
At the Kunstverein in Munich, Adrian Piper, Martin Kippenberger, Pierre Huygue, and Philippe Parreno were among those artists who had their first major German or European exhibitions in its hall.
Given the upside, the model has been attempted in other cities, too. KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s director Krist Gruijthuijsen founded the Kunstverein Amsterdam, which then spawned a network in other cities that have remained more or less active: Kunstverein Toronto hosts programs occasionally; then there’s Kunstverein in Milan; Kunstverein Aughrim in Ireland; and New York’s Kunstverein, which wrapped up activities in 2014.
Michaela Melian (right) and Maurin Dietrich (center) during “The Archive As.. Lost in Munich.” Courtesy Kunstverein Munich.
Naturally, such a model comes with a few vulnerabilities, and this was a topic of deep discussion over the bicentennial celebration weekend, during a sprawling panel with 15 previous directors of the institution. In smaller towns, Kunstvereins can be less reliant on wider pools of paying, voting members. There is also the risk of alienating a traditional membership through ambitious or conceptual artistic programming.
But on the whole, it functions well. “What this structure does, is it creates a space where an audience is not a fiction,” said Dietrich. The members are involved, engaged, and sometimes agitating, and they may take an active role in negotiations. Dietrich suggested this is a more sustainable way to actively work with local publics. “Everyone has been talking about nurturing community,” she noted. “What does this mean if the majority of audiences and ticket sales at large museums are often one-time visitors?”
Installation view of “THE ARCHIVE AS…,” Kunstverein Munich, 2023. Photo: Maximilian Geuter.
Unboxing an Archive
As a key preamble, Dietrich and her team also hired a full-time archivist to manage the documents to help the staff, artists, and the public encounter them. While working in those archives in preparation for her solo exhibition at Kunstverein Munich in 2021, artist Bea Schlingelhoff uncovered an unsettling document: a 1936 paper detailing the barring of membership to “non-Aryans” at the Kunstverein Munich. And while there are plaques and memorials reckoning with Nazi history in Munich, Schlingelhoff questioned why there was none at this institution.
That document she had found dated to one year before the infamous the “Degenerate Art” exhibition took place in 1937 at the arts space, bringing together artists who were not approved by the Nazi state. These included Jews, Communists, and other individuals and groups deemed un-German. As part of her work, Schlingelhoff created small brass memorials for four women who were in this exhibition; their names are enshrined now outside the venue’s front doors.
Schlingelhoff’s adjacent exhibition, “No River to Cross,” which was curated by Kunstverein Munich’s curator Gloria Hasnay, received much acclaim in Germany for its poignant creation of an unsettling shadow space. Inside the exhibition venue, green rectangles all around the wall appeared like the ghostly salon painting show, calling attention to absence. The empty rectangles represent 650 works seized by the Nazis and shown in that “Degenerate Art Show.”
Bea Schlingelhoff, No River to Cross, Mapping, 2021, installation view, Kunstverein Munich. Courtesy: the artist and Kunstverein Munich. Photo: Constanza Meléndez
This show was an important exhibition that once could say prequeled the flurry of events this year. “If nothing else, the path to historical oblivion is paved by the fact that a document from 1939 sits just the same as one from 2017, or that there are predefined boxes that make everything look the same, neutral, and objective,” said assistant curator Gina Merz said of the project in a recent interview with PW Magazine.
“It seems to me that a central part of the archive exhibition is to activate the archive to raise questions of its logic and to think about the reproduction of violent structures,” noted curator Gloria Hasnay.
To correct these is to first bring them into the light—and solve for gaps and omissions. Like the whited-out name of Rachel Salamander from the board list from 2003. Salamander had stepped back and removed her name from all content in the Kunstverein to protest an exhibition that she felt was trying to recontextualize the grandiosity of Nazi design as something separate from fascism.
Salamander has since joined as a participant in “The Archive As…”, and is advocating that everyone be implicated in this kind of advocacy, research, and thinking.
“She notes that looking into histories should not be a specialized tasks reserved for historians,” said Dietrich. “Everyone who participates in social life has a responsibility.”
Friedrich Thiersch’s Perspective section of the reconstruction project for the Kunstverein building in Munich, May 1890. Courtesy Architekturmuseum der TU Munich.
There are many bright spots from its past that are being recentered, too. A few anecdotes include reflecting on the free childcare that was provided during a protest against abortion in the 1970s. The team tracked down the photographer who had documented women-led protests that took place on Kunstvereins front steps—it turned out to be Barbara Gross, who later became a noted Munich dealer. When the conservative Christian Social Union closed the academy, the Kunstverein Munich offered up its spaces to unhoused artists.
This archival material and the process that unearthed it is perhaps even more paramount to its understanding of itself than it might be for a museum. Kunstvereins are ultimately art spaces and non-art collecting entities. But what these institutions do collect is something less tangible—the time stamps of social and cultural moments that may otherwise prove totally ephemeral. 
“The question is what constitutes a collection when there are no artworks [being acquired]. A Kunstverein collects the stories around the artworks that were produced, and it collects stories about the Kunstverein’s existence, which is usually very much focused on the contemporary. What [Kunstvereins] have may not constitute a collection, but what it does have, it is of massive public interest.”
“Kunstvereins think about the future, but not always the past,” added Dietrich. “This is changing right now.”

