Exhibitions

What’s on the Whitney Biennial’s mind this year?
In the museum’s ground-floor gallery, the show begins with an American flag, crumpled and dead on a grimy piece of sectional sofa, courtesy the youngest artist in the galleries, the budding art star Ser Serpas (born 1995). It feels like a found-object political cartoon for “the exhaustion of the American dream,” a sentiment felt by a lot of the rising generation.
Assemblage by Ser Serpas at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
The show comes to a climax in one of its few truly photo-worthy images, Kiyan Williams’s Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2024), a sculpture of the north facade of the White House, made of earth, listing like a ship going under. An upside-down American flag flutters in the wind.
At first, I thought Williams’s sculpture was a little obvious. On second thought, I realized it was very ambiguous. What, exactly, is being pulled down here? The “master’s house” of the title—as in the bad, corrupt, bigoted America?
Maybe. But the White House seems made of earth, not being swallowed by the earth. This double of the White House—the alternative, the reversal, the imagined negative image of the bad, corrupt, bigoted America—is what appears to be in the process of collapsing, like the limp flag on Serpas’s couch.
This kind of ambiguity—intentional and unintentional—permeates the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which is called “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and curated by Chrissie Iles, a veteran Whitney curator who also co-organized the 2004 and 2006 biennials, and Meg Olni, a curator-at-large there. The artists here seem to both claim art as a form of resistance and feel all resistanced out. Which fits the moment where art’s core audience seems both transfixed by politics and exhausted, oscillating between urgency and futility.
Works by K.R.M. Mooney. Photo by Ben Davis.
Everything here feels slightly withdrawn, alluding to an experience held out of range. Big or small, the sculpture of the 2024 Whitney Biennial is a sculpture of fragments, ruins, and quirky bits of things that telegraph absences or aspire to a material state so specific that it is hard to describe or explain.
As for the film, it is almost uniformly in a vein of historical lecture or healing ritual, ranging from flatly didactic to lightly lyrical, with a lot of hushed, halting narration. The painting is all abstract or abstract-adjacent.
Installation view of Isaac Julien, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Notable trends include casting body parts (B. Ingrid Olson, Jes Fan, Julia Phillips) and the taking of rubbings (Dala Nasser, Dora Budor)—both techniques that are about expressing an intimate, direct experience of something past, bearing the trace of that experience but suggesting rather than representing it.
Julia Phillips, Nourisher (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
A variety of works also make a point of referring to an imperceptible decay or unspectacular flux in their material state that will unfold over time, as if to suggest resistance to any direct and immediate expression (Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, K.R.M. Mooney, Lotus L. Kang).
Installation view of Lotus L. Kang, In Cascades (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
Unlike biennials past, there’s almost no photography here, which I find telling. Where it appears, it’s quite deliberately to negate visibility rather than affirm it, e.g. P. Staff’s ghostly self-portrait wallpaper with their face covered, or B. Ingrid Olson’s elliptical photo works, showing fragments of the artist’s own body, barely visible in the studio.
The exception that proves the rule is Carmen Winant’s wall of photos capturing the daily work at abortion clinics. The sheer mass of documentation blurs into one collective portrait, as if to give the individuals the protection of the group. And even there, a point is made that no patients are depicted without their permission, and that in some cases scenes have been restaged to capture important moments without exposing the original subjects. Visibility is vulnerability.
Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
What is legible as positive representation is almost all about the past, and almost all in the (blessedly few) film installations. These works feel as if they are meant to be educational, while also being too distended and indirect to be great teaching tools.
Much of the film is about looking back, recalling some historical figure—usually from the pantheon of radical history (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on Suzanne Césaire, Isaac Julien on Alain Locke, Tourmaline on Marsha P. Johnson)—and creating a video essay that somehow feels like both homage and lament.
Installation view of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Too Bright to See (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis
It occurs to me that all this sounds a lot like I am also describing the last Whitney Biennial, from 2022.
In spirit, the 2024 show fits the previous edition’s title, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” much better than “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” which rings too defiant and optimistic for this show. The cardinal themes are the same—opacity and invisibility, honoring radical elders, non-canonical abstraction, healing rituals—though the previous biennial had more going on, particularly with experimental media (the Berlin-based duo Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst’s A.I. experiment is the exception here, and it feels completely on its own, unsupported by any of the other work). The present biennial feels like it has drilled even deeper into one specific vibe of atonement and withdrawal, into “a rhetoric of difficulty, of holding space but also retreating from legibility,” as I said in 2022.  It feels as if art has curled itself up into a ball.
