Reviews

How do you measure the success of a public artwork? Maybe when it becomes a landmark, like Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sly Spoonbridge and Cherry (1988) in Minneapolis. Or perhaps when it delights the cognoscenti with conceptual innovations, like Pierre Huyghe’s surreal dog park from Documenta 13. Or maybe when it comes to deliver a potent message, a la Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World (1876–86)—a.k.a. the Statue of Liberty.
Nicole Eisenman’s enthralling new work in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, Fixed Crane (2024), manages all that, as well as another feat as well: It delights kids. The piece is a 90-foot-long Link-Belt crane that Eisenman has flipped onto its side in the center of the park. When I stopped by last week, children of all ages were climbing this absolute beast of a machine. Bigger ones had mounted its overturned cab, nine feet in the air (which looked wonderfully dangerous), while little tikes were carefully moving along its skeletal red boom, guided by caregivers.
A tiny opening in the back of Eisenman’s sculpture contains a secret. Photo by Andrew Russeth
Potential readings—some spelled out in a concise curatorial text—are clear enough. Eisenman, a Brooklyner, has brought down a potent symbol of growth, making the vertical horizontal, and she is perhaps mocking the unlovely “supertall” buildings that have gone up nearby to serve the ultra-wealthy. This crane is old, from 1969, and so there is also a layer of melancholy: An already outmoded belief in progress is now a beached whale. It is its own graveyard.
The piece is not gloomy, though, because of playful little alterations that Eisenman has made. Bandages are wrapped around part of the boom, as if mending a fracture, and a (Jeff Koons-style) shiny magenta nipple ring is affixed to part of it. Some of its components have been transformed into benches and chairs (always welcome in a park). Oh, and look over there, on the back of the cab: There’s a little rectangular opening. Look inside and you will see—spoiler alert—a tiny figure who is hiding from the cold, roasting something over an open flame. (It’s not the first time that Eisenman has built an Étant donnés-like peephole.)
Refashioning dilapidated equipment for new ends, Eisenman invites viewers to dream a bit, and to ask more of public space. Where else might someone seek shelter now? What else could be reengineered for productive—or just joyous—uses today? Her work is on view only through March 5 of next year— but those questions are not going to become less important anytime soon.
Sydney Shen’s SBNO (Standing But Not Operating), 2024, in Riverside Park. Photo by Andrew Russeth
When I stopped by Sydney Shen’s enormous new sculpture in Riverside Park on the Hudson River at West 61st Street one recent morning, there were no children present, which was just as well because it is much less easy to climb than Eisenman’s crane, and it would frighten a certain percentage of them, I suspect. The work takes the form of a metronome that has come to a halt mid-beat—a memento mori whose deathly radiance is heightened by the rather unsettling presence of a white spinal column at its center. The piece’s scale makes it at once frightening and a little amusing. (Behold: a partially anthropomorphized skeleton keeper of time.)
Shen, who’s based in Manhattan, is presenting her thrilling piece as part of “Works in Public 2024,” an exhibition from the Art Students League of New York and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation that runs through August 31, 2025. She has titled it SBNO (Standing But Not Operating), a term for decommissioned amusement park attractions. There is a hint that her sculpture is also a carnival ride (or a model for one): a wooden seat takes the place of the pendulum’s weight, and while it is too small for an actual rider, it is easy enough to imagine the fear that you overtake you, perched high up in the air as it sways back and forth. Given the state of the world, in some sense, we are all up there right now.
A mighty 60-year-old locomotive in Riverside Park in Manhattan.
A bonus attraction sits a few feet away from Shen’s Halloween delight, a massive locomotive that was relocated from Brooklyn to this riverside park in a nod to the area’s former life as a train yard. A walkway has been erected that allows you to get up close to this finely wrought 95-ton behemoth (which is just five years older than Eisenman’s crane). It’s a beauty. Seeing it, I suddenly found myself mourning the fact that Jeff Koons’s ridiculous 2012 proposal to hang a replica 1942 steam locomotive above the High Line was never realized. (It was estimated to cost $25 million back then. Even if the cost has quadrupled, it’d still be less than half the cost of Thomas Heatherwick’s horrible Vessel. Someone, please, get this done.)
