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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

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

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      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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      The Head of Documenta Has Resigned Amid an Ongoing Antisemitism Scandal

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      Sabine Schormann, director general of Documenta, has resigned from her post. The quinquennial exhibition’s nonprofit parent company, Documenta gGmbh, announced the decision on Saturday.
      According to the statement, the Documenta board and Schormann reached a mutual agreement on “short notice” after a meeting on Friday evening. The news comes after months of allegations of antisemitism came to a boiling point two days after the opening on June 18, when viewers became aware of anti-Semitic imagery in a prominent artwork by Indonesian collective Taring Padi.
      The announcement on the weekend came on the heels of a statement Schormann issued on Tuesday, July 12, that sought to clarify how Documenta and the curators had handled an unfolding controversy that began in January when members of the artistic team and some artists were accused of anti-Semitism.
      “A lot of trust has unfortunately been lost,” the board said in the statement confirming Schormann’s departure. A search is underway for an interim director for the exhibition, which is just 30 days into its 100-day run.
      The supervisory board also recommended appointing an expert advisory board consisting of scholars of contemporary anti-Semitism in the German and global contexts, as well as on postcolonialism. The advisory board should be “responsible for the initial stocktaking of the processes, structures, and receptions” surrounding the exhibition. According to the statement, an investigation should include indications of possible anti-Semitic imagery and the promotion of “Israel-related anti-Semitism… with due regard for the fundamental right to artistic freedom.”
      Art lovers look at the large covered painting People’s Justice (2002) by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, covered with black cloth, on Friedrichsplatz. Photo: Uwe Zucchi/dpa.
      Documenta 15, which was organized around the Indonesian word lumbung, which means a communal rice barn, focused on collective practices. With more than 1,500 participating artists, the show itself received generally positive reviews, including from Artnet News’s Ben Davis, who wrote that “the particular network-of-networks that Ruangrupa has pulled in genuinely feels like it knits together artistic scenes that are vital and under-known.”
      Despite the achievements, since January, the 15th edition of Documenta, which takes place every five years in Kassel, has been embroiled in controversy over allegations of anti-Semitism since January when an anonymous blog post on the Alliance Against Antisemitism Kassel website accused members of the artistic team and some participating artists of supporting the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement. Ruangrupa said the allegations were “bad-faith attempts” to delegitimize them.
      A talk set to take place in April that would address antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism was canceled after the Central Council for Jews in Germany accused the talk’s organizers of bias.
      Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Education Center, speaks on the topic of “Anti-Semitism in Art” at a panel organized by the Anne Frank Education Center and the supporting organization documenta gGmbH. Photo: Swen Pförtner/dpa via Getty Images.
      Then, in June, just days after the official opening, it emerged that two antisemitic characters were in an artwork in the show. In Taring Padi’s publicly installed work, one could see a caricature of a Jewish orthodox man, with sidelocks and bloody fangs, donning a hat emblazoned with the Nazi SS symbol. Alongside that character, there is a depiction of an Israeli Mossad soldier as a pig. The work was immediately covered up and then removed. Both Taring Padi and the curators of Ruangrupa apologized. The large artwork dates to 2002 and was made to criticize the Suharto regime. It contains hundreds of characters, including demons and animals, as well as KGB and Australian intelligence officers.
      The controversy did not quell after the removal of the work, called People’s Justice. An emergency panel was brought together on June 29 to discuss antisemitism in art. Less than two weeks later, artist Hito Steyerl, who was showing in the exhibition, pulled out of the show claiming that there was a “refusal to facilitate a sustained and structurally anchored inclusive debate around the exhibition, as well as the virtual refusal to accept mediation.” That same day Meron Mendel, the head of the Anne Frank Educational Institute in Frankfurt who had been brought on as an advisor to the exhibition in the wake of the scandal in June around Taring Padi’s work, also resigned.
      Schormann had just a week ago rebuked statements made by Mendel, who told German media that Documenta was not active enough when it came to redressing in the wake of the revelations about People’s Justice. She said that the artists feared external panels would lead to censorship and that participants “saw themselves under general suspicion” and threatened in part because of their origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.
      In the wake of Schormann’s statement, a spokesperson for Germany’s Culture Minister responded that the narrative given by the director general was “not accurate” and Roth “was very surprised and alienated” by it. In an interview after Schormann’s resignation announcement, Roth commented that it “right and necessary” and that “reappraisal” of the exhibition and consequences can now take place.
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      ‘There Aren’t Any Reasons for Painting. That’s What’s Special’: Watch Artist Christopher Le Brun Walk Through His Latest Body of Work

