Reviews

“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is being touted as Artificial Intelligence’s triumphant arrival in the museum-art canon. So I went to see the splashy installation currently in the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-floor annex with a mission, to get a glimpse of what MoMA-approved A.I. art promises, or threatens, for the future.
Born in Istanbul and currently based in Los Angeles, with a studio of more than a dozen people, Anadol was known for many years more for interactive public-art commissions than for work in museums and galleries. He boasts collaborations and support from the likes of Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google. In the recent past, his stock has dramatically soared—which makes sense given the fact that his work engages with three trends that have lately shaken up the art conversation: immersive installation, NFTs, and generative A.I. “Unsupervised” combines a bit of each.
Here is what you see at MoMA: A towering, high-res screen where abstract images morph hypnotically and ceaselessly. Sequences run a few minutes each, toggling between different styles of animation.
The most crowd-pleasing of these simulates a seething, gravity-defying cloud of colorful fluid, the palette based on colors derived from the works in MoMA’s collection. New colors are constantly swirling into the image and taking over, the whole thing surging in and out restlessly, like a psychedelic, drugged-out ocean wave. The high-res screen renders the simulated rainbow gloop convincingly thick and dimensional.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
While this mode is the most visually memorable, it is also the one that has the least clear connection to the ostensible Big Idea of the show. “Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection,” the show’s description explains. “As the model ‘walks’ through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.”
This premise is more directly enacted in the other two types of animation, which are also harder to describe. One evolves endlessly through blobby, evocative shapes and miasmic, half-formed patterns. Sometimes an image or a part of an image briefly suggests a face or a landscape but quickly moves on, becoming something else, ceaselessly churning. It looks like this:

A third type of animation does much the same, but with jittery networks of lines connecting different key points as the art-inspired shapes define themselves. I’m not totally sure what these vectors suggest, but they give the image texture and atmosphere. It looks like this:

Art History, Without the History
You definitely can tell, in these latter two types of animation, that “Unsupervised” is manifesting art-like images specifically inspired by some constellation of works in MoMA’s collection. However, despite a screen that appears as punctuation between sequences displaying dense graphics and data about what you are seeing, the exact operation is never really clarified.
The ever-new, synthetic images of Anadol’s “Unsupervised” are blobby and chaotic, and look exactly like what art made via Generative Adversarial Networks most often looked like before the breakthroughs of DALL-E and its A.I. ilk captured the imagination of the public last year: Woozy, semi-random, art-like visual outputs, with wispy, unresolved edges. They look a little bit like preliminary sketches for art you might have seen in the original data-set (or in the galleries)—if you squint.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
The effect is pleasant. What it is not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that “reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.”
MoMA has spent recent decades trying to move beyond the formalist ideas of art that it inherited from its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. with his famous graph of Modernism as a bunch of styles mechanically branching off of one another. Generally, contemporary art historians would insist on rooting meaning in culture and context. Abstraction means one thing when its Gee’s Bend Quilts, another when it is Abstract Expressionism, still another when it is Tibetan sand painting, and still another when you put a bunch of images into an A.I. blender and remix them.
It’s striking to see MoMA tacitly let a new high-tech formalism through the door, one even flatter and less historical than Barr’s—as if the curators were so excited by the wonders of A.I. that they didn’t notice. What the endorsement of “Unsupervised” as an alternative-art-history simulator insinuates, for its audience, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.

Dreaming… Reimagined?
Describing his works that use A.I. to make generative art out of huge datasets like “Unsupervised,” Anadol speaks of them as akin to “dreams” or “hallucinations.” But the terminology, once more, mystifies what is going on.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
As Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, citing Coleridge, in dreams (I guess I have to specify here, in human dreams) emotional causality is reversed: “Images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause. We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling.”
But there is no emotional text to Anadol’s endless animation at MoMA. At most, the installation conveys a generalized awe at the machine’s superhuman capacity of visual analysis. (The fact that the soundtrack is a kind of shapeless, droning synthesizer score that is almost a cliché in “futuristic” video work doesn’t help.)
I sat through two hours of “Unsupervised.” I can’t think of a single image in it that evoked any feeling in me besides curiosity about what it might be referencing. As one might expect, they are just aleatory acts of syntheses and recombination of properties, expressing nothing about anything in particular except for the machine’s ability to do what it is doing.

Mis-recognizing Dystopia
I would contend that scraping away the ill-considered metaphors (e.g. reimagined art histories, dreaming) helps to better see what’s really happening in front of your eyes.
This would be nitpicking, though, if it weren’t for the fact that these poetic readings of the technology are selling us on a certain style of thinking about A.I. as a creative proposition, at a time when A.I. text-generation and A.I. image-generation are being deployed so fast that society is racing against the clock to catch up with the implications (as if “move fast and break things” hadn’t been discredited as a motto).
It is because Anadol has created such a purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art—so different than the critical lens that artists such as Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen have brought to the subject in recent years, with great impact—that he received so much support along the way from the tech giants. Indeed, his positivity is probably an unstated condition of that support.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pervasive and perverse rhetorical sleight of hand in the art-tech conversation. Call it the willful misreading of dystopia. You hear technologists reference artworks that are meant as sci-fi cautionary tales but, weirdly, purely as positive design inspiration, divorced from their prophetic moral or ethical substance. The recently trendy idea of the “metaverse,” which comes from Neal Stephenson’s grim take on virtual reality in Snow Crash, is an obvious example.
Anadol is a notable dystopian mis-reader. When he refers to his works as “machine dreams” and “collective hallucinations,” he often says his inspiration is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In a TED Talk, he describes having his imagination fired by the moment in that movie when the android Rachael realizes that her memories are not real, but implants. “Since that moment,” Anadol says, “one of my inspirations has been this question: What can a machine do with someone else’s memories?”
Blade Runner is a melancholy work about the uprooted sense of self and collapsing sense of reality in a future where humanity and machine are no longer distinguishable. None of this seems to register with Anadol, just the idea that machine-generated memories are cool.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
Anadol’s first work that used A.I. to generate infinite new outputs based on a massive dataset was Archive Dreaming, executed in spectacular installation form in 2017, as an application of the experiments he had been engaged with at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program. It looked at 1.7 million documents and generated ever-new images based on them.
In that same TED Talk, Anadol claims that Archive Dreaming was inspired by Borges’s famous short story The Library of Babel, which envisions a universe that is one never-ending library, whose books contain every possible combination of characters. But The Library of Babel was an intellectual horror story, a parable about the nihilism that results when all meaning collapses into nothing. When the inhabitants of Borges’s library finally realize the implications of the world they live in, they commit mass suicide!
