Exhibitions

You could say that depicting motherhood has been something of an obsession for Old Masters from medieval times well into the Baroque period—after all, the Virgin and Child must be art history’s most iconic motif, where Mary often appears suitably docile and doting of the miniature adult in her arms. It may be evidence enough that none of these images were actually made by a mother, and it would be centuries before most had the chance to professionally paint, let alone offer a more candid portrayal of motherhood based on real experiences.
The question of how to represent what is, arguably, humanity’s most impressive act of creation, yet one that is consistently maligned, is the subject of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The show, curated by critic Hettie Judah, author of the manifesto “How Not to Exclude Artist Parents,” also delves into the history of artist mothers and their struggle to make their voices heard within a male dominated field.
Installation view of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
As Judah points out, for centuries it was up to male artists to present their most idealized visions of motherhood. “It’s not often that you see art featuring mothers who are bone-tired from night feeds, picking a chaos world of toys off the floor, or negotiating with opinionated toddlers,” she commented. “Our great museums seldom show mothers desperately juggling work and childcare, struggling with postnatal depression, or worrying about their kid getting picked up for a police ‘stop and search’. Real motherhood, in other words, in all of its diversity.”
Tabitha Soren, My Great American Novel (2007) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
“In the 20th century, women were led to believe that they couldn’t be both an artist and a mother—motherhood was seen as a culturally unserious state, evidence that the woman in question was not fully committed to being an artist,” said Judah. “Until very recently, it was common for art students to be told that lived experience of motherhood was not an appropriate subject for art.”
Claudette Johnson, Afterbirth (1990). Photo: © Claudette Johnson.
One of the most fraught topics for expectant mothers living under the rigid strictures of patriarchy is the question of how their body will change after bearing new life. Stretch marks, scars, and folds are worn with pride by artist Claudette Johnson in a startlingly intimate self-portrait from 1990 that shows the artist in a powerful stance that defies stigma.
Caroline Walker, Bottles and Pumps (2022). Photo courtesy the artist.
The practical realities of caring for a baby was the subject of several 2022 paintings by Caroline Walker, who helped her sister-in-law through the first few anxious days after birth. In one work, the cleaning of equipment for bottle feeding becomes a painterly still life. The collection of plastic objects has unexpected beauty, despite their bright artificial tones of purple and yellow.
Billie Zangewa, Temporary Reprieve (2017) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, photo courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
Among the works Judah was particularly excited to include the intimate drawings of labor and delivery by Canadian-born artist Heather Spears, who stayed with a woman for several days to create the series.
“I have never encountered such a powerful account of the process of labor,” said Judah, “the long duration with its peaks and dips of activity, imagery of women getting up and walking around, napping, embracing their partner, having their cervix measured. It is an extraordinary body of work, and one that has not been seen.”
Jessa Fairbrother, Role Play (Woman with Cushion) (2017) installed at “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
Judah is also particularly fond of a small 2011 self-portrait by Celia Paul called Frank and Me, in which her son lies on a sofa in the foreground and she can be seen smiling in the mirror behind.
“My sons are in their 20s, and I am so enjoying this new phase of the mother-child relationship now that they are adult men,” the curator said. “This work of Paul’s moves me so much.”
Paula Rego, Untitled 6 (1999). Photo courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery.
The exhibition also features the work of women who have more complicated relationships to motherhood. One example is Paula Rego’s moving “Abortion” series based on her own experiences in the 1950s. It was made in the late 1990s to protest a referendum in Portugal that failed to legalize the vital medical procedure. (It was later legalized in 2007.) These works ruminate on the physical dangers and psychological toll of women being forced to visit back street clinics in secrecy.
Installation view of “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” at Arnolfini, Bristol. Photo: Lisa Whiting, courtesy of Arnolfini and Hayward Gallery Touring.
“Addressing the historic gender gap isn’t just a matter of fitting women into the story of art as it has been told,” said Judah. “It is also crucial that we start asking which stories and which experiences have been excluded, and which lives have been less visible.”
“Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” is on view at the Arnolfini in Bristol through May 26, 2024. 
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Spring has sprung in New York—and so has the art world’s busy fair season. Whether you’re a local or in town to visit the more than half dozen fairs alighting in the city this May—including Frieze, NADA New York, and TEFAF, as well as newcomer Esther—you’ll also want to make room on your calendar (and take advantage of the spring weather) to also visit some of the gallery shows debuting this month.
From a New York-native artist taking over a gallery space with site-specific installations to a painter bringing the culture of Aboriginal Australia to a wider audience, these five artists starring in solo shows across the city are not to be missed.
1. Daniel Walbidi, “Yurlupirti: Forever Without End (eternal)”D’Lan Contemporary, through May 31
Daniel Walbidi, Winpa (2023). Courtesy of the artist and D’Lan Contemporary.
Hailing from the Northwestern coast of Australia, Daniel Walbidi (b. 1983) is a Mangala/Yulparitja artist whose practice is centered around learning about and expressing both his culture as well as the natural landscape of his community’s ancestral homeland. A rising star within Australian First Nations artists, the exhibition features 10 recent works by Walbidi that are larger in scale than his previous (and sold out) exhibition with D’Lan Contemporary in May 2023. Employing his signature, meticulous brushwork and vivid color palettes, Walbidi’s paintings illustrate his own deep connection with the coastal desert environment and convey it to a broader international audience.

2. Rachel Eulena Williams, “Dream Speak”Canada, through June 1
Rachel Eulena Williams, Soul on Ice (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Canada.
Marking her second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Dream Speak” sees Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991) continue her pursuit of “making painting literal.” Breaking down painting to the essentials, Williams reconstructs these elements (like color, light, texture, and perspective) by using diverse—and sometimes surprising—materials. Colorful fabrics, canvas, rope, fiberboard, hooks, and wire all symphonize, and let viewers explore her distinct artistic vernacular; this includes symbols and iconography that tap the pictographic language of the Bono People, Andinkra, recognized for its ability to concisely express concepts and maxims, as well as pagan symbology.

3. Ronny Quevedo, “Composite Portals”Alexander Gray Associates, through June 15
Ronny Quevedo, El valle de la periferia (The Valley of the Periphery) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981) maintains a practice that consistently draws sharp focus on the intersections and dichotomies between personal and collective histories, dominant and marginalized cultures, and how ideas around identity are shaped. In his newest body of work, Quevedo uses Andean textiles as a starting point to examine pre and postcolonial realities, and in his work literally weaves materials such as paper sewing patterns, metallic leaf on muslin, and carbon copy paper into geometric patterns. The result are works that are deceptively straight forward, full of clues and references that promise to reveal their origins with close and careful looking.
4. Sahara Longe, “Sugar”Timothy Taylor, May 2–June 15
Sahara Longe, Good Times / Bad Times (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor.
In “Sugar,” Sahara Longe (b. 1994) reconsiders art history and its canonic perspectives to generate new compositional and figurative possibilities. Tapping traditional allegorical motifs—such as Adam and Eve or the reclining Venus—Longe creates entirely new visual interpretations and arrangements, resulting in works that are haunting and timeless. Across all 12 works on canvas in the show, Longe’s deft handling of line and color are brought to the fore, and her use of raw pigments and thick-grain linen make these new works appear from a time gone by, recalling historic modes such as Symbolism or the Bauhaus.

5. Hugh Hayden, “Hughmans”Lisson, May 2–August 2
Hugh Hayden, American Gothic (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
For his second solo exhibition with Lisson this year, Hugh Hayden (b. 1983) creates a site-specific installation for the gallery’s New York space. Employing recognizable materials and motifs in his work, Hayden engages with widely relatable personal themes such as intimacy and desire within a physically explorable context. The show is timed with his 10-year survey exhibition at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, Missouri, and precedes another major solo exhibition opening this fall at the Rose Museum of Art at Brandeis University, together denoting an important moment in the artist’s career.