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      British artist Christopher Le Brun recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but despite having been painting for decades, the artist remains as deeply curious about why he paints and where his inspirations come from as when he started. In fact, in his London home and studio, the artist keeps a framed drawing he made in his younger years, the dash-like passages in the sketch echoing the mark-making in his most recent gestural canvases.  More

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      The Frick’s First-Ever Solo Show for an Artist of Color Will Pair Barkley L. Hendricks’s Stylish Portraits With Its Fabled Old Masters Collection

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      For the first time in its 87-year history, Frick Collection will present a solo show dedicated to an artist of color—the late portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks. In September 2023, around a dozen works by the artist, best known for his life-size, full-length paintings of Black Americans, will hang alongside works by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and other European masters in the collection’s temporary home, Frick Madison.
      The show, titled “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits,” is organized by Frick curator Aimee Ng, and Antwaun Sargent, the influential director at Gagosian, who will act as consulting curator. An illustrated catalogue with contributions from creatives including Kehinde Wiley, Derrick Adams, Jeremy O. Harris, and Toyin Ojih Odutola will accompany the exhibition.
      Barkley L. Hendricks, Steve (1976). © Whitney Museum of American Art, licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY.
      Hendricks was an accomplished photographer as well as painter, and his keen eye and warm personality “made everyone feel like a photographer’s model,” according to Anna Arabindan-Kesson, assistant professor of African American and Black diasporic art at Princeton University. This was translated through the portraits he often made from still photos, with the friends and family members who were his subjects dressed to the nines in the hottest fashions of the time, radiating pride and charisma on the canvas.
      There are similarities between Hendricks’s subjects and those depicted by Old Masters, such as Lawdy Mama, a 1969 painting of the artist’s cousin, whose afro hairstyle set against an arched gold-leaf background recalls the early Italian Renaissance religious panels in the Frick’s collection.
      Similarly, in Hendricks’s striking portrait of Steve, the slight gradations of the man’s white trench coat and pants can be compared to the detailed draping of garments in Jan van Eyck’s works, including The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos. Meanwhile, a reflection of arched windows can be seen in the 1970s subject’s sunglasses, alluding to those that appear in the 15th-century Flemish painting.
      Barkley L. Hendricks, Woody (1973). © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
      In recent years, the Frick has been branching out of its traditional wheelhouse to show work by contemporary artists like Salman Toor and Jenna Gribbons, in the exhibition “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters.” But the long-overdue inclusion of work by a wider diversity of artists, and the political and social issues that come with it, may rankle with some longtime visitors, the curators acknowledge.
      “There are traditionalists who don’t think there is a place for artists of color because that is not what the Frick has been traditionally doing” curator Aimee Ng told the New York Times. But she added: “Our young fellows group is bigger than it has ever been. That tells me we are going in the right direction. I don’t want to alienate people who have been with the Frick for 40, 50, 60 years. I do want to bridge the historic collection and other art.”
      “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” will be on view at the Frick Madison from September 21, 2023, through January 7, 2024.
      Barkley L. Hendricks, Northern Light (1975). Barkley L. Hendricks, Blood (Donald Formey) (1975). Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
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      The Investigative Mode of the Berlin Biennale Raises an Uncomfortable Question: Who Is All This Research Really for?