Keep that in mind when you are sampling the bottomless brunch of art-like A.I. imagery at MoMA.
Mainly, the point is that these science-fiction references are mined in the most superficial way—very much as MoMA’s archive is sucked up into “Unsupervised” as context-free visual inspiration. As a result, this style of art feels emblematic of a moment in which a tech aesthetic of perpetually novel gadgetry is culturally dominant while the humanities, with their unprofitable baggage of historical and moral concerns, are being allowed to wither.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
And Then There Are the NFTs
Don’t get me wrong. “Unsupervised” is amusing enough on its own, if you look past the cloud of mystification. It’s a bit like an extremely intelligent lava lamp.
But if it seems a little vacant, there is reason to suspect that MoMA is incentivized not to ask too much of it.
With his background, Anadol was well-positioned to become one of the biggest stars of the NFT art scene during the crypto boom of 2021. In fact, his “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams” line of NFTs based on MoMA’s collection is being sold on Feral File, the NFT marketplace from the well-respected art-technologist Casey Reas (one of Anadol’s former teachers at UCLA). “Ten years ago, when we asked, Can we mint machine memories and dreams in the blockchain of one of the world’s most inspiring archives? I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible,” Anadol enthuses in MoMA Magazine. “I mean it was a very Philip K. Dick idea, but I feel like we are, right now, truly doing it.” (Finally, a way for MoMA to help bring the happy world of Total Recall closer to reality!)
MoMA itself gets a percentage of the sales of the digital artworks—17 percent of primary sales and 5 percent of secondary. Surely showing “Unsupervised” prominently at MoMA has to be considered as a great ad for the associated line of NFTs that sends profits back to the museum (you can see the spike of trade in them that coincides with the show opening on OpenSea). The curators have been promoting the show with conversations featuring both Anadol and Reas, where they talk as much about NFTs as about the installation.
It may be that the exact same thing that makes this genre of work commercially appealing for people buying crypto-art—its untroubled techno-philia—is what makes it feel flat to me as an artistic statement. The suspicion that MoMA is incentivized to fast-track this kind of art is going to linger.
Sadly, the melting of commercial and non-commercial borders strikes me as more prophetic of “what might be to come” in art than any of the images summoned up by the machine in the gallery.
“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, November 19, 2022–March 5, 2023.
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During last month’s edition of Bamako Encounters–African Biennale of Photography, as dusk arrived following a captivating artist talk by revered Nigerian photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi, southern winds carrying Saharan dust settled over Mali’s capital and clouds of bats took flight between the trees across a lavender-hued sky. 
Pioneering photographers such as Seydou Keita, Abdhourahmane Sakaly, and (of course) Malick Sidibe loom large here. And at such moments, even an untrained eye can understand how Bamako is an image-maker’s paradise, and a seemingly perfect setting for a photography biennale. The city’s endlessly compelling, starkly geometric architecture—angular and curved, Sahelian, colonial, and contemporary—is magnificently illuminated by the light. 
In early December 2022, dozens of artists from across the world convened for the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters, which runs until early February 2023. It is titled “On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage,” a theme that invites the audience to consider moving past understandings of the world that focus on singularity and essentialism, creating room for movement, change, and malleability. Mali is a country with diverse geologies and geographies, inevitably yielding varying ways of living and cultures. This biennale thus explores a universally applicable theme in a place where liminal spaces are ever present. 
Highlights
Spread across seven key sites, including the National Museum of Mali and a disused train station that formerly connected Bamako to Dakar, a standout feature from this edition of the biennale is its substantial inclusion of artists from across the African Diaspora.
Still from Baff Akoto, Leave The Edges (2020).
One of the noteworthy works from the biennale, Leave the Edges (2020), which won the biennale’s Grand Prix/Seydou Keita award, came from artist-filmmaker Baff Akoto, who was raised between Accra and London. The work explores African and Diasporic spiritualities, and how they have mutated and transformed across time and in different spaces, as a metaphor for a wider conversation around cultural exchange.
An exceptional and meditative piece, employing tender cinematography, subtle lighting, and mesmerizing soundscapes, Leave the Edges is a poetic movement film melding performance art and commemorations of slave rebellions in Guadeloupe.
Installation view of works by Anna Binta Diallo, both 2022. Photo by Photp by Tobi Onabolu.
Meanwhile at the National Museum, Anna Binta Diallo’s futuristic looking work explores the historical roots of folklore and storytelling. Employing a variety of maps, prints, and images superimposed onto outlines of human forms, Diallo invites us to consider what it means for humanity to exist in symbiosis with the natural environment. Concurrently, she explores concerns such as migration, identity, and memory. 
Installation view of works by Anna Binta Diallo, both 2022. Photp by Tobi Onabolu.
Sofia Yala works in the same vein, but on a more personal level within the setting of her own family, questioning the notion of the body as an archive. Yala’s work involves screenprinting her grandfather’s archives—whether private notes, I.D. documents, or work contracts—onto photographs taken by Yala in domestic spaces. Through the process, she is able to uncover deeper layers of identity—a poignant exercise in the context of reconnecting with the artist’s Angolan heritage.
Installation view of works by Marie-Claire Messouma, all 2022. Photo by Tobi Onabolu.
Over at the former train station, sub-themes of magic, the ethereal, and eternity emanate through more conceptual and abstract works. Marie-Claire Messouma’s mystical, melismatic photography aims to spark a conversation about humanity and the cosmos, mixing textile sculptures, ceramics, and other materials, and evoking the feminine.
Similarly, in Fairouz El Tom’s work, the artist questions where the “I” ends and the “you” begins within the discourse of human ontology, prompting vital discussions around the interconnectedness of humanity—or, perhaps, the lack thereof, in this age of uncertainty.
Installation view of works by Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, all 2019. Photo by Tobi Onabolu.
In Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s haunting works, we are invited to reflect on the legacies of human violence and the enduring trauma that comes from it. Drawing on his own past and personal experiences, Hlatshwayo has converted the tavern where he grew up—a site of intense trauma—into his studio, demonstrating a tangibly curative element within his practice. 
Who Is It For?
With a high-profile curatorial team attached to the biennale under the artistic direction of superstar curator Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bamako Encounters is a triumph for the artists, and undoubtedly an impressive notch on any exhibition C.V. Yet the hyper-conceptual nature of “On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage,” married with sub-par scenography that often attempts to emulate the white cube model, also creates a disconnection between organizers and audiences, prompting questions, the most pressing of which is: “who is this really for?” 
The well-curated, robust program of artist talks and conversations was predominantly attended by the artists themselves, alongside other industry practitioners, once again creating the all-too-familiar echo chambers that the art world is known for. The same problem is felt with the text-heavy, exclusive language of art that accompanies this exhibition, often using insular vocabulary that very few people outside of the industry even understand. 