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The Motor City is the venue for an expansive exhibition of queer artists taking place this summer, timed to Pride Month. “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer” is curated by Detroit artist and high school art teacher Patrick Burton. Its title echoes that of a classic Velvet Underground song to suggest a relationship between art and the viewer, as well as, Burton said, “the importance of visibility and affirmation.”
“In many respects, we see art as activism, and it’s really important to respond to the many anti-LGBTQ+ bills that are being advanced right now,” said Burton. “When you want to understand a people, you look at its culture. It’s the same for queer people. It’s in June for a reason, to offer an alternative to parties and parades and drag shows, to help viewers to understand who we are.”
John Criscitello, FGGT (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
The sprawling show includes more than 800 works spread across 12 venues by 170 artists, including well-known contemporary figures like Eve Fowler, Hillary Harkness, Lyle Ashton Harris, Clarity Haynes, and Wayne Koestenbaum, as well as some historical practitioners such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and George Platt Lynes.
This is the biennial’s second edition; the first, which was devoted entirely to Detroit artists, was similarly curated by Burton and also took place over the course of Pride Month. This time, the scope is international, with artists from as far as Beijing. The nonprofit organization that’s putting on the show, Mighty Real/Queer Detroit, is made up of just a handful of people, all with day jobs, who are volunteering their time, Burton said.
Unconventionally for biennial exhibitions, the work is openly for sale; all proceeds go to the artists. The organization’s website includes links to every artist’s website. More

Any halfway serious film buff can name an array of films that take place in New York City, from Taxi Driver to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, from Manhattan to Splash, and from West Side Story to Midnight Cowboy. A film series at New York’s Lincoln Center presents an alternative history of Gotham, including selections from the nearly 6,000-strong collection of the city’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
“Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York” will run at Film at Lincoln Center from May 3–7 and will highlight visions of the city premised on experimentation and subversion, many of them on 16mm film.
Charles Simonds and Rudy Burckhardt, Dwellings (1974). Courtesy of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Organized by Tom Day, executive director of the New American Cinema Group/The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Film at Lincoln Center’s Dan Sullivan, the festival will explore themes like mass transit, the built environment, gentrification, “non-human animals,” and specific neighborhoods, from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx and Coney Island. 
Among the filmmakers are some well-known names. Stan Brakhage contributes The Wonder Ring (1955) as part of a program on transit. Rudy Burckhardt’s Eastside Summer (1959), D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953), and Arthur “Weegee” Fellig’s WeeGee’s New York (1948) are all part of a program on “city symphonies,” a genre that offers a panoramic view of a city’s architecture and people.
Stan VanDerBeek’s Snapshots of the City (1960), meanwhile, is part of a program of films documenting the various art forms manifesting in 1960s New York, including documentation of Pop Art and Happenings pioneer Claes Oldenburg’s storefront and Judson Church performances.
Francis Thompson, N.Y, N.Y. (1957). Courtesy the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.a
Also on tap are a selection of women’s films about gendered space, such as Shirley Clarke’s 1959 film Skyscraper, documenting the building of 666 Fifth Avenue; Holly Fisher’s 1978 From the Ladies, shot in the powder room of what was at the time the city’s only Holiday Inn; and Bette Gordon’s 1987 Greed: Pay to Play, in which, as Gordon wrote, “Three women have a strange claustrophobic encounter in the ladies lounge of a luxurious Manhattan hotel.” A fixture of New York’s artistic sphere appears in sound: Laurie Anderson’s electronic music forms the soundtrack to Rick Liss’s 1983 N.Y.C. (No York City), in the “city symphony” genre.