Installation view of “Sungsil Ryu: Return to Roots” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Photo courtesy Tiger Strikes Asteroid
One more show about public space, in a more general sense: Remember those halcyon days when there was a widespread belief that the internet was shaping up to be a great digital agora, an open marketplace for good-faith discussion and debate? That was a long time ago. Over at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Bushwick, the superb South Korean artist Sungsil Ryu is offering a super-charged satire of the current digital hellscape in a show titled “Return to Roots” that runs through this Sunday. (The exhibition is a collaboration with the Doosan Art Center in Seoul, organized by its chief curator, Hyejung Jang.)
Dressed as an indefatigable YouTube influencer of her own creation, “BJ Cherry Jang,” Ryu spews misinformation (about a North Korean missile attack, for instance) and self-help advice (about how to obtain “first-class citizenship”) in videos that are overloaded with graphics. Screened in a room-filling installation that suggests a fleshy, earthen mound, Ryu’s works are hypnotizing, alluring, and a touch repulsive. Claustrophobia threatens. Jang (who, in this show’s intricate backstory, actually “died” five years ago) has all the answers, and she wants to help, if only you would listen. Are we being hoodwinked? Naturally. Sometimes, she knows, that is exactly what we want. More

A robotic arm moves a long, black whip across the floor, and then suddenly lets it rip. Nearby, a motor pulls a knife on a wire toward the ceiling. Without warning, the blade falls, puncturing a wooden table. Low stanchions separate you from these works, which are by, respectively, the Vietnamese artists Nguyễn Phương Linh and Trương Quế Chi, but they are still quite menacing.
Partial installation view of Nguyễn Phương Linh & Trương Quế Chi’s Sourceless Waters: The Whip & The Knife (2024).
Another room here at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea has a peculiar amount of empty white wall space. As you stare, your eyes tingle. Is it really empty? There are “three almost invisible hues of color,” a wall label explains. This is Carla Arocha’s Snow (2003/2024), which simulates snow blindness, a condition that “causes us to see dead cells as the blind spots in our eyesight.” We are “looking at our own death,” the label adds.
On a grass field outside, there is an old trailer painted with larger-than-life flowers by Doowon Lee. The self-taught Korean artist has stuffed similarly exuberant canvases inside the vehicle, along with a bevy of potted plants, creating a verdant little refuge on MOCA Busan’s island home. Across the Nakdong River, apartment buildings stretch off into the distance.
Doowon Lee’s The flower garden of BUDDHA-BEE in a caravan (2024).
Welcome to the 2024 Busan Biennale, which is by turns harrowing and sedate, almost comically blunt and frustratingly hermetic. It is one of the more freewheeling exhibitions I have seen in recent years, and also one of the more enervating. On view through Sunday, it’s titled “Seeing in the Dark”—which is difficult to do, literally speaking, but it is precisely what great artists can accomplish by developing fresh ways of looking at the world and allowing us to make sense of, yes, very dark times.
The biennial’s artistic directors—Vera Mey, an independent curator from New Zealand, and Philippe Pirotte, a former rector of the Städelschule in Frankfurt—have marshaled an admirably eclectic list of 62 individuals and groups for that task. There are big-league Korean names and a few regulars on the global art circuit, but most are not well known. This show is a bet on new talent.
Kyung Hwa Kim’s Harmony (2024), made from cloth used to make hanbok, traditional Korean clothing.
Violence is everywhere, even in unabashedly beautiful material. one hanging tapestry—hundreds of fabric flowers stitched together by the Korean artist Kyung Hwa Kim—is titled People massacred in the valley (2024). The plants are native to the site of a mass killing of leftists and alleged leftists in 1950s Korea. Kim’s work stuns, but other pieces feel overly fixated on history: Footnote Art that mines historical minutiae to no real end in wan installations and paintings, interesting enough but random.
Activism is also everywhere, for better and for worse. Subversive Film, a Palestinian collective that took part in the fraught Documenta 15 in Kassel in 2022, is on hand with a compilation of film clips from anti-colonial and worker movements. Here, too, is the Indonesian group Taring Padi, which displayed a piece with anti-Semitic imagery in that show, igniting a firestorm. Its contributions in Busan include frenetic banners from peasant protests back home and a low wall (a barricade?) made of bags of rice. (Midway through my visit, I hear a man with a Germanic accent muttering to his companion, “Documenta redux, Documenta redux.”)
“Glitch Barricade,” a solo show of protest photographer Seo Young-geol’s work that was staged as part of the biennale by Hong Jin-hwon.