In recent times, the scrutiny of these echo chambers, and the industry at large, have become well popularized by the likes of the Instagram-based account @freeze_magazine. Such critiques often touch on how the art world perpetuates harmful capitalist tendencies, whose victims include both humans and the environment; the flaws and hypocrisy of institutional spaces; and general elitism. And at points, the 13th edition of Bamako Encounters might be guilty of all three offenses, even if to only a fraction of the degree of the Venice Biennale or other biennials in the Global North, or the market at large. 
Installation view of works by Adama Delphine Fawund, all 2020. Photo by Tobi Onabolu.
“If the art only exists within institutional spaces it makes you wonder who is it really for and how is it functioning?” exhibiting artist Adama Delphine Fawundu told Artnet News, reflecting on these challenges. “I think most artists are making work that deals with subject matter that actually interrogates the institution. Therefore, what’s important about this biennale is the way that it’s documented, through the books and the text. Fifty years from now, what will people be saying about today? And if the work is not being documented at least for the future, then the biennale has to be interacting with people. How do you take it outside of the museum or the gallery space, and actually engage with real people that we see around? Because this is what we’re actually concerned about.” 
And although this edition of Bamako Encounters has a central theme that relates so directly to contemporary realities in Mali, access to these conversations is largely limited to industry practitioners and socio-economic elites, many of whom were flown in specifically for the opening weekend (inevitably producing excessive quantities of carbon emissions just for the biennale to take place). In African contexts, the debate around the most effective modes of presentation and sharing critical artistic work with new audiences continues to bubble.
Nevertheless, perhaps the biennale’s biggest strength was that it became this meeting point for important, unfiltered conversations between artists and practitioners who may never have met otherwise. Indeed, amidst an onslaught of almost-farcical organizational errors, including missing baggage and overbooked hotels, the artists rallied together, evoking the power of the collective through their inter-generational and cross-cultural collaborations and exchanges. With the sheer number of artists present for this event greatly outnumbering overbearing know-it-all curators, hard-to-please institutional overlords, and opportunistic dealers, Bamako provided the platform for real connections to emerge between its exhibiting artists.
And so, despite underlying political uncertainty in Mali, fears of a global recession, and the overarching problems of the global art system, the 13th edition of Bamako Encounters emerges as a success, albeit with a plethora of concerns left to consider. 
The 13th Edition of Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography, is on view at venues throughout Bamako, through February 8, 2023.
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This will sound terribly jaded, but, in the spirit of honesty: artists Annika Kuhlmann and Christopher Kulendran Thomas presented two types of exhibitions I normally would have walked out of.
On the first floor of their show at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art is a political video documentary; on the second an all-too familiar Ab-Ex relaunch. So many biennials later, I’d rather read about a political uprising in a book by an anthropologist than hear about it from an artist. Abstract painting, for its part, can be enjoyable in a straightforward way, but, these days, it is often employed not because of what it is, but because of who made it. These kinds of encounters are often with art that doesn’t need to be art, but rather art that is promoted simply because it supplies a window onto a subject of importance.
“Another World,” where the focus is on the Tamil Tigers, an ex-militant organization once based in northeastern Sri Lanka, is not that. Rather, Kulendran Thomas and Kuhlmann’s exhibition is so self-conscious as to what it means to think through and with art—and so forceful in that self-consciousness—you cannot help but be intrigued. And so I stayed; it stayed.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas The Finesse (2022) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. Installation view of the exhibition Christopher Kulendran Thomas. “Another World” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Photo: Frank Sperling
Kulendran Thomas, a Berlin-based artist of Tamil descent, alongside his German collaborator Kuhlmann, created “Another World” as two parallel exhibitions simultaneously on view at KW and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Its central work, The Finesse, a newly commissioned video work, is projected onto a mirror, and facing it is another screen showing slow-panning footage from a forest planted by the Tamil Tigers. Sandwiched in between the two are the viewers, collapsing three image-situations into one. The video itself is based partly on early 1990s archive footage featuring a member of the group who speaks with other-worldly eloquence about the Western fictions of democracy and freedom. A democracy should allow us to choose between different systems, she says, but in the West, there is only one. Her wit and charisma are of a type made for political influencing; her TikTok would be irresistible—and this, partly, is what the work is about. 
The narrative of Tamil Eelam’s independence movement (a proposed autonomous Tamil state that the Tamil Tigers were fighting for) is neatly slotted into the context of the media spectacle of OJ Simpson’s trial, which took place at the same time—so neatly that I am not sure which parts of the film are authentic, and which not. It is not so difficult to manufacture a VHS grain, recreate an old Yahoo search, nor, it turns out, render a deepfake of Kim Kardashian, who appears in The Finesse, though slower, more immovable, and perfectly mesmerizing. With the same eloquence as the young Tamil, and with reference both to her Armenian roots, and, indirectly, to her early adjacency to the media vertigo of the Simpson trial, Kardashian’s avatar argues that certain people are less prone to believe in the fictions of capitalist hegemony. Certain circumstances—such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, we can infer—require you to be more realistic when it comes to how stories are fabricated as truth in newsrooms and on the internet.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas The Finesse (2022) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. Installation view of the exhibition Christopher Kulendran Thomas. “Another World”at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin2022. Photo: Frank Sperling
In another segment of The Finesse, contemporary recordings follow another young Tamil investing in the legacy of the once-imagined Eelam state, now more than ten years lost. But the possibility of that history and its politics to become wearable as an identity for the young woman in the present is put into relief by a phone call she gets from an older friend or relative. It was a fantasy we had, says the voice on the other end of the line, who questions what it is that the younger generation expects to get out of identifying with it now. And the viewer— themselves caught inside the projection—wonders too.
It is through such sober, whip-smart interjections that Kuhlmann and Kulendran Thomas consistently install self-consciousness into their narrative while smugly escaping the dangers of romanticism. What I like about the work is that it does not allow us to take its politics at face value; rather, it is laced with an irony that has generally not been tolerated in the art world since the DIS-curated Berlin Biennial in 2016 (where Kulendran Thomas also participated). There is a critical tension without which we would risk collapsing into the neo-essentialisms of post-truth. Eloquence, charisma, and charm, too, are art forms, which each cease to function as modes of manipulation once we accept them as such. In parallel, the extent to which these conversations and monologues are scripted, made deepfake, or not, likewise loses importance.