Rudy Burckhardt, Eastside Summer (1959). Courtesy of Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Two opposing notes are sounded by a duo of films spotlighting urban renewal, or gentrification, as the opposing parties might label the phenomenon. John Peer Nugent and Gordon Hyatt’s What Is the City but the People? (1969) was a propagandistic documentary produced by the Department of City Planning to promote its projects. The film Break and Enter a.k.a Squatters / Rompiendo Puertas (1971), by a collective called Newsreel, by contrast, spotlights the efforts of Puerto Rican and Dominican families, as well as the activist work of Operation Move-In, to reclaim abandoned homes.
The Film-Makers Coooperative was established in New York in 1961 by a group of filmmakers and artists and holds one of the world’s largest repositories of film and media art.
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On the heels of the opening of the 60th Venice Biennale comes the 20th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, a city-wide initiative that includes scores of solo and group exhibitions around the German capital. This year’s edition is helmed by new director Antonia Ruder following longtime head Maike Cruse’s move to Art Basel, where she now leads the marquee Swiss edition of the fair. With some 50 galleries presenting brand-news shows this weekend, there is a lot to see—but amid the swirl, here are five shows you shouldn’t miss.

Clemens von Wedemeyer’s “Social Geometry” at KOW
Installation view of Clemens von Wedemeyer, Social Geometry (2024) at KOW, Berlin. Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin.
The German filmmaker has a longstanding interest in social groups and the behavior of the masses. Speaking to those macro themes, he’s again made a comment with his new show, though there is no mob or crowd in site as there has been in works of the past.
Calm and mundane scenes taken from around California, from Meta’s manicured HQ to a dusty landscape at Desert X, or the hilly streets of Palo Alto with their sloped driveways and sea views, become unsettling over time in von Wedemeyer’s new video work Surface Composition, one part of his exhibition “Social Geometry.” A camera hovers, neutrally observing the minutiae of a place that has, in many ways, had the greatest impact on our society and psychology in this century. But the work does not explicitly moralize; instead, it simply gazes on at the details of the physical landscape and people and intersections that have in some indirect, intangible way, shaped the virtual world.
The scenes in Surface Composition could be read like a backstage of our society, which is increasingly migrating onto online platforms that are headquartered in California. The front stage, then, is the titular work of the show, a large immersive video installation that beams a series of abstract nodes that twist, expand, and flicker on screen, cascading against you as you walk through the space. A disembodied voice (which just so happens to be that of the inimitable poet Anne Clark) describes a rapidly entangled network of human impulses, of changing habits, of news as gossip, censorship, and total surveillance. Through poetic simplicity, von Wedermeyer captures what is most unnerving about our era: how the profundity of the change we are living through still eludes us.

Rachel Harrison’s “Bird Watching” at Konrad Fischer Galerie
Installation view of Rachel Harrison’s “Bird Watching” on view during Gallery Weekend Berlin. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
The sculptor and artist is a star in my books, a conceptual and poetic trickster whose work pries at the strangeness of high and low culture with poignancy and wit. In “Bird Watching,” there are no birds to be watched, but rather it is the curios of human nature and society that is being drawn up in front of us and formed, filtered, and collaged in various ways onto Harrison’s brilliantly executed sculptures, photographs, and a cheeky new video work.
Nothing seems out of bounds when it comes to what is borrowed, yet it is meticulously mixed in and it all blends perfectly: Stanley Quenchers (those titanic mugs that went viral earlier this year) are juxtaposed against remakes of Giacometti sculptures, one of which is wearing glasses on the back of his head in a clever nod to bro culture but also, perhaps, in homage to Isa Genzken. In view from there are large-format photographs that Harrison made by capturing a televised dog show. These ephemeral photo prints almost seem holographic as you walk near them and reveal themselves the longer you look—fingernails scratch the film, a ghostly dog appears in another—as if the images were being burned into the negative in real time.
Content is layered over and over itself through Harrison’s artistic processing and through relations with other elements in the show. Everything is slightly off-kilter. What gets historicized or becomes valuable, and what is ultimately non-precious and detritus, is completely thrown on its head.