Well, I am sure a lot of people feel like curling up into a ball right now.
Beneath all the diverse modes of retreat, what is on this show’s mind is actually not at all ambiguous, and it’s pretty clear exactly when the atmosphere that is now all-pervasive kicked in. I looked back at my take on the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a show that was planned before the election of Donald Trump, but arrived after. My review—which came out before the thunderstorm of paralyzing controversy over the 2016 painting by Dana Schutz, Open Casket—was titled “The Whitney Nails a Balancing Act Biennial.” It reflected my sense that the show felt relevant to a turbulent moment but that it also contained art of an engaging variety, some groovy, some punk, some angry, some mournful, some healing, some troubling.
Amid the disorienting crosscurrents of protests of Trump and protests of museums themselves as bastions of power in the years that followed, the Whitney Biennial—and a lot of biennials, for that matter—shifted into its present register, where “the reckoning” became the implicit main theme. (The fact that this is a sharp narrowing is reflected by the fact, which a lot of curators will complain about, that the cadre of artists in the 2024 Biennial is very familiar from other similar recent events.) As the historian Matt Karp wrote in his 2021 essay “History as End,” a project of perpetually pondering the sins of the past came to dominate at a time when any path toward a better future was frustrated in the mainstream liberal cultural imagination. The goal of culture became to signal awareness of the magnitude of the world’s brokenness, and to cope.
Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: four (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Sharon Hayes has a video here, Ricerche: four (2024), unspooling a group conversation with queer elders in Tennessee, where demagogic politics targeting gender nonconforming people are ascendant. There’s a moment that hit me, as they recall the loss of spaces of community—how there used to be many gay bars and how the options are now so limited. (Incidentally, the 2022 biennial also had a Nayland Blake work that was a tribute to a lost gay club.) Hayes’s installation is ringed by chairs where visitors can gather to watch this conversation, and in general the installation captures the sense of an art trying, through the force of its good intentions, to make up for lost real spaces of possibility.
Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
But we all know that something so modest as an art show is not up to the enormous scale of the problems of a world that is degenerating fast. That disjunction makes any symbolic act feel “performative,” like empty theater. The art here is explicitly summoned to speak for the concerns of the marginalized—that’s what the curators say this biennial’s main mission is as you step into the galleries, in the show text. But the art itself seems suspicious of or indifferent to giving an art audience anything like easily consumable content to make it feel virtuous or righteous (indeed, one function of the interest in historic abstract painting by Black artists is to provide the occasion to remind us that the demand to represent Black struggle has been a burden).
What results, overall, is a kind of “I can’t go on/I must go on” sensibility. The show characteristically avoids both outrage and joy, instead conveying a restrained and depressive air.
Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio’s monolith made of amber is actually embedded with scraps of documents, which, we are informed, were “produced by white activists in Los Angeles and New York looking at the complex relationship between privilege and solidarity.” Unable to understand what this meant, I went to the audio guide, where the artist says he feels like we are stuck in history, “how time and history is very cyclical,” with today’s struggles of Central American migrants mirroring struggles from the past. He does say we should learn from the inspiring examples contained in the texts here. Yet in the galleries, it is impossible to make out what any of the texts are, as if the form of the art itself were pushing back against the thought, conceding we are stuck.
Detail of Eddie Rudolfo Aparicio, Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
So far, the critical reaction to this show has been “meh.” That’s my first impression, too, though as with “Quiet as It’s Kept,” when I dig in, I find more to love (though I ultimately liked “Quiet as It’s Kept” more). To be clear, I don’t find the big themes of “Even Better Than the Real Thing” objectionable, on their own. But, also, there’s more going on in contemporary art than mournful post-conceptualism and personal ritual. I do think that it is a big mistake that biennials have given themselves over so completely to one vibe, which robs even good works in this vein of the contrast they need to connect.
Takako Yamaguchi, Clasp (2022) in the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
Because of the lack of contrast, I guess the works that stand out for me most are the ones that cut a bit against those dominant tones. The hard-edged, stylish geometric landscape paintings by Takako Yamaguchi are very pleasurable, with a lot of crystalline visual beauty.
Detail of Pippa Garner, Inventor’s Office (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Down on the third floor, I appreciate the wall of fake product pitches by Pippa Garner, an elder artist here (b. 1942). These are the only really funny works in the show, and in their occasional lustiness and consistent wackiness, cut against the somber, ethical aura of a lot of the rest.