Upstairs, Being Human, a video work from 2019, is screened on a translucent wall, dissecting the space. The rooms on either side of it are lined with the abstract paintings, which, it turns out, are generated by AI and executed by Kulendran Thomas’s studio, as are their sculptural counterparts. Climaxing like a pop song, the screen occasionally lights up to reveal the other side of the room. Art and modernism are part of the same ideological image circuit as Kardashian and Taylor Swift (whose deepfake reflects on the possibility of authenticity in Being Human) and the propaganda machines that would render the Tamil Tigers terrorist insurrectionists, or not. The theoretical implication is that we are completely immersed in the simulacrum, but it is also plain beautiful; as an experience, enchanting.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas The Finesse (2022) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. Installation view of the exhibition Christopher Kulendran Thomas. “Another World”at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin2022. Photo: Frank Sperling
In The New York Times, critic Travis Diehl wrote about the London-chapter of the exhibition, a mirror of the KW show. “If Kulendran Thomas genuinely aims to offer new political possibilities, count me as a skeptic. If his goal is to ruin contemporary art, he just might,” he says. Here, Diehl refers to the zombie abstraction that is part of the installation of Being Human, and, perhaps, to the generally unplaceable morality of the tone. But this is far from a threat to contemporary art. Rather, after a summer where structure, relational aesthetics, and good intentions stood in for artworks at ruangrupa’s Documenta 15, “Another World” retains a medial self-consciousness that presents a hopeful glimpse for its future. The element of spectacle in both works—The Finesse peaks in an exhilarating rave scene—might have come across as cheap in its pop appeal, but it is precisely this hint of cynicism that makes both works at once disturbing and intelligent.
In recent years, the discourse around politics and art has seen a loss of distinction between the sphere of representation and reality, taking, for instance, images for actions, depictions, or reflections on violence as that violence itself. But “Another World” does not let reality become subsumed by its image; instead, it asks the audience to continually observe the line between the two, even as it blurs. And the experience of sitting inside of Kuhlmann and Kulendran Thomas’s infinity mirror, oddly, makes you quite sure of what parts of reality that survive the spectacle of media and what truth rises to the surface of a deepfake. There is so much, in fact: the intelligence and humanity of the protagonists (real or not); the pleasure and fun of imagining another world, and in being surrounded by images of it; how political dreams and artful fictions can overlap in certain moments, and in others, crucially, diverge. And while you may not be able to spot the difference, you will feel it.
“Another World” is on view through January 22, 2023, at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, and through January 15, 2023, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
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Who says criticism is dead? Sometimes, despite an artist’s best intentions, an artwork misses the mark—at least according to some opinions. Art is delightfully subjective, and we are sure that many people hold dear some of the art our editorial staff found, well, less than perfect.
Poncili Creación’s Boring White WallOn view at NADA Miami(November 30—December 3, 2022)
A scene from the NADA Miami performance Boring White Wall by Poncili Creación. Photo by Eileen Kinsella
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the “worst” of the year, but the live performance I stumbled into at NADA Miami a few weeks ago, after a day of viewing great art, was certainly among the most jolting and bizarre. It started with a performer in a white hazmat suit entering the room with a rake, frantically swiping the floor, reaching under people’s chairs, and randomly sniffing startled audience members.
After Poncili Creación’s performer made his way to the white wall—the title of the piece which was a standing foam structure at the front of the room—he proceeded to let out wild screams while alternately hiding behind the wall, attacking it, tearing holes in it, and, eventually, ripping it apart in two with the help of an identically dressed partner performer.
At times a mannequin, also in a white hazmat suit, was tossed wildly in the air and various bright red sponges and appendages that appeared in mouths and hands flew around, seemingly suggesting bleeding or heartbreak.  The whole 40-minute-ish performance was accompanied by an equally dissonant live music score with sporadic drums and keyboards that had me wondering the whole time whether or not there was an actual structure—or if the obviously talented musicians were just making it up as they went along. I felt a measure of relief when many others in the packed audience burst into laughter at some of the antics, a reaction that did not ruffle any of the performers in the slightest.
—Eileen Kinsella

Uffe Isolotto’s “We Walked the Earth”On view at the Danish Pavilion(April 23—November 27, 2022)
Uffe Isolotto. “We Walked the Earth.” Pavilion of Denmark, Biennale Arte, 2022. © Ugo Carmeni.
I was bewildered by the Danish pavilion this year. I don’t exactly know what the budget was for this pavilion, but in general I feel keenly aware of how much money is floating around the Scandinavian art world, which makes the task of turning out a flashy pavilion in Venice a lot easier. Well-funded artists, take heed: just because you can, does not mean you should.
The Danish pavilion struck me as an immensely overproduced work without a powerful message—at least, the message was not delivered. I found it unequivocally graphic, which left little room for interpretation. The concept of “We Walked the Earth,” so I read, was to evoke a Danish pastoral scene with a surreal and disturbing twist that speaks to modern society. And so, one view were many bales of hay alongside a lifelike centaur with dead eyes lying on the ground post-birth wearing a Uniqlo t-shirt. Another centaur in fetish wear appeared to be dead by suicide. I guess the hyperrealism was supposed to incite macro-contemplation, but it was so under-edited that I left feeling thoroughly annoyed. The over-offering also brought out the worst of our selfie addled culture, and so it continued to haunt my social media feeds all week.
—Kate Brown

Paul Cézanne, Les Courtisanes (The Courtesans) (ca. 1870–71)On View in the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania(Ongoing)
Paul Cézanne, Les Courtisanes (The Courtesans) (ca. 1870–71), installed at the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Photo by Tim Schneider.
My first visit to the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia this January was one of the most fascinating, disorienting, and memorable art experiences of my year, largely because of the gargantuan variance in quality among the hundreds of works crammed, salon-style, onto every available square inch of wall space. The collection mixes up gems from Hieronymous Bosch, Matisse, and van Gogh (among others) with what looked to me like the laziest castoffs and most catastrophic experiments some of the canonical Modernists must have ever produced.
A reverse standout from the latter category was this blobby, erratic rendering of four courtesans in an illegible mess of a space. (Interior? Exterior? Who can say!) It would be unrecognizable as the work of structural visionary Paul Cézanne if not for the placard unintentionally indicting him at the bottom of the frame. Even at less than seven-by-seven-inches, the canvas made a powerful enough impression to leave me wondering, still, whether Paris’s emerging greats used to quietly compete with each other to see who could saddle the voracious Barnes with their worst dud as part of the bulk purchases that also landed him so many good-to-classic canvases. If so, Cézanne laughed all the way to the victor’s podium.
—Tim Schneider

Damien Hirst, The Currency (2022)On view in “Damien Hirst: The Currency” at Newport Street Gallery(September 23—October 30, 2022)
Damien Hirst at Newport Street Gallery for the grande finale of The Currency. Photo by Naomi Rea.