There are more nuanced and fruitful approaches. One the biennial’s highlights is a miniature solo show-within-the-show of Seo Young-geol’s photographs of tense pro-democracy demonstrations in South Korea in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was organized by the filmmaker Hong Jin-hown, who’s printed Seo’s images in a variety of sizes, pasting some to the wall and framing others, building a chaotic collage of people chanting, waving banners, crying. In a neighboring theater, Hong has a two-channel documentary, Double Slit (2024), that looks at how leaders of those protests became elected officials, abandoned radical aims, and formed a new establishment. Post-viewing, those heroic snapshots are tinged with melancholy.
Yun Suknam, a pioneering feminist artist in Korea in her mid-80s, has a series of affecting portraits of women involved in the nation’s fight for independence from Japan in the early 20th century. No depictions remain of some of these figures, who worked in obscurity, so Yun drew on archival texts, using pencil and pigment to make the only ones that now exist. And in a chilling video by the Chinese artist Chen Xiaoyun, Night/2.4KM, the camera follows a group of young men—construction workers or farmers, perhaps—as they march through the night. They are carrying sticks and shovels, as if headed toward a brawl, but they never arrive. They just keep going. The piece is from 2009, but it feels awfully of the moment.
A partial installation view Mugunghwa Pirates (2024), portraits of South Korean presidents as pirates by of Koo Hunjoo, who also works under the name Kay2. It’s on view at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
The biennial’s stated themes are doozies: “pirate enlightenment,” borrowing from anthropologist David Graeber’s eponymous 2023 book, which posits that communities formed by descendants of pirates in 18th-century Madagascar helped inspire the European Enlightenment, as well as Buddhist enlightenment. (These phenomena provide means of “seeing in the dark,” in a very expansive sense, you might argue.) Pirate and Buddhist iconography get big play here.
Seven pirates smile from gold frames in the basement of the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum, one of the biennial’s three satellite locations. They’re the work of a Busan street artist named aka Koo Hunjoo, a.k.a. Kay2, who has literalized Graeber’s thesis by taking spray paint to official-looking portraits of South Korea’s democratically elected presidents, détourning the besuited politicians with black hats, scrappy beards, and missing teeth. It’s goofy, but it does have a certain piquancy following the uproar caused by a high school student’s amusing caricature of the current president (as Thomas the Tank Engine, controlled by his wife).
Eugene Jung’s W💀W (Waves of Wreckage), 2024.
Back at the museum, the young gun Eugene Jung, who works in Seoul and New York, ripped open walls to a gallery where she scattered about all sorts of construction materials (plywood, steel pipes). The 2024 work, W💀W (Waves of Wreckage), “resembles a temporarily wrecked pirate ship,” a wall label claims, and while I can’t quite see that, I am impressed by the raw energy, the mayhem, of the effort—a reasonable response to life right now. On the roof of an abandoned house in the heart of this city of 3.5 million, Jung placed rugged, charred sculptures that could be fragments of an enormous sphere that has been cracked open in some unnamed disaster. (It vaguely recalls Fritz Koenig’s 1968–71 Sphere, which was smashed on 9/11.)
In some of the most potent work in the biennial, artists invent new languages or create private worlds. There’s the Jamaican American Douglas R. Ewart, who makes charismatic instruments out of things like crutches and cake pans, paying tribute to people like Sun Ra and George Floyd; Doowon Lee, with his joyful garden paintings; and the Togolese-Belgian photographer Hélène Amouzou, who toys with camera techniques to make unforgettable black-and-white self-portraits where she has a furtive presence, there and not there, only giving her viewers so much.
Daejin Choi, And, nothing was said, 2024.
The work that has really stuck with me, though, is one of the most traditional. It’s a massive ink drawing on paper, à la Raymond Pettibon, by the Korean artist Daejin Choi, and it shows about a dozen elite South Korean commandos in a raft (the kind of subject that rarely appears in exhibitions of vanguard-minded contemporary art). These soldiers are wearing wetsuits and goggles, training, perhaps prepping for some clandestine strike. You might think of it as a companion piece to Arocha’s nearly invisible Snow.
Death hovers in the air here, too, but with cold clarity. Choi has rendered these men with loose brushstrokes, and it almost looks like they could evanesce into a pool of ink at any moment. For now, though, we can see them clearly.
See more images of the Busan Biennale below.
Carla Arocha’s Snow (2003/2024), a wall painted with almost invisible color.
Partial installation view of Shooshie Sulaiman and I Wayan Darmadi’s PETA – One cloud, nine drops of rain (2024) at Choryang House.