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When New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited the surreal worlds of Tim Burton in 2009, the director described the experience of walking through the show as akin to looking at his soiled socks nailed to the wall.
Perhaps the American auteur has grown accustomed to the sensation because he’s lent his eye and considerable artwork to a major exhibition currently on the second leg of a global tour. “Tim Burton’s Labyrinth,” staged at Paris’s Parc de la Villette through August 20, follows through on the title’s promise, taking visitors on an hour-long choose-your-own-adventure tour of Burton’s bizarro universes.
“Immersive experience” may have become a tainted phrase in some art world circles, indicative of high-cost skin-deep crowd-pleasers, but “Labyrinth” leans in. This is to be expected from Spanish producer Letsgo, known for throwing mega events, and indeed from Burton himself, a creative whose work is not best suited to white-walled surroundings.
This is not, however, an immersive experience of panoramic screens and dazzling projection mapping. It’s the physical kind—a button press, door push, down-the-rabbit hole maze—one Burton calls a “weird funhouse.” Under a giant tent inside Villete Park, visitors stumble along one of more than 300 possible labyrinth routes encountering Burton’s full filmography along the way.
Tim Burton. Photo: Fabian Morasut.
“[Visitors] cross from universe to universe. Each room is really very different and everything in the immersive experience is supervised by Tim Burton. We worked together for a long time on the exhibition,” creative director Álvaro Molina said in a statement.
For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there’s a mirror room of contorted candy canes, for The Joker, a wall scrawled with demonic neon laughter, and for The Nightmare Before Christmas, an enormous Jack Skellington looming over a doorway. From the flooring to the soundscape, each space is a detailed miniature of a Burton universe. No matter the chosen route, organizers promise that visitors will encounter their favorite film—Burton’s early, lesser-known titles included.
A room dedicated to clowns. Photo: Fabian Morasut.
At the debut of “Labyrinth” in Madrid last year, Burton said he hoped the exhibition would transport visitors inside his creative process. He begins projects with characters, unsure if they’ll materialize as animations, sculptures, or live action figures and here they’re woven together—albeit with costumes standing in for actors. Burton notably began his career in cinema as an animator at Disney and each room is accompanied by artworks that informed the relevant film, from early doodles to animated sequences, numbering around 150 in total.
Like most immersive experiences, “Labyrinth” is pitching itself as essential viewing for young and old alike, though it’ll likely bring out the inner child in most.
See more images of “Tim Burton’s Labyrinth” below.
Installation view of “Tim Burton’s Labyrinth.” Photo: Fabian Morasut.
Untitled artwork by Tim Burton. Courtesy Tim Burton.
A room in “Tim Burton’s Labyrinth” focused on Burton’s poetry collection, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. Photo: DR/ Expérience TimBurton – Letsgo.
Untitled artwork by Tim Burton. Courtesy Tim Burton.
Untitled drawing by Tim Burton. Courtesy Tim Burton.
Untitled drawing by Tim Burton. Courtesy Tim Burton.
Untitled drawing by Tim Burton. Courtesy Tim Burton.
“Tim Burton’s Labyrinth” is on view at La Villette, Quai de la Charente, 75019, Paris, France, through August 20.