Installation view of Ligia Lewis, A Plot, A Scandal (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Of the film installations, Ligia Lewis’s work is burdened with a text I could not make sense of before watching, and can only barely make sense of after (“Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? Is it the demand for repair? Or the otherwise brutish desire for revenge?”) But its subject, the practice of 19th-century Dominican Vudú, is interesting, and the use of dancers to act out an aggressive, bawdy burlesque of European colonial authority has an in-your-face, unnerving edge.
Diane Severin Nguyen, In Her Time (Iris’s Version) (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
I also appreciate Diane Severin Nguyen’s hour-long film about a young woman who goes to work in the Chinese film industry, chasing dreams of being discovered as a star via her role as a background player in an epic film about the Nanjing Massacre, one of the most brutal military crimes of the 20th century. You hear the woman, Iris, talk about her aspirations; see her dutifully studying the gruesome history in her tiny apartment; watch her playact choking herself with a cord, as if internalizing her allotted role.
On a meta level, I think Nguyen’s film highlights the mix of perversity and melancholy of a culture built on revisiting, over and over, historical tragedy. But it also avoids the total cynicism that could come with that thought.
Finally, the most-talked-about work of the show will certainly be Demian DinéYazhi’s neon text-art signs flickering phrases such as, “We must stop predicting apocalypse + fascist governments + fascist hierarchies!” They face the windows on the fifth floor, buzzing out towards the waterfront. Truth be told, I at first considered the actual texts a little grad-student-y, though I appreciate their sentiment. My colleague Annie Armstrong was the first to note that the flickering letters in the sign subtly read out the words “free palestine,” and it turns out that the message was basically smuggled into the biennial without the curators knowing.
Demian DinéYazhi, we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation (2024) at the opening of the 2024 Biennial. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Now I am obsessed with the idea that this smuggling operation is the art. It makes DinéYazhi’s work about the paradoxical invisibility and inescapability of this raging political issue, given the horrifying hourly news from Gaza and the robust repression of antiwar sentiment that has ripped through culture (my god, even Jonathan Glazer, the director who made an impeccable, freshly horrifying movie about the Holocaust, has had his name dragged through the mud for basically saying the equivalent of “not in my name” at the Oscars).
Granted, a hidden message in neon is little to celebrate, given the fact that about a million people face starvation in Gaza right now. “We must stop predicting apocalypse…,” the sign says, even as it also alludes to a vast human disaster unfolding in real time. But I don’t take lightly the potential professional consequences of such gestures. They take courage.
“Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through August 11, 2024.
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“This Documenta will be like no other Documenta,” says Paul B. Preciado some four hours into a 14 hour documentary about the 2017 edition of the prestigious German quinquennial art show. He clarifies: “It will be the last one… A Documenta for the end of times.” Among its facets, Dimitris Athiridis’s 2024 film Exergue—which means other side of the coin, apt for an exhibition most famous for going millions of euros over budget—is an uncanny and oddly reassuring reminder of how the world used to be ending not so many years ago, albeit in a slightly different way from how it is ending now.
Premiering at the annual Berlinale last month (the documentary was viewable over the course of two days, with six and half hour segments split up with a 60-minute intermission), Exergue is the product of Athiridis tailing around artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his large curatorial team, among them Preciado who served as curator of the public program, capturing 800 hours of footage across four years leading up to their controversial exhibition. “Learning from Athens,” as Szymczyk’s Documenta was called, took place between its usual home of Kassel, a famously uncharming town amidst the rolling hills of Germany’s fairy tale land, and the Greek capital, then the nexus of financial collapse and the ensuing neoliberal austerity measures imposed via the E.U. and Germany’s then-chancellor Angela Merkel. The shores of the bankrupt Aegean island state were also the frontlines of the refugee crisis that included Syrians in the thousands seeking shelter.
Adam Szymczyk with Edvine Larssen’s Verging (2016) © Faliro House Productions
Exergue tells the story of an art world in a chronic state of attendance at the end of times, of its wrinkled and wonderful minds that etch out a living out by grappling with this paradox. At different points in the film, the ensemble of curators is periodically distracted from their work as gunshots sound from a rooftop during a research trip to pre-blast Beirut; members of Greece’s alt-right party Golden Dawn set fire to an African street vendor’s property right outside Documenta’s HQ and the team looks on in disbelief as they smoke their cigarettes in the lights of the blaze. When news of the Paris shooting in November of 2015 ticks in, Preciado reflects that “we have to be more radical, like never before.” Speaking to the writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in Beirut about the traveling circus of the art world, Szymczyk bluntly states that “the party’s over.”