Installation view of Nika Dubrovsky’s three-channel video work Fight Club (2022) at the Hansung1918 venue.
Cheikh Ndiaye’s Le Paris (2024) at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
Absolutely wild photographs by Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé at the Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum.
At left, Joe Namy’s Dub Plants (2024); at right, Omar Chowdhury’s short film BAN♡ITS (2024).
A (nearly) empty room containing a sound work by Daejin Choi, Kim ChooJa Medley No. 2 (2024).
[embedded content]Daejin Choi’s Kim ChooJa Medley No. 2 (2024) slows down an album by that popular singer of the 1970s and ’80s so that it lasts 24 hours.
Single-print etchings on paper by Fred Bervoets from 1997. Each is titled Mijn Stad (“My City”).
Partial view of Ishikawa Mao’s The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll part 10 (2023), which takes up moments in Okinawan history.
Paintings by Doowon Lee.
Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson’s Kimchi-Waakye (2024).
Ghostly self-portraits by Hélène Amouzou, highlights of the Busan Biennale.
Two paintings by Bang Jeong A, Those Enlightened in the Water, which shows a Buddhist Arhat (a saint), and Growing Claws-Becoming, both from 2024.
Golrokh Nafisi with Ahmadali Kadivar, Continuous cities, 2024.
John Vea’s Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000 (2019) (2024), a break room-as-installation that can be used by visitors during set break times: 15 minutes at 10 a.m., 30 minutes at noon, and 15 minutes at 3 p.m.
Installation view of the 2024 Busan Biennale, with Nathalie Muchamad’s ENRIQUE (2024) at left.
Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s short video piece It Is Not a Place (2024).
Song Cheon, Avalokiteshvara and Mary-The Truth Has Never Left My Side, 2024.
Works from Yun Suknam’s “Women of Resistance Series” (2020–23), which depict women who fought for Korea’s independence from Japan.
Untitled works by Kanitha Tith from between 2000 and 2024 at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art.
Taring Padi’s Memedi Sawah/Scarecrow Installation (2024).
Inside Doowon Lee’s The flower garden of BUDDHA-BEE in a caravan (2024). More

Elizabeth Catlett once told an interviewer that one of the biggest public misconceptions about her is that she’s a great artist.
She was “just lucky,” she said, to come “at a time when it’s fashionable or necessary to do something about a Black person and about a woman.”
Catlett made this comment in 2002, a few years after her 50-year retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. Twenty-plus years later, the Brooklyn Museum has organized another. “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” features a staggering amount of Catlett’s work, nearly 200 pieces ranging from the mid-1930s to the aughts. It demonstrates not only this artist’s remarkable versatility, but also how her lifelong devotion to issues much bigger than herself may have prevented her from quite seeing it. More

I do love The Americans. When I’m feeling pensive, sometimes I open the book, and every time I find in Robert Frank’s photographic catalogue of ‘50s America a feeling of clarity about how to look at the world, something to take me out of myself.
I can already imagine the curators of MoMA’s lovingly assembled “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” frowning at this intro. The exhibition’s selection of 200 works is about just about everything but The Americans, the six decades of work that Frank did after that classic achievement.
Not having it in the mix is a little bit like a band refusing to play its biggest hit, but I actually appreciate the desire to focus on lesser-appreciated material. The reason I bring it up is that I think to understand what Frank was up to, it helps to know not just what he was trying to do, but also what he was trying to undo. And one of the things he was trying to undo was The Americans.
“Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
Frank, who died in 2019, was born in Zurich in 1924. He apprenticed with photographers in his teens, so when he moved as a young man to New York, in 1947, he already had chops. He got work for Harper’s Bazaar doing light editorial work, but it was two Guggenheim grants that let him go on the 30-state road trip in the mid-‘50s that formed the foundation for The Americans, with its gorgeously forlorn vision of the United States in the Eisenhower/McCarthy era.
Some early critics thought it was a foreigner’s unflattering take on his adopted home—funny now, because what stands out is how equipoised its mixture of alienation and tenderness is, how much poetry Frank gets from the materialism of midcentury U.S.A. Back in New York, he was part of the artist crowd around the Tenth Street galleries and the Beats, and MoMA’s show contains plenty of his images and collaborations with each. Writer Jack Kerouac, then at the peak of his post-On the Road fame, would do the book’s introduction, and The Americans took on a reputation as a definitive document of its time.