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      When I look back over what was actually in the current Berlin Biennale, curated by artist Kader Attia and titled “Still Present!”, it seems a lot less dire than I remember.
      In fact, there’s a lot of poetry in Attia’s show. There are Tammy Nguyen’s vibrant, verdant paintings, rendering the Biblical Stations of the Cross but in an indelibly intricate style. I sat twice through Haig Aivazian’s They May Own the Lanterns But We Have the Light, Episode 1: Home Alone (2022), which strings together found cartoons into a ghostly black-and-white dream-tale.
      Zach Blas’s techno-horror installation is bombastic, but also truly unnerving. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) memorably weaves together myths and political musings. There’s Mónica de Miranda’s mythic film, Path to the Stars (2022), and Amal Kenawy’s resonant animation, The Purple Artificial Flower (2005).
      There’s a lot of wit, formal flair, and intelligence in all these works.
      Overall, the show is pitched as Kader Attia’s survey of “two decades of decolonial engagement,” a framing device I think has overdetermined the way critics have experienced it—though “Still Present!” does contain a fair amount of art that feels like a homework assignment, enough to color the whole thing.
      Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      As opposed to the sociable, DIY chill-out sensibility of the current Documenta, the 2022 Berlin Biennale feels like Biennale Classic, a Biennale full of Biennale Art: work characterized by a combination of aloofness and political declaration, often with a mild gulf between the object and the wall text filled in by an assumption of shared belief. A number of this show’s stars (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Uriel Orlow, Susan Schullpi, Attia himself) are among the most-shown figures at big art exhibitions of the last five years.
      I agree with Rahel Aima, who wrote in Frieze that one of the overall effects of Attia’s exhibition is to leave you asking “who is this for?” And not just in front of a work like Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Poison soluble (2013), the 2022 Berlin Biennale’s most controversial moment. That installation traps you inside a literal maze composed of blown-up details of the ultra-graphic Abu Ghraib photos of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.
      Who is this for? It’s not as if the Abu Ghraib torture photos are news—they had a huge geopolitical effect from the moment they were first published 18 years ago by CBS, and caused a lot of anguish for Iraqis. I guess the idea here is that if we literally force the First World subject to confront this material again, some new catharsis will happen? But Lebel’s work does so by signal-boosting the degradation it decries. Poison soluble had to be supplemented by a rather panicked trigger warning.
      A trigger warning on view at the Berlin Biennale outside of Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Poison soluble (2013). Photo ben Ben Davis.

      Investigative Aesthetics, Revisited
      There’s quite a bit going on in the show, and any number of routes to cut through its 80-plus artists. The main issue I’m going to talk about in relationship to Attia’s Berlin Biennale is the current status of “investigative aesthetics.”
      As I understand it, that term, associated with the group Forensic Architecture, was meant specifically to resist the temptation, evidenced by Lebel, to make art that tried to rouse its audience by directly showing atrocities or suffering. Instead, the idea was to assume the persona of an investigator, marshaling high-tech evidence, advancing specific cases.
      Thus, when Forensic Architecture showed the three-channel video 77sqm_9:26min at Documenta 14 in 2017 it was received as an advance on the more abstract fulminations of a lot of global Biennale Art. Its presence at Documenta was part of an ongoing agitation around the 2006 murder of immigrant Halit Yozgat by neo-Nazis. Using digital animation to recreate the internet café where the crime had taken place, the artwork carefully unspooled evidence that an undercover agent on the scene had lied under oath, and thereby may have taken part in the killing.
      Highlighting Forensic Architecture’s presence at Documenta, Hili Perlson would say that its work was “stretching the definition of what may constitute an artwork.” Now, five years on, Forensic Architecture’s art-as-investigation is one of the most prominent and in-demand genres of art.
      But compare 77sqm_9:26min from Documenta 14 to Airstrike on Babyn Yar (2022), on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in this Berlin Biennale. While the former investigation took eight months and built on activism ongoing since 2006, the later engages with an event that happened just three months prior: the Russian missile attack on a TV tower in Kiyv on March 1, 2022.
      Forensic Architecture, Airstrike on Babyn Yar (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      “We gathered over dozens of videos, maps, and archival materials in order to study how these strikes hit not only media and communication networks but a tangled nervous system of historical references and repressed memories,” the narrator intones, in clinical voice. Airstrike on Babyn Yar goes on to detail how the Russian missile attack on the TV tower also hit the nearby Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, pointing out the symbolic significance of this fact as linking two atrocities.
      But this connection was not in need of investigating, not really. 77sqm_9:26min was meaningful as an act of “counter-forensics,” a particularly resonant concept because the official German authorities investigating the murder of Halit Yozgat were potentially in league with his killers. But there is no serious “counter-forensic” aspect to Airstrike on Babyn Yar: the symbolism of attacking a Holocaust memorial was the media narrative about this event, pointed out immediately by Ukrainian President Zelensky in a Tweet after the attack as a way to shock the conscience of the world, and widely shared everywhere in outraged Western media coverage.
      What, then, does Airstrike on Babyn Yar’s investigation bring to the table? Onscreen, the video shows you different clips of the missile hitting the TV tower. “With the metadata from this clip that was sent to us directly, we corrected the time stamp from other videos, and determined the time of the strike was 5:08 a.m., which matches the first reports of the strike.”
      To sum up: Forensic Architecture has been able to confirm that the time of a particular Russian airstrike was… the same as the first reports of that same Russian airstrike.
      My suspicion is that this work exists here not because there was something urgent to investigate—there have been far grislier and far more shocking crimes by now—but to fill a need in this Berlin Biennale to address the war in Ukraine somehow. And so, despite the performance of investigation, we’re back to the old danger of Biennale Art, with artists on call for big art events to throw together some resonant material to make a Serious Statement.