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This spring, Tate Britain announced the four artists shortlisted for the 2023 Turner Prize, the most prestigious contemporary art award in the U.K.
Along with an exhibition of their work at Towner Eastbourne, a museum on the southeast coast of England, the shortlisted artists will all receive a cash prize: £25,000 ($31,000) for the overall winner and £10,000 ($12,000) each to the other artists. The winner will be announced on 5 December, at an award ceremony in Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens.
The shortlisted artists were chosen by a jury of experts, which included Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre; Cédric Fauq, chief curator of Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Melanie Keen, director of Wellcome Collection; and Helen Nisbet, artistic director of Art Night, chaired by Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain. Here’s what to expect from each artist in the show, ahead of its opening on 24 September.

Jesse Darling
Jesse Darling, “No Medals No Ribbons,” installation view at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo: Ben Westaby. © Modern Art Oxford.
Age: 41
Nominated for: Solo exhibitions” No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford and “Enclosures” at Camden Art Centre
What the jury said: Darling’s manipulation of materials “in ways that skillfully express the messy reality of life,” was a pointed out in particular by the jurors, who felt that Darling’s work exposed the world’s “underlying fragility.”
In their own words: Writing in an Instagram post last year about the show that got him nominated, Darling said: “I’m having an exhibition of the last 10 years of my work, and it’s happening in my hometown on a full circle Ferris wheel roll up vibe. Venice Biennale was a fancy gig but not as wild a feeling as seeing my flyer in the local chippy. Though why am I conflicted and haunted by many ghosts, is it the war weather or the retrospective? Thinking of everyone who made me what I am for well and for ill, and f— it, I’m still alive even if “mid-career” means half-embalmed in the zombie art circus. And I still got work to do in this world goddamit.”

Barbara Walker
Barbara Walker, “Burden of Proof” (2022), installation view: Sharjah Biennial 15, Old Diwan Al Amiri, 2023. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation with the support of The Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic.
Age: 58
Nominated for: “Burden of Proof” at Sharjah Biennial 15.
What the jury said: Jurors praised Walker for her use of portraits at a “monumental scale” to tell stories of a “similarly monumental nature,” particularly highlighting one work—an installation wall drawing in the Sharjah Biennial.
In their own words: Walker spoke last year about the show that got her nominated in a video published by the Sharjah Art Foundation.
“I’ve been developing a series of drawings that reflects on individuals and families experiencing stories that have been affected by the Windrush scandal,” Walker said, referring to the political scandal that started in 2018, when British citizens mainly of Caribbean descent were detained, denied legal rights, and threatened with deportation. “Some even lost their home and income and were categorized as illegal immigrants,” Walker explained.
In Sharjah, Walker presented eight framed portraits of individuals swept up by the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policies, which led to the scandal, with the backgrounds reproducing documents that were presented as evidence by the government for these citizens being wrongly categorized as illegal immigrants. “There isn’t a blueprint. The work happens as it develops,” Walker said of the series. “What preoccupied me was the creation of wall drawing portraits of three of the survivors.”

Rory Pilgrim
Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS (2022), HD Video Still (l :06:55). Courtesy andriesse~eyck galerie.
Age: 35
Nominated for: the commission RAFTS at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, and a live performance of the work at Cadogan Hall in London
What the jury said: Jurors called the project a “standout example of social practice” in art and called Pilgrim’s musical arrangements “beautiful and affecting.”
In their own words: “Making connections between work, mental health, home, recovery, and our environment, additional voices of people from near and far join the chorus, including members of Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance and Project Well Being: a group for people experiencing homelessness in Boise, Idaho,” Walker wrote about the show that got them nominated in an Instagram post last year.

Ghislaine Leung
Ghislaine Leung, “Fountains,” installation view at Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Simian, Copenhagen; and Maxwell Graham, New York; and Cabinet, London. Photo: GRAYSC
Age: 42
Nominated for: her solo exhibition “Fountains” at Simian in Copenhagen
What the jury said: The jury felt that Leung’s work exuded “warm, humorous and transcendental qualities” which challenged “the way art is produced and circulated,” establishing the gallery as a co-performer for her “score-based” work.
In their own words: “The term ‘shedding light’ is often used in the context of explanatory texts. I have dozens of photos I have tried to take of some weird thing in the inside of my mouth using the flash on my phone, or sometimes a combination of torch and flash, awkwardly both positioned in one hand. To see some little fleshy nodule or chewed bit of mouth. And the photos are inevitably over or under exposed or blurry or at the wrong angle,” Leung said of her work, in the publication YYYYMMDD. “Illumination is perhaps not the same as more light, it is often something that happens in and because of the dark.”
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