This is more or less where “Life Dances On” starts. Among its first highlights is a fine series called “On the Bus,” which was first shown at MoMA the same year The Americans was published, in 1958. Superficially, it is similar: a sequence of images in the same gorgeous gelatin silver tones showing ordinary characters on the street, here shot from the window of a bus going down Fifth Avenue.
Two works from Robert Frank’s “On the Bus” series (1958) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue.” Photo by Ben Davis.
But it’s very different. For all its everydayness, and its similar-seeming obsession with shooting from moving vehicles, The Americans was artfully sequenced and composed, each image striking a perfect, clear note that builds into a (minor-key) harmony. The “On the Bus” series aspires to being a field recording rather than a symphony, a document of passing through a place at a specific moment. Frank saw “On the Bus” as the end of something and the beginning of something else. It was.
From then on, Frank began to exit conventional documentary photography. I cannot think of any other artist whose public profile shifted as dramatically, from being seen as popularly resonant in a Voice-of-a-Generation way to being seen as intensely hermetic, a complete artist’s artist. (Although his Beat cachet would bring him work shooting the Rolling Stones for 1972’s Exile on Main Street and Tom Waits for 1985’s Rain Dogs, which get their due in displays.)
Images of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by Robert Frank displayed in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Frank’s process of editing The Americans involved making 1,000 work prints from 767 rolls of film before making his final selections. You often see his contact sheets reproduced in discussions of the work—all the alternative angles on some scene and then the one famous image from the 83 in the final book, marked out by a red circle (the National Gallery of Art has some you can look at online). Notably, there are later works in “Life Dances On,” like Beauty Contest, Chinatown (1968), with its multiple stacked serial images of the same busy scene, that evoke exactly this raw visual source material.
Distilling a long, lonely process of looking down to perfect, gem-like moments, Frank had created one of the great, magnetic accounts of postwar ennui—but thereafter it was as if he wanted to reverse the achievement by trying to welcome back into the picture all the life that he had previously edited out. The animating belief behind all of Frank’s experiments post-The Americans is that such documentary images participate in the alienation they document, rendering life cold.
Robert Frank, Beauty Contest, Chinatown (1968) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at MoMA. Photo by Ben Davis.
Thus, the world-in-motion of “On the Bus” augured Frank turning to the moving image, mainly to odd and difficult art films. The first of these, Pull My Daisy (1959)—shown via a clip and a cluster of stills—was a collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie. It features narration by Kerouac laid over somewhat shapeless scenes of an apartment meet-up of art people. The cast included poets Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso and painters Alice Neel and Larry Rivers. Coming after Frank’s deep and deliberate marination in alienation, Pull My Daisy is most interesting in the way it reads as an almost theorem-like reversal, making a direct virtue of intimate community and messy conviviality.
As for Frank’s subsequent non-moving-image work—the bulk of this show’s cargo—he made photo collages (like Pablo and Sandy, 1979) and landscapes assembled from multiple stitched-together pictures (Mabou Mines, 1971-72). He photographed his own photographs, hung from clotheslines in nature, thereby literally animating them with the surrounding environment (Bonjour—Maestro, Mabou, 1974). He did a lot of scratching lines or scrawling words directly onto the image surface, emphasizing its psychological character (Hold Still—Keep Going, 1989). He spent a lot of time on correspondence that itself can be seen as diaristic mail art (Sarah Greenough has a lovely essay about this in the catalogue).
Frank’s change of style coincided with a change of content and scenery. After making his name documenting the United States of America, Frank moved to the tiny rural community of Mabou, far out on Cape Breton Island in the east of Canada, in 1970. (An image of a wispy, almost-alive snowdrift swamping a Nova Scotia landscape from 1981 may be the most visually arresting in the show.) From his sprawling, restless tour of the byways of the U.S., he went to rooting in small-town life. Late in life, he made a film that simply followed along on the local paper delivery route, much to the bemusement of fellow Mabou residents, who weren’t sure why this was interesting.
Robert Frank, Storm in Mabou, New Year (1981) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at MoMA. Photo by Ben Davis.
Most importantly in terms of Frank’s reversals and negations, The Americans was read as the emanation of a collectivity as much as a product of a personal vision (as the title suggests). It was first published in a French version as Les Américains, with Frank’s pictures accompanied by quotations from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wright—textual ornamentation wisely eliminated from the U.S. version to allow the images to speak on their own and of their moment. By contrast, almost all of the work in “Life Dances On” feels turned away from social life, deeply in Frank’s head—even when it is literally looking out the window. Landscapes, interiors, and still lifes are all presented as containers of intimate, half-divulged symbolism.