      The Problem of Purpose
      Susan Schuppli is associated with Forensic Architecture and is the author of Material Witness: Material, Forensics, Evidence, a book on the possibilities of art-making that interrogates how objects bear witness to various crimes. Her work Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border (2021–22) is on view at the KW Art Institute.
      This work is, once again, a narrated investigation. It draws together evidence that U.S. border agents use freezing temperatures as an instrument of abuse, stating its mission as being an investigation of “a new thermo-politics defined by cold.” The facts Schuppli lays out are clear and scandalous—though also, once again, very well known to people who watch the news. (Perhaps they are more important to highlight now, when the U.S. media simply doesn’t report on the border as much as it did during the Trump administration, even as abuses go on.)
      Susan Schuppli, Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border (2021-2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      But the words from Schuppli’s video narration that haunt me are the following: “despite numerous investigative reports… ‘icebox detention’ continues unabated.” If numerous professional investigative journalists and large human rights non-profits have already exposed the same facts to the public, in platforms with much bigger reach than the Berlin Biennale, what is this video hoping to add to the mix?
      The project’s own description of its mission is that it “invites viewers to reflect upon the ethical imaginaries implicit in the conjoined term just-ice and by extension the experiential valence of temperature as it both interacts with and is instrumentalized by institutions, bodies, materials, and environments.”
      List of sources for the data in Susan Schuppli, Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Photo by Ben Davis.
      If you were being ungenerous you might suspect that the form of spectatorship that such art implies is, on average, not being chastened or informed, but the half-disavowed pleasure of recognizing oneself in its footnotes from the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, and so on. “Yes, I too am the kind of person who keeps informed of such things; therefore I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am on the correct side of the moral line.”
      In fact, I hope that is how most people receive it. Because if you think more deeply about Icebox Detention Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, it literally informs its audience that the mere exposure of facts has done nothing, even as it sticks closely to the form of being an expose of facts. Its logical effect is not to rouse the audience, but to make it tune out.
      Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Conditioning (2022) in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Yet another artist associated with Forensic Architecture in “Still Present!” is Lawrence Abu Hamdan. His work, Air Conditioning (2022), is the first thing you encounter at the KW space. It consists of a well-researched but short informational video laying out Israel’s history of violating Lebanon’s air space over the past 15 years, based on U.N. documents. This seems an important topic, and newer terrain to me in terms of data.
      In addition to the video, Abu Hamdan offers a long mural that occupies the walls of the adjoining, giant, otherwise empty gallery. Using a software that simulates clouds, a trail of artificial vapor is rendered, supposedly using the U.N. data as a basis for its fluctuating shape, so that the long ribbon of depicted clouds acts as an illustration of the history of noise pollution over Lebanon from Israeli drones and fighter jets, each centimeter being a day.
      But honestly, this is just not a very compelling way to convey the visceral human impact of the material in question. Nor is it a truly useful infographic, since it doesn’t visualize any comparisons with other types of sonic environments that would give you a sense of how relatively severe the noise is. Nor is this artificial vapor plume a particularly arresting image on its own, detached from its role as data-illustration or advocacy. On all counts, the effect of Air Conditioning is nebulous. (The project’s website seems to be its currently most convincing form.)
      Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Conditioning (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Clouds on the Horizon
      One of the few works getting consistent praise from this show, even from its critics like Isabella Zamboni, is another work about clouds: Forensic Architecture’s other video, Cloud Studies (2021), at the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg. It is actually less a single work and more of a summa of various Forensic Architecture projects from the recent past, with excerpts from different investigations the group has done threaded together with a voiceover on the theme of clouds.
      Cloud Studies moves between a discussion of Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorous in Gaza, to struggles against methane gas flares from fracking sites in Argentina, to the deaths by smoke inhalation during London’s Grenfell Tower fire disaster.
      Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
      At one point, the video compares the work Forensic Architecture has done building computer models analyzing different explosions to the 19th-century tradition of “cloud atlases” created by amateur meteorologists, or to atmosphere studies created by landscape painters. But Cloud Studies‘s real point is political: the tour of Forensic Architecture’s various initiatives is, in effect, an argument that all these struggles are one: “we the citizens of toxic clouds must resist in common action.”
      I agree with Forensic Architecture’s general political perspective on these different matters, I think. The video is lovely and lucid.
      Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2021) in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
      But what I realized, watching Cloud Studies a second time, is how much the video’s effect depends on that pre-existing agreement on my part. In its own description of itself, it is not doing something so ordinary as making a case: “our ‘cloud studies’ meander between shape and fog, between analysis and experience.”
      The common links between, say, the suffocating pollution caused by deliberately set forest fires in Indonesia and dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chlorine gas in Syria may seem obvious within a certain progressive milieu, but not much beyond it. I’m not sure the appeal to the “citizens of toxic clouds” does any work to build tangible arguments linking different, situated, hotly contested struggles. It’s a poetic device—which is to say, artistic in the most classic sense.
      In a video that condenses a variety of larger research projects into a montage, the “investigative aesthetic” becomes visible as a set of tropes: zooming in and out of maps or computer models; highlighting sections of photos or overlaying squares on details of footage; synching up different bits of footage or audio; voiceover references to algorithms, models, and computer scripts.
      “Art has been very good in the last decades in problematizing the notion of truth, insisting that narratives are more complex than we’re told, that art is about doubt,” Eyal Weizman, of Forensic Architecture, said of 77sqm_9:26min five years ago. “We want to show another possibility of art—one that can confront doubt, and uses aesthetic techniques in order to interrogate.” In retrospect, it seems significant that this style of art-making gained such cachet at exactly the moment of the panic about “post-truth,” the idea that the ascendent right had somehow outflanked the postmodernists on their own terrain of epistemological doubt and narrative fragmentation.
      But the pitfall, as Lisa Deml wrote in a review of Schuppli’s book Material Witness, was always that this style snuck back in a relatively unsophisticated positivism—that is, the idea that “facts speak for themselves” beyond ideology and context, so that a mythology of forensic prowess comes to stand in for making compelling images or persuasive arguments.