Time is a precious commodity for a journalist, and especially for an art journalist during Frieze Week in London. Still, I wanted to watch the completion of Hirst’s debut NFT project—a wager that pitted NFTs against physical art—which would see him burn thousands of works on paper potentially worth millions of dollars on behalf of every buyer who had opted to keep one of his NFTs instead. I trekked over to Newport Street Gallery mostly for the anecdote. Hirst is one of few artists whose name extends far enough beyond the art world bubble that it has resonance with my friends and family. And he famously knows how to conduct a spectacle, from his infamous formaldehyde shark to his 2008 market-decimating auction to his phony shipwreck in Venice. 
But when Hirst slumped out to take part in the event, it was…really boring? I don’t know if something happened to Hirst—all his previous headline-grabbing stunts happened before my time in the art world—or if this is just what a spectacle looks like in our increasingly digital world, but his utter lack of enthusiasm totally put a damper on the flames. Filmed from multiple angles, it was clear that the main audience was the larger one online than the select audience invited into the room. IRL, it felt kind of like a meet-and-greet with your favorite influencer and seeing the “I’m just here for the paycheck” energy up close.
—Naomi Rea

“KAWS: New Fiction” (2022)Serpentine Gallery, London(January 18—February 27, 2022)
A general view of the “New Fiction” Exhibition showcasing paintings and sculptures by artist and designer KAWS at Serpentine North. Photo: by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images.
I wanted so much to believe that KAWS’s art is interesting. The first-time collaboration between the respectable Serpentine and the online video game Fortnite seemed also like a partnership that could take art to a new frontier in the digital realm, and make art more accessible to the public. But no matter how much the Fortnite players raved about the experience when it was launched at the beginning of this year, I decided to side with the rest of London’s critics who almost unanimously panned KAW’s show. It was not a particular work—the entire art-viewing experience was a let-down.
The only way to appreciate KAWS (aka Brian Donnelly) is to be his fan, and I have yet to convince myself to become one. Seeing the blend of sculptures and paintings based on the artist’s trademark crossed-eye figure Companion did not help. The A.R. versions of Companion sitting on top of the gallery building in Hyde Park or floating inside the gallery space did not make the show more interesting—there are other A.R. works out there that are far more inventive. And the exhibition in the Fortnite game? I don’t play video games, but from the YouTube videos I saw, I hardly observed any players who managed to have any interaction with other players in the virtual gallery. I thought it would be a virtual space that allowed players from all walks of life to meet and greet but, instead, most of them seemed to wander around alone and aimlessly. This could’ve been a wonderful project but, as Alastair Smart suggested in his review, it was a bit of a “lost KAWS.”
–Vivienne Chow

“Michel Majerus: Progressive Aesthetics” at the ICA MiamiNovember 28, 2022—March 12, 2023
Michel Majerus, Progressive Aesthetics (1997). ©Michel MajerusEstate, 2022, Private collection. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin. Courtesy of neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
I was tempted to call out the life-size bronze of reclining female angel, nude and masturbating, that I saw at Scope Miami Beach, but I will avoid such low-hanging fruit in lieu of a choice that might make me look like the philistine, rather than the artist.
First, I’ll confess that I had never heard about Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus before the current raft of shows honoring the 20th anniversary of his death. (There are 19 in Germany, and this one in Miami’s Design District, his first solo at a U.S. institution.) Second, I’ll admit that I was completely mystified as to the appeal of his work upon seeing it for the first time. It was large and colorful, heavy on text, and rife with appropriated imagery from brand logos, cartoons, and other artists—not unlike, I might point out, the kind of pop culture-saturated work typically on offer at Scope. The massive canvases seemed like art in the lobby of a trendy hotel, intended as edgy but in actuality blandly inoffensive. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe Majerus was an artistic genius. (My colleague Taylor Dafoe wrote a great explainer about his career.) (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michel-majerus-first-us-survey-2213613) Or maybe this is a “the emperor’s new clothes” deal, where a bunch of rich old guys have invested in Majerus’s work, and orchestrated this wave of renewed attention to drive up the prices on these uber-boring canvases so they can make a killing on the auction block. Feel free to skewer me for my unsophisticated taste if you disagree—but I have a sneaking suspicion I’m not the only one who was underwhelmed when I finally encountered the work of this (IMHO) overrated artist. 
—Sarah Cascone

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Before heading out to Turin last week, a U.S. collector offered me an unforgettable review of the city’s Artissima art fair: “It’s the only fair where you can trade art for truffles.”
The comment turns out to be more about attitude than actuality (though the prices are somewhat comparable, Italian truffles go for about $1,500 a pound), and though I did not see any knobbly fungi circulating the fair, I ate them elsewhere over handmade tagliatelle during my visit. What the collector meant is that, in Turin, food, wine, and art are parts of a whole, much more so than in other fair towns like Basel, Cologne, or even Madrid. This is Italy, after all.
The city of Turin, nestled as a posh base camp of the Italian Alps, is one of the country’s richer cities, and the region in and around it is a heartland of big industry and banking, as well as nobility. Among the companies with headquarters there are car manufacturers Fiat and Alfa Romeo, Italy’s largest bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and coffee brand Lavazza, to name a few.
Turin is also the old seat of the royal family of Italy, the House of Savoy, and this history lingers in the air along its parade-ready avenues. The fair’s VIP list, in turn, is clustered with deep-pocketed, cultured shareholders as well as some distant dynastic wealth, and, crucially, the eagle-eyed curators of these two sets’ various foundations.
Artissima 2022, Photo credit: Perottino – Piva – Peirone / Artissima
Some of these important people from the region dined together on Wednesday night, around white-clothed tables at Castello di Rivoli’s Michelin-starred restaurant. They were brought to the museum to celebrate the opening of Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition “Trembling Horizons.”
In the other wing, a maze of palace rooms contain the storied Cerutti collection, as well as Beeple’s rather expensive Human One, a digital sculpture of a walking astronaut, on loan from digital art collector Ryan Zurrer. It stands alongside Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait IX (1956–57).
One Italian collector I ran into was sitting near the pair of works. “If the French had an inch of the taste and talent of the Italians…” he said, speaking of neither Bacon nor Beeple, whose work he did not care for in the least, but of the castle architecture itself that surrounded it.
Human One by Michael Winkelmann (Beeple) at Rivoli Castle Modern Art Museum, Turin. Photo: Roberto Serra—Iguana Press/Getty Images.
Anything that takes place in Turin is certainly imbued with a bit of aesthetic magic, because the sites and landscape of the city are so particularly lovely. The late artist Carol Rama’s studio is here, on the top floor of a historic building, where she blocked off all the windows because Turin was too beautiful and distracting for her. It remains intact and, since her death in 2015, is open for tours.