Of course, there have been more shootings and devastation, in Paris and elsewhere—one loses track. Meanwhile, the party Szymczyk refers to continues to end and return; it is the same one that was over when COVID hit in 2020, before going into turbo-mode with more coke-fuelled pop-ups in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. It is a party so grotesque in its nature that it must necessarily always be ending in order for us to bear the fact that it happened in the first place, and that we all went and that we are still there.
Adam Szymczyk and Marta Minujín © Faliro House Productions
The premiere of Exergue meets us in a moment when, in the aftermath of Documenta’s subsequent fifteenth edition, the time-worn organization really does seem to be in death throes. The exhibition in 2022—curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa deploying a mode of decentralized authorship that was attractive mostly on paper—included an anti-semitic caricature that shot parts of the German public into a state of collective psychosis we’ve come to know well in the years since. Last fall, the organization’s finding committee that was set up to elect the curator for Documenta 16, fell apart after member Ranjit Hoskoté resigned following accusations of anti-semitism due to his signature on a petition condemning a well-documented alliance between Zionism and extremist Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) back in 2018.
In an open letter to the CEO of Documenta, Andreas Hoffmann, Hoskotés wrote: “It is clear to me that in this poisoned atmosphere there is no room for a differentiated discussion of the issues at hand… My conscience does not allow me to accept this blanket definition [of anti-semitism] and this restriction of human empathy … A system that insists on such a definition and such restrictions—and that chooses to ignore both criticism and compassion—is a system that has lost its moral compass. I say this with the greatest sadness.”
Adam Szymczyk, Katerina Tselou, and Cecilia Vicuña with Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread Athens (2017) © Faliro House Productions
That same month in 2023, as Artforum saw the dismissal of its editor-in-chief in the wake of an open letter, which was followed by a walkout of key members of its editorial staff, it seemed modernist institutions were falling like flies. And so it would not be #MeToo, nor austerity measures, nor the pandemic, nor the near-bankruptcy caused by Documenta’s sojourn in Athens, but a strange and wilful mobilisation of inherited guilt under the sign of real political violence that would end the party. Exergue emerges as we wonder whether this time, it may actually be over for good.
More than anything, across its 14-hour run Exergue becomes a character study of Szymczyk, his generation, and his milieu. The Polish curator, born in 1970 and formerly the rock-star director of Kunsthalle Basel, is a perfect specimen of the aughts: with skinny jeans, emo haircut, lanky boyish appearance, and Margiela stitches on the back of his black blazer. He is Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in Only Lovers Left Alive. He rarely raises his voice but instead flips his hair and mysteriously wanders off camera or takes a picture with his phone at the edge of the screen. He is sensitive, but not neurotic—he is not a millennial. He plays Nick Cave on piano, wears a tote bag, smokes endlessly, unbuttons a bottle of Amstel and believes that art can have real political impact. I personally have assigned art a somewhat more modest role vis-a-vis the world’s various fires than Szymczyk. Yet I am happy for Szymczyk, the fantast, the incorrigible dreamer. Perhaps his was the last Documenta. What we saw in 2022 was a denouement, a final blowout on a ruined campsite.
Rebecca Belmore, Biinjiya_iing Onji (From inside), 2017 © Faliro House Productions
We watch his cohort artist Douglas Gordon asking for the nearest hospital: “I will have a breakdown in about 15 minutes,” he says. We see lit minds and idiosyncratic temperaments that are powerless in the face of practicalities, who are wizards at projection. I did not expect to sit through as many hours of Athiridis’s documentary as I did, but Szymczyk’s particular Gen X charisma kept me, if not exactly hooked, then lulled into a type of charmed complacency, exerting the kind of patience usually reserved for the young. We see Wilson-Goldie get turned down for a photo op of Szymczyk (for Artforum’s series Scene & Herd). Szymczyk declines, saying he doesn’t like how that “gossip column” tends to throw everyone—artists, dealers, collectors, critics—into “the same pot.” (He later takes the picture.) Exergue is a portrait of this pot-ness that Szymczyk seems to willfully or strategically deny.
Documenta 14’s main problem was its size. This much is clear from watching Athiridis’s film and also from having visited the exhibition back in 2017—both from a financial perspective and an art critical one. There is simply no reason to produce a show of such a magnitude, especially one that purports to be critical of capitalism, spectacle, growth, and of the imperialist ambition to grasp the whole world through a single project. In Exergue we watch this car crash happen in slow-motion.