Sung Tieu’s “Perfect Standard” at Trautwein Herleth
Installation view of Sung Tieu’s “Perfect Standard” at Trautwein Herleth. Courtesy of Trautwein Herleth.
The devastations wrought by extractive colonialism are vast and wide-ranging, but German-Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu keeps a tight aperture in her new exhibition “Perfect Standard,” taking an empirical approach to express how seemingly mundane administration was used as a tool for domination.
A thin line of measurement sticks bisects the entire gallery at Trautwein Herleth (formerly Barbara Weiss), a brutal incision by Tieu that heightens a lurking notion of violence. Two different wooden rulers stacked on atop the other stand in for how, through the seemingly neutral tools of bureaucracy and administration, one society imposed itself onto another, in particular France’s colonial rule over Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Currency is smushed into a walkway of rubber—the material was one of the raw materials extracted by the French via most unfair dealings—that runs the inner perimeter of the gallery. It nearly feels like an existential walk on the plank into the past,  leading visitors to a pair of wall works depicting a second-long scene from the late 19th century. A French colonizer is tossing coins at local children, an act that is vile but seems to have occurred under the auspices of benevolence, as implied by the work’s title, The Opposite of Good is Good Intentions.
In the series of ruler works, variously called “The Ruling,” one set of sticks includes the indigenous measurements that were formerly used in the region while the top lines plots out the European metric system. There is a seven-centimeter difference between them. In many business dealings in the colonial regime, the difference was negated, meaning an unaccounted surplus was continually scooped by the French. Out of this replication of this precise difference, a negative space intermittently occurs in her sculpture, a mathematical gap that expresses an unquantifiable amount of injustice. It is a white space that bleeds all out to rest of the walls, spiraling into a formless scream.

“territory” at Sprüth Magers with works by Mire Lee, Liu Yujia, Gala Porras-Kim, Tan Jing, Zhang Ruyi
“territory” Installation view of Mire Lee. Sprüth Magers, Berlin, April 27–June 29, 2024. Photo: Timo Ohler. On view during Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Shi-ne Oh, head of Asia and Senior Director at the gallery, has put together a deftly curated exhibition of museum-quality work contemplating notions of borderlands. As the shadows of conflict continue to spread a dark sense of anxiety globally, “territory” meets the moment, exploring boundaries as shifting psychological sites as well as political, ecological, and even intimate.
Much of the work in this show feels like it is breathing. In some cases this is actually true: Gala Porras-Kim’s spore-laden work includes mold collected from the British Museum. The microbes are thriving well on this work, called Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022/24). On a top level, it jests at the lack of care that’s been made apparent at the British Museum with all its recent scandals sullying its reputation. But the entropy of the work also speaks most poetically to the decay of the colonial legacy and the so-called universal museum.
And I won’t soon forget the noise of Mire Lee’s rehang of 2022 installation Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love, a sonically invasive space you step into that is very nearly dark, which feels like a forgotten construction site or a buried memory. Concrete mixers come to life intermittently, violently spinning at odd intervals. Lee brings the borderland to its most intimate zones—the artist said the kinetic sculptures stand in for mouth and assholes. In another part of the installation, visitors can pull up fleshy looking curtains to read concealed fragments of poems, part of a work of poems Lee is publishing later this year.
This show is poetic but deeply political. “We are fed with news 24 hours all around the world and we are constantly here but not here,” commented Shi-ne. “[W]hat is a territory, who defines it, do I belong in my own territory? Is there such a thing?… As a Korean native, this is a question that resonates with me deeply.”

Alex Carver’s “Expanded Skin” at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Alex Carver, exhibition view, “Expanded Skin,” Kraupa–Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2024. Courtesy the artist, and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.
Suffering is a constant condition that is made explicit in Alex Carver’s paintings. It is unrelenting. His large-scale paintings, which hang on walls or are tautly suspended on wire cables in the middle of the gallery, depict what is simultaneously beautiful and cruel, capturing something precisely horrific in a blend of painterly styles.