In Laura Israel’s documentary about Frank, Don’t Blink (2015), you see footage of him addressing a college class in the early ’70s. He fields a question about why his work has become so hard to penetrate. “I am looking for something,” he says defiantly, “and if my films are in no way as successful to almost all people as my photographs are, it just makes me look harder, to express it stronger and better. Maybe I’ll never get there. I’m just happy that I am looking for it.”
And Frank did seem, on some level, to find happiness in his journey inwards. If “Life Dances On” nevertheless leaves behind the impression of melancholy, it’s because life itself remains stubbornly full of sorrow.
Frank outlived both his children. His son, Pablo, suffered from schizophrenia and died by suicide, in his 40s, in 1994. His daughter, Andrea, lost her life in a freak plane crash, aged 21, in 1974.
As I left the MoMA, I thought suddenly of one of the better-known images in The Americans, titled Crosses on Scene of Highway Accident, U.S. 91, Idaho: scrubby grass, a placeless stretch of road, and three small cross-shaped markers crudely mounted on pieces of rebar thrust into the earth. It’s powerful because the memorial is so anonymous and so unremarkable. A flare of light descends from the sky, seeming to intimate something spiritual. But because the crosses are angled away, the feeling the photo conveys is of them being sped past, forgotten at the moment of their revelation, memory a victim of the same speed that kills.
Robert Frank, Mabou (1977), showing his personal monument to his daughter. Photo by Ben Davis.
Two decades later, Frank would make a series of works to memorialize Andrea. Some, in mournful black and white, show abstract shapes, evidently bits of wood and stones he built up in the landscape as a personal mourning ritual, then photographed to give them permanence (his exact explanation, quoted in the catalogue, remains a bit obscure to me). Another, a collage, features a photo of Andrea smiling, inset in a grid. Some of its squares are blank; some contain hazy picture fragments adding up to the outline of the family’s Mabou house. And in one of the squares, Frank has written these words: “for my daughter Andrea who died in an airplane crash in Tical in Guatemala on Dec 23 last year. She was 21 years and she lived in this house and I think of Andrea every day.”
Frank’s photos of the improvised memorials feel so personal as to remain mysterious. But the collage with her face is so direct that it is almost like witnessing unprocessed grief or reading a page from a diary.
As an image, that sad roadside memorial from The Americans is the more reverberant testament to the modern experience of death. But as a form of coping with that experience—of inhabiting a consciousness that actually refuses to speed away from the tragedy—the Mabou works are the more meaningful. Their imperfection is something like the beautiful unguarded ugliness of someone’s face as they let themselves weep. More

As the Catalan capital, Barcelona’s tourism has sparked a crisis for those who live there. Local residents are battling crowds, pollution, and carelessness when it comes to the region’s culture. Despite the municipal government taking measures including banning the construction of new hotels and raising tourist tax, over the summer, tensions culminated in thousands of protestors not only denouncing the city’s over-tourism, but even shooting tourists with water guns out of sheer frustration.
The urgency of this atmosphere underpins the 15th edition of Manifesta, which opened to the public on September 9 (running until November 24, 2024). With an artistic team spread across 12 cities on the periphery of the Spanish city, this edition is intentionally decentralized, focusing on local communities as a methodology for sidestepping the ever-increasing tourism and gentrification of Barcelona itself.
Overseen by Portuguese curator Filipa Oliveira, who is the collective’s creative mediator, this edition takes place around the metropolitan region with a clear ambition: to encourage long-lasting change in the area. Large-scale art events are notorious for paying lip service to such endeavors while often avoiding any meaningful responsibility for enduring transformation. Manifesta 15 seeks to redress this imbalance.
Garden of ‘La Ricarda’, 1965 © Moisès Villèlia. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
Shakespeare’s famous adage, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” could easily apply to Manifesta, which also goes by the European Nomadic Biennale, and has been ever on the move since 1994. (The last edition was in Prishtina, Kosovo, and the next will head to the German region of Ruhr.) Launched to respond to the new social, cultural, and political reality after the Cold War, thirty years on, the project now doubles down, aiming to make socio-ecological improvement its fundamental principle.
A tall order, no doubt. Yet this edition’s will to turn our gaze to the peripheries is, thankfully, non-exhaustive; this show is not about asking everyone to go everywhere. Rather, by embedding itself within atomized local social and ecological infrastructures, the project activates art as a mediating factor to enable both critical engagement and, hopefully, sustained change.