Douglas Gordon © Faliro House Productions copy
Dieter Roelstaete, also on the Documenta 14 curatorial team, is another of the film’s delightful Gen X characters. After they’ve gone through “101 artists proposing 101 projects,” he asks whether, given the mounting financial woes, this is not when they should decide which ones to go for and which not: “Or am I deluded? Am I hallucinating?” Roelstaete even brings a scythe to prove his point. There is some laughter. “You mean cuts and austerity measures,” says another curator Monika Szewczyk—jokingly but also not.
At another point in the film, Szymczyk offers his counter-argument: that they need more artists to balance the exhibition’s identity matrix, with Szewczyk chiming in that they should distribute as much money as possible to as many artists as possible as a matter of political principle.
So, if one wonders why this room full of curators is so hesitant to curate—that is, to choose one thing and not another which is surely the crux of the profession—the answer perhaps lies in the ethos of this team, a sense that “curating” is paramount to a kind of economical redistribution. After formalism (which, in 1972, critic Robert Hughes called “a game not worth playing anymore”) a new game developed out of the discourses of globalization and postmodernism: attitude morphed into identity, pluralism into intersectionality. By the time Szymczyk came around, the game had become one of casting a net so wide, and stretching it at every corner to include every possible subject position, that the centre—as Yeats’s famous line goes—could not possibly hold.
The Parthenon of Books (2017) by Marta Minujín, Kassel, Germany © Faliro House Productions Kopie
This method of curation has since become something a recipe for every major exhibition. The upcoming Venice Biennale, called ”Foreigners Everywhere,” includes more than 300 artists most of whom are from the Global South. Szymczyk calls it “global shopping” and attributes it to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2012 Documenta, admitting that “it was good,” and noting his own edition would “do the same, but more.” In another emblematic scene, we see Preciado lay out the thematic ground that the exhibition proposes to cover:
“ruins, monumentality, multiple temporalities, multiple modernities, institutional ruins, new institutionality… politics versus state craft, disability studies, anti-psychiatry, sexual politics, post-porn politics, trans-feminism, energy politics… death, radical mourning, necropolitics, technologies of consciousness, epistemologies of the oppressed… shamanism, multi-naturalism, architecture as protocol for the invention of freedom… pan-africanism, black traditions, anti-colonial and decolonial knowledges, first nation peoples, indigenism… radical pedagogy.”
At the end, Szymczyk comments that the list is “kind of maybe lacking… realism?” A couple of smiles break out around the table, and even in the cinema one could sense a palpable moment of relief from the audience as Roelstraete concedes that this all does sound “slightly unrealistic.” However it soon becomes clear that Szymczyk is actually talking about the realism of Gustave Courbet—socialist realism. Of course! Nevermind reality.
Artistic director of documenta 14 Adam Szymczyk speaks at a press conference of documenta 14 at the Athens Concert Hall on April 6, 2017 in Athens, Greece. Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
When the budgetary issue becomes too great to ignore, Roelstraete organizes a summit at the unimposing site of the so-called Währungskonklave (currency conclave) where officials had met in 1948 to reconstitute the German currency. In this evocative setting, the revelation of the concept of “money” as an arbitrary cultural construct seems to offer at least a provisional solution to their problems—a wonderful move, priceless in its welding of intellectual ambition and practical absurdity. Moments such as these make “Learning from Athens” look like an accelerationist plot to dismantle modernism and capitalism—or, at the very least, the Documenta gGmbH, modernist relic of an institution that it is—and Preciado’s quip about “the last Documenta” echoes less like a grim prediction than a statement of intent. In this, Documenta 14 was almost successful—if only the art hadn’t been as good as it was.
For, as Daniel Birnbaum remarked in Artforum at the time, there was a “show-within-a-show;” behind the savior complex, the political allegory, the auto-ethnography, there was a trove of excellent works, intelligent and erotic, in turn. Seven years on, I remember whole rooms of the Neue Galerie in Kassel and the EMST in Athens: Alina Szapownikow together with Lorenza Böttner was electric. Stanley Whitney’s color fields, the Sami Flags, Ernest Mancoba’s watercolors communicated something so clear about abstraction, musicality, and power; Vivian Suter in the Acropolis Park; Jonas Mekas upstairs in the train station. Lines burst out of canonical modernism to loop in Amrita Sher-Gil and trace back to Johann Winckelmann.