      What the Data Says
      Here’s why I’m worrying these issues now. Over at Hamburger Bahnhof again, there’s another data-journalism-as-art installation by David Chavalarias. Here we take “investigative aesthetics” to the point where Attia just literally displays a book by Chavalarias, Toxic Data, on the wall. Chavalarias does not identify as an artist; he’s a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
      A book by David Chavalarias displayed in the Berlin Biennale. Photo by Ben Davis.
      The bulk of his installation presents one long infographic on the gallery wall, showing color-coded data gathered from an application he has created called the Politoscope, tracking the influence of various political tendencies online over time.
      Laying out years of Twitter data, the graphic shows the upward trajectory of right-wing and xenophobic presence over the last five years, which now dominates the conversation. Chillingly, Chavalarias says that he was inspired to do this work by his interest in tracking the breakdown in civic discourse leading up to the Rwandan genocide. I hope we’re not close to there yet.
      David Chavalarias, Shifting Collectives (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
      These are the same five years that the “investigative aesthetic” became a dominant mainstream genre of art in the institutions. The point being: Now seems like a good time to check in on some of the political communication strategies adopted in the recent past, both in the museum and out. How effective are they at getting things done? How capable are they of reaching wider audiences? And to what degree do they serve the purpose of consoling a progressive audience in its own increasing isolation within a larger culture war that it is losing?
      “The 11th Berlin Biennale: Still Present!” is on view in Berlin, through September 18, 2022.
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      In Pictures: See Some of the Fabulously Fun Visual Artworks Decorating This Year’s Henley Music and Arts Festival in England