To build his world at the Castelo di Rivoli, Eliasson also darkened the museum’s tall and long Manica Lunga gallery wing, which has been broken up with kaleidoscopic sculptures that you can step inside. The wobbly light projections create an illusion (sort of) that the projections go beyond the walls of the room.
Though the Rivoli’s show seemed to be aiming for embodied sensation and immersion, it was less engaging the installation by U.S. artist Arthur Jafa at OGR Turin, housed in a late-19th-century steam engine repair facility, yet another testament to the old industrial power in Turin. Viewers sat on a large wedge of wood that trembled and vibrated under the weight of a booming soundscape accompanying an 85-minute video of a waving sea made up of computer-generated black rocks. The ocean of stones ebb and flow, rising at points to seemingly threaten to submerge the viewer before receding again, and the horizon returns.
The cinematic installation, conceived together with London’s Serpentine Galleries, was another brilliant manifestation of Jafa’s nuanced inquiry into Black identity through the avenues of visual archives and music. He described the abstract film work, a bold step away from his rapid-cut found-footage works, to the Giornale d’ell Arte as “a [James] Turrell while chained to the bottom of a ship.”
View of Arthur Jafa’s show “RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON,” at OGR Torino. Photo: Kate Brown.
Meanwhile the art fair Artissima, around which all these high-budget openings were coordinated, is known for being ripe for fresh discoveries, a reputation that I found to be true.
It is hosted at the former Olympic sports arena from the 2006 winter games in Turin. And while there is a more collaborative spirit here, it was noticeably international, gathering 174 dealers with footholds in 27 countries. This is not a regional fair, either—Italian galleries are outnumbered by visitors.
Seven curators are involved in the fair’s selection of works or galleries in different capacities, which brings an array of positions. There is, for example, a curated section dedicated to drawing, and emerging art is at its core in another centrally located sector called “Present Future,” not tucked in a back corner like many other fairs. Artissima’s new director, Luigi Fassi, is also a curator.
Rossella Biscotti Trees on land (Alberi sulla terra) (2021) at Mor Charpentier, Paris and Bogotà. Photo: Perottino-Piva-Peirone / Artissima.
Delegations of institutions were omnipresent. “I hate art fairs, but I like Artissima,” one German museum director told me between sips of cold Barrolo wine. And while there is a nearly dizzying amount of different awards handed out across the four days of the fair, they are a good-natured effort to offer concrete engagement from the fair’s sponsors.
There was also a roll call of acquisitions: the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT acquired 10 works; Castello di Rivoli bought a group of poignant sculptures—large reconstructed clay urns made with the ashes of burned olive trees by Rossella Biscotti—on view at Mor Charpentier; and work by Simone Forti, on view at Raffaela Cortesi, was among the work acquired by GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna di Torino.
All in all, dealers seem pleased with the quality of the fair and the interest and engagement its visitors bring, not to mention a more intimate access to the Italian elite than one might experience at larger fairs like Art Basel. Though, as one dealer said, you might need to give a heavy discount for a work here, it is usually because what you are selling is entering a formidable public collection.
Foreign collectors were in town, including Frédéric de Goldschmidt and Alain Servais, among special attendees to Patrizia Sandretto re Rebaudengo’s annual dinner at her home, which included curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Oscar Murillo, outgoing Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler, and Jafa. The artfully choreographed and sumptuous dinner is hosted by the influential contemporary art patron, a cornerstone of Turin’s art scene. A testament to this is her foundation, which has a large display of Victor Man’s contemplative paintings and a new commission by Beirut artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. At her home on the main floor, there is work by Avery Singer, Maurizio Cattelan, and Jana Euler; the house understandably has its own floor map available to visitors.
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s home. Photos Maurizio Elia, Courtesy Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection
“I’m quite happy that at my hometown fair, there is the right quantity of people,” Sandretto re Rebaudengo said, speaking in reference to Paris+ and Frieze, which were marred by overcrowded halls and long cues. “You can move around and speak with the galleries,” she noted.
That said, in Italy, much like everywhere else, the effects of the pandemic still linger, one of which is that the art world’s venues have experienced dips in attendance—and, in tandem, ticket revenue—as well as more precarious situations for funding. This is helped in no way by the war in Ukraine.
Just before Turin’s art week events began, over in Florence, the Uffizi director Eike Schmidt was forced to keep the museum closed over a public holiday due to cost-cutting around staff. After a prickly comment was received from the new culture secretary Gennaro Sangiuliano, Schmidt reminded his new boss that Italy’s museums need economic “reinforcements.” No one I spoke to in Turin is quite sure what exactly the new government, headed by a right-wing coalition, will mean for the cultural field, to say nothing of wider society.
View of Intesa Sanpaolo Publifoto Archive at the Gallerie dItalia Torino, the fourth museum from Intesa Sanpaolo Bank. Photo: Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
As such a junction, patrons like Sandretto re Rebaudengo are perhaps increasingly vital to the city’s art scene, as emblems of stability in times of flux. A museum curator from Turin emphasized this to me, saying that private money has helped them pull through the past few years and continue to organize ambitious shows. Artissima and Turin are especially well-equipped, not only because of the apparent high-net worth of the area, but because there is an ingrained spirit of working together, between the state, the art market, the institutions, and private companies.
Take for example, the banking group Intesa Sanpaolo’s new Gallerie d’Italia, its fourth museum, which opened this year and is focused on image-based media. The private collection also has a public mandate: during Artissima, film works by a few galleries participating in the fair were on view at the Gallerie d’Italia.
“I really believe it is important to find ways to collaborate between all of us in Turin,” noted Sandretto re Rebaudengo as she poured over her map of Artissima and outlined her week of exhibition plans and prize-giving. “It’s the best way forward in this moment.”

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In what is sure to be remembered as a historic moment that honored Black womxn’s labor, creativity, and intellect, dozens of scholars, thought leaders, educators, writers, curators, authors, and artists from across the African diaspora communed in Venice last week for artist Simone Leigh’s symposium, “Loophole of Retreat.” The program included talks, film screenings, dance performances, music, panel discussions, and more. Over three emotional days, from the perch of my home office in New York—and at times, my local Soho House—I watched the livestream, engulfed in the feeling of being seen, heard, and perhaps finally understood in a way I’d never quite been before—in a way only a Black woman could understand.
Taking its name from a section of Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the symposium was guided by five overarching themes, or “key directives:” “Maroonage,” “Manual,” “Magical Realism,” “Medicine,” and “Sovereignty.” It unearthed a long legacy of scholarship, free thought, wild imaginings, and the freedom Black women have continuously worked to build for themselves despite centuries of racialized and gendered oppression.