Carver reflects and refracts many moments across art history, in particular its more dysmorphic tendencies: one can detect an homage to Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings. But Carver does something more brutal when he paints these modernist slices across his scenes, never letting us forget how painting is just a picture, that it’s always just surface.
These are works worth seeing in person because they play with flatness in a most curious way. Several works mirror the maximal logic and figures from Hieronymous Bosch and other medieval scenes. In other parts of a painting, one can pick up a call back to the opulent flowing drapes and clothing folds mastered by Titian, which are skillfully copied in here. Speaking of copies, Carver’s meticulously layering tactics include frottage, pulling in whiffs of patterns and imagery using a technique of rubbing a pattern onto a canvas, officially developed by Max Ernst in the early 20th century, but which we all probably did at some point in the autumn with dried leaves as children. This chorus of references could edge on cacaphony, but Carver holds it together. Anyway, we are fluent in this kind of chaotic flush of images now, where we swipe past brutality and then onto beauty in an instance online, managing our emotions through a constant stream of virtual images that are spliced together. Carver, refreshingly, brings us back to an edge.
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A surprising and often unwelcome intervention at the Venice Biennale has become something of a trademark for the Swiss provocateur Christoph Büchel. His conversion of a 10th century Catholic church into a mosque in 2015, while representing the Icelandic Pavilion, was clearly intended to rouse some kind of commotion. It succeeded in making headlines when it was labeled a safety threat and temporarily closed by local authorities.
True notoriety came four years later with Büchel’s Barca Nostra (Our Boat), the recovered wreck of a barge that sank in the Mediterranean in 2015, killing 1,100 migrants trying to make their way to Sicily. Taboo-breaking work is usually celebrated in the art world, but this divisive piece was seen by many as a step too far. Commentators described the work as “haunting” and “absolutely vile.”
Considered in this context, Büchel’s latest Venetian venture feels like a retreat from courting controversy in favor of good old fashioned conceptual art. “Monte di Pietà,” at the Fondazione Prada’s permanent space in Palazzo Ca’ Corner della Regina, riffs on one of the venue’s earlier functions as a kind of bank offering intentionally reasonable interest rates as an antidote to loan sharks between 1834 and 1969. Büchel uses the site to explore the various ways in which debt is still used as a means of power and suppression.
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
Upon entering the immersive installation, visitors step into a bankrupt pawnshop of the modern day that is stuffed to the brim with tacky objects of dubious value. Though the initial impact of the work is immediately evocative, layered references to the history of property and wealth are to be found throughout the items on show and could reward many hours of close looking.
Through these examples, Büchel explores how debt shapes our lives as a system of control that partly traces its roots back to the kind of early mercantile activities for which the Republic of Venice was once a global hotspot. It was this that allowed the city to grow rich and bejewel itself with its grand palazzos, resplendent squares, and monumental churches. Now, of course, the arts provide the city with a whole load of soft power.
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
“Monte di Pietà” also features The Diamond Maker, an open suitcase containing an array of lab-grown diamonds created by Büchel who applied heat and high pressure to extracts of organic matter from his unsold artworks and his own feces. An ongoing project since 2020, the work takes aim at the art market’s materialistic approach to constructing value. Of course, the avaricious art world is easily lured in, though not so much by shiny surfaces as by the slightest whiff of anything that claims to be transgressive.
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
In places, the show resembles a hoarder’s attic that has been neglected for the past 20 years. Why and how do we amass such an excess of material belongings? The detritus stacked high and overflowing out of cardboard boxes is hardly an appealing sight. Yet whole systems have been set up to peddle us this never ending tide of useless tat, as evidenced by the blankets that Büchel has laid out and adorned with the kind of knock-off bags that are apparently so tempting to tourists.
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
One section of the exhibition that more obviously prods at a nerve is a dusty room of exposed brick filled with references to Israel’s war in Gaza. The space contains bags of cement from Israel, piles of rubble, a sign in Arabic for a fictitious museum of souvenirs installed above what looks like an abandoned kitchen with a radio, vessels, and hookah pipes. Most shocking of all is footage being live streamed out of Jerusalem and Gaza. True to form, Büchel’s intended meaning is left ambiguous.