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      A summertime music and arts festival may not be your usual venue for selling art, but then the annual Henley Festival in Henley-on-Thames isn’t your usual festival.
      While the principal players in the festival, which ended July 10, were the musicians and comedians taking the stage, from Tom Jones to Boney M, a slew of contemporary art installations were scattered across the site of the black-tie event at the Leander Club, one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world.
      The tony festival was established in 1982 as a charity for the local community, and to boost local businesses and artists, which has become ever more important following the pandemic.
      The visual arts program for the 40th anniversary was curated by the Hollandridge Group art consultancy and included seven galleries, 114 artists, and 10 outdoor sculptures. Participating galleries included Jenna Burlingham Gallery, Panther and Hall, and Zuleika Gallery, showing works by early Modern British names such as Edward Seago (showing with Panther and Hall, with a work priced at £12,759); contemporary names like Damien Hirst and Chris Levine (at Drang Gallery for £19,960 and £89,000); and sculptors Paul Vanstone and Johannes von Stumm (whose works were for sale at £72,000).
      “The atmosphere at Henley Festival has been electric, second to none this year,” Alex Hammersley, director at Hollandridge, told Artnet News. “It’s a hugely well-attended festival of over 30,000, that attracts a well-heeled, cultured, and intelligent audience who enjoy all aspects of the arts, many of whom are time poor but who love looking and buying art in a relaxed and informal way.”
      Check out some images from the event below.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
      Image courtesy Henley Festival.
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      Artist Hito Steyerl Has Pulled Her Work From Documenta, Saying She Has ‘No Faith’ in Organizers Ability to Address Antisemitism Accusations

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      Artist Hito Steyeral has withdrawn from Documenta 15, citing organizers’ failure to address complaints of antisemitism.
      The prominent artist’s decision comes after a string of controversies surrounding the latest edition of the quinquennial event and the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa, which curated it.
      After allegations of antisemitism among some of the invited artists surfaced earlier this year, Ruangrupa scheduled, then abruptly canceled, a panel on the topic. Then, days after the exhibition opened, on June 18, the group covered up a banner by art collective Taring Padi that featured stereotypical Jewish caricatures.
      “I will no longer take part in [Documenta 15],” Steyerl wrote in an email to the exhibition’s organizers this week, a copy of which was shared with Artnet News. “I have no faith in the organization’s ability to mediate and translate complexity. This refers to the repeated refusal to facilitate a sustained and structurally anchored inclusive debate around the show as well as the de facto refusal to accept mediation.”
      The artist, who is based in Berlin, referred directly to “antisemitic content displayed” at Documenta’s “central location” and alluded to “unsafe and underpaid working conditions for some of the staff” working the event. She requested that the production team remove her work—which includes a video piece and an installation of A.I.-animated cave paintings—from view.
      In a message to Artnet News, Steyerl explained that she has also removed her work from the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin after the institution’s namesake collector denied claims that her family’s fortune came from manufacturing gasoline canisters and armaments for the Nazis during World War II.
      A Documenta poster hangs in front of the pillars of the Fridericianum during the opening day of the Documenta 15 modern art fair on June 18, 2022 in Kassel, Germany. Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images.
      Steyerl isn’t the only figure to sever ties with Documenta over the ongoing scandal. Meron Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Educational Institute, who was brought on as a consultant, resigned from his role earlier this week. In an interview with the German news outlet Der Spiegel, Mendel claimed that Documenta’s organizing team never made a proper effort to address the accusations against them.
      “There is a lot of good at the Documenta, but when dealing with the current antisemitism scandal I miss the serious will to work through the events and to enter into an honest dialogue,” he said. 
      After the Taring Padi artwork was covered last month, Ruangrupa said it would work with outside experts, Mendel included, to investigate other pieces in the show for antisemitic content. But Mendel claimed that never happened. 
      He also called out Sabine Schormann, general director of Documenta, for inaction. 
      “When she asked me, I got the impression that she understood the gravity of the crisis,” Mendel recalled. “She said she was taking responsibility for handling the antisemitism scandal with the necessary urgency and determination.” However, he said, nothing came of it. 
      Spokespersons for Documenta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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