People visit an installation by Argentinian artist Vivian Suter called “Nisyros” at the frames of Documenta 14 art exhibition, at Filopappou Hill in Athens in July 14, 2017. Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP via Getty Images)
No one would have anticipated it then, but so many of the artists featured have cropped up across the European institutional landscape again and again in the years since, just as so many of the issues on Preciado’s laundry list have become lightning rods. It could have been circumstantial—I was younger then—but I don’t think I’ve felt quite like that about an exhibition before or since. In Kassel in 2017, I left my group behind, skipped lunch, just kept going, wanting to know where the argument would branch off to next. It was an argument that worked intellectually—and this was the great feat—without being primarily cerebral. You took the leap with them, as Annette Kuhlenkampf, Documenta’s then-CEO, also did (a 64 million euro leap), and you take it again, with Athiridis—for 14 hours.
No amount of dextrose could have saved Documenta 15. There was no exhibition-inside-the-exhibition because there was barely an exhibition behind the curatorial foil. The anti-semitism scandal of that year could not have happened in the same way in 2017 because no one would have believed any picture in Szymzcyk’s show to be so simple or unselfconscious. By staying in line with the Contemporary Art trademark, Documenta 14 reaped the benefits of the complex object ontology developed within that field by which Taring Padi’s mural may have at least been partly buffered by critical reflexion.
Paintings (2017) by US-artist Stanley Whitney are pictured the Documenta 14 art exhibition in Kassel on June 7, 2017. Photo: Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images
When, during Documenta 14, theorist “Bifo” Berardi had his performance canceled for comparing the refugee crisis with the Holocaust, a new performance was staged to address the issue intellectually. “Yes, I am ashamed,” responded Berardi. “Ashamed that I cannot stop fascism.” Roetstaele, when presenting the planned inclusion of the then-recently recovered estate of Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, explains the German government’s resistance by saying they have a strong interest in using the recovered paintings as an opportunity “to publicly expatiate their guilt.”
Five years later, Taring Padi’s caricature presented another such opportunity, but this time ruangrupa—whose biggest success was managing to fall wholly outside that art world pot (we know that barely anyone from the concurrent Art Basel had reason to attend the opening)—had few tools to defend themselves. What I saw in their great after-party was art demoted to the status of a more or less arbitrary outcome of community activity. But exhibitions have publics, not communities. To make art for a community is to concede to making art for your friends. To me, that spells art for the end of times.
Adam Szymczyk © Faliro House Productions
Documenta 14, too, included this pretension: to effect real social impact in Athens, build relationships, not be a UFO. In this respect, Szymscyk wanted to have his cake and eat it too—cultural prestige and grassroots credibility; theory and practice. The cake, more concretely, was the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, which he got in exchange for giving the Kassel Fridericianum over to a display of their collection. Theoretically, as his curators excitedly exclaim when the idea is first presented, “it puts everything into place” and “addresses the issues of repatriation [and] archaeology.” But in practice, as Exergue shows, the invitation to the Fridericianum was first and foremost the solution to a problem of square meters in Athens, and it read that way to viewers, too—as if you did not even need to actually see it. The ESMT director, Katerina Koskina, a small, busy lady, tough as jerky, smelled foul play from the onset, and resisted in her various creative ways until the end. In Athiridis’s film, she takes on the role of villain. Or anti-hero?
But what could Documenta possibly have fixed for the Athenians, for the Greeks, for refugees, or for anyone anywhere? Was its landing in Athens a form of crisis tourism? Yes. But it was also something else: an art exhibition. An intellectual, political, and artistic proposal, rare in scope and ambition. The other side of the coin shows a group of sharp, creative minds playing a game that couldn’t be won.
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Last month, the Lagos Biennial assembled the works of over 80 artists for its fourth edition, on a site named in honor of the first Prime Minister of an “independent” Nigeria. Prior to being renamed Tafawa Balewa Square in 1960, the 14.5-hectare plaza had been known as “Lagos Racecourse,” having been “given” to British colonial authorities by the Oba of Lagos in 1859. In less than two centuries, this particular piece of land was transferred through the hands of the Lagos Royal Family, the British Royal Family, the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and—since Abuja became Nigeria’s capital city—the Lagos State Government. The square is a high-potential and largely underserved space, and the co-artistic directors of this year’s Lagos Biennial, Folakunle Oshun and Kathryn Weir, invited audiences to use the historically charged site to reflect on the idea of the nation-state.