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
The Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, whose work is on view at the “South West Bank” exhibition in Venice, took to Instagram to decry these elements as cheap tactics. “Watching collectors and other art professionals walking around salivating all over the show because it’s a ‘creative environment’ was enraging,” she wrote on Instagram, adding that the Biennale’s mix of protests and extravagant art world parties was often jarring. “It’s impossible to navigate these spaces. Dinners where collectors invest in art as currency while readings on Gaza happen next door.”
Installation view of “Monte di Pietà” by Christoph Büchel at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
Of course, no examination of wealth in our modern era would be complete without a reference to the creation of strangely immaterial, blockchain-based financial systems in the digital realm. To this end, Büchel has created a new cryptocurrency called Schei, which aims to incite speculation via a fake influencer account on TikTok and redistribute profits among the inhabitants of Venice.
An impressively detailed tapestry of historical and contemporary references that build a rich picture of a fast modernizing West as it galloped towards our late capitalist era, it is little wonder that such a complex work was only just installed in time for the very end of vernissage week. Nonetheless, finally open to the public last Saturday, Büchel’s show is already provoking mixed reactions and has been heralded as a standout among the many collateral offerings at this year’s Biennale.
“Monte di Pietà: A Project by Christoph Büchel” is open at the Fondazione Prada in Venice until November 24, 2024. 
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As soon as you set foot in the main hall of the first floor of Venice’s Palazzo delle Prigioni, you are confronted by a surreal vision of Taipei. The typically bustling city is seen at a stand-still in a drone video projected onto a large screen. But this quiet, empty scene is quickly disrupted: The sound of sirens, explosions, gun shots, and a cacophony of jumbled cutlery and tableware disrupt the hushed space. Although you’re curious as to what could be making these noises from inside the exhibition, you fear that you may be entering a rehearsal for the unthinkable.
“I wish this was just an exhibition,” said Abby Chen, the curator behind artist Yuan Goang-Ming’s show, “Everyday War,” an official collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale, presented by Taiwan’s Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).
“War can happen anytime, anywhere,” Chen added. “It’s not so remote anymore. But at the same time, a war can be understood as how a person deals with the reality [of conflict] on a day-to-day basis.”
Installation view of Yuan Goang-Ming’s Everyday Maneuver (2018) at “Everyday War,” a collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of TFAM and the artist.
Born in 1965, Yuan is a pioneering Taiwanese video artist who has been creating moving-image works since 1985. The show, which opened on April 20 and is housed in a former prison, highlights six major works and one sketch from the artist’s expansive oeuvre. Some of the individual works have been exhibited before yet, taken together, they create a holistic narrative that guides visitors on a journey through the nuanced meanings of war expressed over the course of years in Yuan’s practice.
Set against the backdrop of current large-scale military conflicts and geopolitical tension both in Asia and around the globe, the exhibition isn’t just telling Yuan’s story or even a Taiwan story. The anxiety embedded in the artist’s works is the product of both external and internal forces, according to Chen, and is highly relatable today no matter where one comes from, adding an extra layer of meaning to the biennial’s theme this year, “Foreigners Everywhere.”
“I had the idea of ‘Everyday War’ before the pandemic,” Yuan said in an interview in Venice. “Besides the fact that Taiwan is facing an imminent threat of war [from mainland China], war can have many meanings and can happen in different settings, including political and economic debates that affect the future for many young people. The present is not ideal. We are already in a state of war.”
Still from Yuan Goang-Ming’s Everyday War (2024). © Yuan Goang-Ming and TFAM.