“The labor of Black women is often made invisible,” author, social media star, and Pace gallery associate director Kimberly Drew told me, commenting afterwards on the remarkable experience of the weekend. “This obscuring of our rigor, scholarship, and dedication makes it seem like we haven’t been here. During these three days, I left feeling far from alone, inspired in every moment never to take for granted what happens when Black women come together.”
Rashida Bumbray and Simone Leigh. Photo by Glorija Blazinsek.
Curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray organized the event, with Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt. And from the moment that Bumbray’s voice flowed through my computer screen, singing out “good morning everybody” to the audience, I knew this weekend would be filled with claiming strength through sisterhood, and finding empowerment in the ethos of “doing it ourselves” (as trail-blazing Black gallerist Linda Goode Bryant puts it in a text currently on view at MoMA for a show celebrating her Just Above Midtown gallery).
The conference’s first theme, “Maroonage,” was informed by Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger’s work. Anzinger herself was on hand with a presentation that offered a reevaluation of both Black labor and the extraction of natural resources. But many other inspired interventions into the past filled the event. One that sticks in my mind is professor, poet, and critic Canisia Lubrin’s presentation of a series of 59 fictional codes in response to King Louis XIV’s infamous Code Noir (The Black Code), the set of rules defining the conditions of enslaved Africans within the French empire.
Las Nietas de Nonó perform during Loophole of Retreat: Venice, October 9, 2022. Photo by Glorija Blazinsek.
The second theme, “Manual,” was inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s “Manual for General Housework” in her brilliantly moving book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. While some presentations contextualized a set of conditions Black women have been subjugated to through physical labor and egregious bodily harm, I came away with the sense that, infinitely more important than these crushing constraints are the ways in which they, us, and the collective ‘we’ have persisted, forged untrodden paths, and continued to envision new forms of freedom by revolutionizing personal intimacy and kinship. Watching the program, I truly felt that by holding space for Black women to congregate and share knowledge, “Loophole of Retreat” existed as a haven, a respite, a dwelling where community could flourish.
The event’s other directives—”Magical Realism,” “Medicine,” and “Sovereignty”—guided conversations and performances that made visible the creative labor of poets, activists, authors, and academics from every part of the diaspora. Women who were also mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters came from Portugal and Berlin, from South Africa and Brazil, and from all over the United States to share knowledge and hold space for joy, creative freedom, and community through sisterhood. To take one example, the literary and artist collective Black Quantum Futurism incorporated spoken word and poetry with rhythmic music and the ancient sounds of maracas.
Black Quantum Futurism performs at Loophole of Retreat: Venice, October 8, 2022. Photo by Glorija Blazinsek.
“‘Loophole of Retreat’ beautifully captured the thoughtfulness, joy, sacrifice, and rigor that is often carried out in the Black feminist imagination,” said Taylor Renee Aldridge, curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, after the event. “One of the many memorable moments for me was witnessing deference on display between generations and peers: Simone’s reverence of Lorraine [O’Grady], Rashida’s reverence of Simone, and Simone expressing gratitude for her own daughter.”
Elsewhere during the weekend, the phenomenal Legacy Russell spotlighted works by painters Naudline Pierre and Firelei Báez, and moderated a riveting conversation with artist Ja’Tovia Gary following a screening of her work. Russell inspired the audience by speaking powerfully of the collective purpose represented by the event. “In a moment in the world where the visibility of Black femmehood continues to rise yet where sustained equity and representation still requires constant vigilance, care, and strategic work, being ‘in the loophole’ perforates boundaries and breaks through the mythos of Black exceptionalism and Black alienation—a reminder of the power of collective congress and its dazzling capacity to transform the world by holding space for shared information.”
Guests share a moment during Loophole of Retreat: Venice. Photo by Glorija Blazinsek.
As I reflect on the exuberant and utterly transformative weekend of “Loophole of Retreat,” I find myself entranced by this surplus of Black feminine creativity, presented in a way I have never seen. Every friend I spoke with during the retreat and in the days following remarked that they were “still processing” and needed “time to unpack.” It took me days to come up for air.
When I finally resurfaced, I recognized that through the scholarship, care, and the brilliance of Simone Leigh, Rashida Bumbray, Saidiya Hartman, Deborah Anzinger, Zara Julius, Ja’tovia Gary, Mabel O. Wilson, and so many others who touched me, I came through the symposium forever changed. Perhaps by some force of nature or deep ancestral ties, I felt protected, seen, and celebrated by every Black woman I have ever known or have yet to meet, privileged not only to bask in our glory, but also to be in service to so many Black women.
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The resplendent chandeliers of Vienna’s Kursalon concert hall clashed with the lonely figures by Maria Sulymenko on view at the Vienna Contemporary fair. Standing in the booth of Ukraine’s Voloshyn Gallery, assistant Anna Kopylova and I had quick aside about her travels. She had driven for 30 hours from Kyiv, where, at the beginning of the war with Russia, she spent weeks living in the gallery. It is mostly underground, making it an ideal bomb shelter.
I was haunted by a remark I had made the night before, lightly complaining over dinner about my seven-hour train ride from Berlin to attend of Vienna Contemporary and Curated By, a city-wide art festival that is, to quote one collector, “unique in the world.” It’s true: for 14 editions, this innovative model sees 24 dealers, with €9,000 in city funding, turn over their spaces to external curators who often hail from museums beyond Austria. Each organizes a single show that reflects on one umbrella theme.
With an eye toward the ongoing war a 30-hour drive away, this year’s concept was kelet, Hungarian for “east.” (In case the psychological rift in Europe is not clear enough, the theme last year was humor.) Participating galleries each absorb the prompt differently, though in the case of kelet, many took it literally, opting to invite curators from longitudes east of Austria.
Viennacontemporary 2022. 8-11 September, Kursalon Vienna. Photo courtesy of: kunstdokumentation.com
Even without such a specific ask, Vienna’s art scene has long looked toward that horizon. Vienna Contemporary, held earlier this month, and the newer fair Spark, which takes place in the summer, both feature an array of galleries from central and eastern Europe.
At Vienna Contemporary, one of the newcomers this year was Bucharest gallery Sandwich, a small artist-run space quite literally sandwiched between two buildings. The Romanian dealer showed small ceramic works based on a combination of folkloric myths and real political events by Ukrainian artist Diana Khalilova. On another floor, Ukrainian galleries Voloshyn and Kyiv’s Naked Room exhibited for free.