A Curatorial Critique
Given the title and theme of “Refuge,” the 2024 Lagos Biennial was undeniably ambitious, in a way that has prompted a flurry of urgent conversations on the ontology of art biennials in post-colonial African urban centers. Unfortunately, public audiences and engagement during the show’s short run were lower than expected. That fact, coupled with a flurry of tech issues, caused considerations around functionality, utility, and accessibility to rise to the fore.
La Biennale di Venezia, the first art biennale, was founded in 1895, at the height of European imperialism. It is challenging to disassociate its offspring, even in their contemporary and supposedly revolutionary forms, from that origin. So long as art-making practices from Africa and the Global South continue to write themselves into a Eurocentric canon, they will find themselves subjected to the gross power imbalances of Eurocentric hegemonies. The alternative models proposed by the major players in the current restitution wave—of which Nigeria is definitely one—in the coming years are likely to have defining consequences.
Installation view of the Traces of Ecstasy Pavilion. Image courtesy of the Lagos Biennial.
Yet the agility of Lagosians and indeed Nigerians remains unmatched, as demonstrated by this event’s extremely dedicated team. Amid global difficulties that are felt exponentially more keenly in Lagos, the mere completion of the event’s fourth edition deserves applause. Indeed, the caliber of works presented was impressive, albeit with a notable number of comments about the lack of (younger) local and regional artists. If imperialism ruled the 19th through to the first half of the 20th century, and the proceeding period of nationalism is being eroded by multinational tech companies, the ways in which African philosophical, artistic, and cultural production choose to assert themselves at this moment feel increasingly critical.
The philosophies of Ubuntu and universal consciousness are intrinsic to African epistemologies, expressing connection both across space with other humans, the planet, and the cosmos, and across time through the prevalence of ancestral veneration and divination. In African belief systems which understand existence beyond the linearity of time, the importance of process is perhaps already a given for an art event like this. Yet at the same time, the curatorial theme of this Lagos Biennale, “Refuge,” also appeared to semantically echo much of the thinking from documenta 15 (whose theme was collectivity), and the wider global cultural shift that has become popular in non-commercial praxis. And considering the sheer, possibly daunting scale of Tafawa Balewa Square, which requires a certain level of scenography due to its vast open spaces, the curatorial decision to show prototypes rather than final works and to allow for aesthetically ambiguous outputs was bold, if also possibly symptomatic of funding constraints.
Em’kal Eyongakpa, Betok babhi, Babhi betandat, bassem (2022-2024). Image courtesy of the Lagos Biennial.
There can be no question about the power and pertinence of the content presented at the fourth Lagos Biennial. Nevertheless, the modes of presentation make for a little bit of head scratching. The jury is still out on how well its theme translated and resonated, within the unique context of Lagos.
Works of Interest
Upon entering the main arena at Tafawa Balewa Square, guests were invited to step into a portal of new possibilities by revisiting the wisdom of the past, through the display of a set of doors by legendary artist Demas Nwoko. The artist and architect was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2023, an apt recognition for his decades of contributions to the discourse on modernity.
Bruce Onobrakpeya’s sculptures. Image courtesy of the Lagos Biennial.
The doors prefaced the towering sculptures of one of Nwoko’s Zaria Art Society contemporary, Bruce Onobrakpeya. Masks and Onabrakpeya’s metal works were caged in by used car parts, motherboards, and other waste materials, which formed the outer structure of the sculptures. The artist invites us to remember that energy never dies and that even the most discarded materials may find new purpose and meaning—an important omen in the context of a global state of affairs which seems to be leading to increased violence, both against one another and against the planet itself.
A packed performance program was kicked off with an emphatic group spectacle by Native Maqari. On a long stretch of fabric, a dancer dressed in a custom piece from the Lagos-based “wearable art brand” IAMISIGO and sporting an extended ponytail covered in black paint contorted her way across its length, marking both the canvas and the surrounding audiences. In a spine-tingling performance underscored by the piercing sounds of the lira (a Moroccan Berber flute), Maqari floated through the crowd, reading out the descriptions of skin bleaching products, and handing out samples to guests. Skin bleaching is a topic that is still under-discussed yet has a booming industry regionally—a blatant hangover from the deep internalization of Eurocentric beauty standards.
Native Maqari’s performance at the Lagos Biennial. Image courtesy of Ugochukwu Emebiriodo.