Cue the “clusters:” With three exceptional, if dense, archival presentations mounted at Manifesta 15’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Eixample district—which respectively explore radical pedagogy in 20th Century Catalonia, Barcelona’s democratic and cultural evolution, and Black life in the metropolitan region—the other exhibitions form clusters in spaces as diverse as churches, disused factories, a former panopticon prison, a grain warehouse, and even a bomb shelter. As a whole, this sees 92 artists within three thematic categories: “Cure and Care,” which looks at the healing power of culture; “Balancing Conflicts,” which seeks to protect local natural resources from existential threat; and “Imagining Futures,” which focuses on the Besòs River region, home to one million residents, which has been defined by its disorderly urban growth.
Exudates, 2024 © Eva Fàbregas. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
Cure and Care
The concept of care has become a buzzword in contemporary art circles, with methods of repair often proposed through exhibition making, and usually in ways that are fundamentally different from Western approaches.
At this cluster’s main venue, a 9th-century Benedictine Abbey, an interior courtyard is the definition of peacefulness with its Corinthian columns, trompe l’oeil frescos, and a fountain with bright orange fish. Encountering Simone Fattal’s bronze sculpture Adam and Eve (2021) is an exultant, tongue-in-cheek dig at the iconography of the Christian church, and presumably, when presented in this context, the history of its own questionable approach to care.
These Biblical figures are abstracted into a glorious amalgam of textured flesh, breasts, legs, and torsos weighted with human authority. Upstairs, Dana Awartani’s medicinally-dyed and hand-embroidered silk installation (Let me Mend Your Broken Bones, 2024) sees darned windows of red, yellow, and orange silk perfectly patching the negative space of the arches, while Wu Tsang’s video Girl Talk (2015), which explores how identity structures can be dismantled, has the exultant singing voice of theorist and poet Fred Moten ringing out through the halls.
Adam and Eve, (2021) © Simone Fattal. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Cecília Coca
The standout work here is Diana Policarpo’s three-channel video Liquid Transfers (2022–24), a speculative-fiction film about ergot, a fungi growing on wheat that caused hallucinations in humans and shaped social behavior alongside the rise of capitalism. Used by healers, midwives, and experimental military programs alike to “reveal the invisible crimes of our psyche,” it poetically taps into not only the cult of hallucinogenic healing but also into the violent undercurrents of political abuse in the name of care and progress.
Liquid Transfers, (2022-2024) © Diana Policarpo. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana /Cecília Coca
At the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Museum of Natural Sciences), it’s easy to wonder whether aesthetic rigor is sometimes sacrificed for methodology. The glass and textile sculptures of Hugo Canoilas, Sculptured in darkness (2020–24)—bulbous, rock-like forms that merge with the vegetation in the museum’s garden—appear less like the “radical inclusion” of non-human life species in a “post-capitalist world” they’re presented as, and more like incidental leftovers. Similarly, the textile and ceramic works by Tanja Smeets, The Life in Between (2024), which appear as fungi-like growths across a great swathe of two additional venues, a Romanesque church and the textile factory Vapor Buxeda Vell, seem parenthetical and, dare I say, needlessly repetitive and rather decorative.
Infinitely more pertinent as an urgent methodology of cure and care are Lara Schnitger’s colorful patchwork banners, which are draped from the factory’s chimneys: Women’s work is Never Done (2024). As the former “Manchester of Catalonia,” this region was known as the world’s second largest textile industry, which created Catalonia’s wealth. Collaborating with a local women’s sewing association, Xarxa de Dones Cosidores, the installation symbolizes female resilience, building upon the stories of these women and focusing on unrecognized acts of female labor.
Sculptured in darkness, (2020-2024) © Hugo Canoilas. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / Cecília Coca
Balancing Conflicts
While some of the venues in this section leave you wondering if you could have just glanced at installation shots online, rather than schlepping for hours to see somewhat mediocre one-work installations, it’s all worth it once you reach Casa Gomis, a private Modernist villa designed by Antoni Bonet i Castellana between 1949 and 1963.
As a former refuge for Catalan’s cultural figures during Franco’s dictatorship, it still functions today as a private home. The villa is bathed in the thick scent of pine, which blends with the heat and rain. It sits in the Llobregat Delta Nature Reserve, bordering Barcelona-El Prat Airport, which is lobbying for an expansion that would destroy both the reserve and the property. This time capsule of Modernist architecture, design, and furniture is one in a million: truly breathtaking, and fighting for survival if indeed the airport is given permission to increase its size.