The work that draws the most attention to this existential state of war is Everyday Maneuver (2018), the aforementioned eerie video that greets visitors at the entrance. Five drones captured the sight of an empty Taipei city during a Wanan Air Defense Drill, a 30-minute air raid exercise that has occured annually since 1978. Upon hearing the sirens, members of the public are asked to stop what they are doing and take cover at nearby shelters. Despite the fact that the island’s martial law was lifted in 1987, this practice continues to remind people to prepare themselves in case of air strike coming from across the strait. In recent years, the authorities stepped up the precautions in the drill amid growing tensions with China.
The work captures how threats of war are a part of Taiwan’s daily life, noted Chen, a Chinese-American who is currently the head of contemporary art and senior associate curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. But this mundane experience can also lead to complacency.
“Most people don’t feel much upon hearing the siren,” Yuan said. “You can see young people taking selfies and cosplaying in the midst of the drill… This feels like being a goldfish living in a safe, controlled environment of a fish tank.”
The fish tank is a recurring motif in Yuan’s work, one that he uses to address this illusion of comfort. Take, for instance, an earlier well-known video work included in the show, Dwelling (2014), the title of which is derived from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s notion of the human condition, written during Europe’s post-war housing crisis. For the film, the artist created what appeared to be a perfect sunlit living room, submerged in a fish tank. The placid environment of the tank is then abruptly disrupted by an explosion that sends the room’s contents adrift in pieces in the water.
Installation view of Yuan Goang-Ming’s Prophecy (2014) at “Everyday War,” a collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of TFAM and the artist.
Yuan took this concept even further in his new video work, Everyday War (2023), which was created for this exhibition and took three years to produce. Instead of creating a small scene in a fish tank, the artist built a middle-class bachelor studio apartment at his own home and then physically blew it up, as if the area where the apartment was located was in the center of a war zone. The seemingly quiet domestic space apart is ripped apart by the explosion as the sound of gunshots punctuate the air. A small fish tank on the bookshelf in the room is shattered. Echoing Dwelling, the new work underscores how the illusion of comfort is undermined by the reality of living in a growing state of anxiety on a day-to-day basis.
“But this war does not stop there,” noted Chen, pointing to Prophecy (2014), a kinetic installation in the adjacent room comprised of a rectangular dining table filled with empty, delicate porcelain tableware sets, cutleries, and wine glasses. At first glance, it seemed to have captured a moment of tranquility before dinner was served. But out of nowhere, the table trembled, causing everything sitting on it to clatter loudly. Next to the dining table is a video screen showing another new work, Flat World (2023), a film showing images of similar streets around the world drawing from Google Street View’s database.
“Yuan wants to illustrate that even in a domestic space, we are constantly being challenged, and our own space is also constantly invaded by technology,” Chen said.
Installation view of Yuan Goang-Ming’s The 561st Hour Occupation (2014) at “Everyday War,” a collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of TFAM and the artist.
The exhibition circles back to the gigantic screen near the entrance, making it feel almost as if there is no way out. But, upon exiting, it displays a different video work that serves as a light at the end of the tunnel.
The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014) is the artist’s documentation of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, the era-defining protest that successfully stopped the passing of a trade pact between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The presentation of this earlier work that captures moments of the nearly month-long occupation of the Legislative Yuan, accompanied by the national anthem played at half-speed, created a space to meditate on the 10th anniversary of this major event and its impact on the region within the exhibition. The events in Taiwan subsequently inspired neighboring Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement that gained prominence in the city’s 2014 and 2019 political protests, which also saw the occupation of the Legislative Council chamber. However, unlike Taiwan, events in Hong Kong resulted in mass arrests and exodus.
Inherent in Yuan’s work is “resistance and resilience,” said Chen, noting that works on view in “Everyday War” examine the trauma experienced in Taiwan across multiple generations.
“I asked myself, how would I react in an environment like that?,” Chen said, adding that the “ultimate resistance” is finding enough normalcy to continue living in the face of danger. “Hopefully, like those young people [in the Sunflower Student Movement], you’ll also do your best to try to participate in this public life that ultimately is going to come back to each individual person.”
“Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War,” is on view through November 24 at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice.
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