In a film and performance by Jermay Michael Gabriel and Justin Randolph Thompson titled Members Don’t Git Weary, the artists remembered Tafawa Balewa Square as the site of FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. A guitar solo by Thompson coupled with Amharic prayers and incantations by Michael Gabriel brought to life a moving-image work that revisited pan-African memories through texts from W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey.
Cameroonian artist Em’kal Eyongakpa’s interpretation of the theme of “refuge” connected deeply with a variety of guests (notably the on-site and construction staff). Incorporating a bass speaker set beneath a wooden palette, the piece’s sound vibrations seemed to invigorate the audiences, who took to sitting, standing, and lying on the installation. In a fast-paced city whose citizens are subjected to all the ills of capitalism, where the acquisition and accumulation of capital supersedes most other ambitions, this opportunity to connect with embodied feelings was particularly well received.
“Traces of Ecstasy,” a cohesive and collaborative pavilion curated by K.J. Abudu and designed by Nolan Oswald Dennis, most efficiently demonstrated and presented the positive intent of the fourth edition. There, Evan Ifakoya ring-fenced a space for processing healing and trauma, via a sound work that reflected on the migration of spiritual practices across the Black Atlantic.
At the center of the structure, Temitayo Shonibare’s noteworthy three-channel video installation invited audiences to revisit the recent traumas from Nigeria’s End SARS protests from 2020. Combining animation, raw footage recorded on mobile phones, and found visuals and audio, the piece is underscored by a delectable sound mix, charged with the revolutionary spirit of the fatal protests.
Overhead view of the Traces of Ecstasy pavilion. Image courtesy of the Lagos Biennial.
Overhead in the pavilion, a revived interest in Yoruba spirituality—particularly amongst younger generations of continental west Africans, and a diaspora in South, Central, and North America, as well as in Europe—manifested through the flowing adire fabrics of Adeju Thompson’s design practice, Lagos Space Programme. Drawing on the importance of indigo in many west African spiritual practices, the artist prompted the audience to look beyond themselves and take solace in the knowledge of divine protection.
And truly, the Lagos Biennial was most deeply rooted in the power of faith, which Victor Ehikhamenor deftly presented through the latest evolution of his chapel series, titled Miracle Central. From the center of a physical imitation of a chapel, the voices of bellowing Pentecostal pastors projected to an audience of hanging chairs, instruments, microphones, and a pulpit, with one of the artist’s well-known large-scale rosary works suspended as the backdrop of the chapel.
Ehikhamenor continues to meditate on the omnipresence of religion in Nigeria, creating space for the urgently needed reflections and conversations on one of the country’s—and the continent’s—most contentious subjects. Through an installation that resonated powerfully with local audiences, the artist demonstrated the possibilities of how multidisciplinary and installation practices can critically engage communities beyond the art industry itself, both locally in Nigeria and in the wider West African region.
Where Next?
Even as a host of new galleries cropping up in Lagos in recent years, the city’s biennial is establishing itself as a noteworthy case study for non-commercial exhibitions, locally and in the Global South at large. There was a certain warmth felt as local and international art communities gathered to realize this 4th edition of the Lagos Biennial. Collaboration and community were the most consistent feeling permeating the event, though it must be admitted that these seemed contingent on a certain degree of exclusivity. Simply put, there was also a slight feeling that the art world had descended upon Lagos to talk to itself for a week.
CBN outdoor cinema at Plan B. Image courtesy of Plan B.
But finally, some encouragement can be drawn from the fact that the biennial’s conceptual fingerprints are left lingering throughout the city—perhaps most excitingly around the corner from Tafawa Balewa Square, where the multinational collective of artists, curators, and organizers known as CBN (a Fela Kuti-esque parody of the Central Bank of Nigeria), created a 10-day street-cinema. Hosted on the facade of Plan B, an artist residency space, the outdoor screenings programmed an imaginative selection of short and feature films, among other moving-image work by artists. During the run of the biennial, it quickly established itself as the after-hours highlight. The ten-day program was frequented by Lagos Island locals, who were joined by the city’s young creative community and some of the spillover crowd from the biennial.
Lagos needs no invitation to innovate, and there is a united appreciation for the biennial’s fourth edition as a physical exhibition, especially after the 3rd edition responded to the constraints of COVID by converting itself into a publication. Therefore, despite the challenges faced, one must hope that this exhibition will have inspired new ways of approaching, thinking, and making in Nigeria and beyond. The impact of these, even if slow, may generate positive lasting effects.
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