Parliament of Trees, (2022-2024) © Elmo Vermijs. Photo © Manifesta 15. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
Encouraging you to sit beneath a leafy, shaded canopy in the garden, works such as Parliament of Trees (2022­–24) by Elmo Vermijs, a layered installation of locally sourced or borrowed timbre, acknowledges trees as being the silent witnesses of climate change, poignantly questioning the fundamental rights of more-than-human entities in our society, which are often voiceless in their struggle for existence.
Inside the villa, another standout moment here is by Catalan artist Magda Bolumar Chertó, whose site-specific painting Xarpellera for La Ricarda (1966) lyrically arranges dots, shapes, and lines like a musical score of joyfully bright primary colors. It was the backdrop for many music performances that took place at the villa against a milieu of political mire. It’s easy to imagine the avant-garde gatherings that flourished here as a means of escaping Franco’s tyranny, even if only momentarily.
Imagining Futures
The absolute standout exhibition at Manifesta 15 is presented at the Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys), an utterly colossal thermal power station of concrete and iron built in the 1970s, which generated electricity for the metropolitan region before it was closed in 2011. While the building provided work for the local community, and was therefore termed the “Sagrada Família of the workers,” it too was a source of pollution, environmental damage, and a health hazard: its final closure resulted from its detrimental impact on the climate, causing acid rain.
Arrow of Time 2, (2022-2024) © Emilija Škarnulytė. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
At the center of the power station is a powerful archival presentation, Memory of the Smoke, which explores the dual sense of belonging and sustenance brought to the people by Tres Xemeneies, alongside its threatening presence. Photographs, letters, maps, and posters trace the development of the building, from the first demonstrations against the “damned soot” to the residents who fought against Francoism, to the fight for improved labor rights and women’s rights. Manifesta 15 worked together with residents of the Sant Adrià area to create this presentation, which is bursting at the seams with memories, as well as to contemplate the role of this past in paving the way for the region’s future urban transformation.
Another ode to the local residents finds form in the dreamlike outdoor sculpture Urchins (2024), which was initiated by CHOI+SHINE Architects, and was made in La Mina by 120 people living nearby. They wove white threads into lace-like patterns to form two giant spherical structures that appear like immense shells or sea urchins resting near the shoreline. Proximate is Mike Nelson’s Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos) (2024), a new commission for which the artist built a shack from salvaged materials, with a window that perfectly frames the vast three chimneys slicing into the sky.
Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos), (2024) © Mike Nelson, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / Ivan Erofeev
The inclusion of two films are notably well curated: Emilija Škarnulytė’s Arrow of Time 2 (2022–24), which centers on the threat of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania when it was under Soviet rule, and Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928), a recently restored propaganda film. It marked the eleventh anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, celebrating the Soviet Union’s dictatorial empire and engineering might with the construction of the Dnipro Hydropower Station in Ukraine. Both speak to the disastrous proposition that utopia is achievable through industry.
When women strike the world stops, (2020) © Claire Fontaine, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo ©Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
It is really the sculptural installations that make this presentation sing, from the acid yellow pigment and hanging pale-pink cocoons of Carlos Bunga’s The Irruption of the Unpredictable (2024), which calls out to the power of renewal, to Diana Scherer’s Yield (2024), a gigantic tapestry made of roots, soil, seeds, and grass that is draped all the way from one factory floor to another, and that references the spines and bones which fascinated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.
On the top floor of the Tres Xemeneies, Asad Raza’s Prehension (2024) saw the artist removing three of the factory’s windowpanes to conjure the poetic possibilities of the wind, which blows through the space, activating long drapes of white fabric that rhythmically dance in with air: truly mesmerizing. And perhaps the pièce de résistance is Claire Fontaine’s LED installation When women strike the world stops (2020), which conjures the importance of women to this factory’s history; while only making up 1 percent of the workforce, nonetheless women fought in the shadow of the building for personal rights, environmental safety, and improved living conditions.
Charging art with having the power to activate enduring change—not only to visualize or represent alternative ways of being in the world, but to actively protect and repair–makes Manifesta 15 political by definition. It is a valiant effort, and one that deserves our support while the potential of its long-term influence plays out.
Manifesta 15 runs from the September 8 through November 24, 2024. More

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