Vienna and its cultural scene are a gateway between these European geographies and identities of east and west, however loaded the terms are. (“Every mention of east and west is accompanied by scare quotes,” noted Chicago-based curator of Curated By, Dieter Roelstraete, in his opening address.) However you want to slice Europe, Vienna is a town that looks like a polished jewel of old empire where you will hear Slavic languages almost as much as German on the streets. People, culture, and ideas flow from Bratislava and Budapest just as much as from western capitals of comparable sizes.
Still, talk of east and west is a bit of a political game in Vienna, especially since the outbreak of war. Austria is pervaded by a “spooking kind of quiet” when it comes to solidarity with Ukraine, as one dealer put it. (The events were quieter too, with few to no Russian collectors.) In the not-so-distant past, this country was far from immune to Russian influence, money, and energy. And in the present, the nation has remained suspiciously neutral in a war with one aggressor.
As such, the concept for Curated By, crafted by Dieter Roelstraete back in March (while Europe was still frozen in a collective gasp), carries a particular weight. Lithuanian curator Valentinas Klimasauskas commented that this year’s focus is, in a sense, a “gesture of art historical or curatorial justice.”
The Prompt. Milda Drazdauskaitė, Elena Narbutaitė, Ola Vasiljeva, curated by Adomas Narkevičius, installation view GIANNI MANHATTAN (2022), courtesy the artists and GIANNI MANHATTAN, photo: kunst-dokumentation.com
Kelet was, in some cases, gently rebutted by curators who deemed it too simplistic: Adomas Narkevičius, who organized an exhibition of Lithuanian artists at Gianni Manhattan, said he hoped to “react without responding.” His exhibition, with an all-Lithuanian female cast of artists (Milda Drazdauskaitė, Elena Narbutaitė, and Ola Vasiljeva) is cheekily called “The Prompt.” It examines the limits any sense of knowing, with minimal materials role-playing as something else. Supple-looking drapes of hanging paper obfuscate the view, and a laser light creates a pinkish-blue “cut” in the wall.
Austrians seem to be well aware of the weird place they occupy now. Until recently, cheap Russian gas accounted for 80 percent of its energy. Europeans are panicking about the impending winter, and what it will mean for the economy (and what that, in turn, will mean for empathy for Ukraine). These same fears are deeply felt in the art world, with its big bright rooms that are costly to heat in a business with tight cash flow.
This anxiety underpinned two exhibitions, including that of Galerie Georg Kargl, curated by Hana Ostan Ožbolt, where the lights were completely off in the gallery. Small sculptures, including meticulously wrought readymades by David Fesl, punctuated an otherwise somber space. At Galerie Crone, the front of the gallery was also darkened in a show curated by Eva Kraus, director of the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Ukrainian artist Volo Bevza. The natural shadows deepened the poignant mood of an exhibition that included young, contemporary Ukrainian artists reflecting on the relationship between virtual and physical realities of war.
“I Had a Dog and a Cat,” curated by Hana Ostan Ozbolt. Installation view. 2022. Courtesy the artists and Georg Kargl Fine Arts. © Georg Kargl Fine. Photo kunst-dokumentation.com.
Particularly impactful was a large, standalone sculpture of a broadsheet by Yevgenia Belorusets. Placed in the middle of the room, the sculpture, called Please don’t take my picture! Or they’ll shoot me tomorrow, is printed with stories written by the artist that play with fact and fiction. The blown-up newspaper encompasses the split personality of media coverage around this war. I was struck by its date: 2015, one year after war officially began in Crimea. It was a time when Russian state money still enjoyed prominent status in the art world under the guise of promoting international exchange. Belorusets’s work punctures that myth and offers a very different picture.
After circulating unknowable amounts of fairs and gallery weekends in recent years, they can begin to feel cacophonous. By contrast, Curated By hangs together in a way that is hybridized, varied, legible, and not pedantic. Although some contributors gently ignored the brief, all participants agreed it was no time for flashy works but instead an opportunity for muted reflection. There was some sense of a collective subconscious: in times of deep trouble, and where words fail us, art fills a void.
Installation view. “The Neverending Eye,” Croy Nielsen, Vienna, 2022. Courtesy Croy Nielsen, Vienna. Photo: Kunst-dokumentation.com
The most successful exhibitions opted to gaze beyond the immediate crisis, tracing a thread between the current war and longer plots. It’s essential not to reduce Ukrainian artists to the experience of this war and the refugee crisis, Polish curator from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Natalia Sielewicz, pointed out as she gave a tour of “The Neverending Eye.”
The solo exhibition at Croy Nielsen features works saved from Ukraine by the late Fedir Tetyanych. The pioneer of Ukrainian cosmism worked as a state artist for Soviet Ukraine. His works engage in double-speak: they are both historical champions of the Soviet era and also transgressive attempts to imagine worlds and ways beyond it.
His “biotechnospheres,” futuristic utopian shelters of his own invention, are depicted in watercolors that were nearly lost to history before a dedicated group of “eastern” Europeans saved them during the onset of war. They hang now in Vienna, as dashed dreams from the past. The futuristic machines are set against lush Ukrainian fields that we now see with new eyes—a fertile, fragile ground.
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The brilliant sunlight was beaming through Mire Lee’s installation on Yeongdo Island. Titled Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea (2022), the 70-foot-tall work made of fence fabric draped across scaffolding is on show as part of this year’s Busan Biennale. The roofless abandoned factory of Song Kang Heavy Industrial, where the work was installed, allowed it to stand under a cloudless blue sky.
A tranquil moment of art appreciation was disrupted, however, when exhibition staffers guided the tour group Artnet News was part of to walk away from the structure—for safety reasons. The glorious weather had already made us forget about Typhoon Hinnamnor, which had struck South Korea’s hilly coastal city of Busan just the day before our visit. The powerful tropical cyclone had devastated the southern part of the country and killed at least 10 people.
But the monumental installation by the Amsterdam-based South Korean artist was still standing strong after the raging storm, albeit a little shaky and slightly damaged. It felt like a symbolic gesture that echoed the theme of this year’s Busan Biennale: “We, on the Rising Wave.”
In this case, “rising wave” signifies the history and transformation of Busan, which was the country’s first port open to foreigners in 1876 and a safe haven for over 1 million refugees during the Korean War in 1950–53. And “we,”—be it the participating artists, art practitioners, audiences, or even the city—are still standing despite such rising waves of endless change, locally and abroad. Just like Lee’s work.
Still standing after Typhoon Hinnamnor: Mire Lee, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea(2022). Photo: Vivienne Chow. An image of the work’s original state is at the bottom of this article.
“This is the story of Busan,” Haeju Kim, the artistic director of Busan Biennale 2022, told Artnet News. Taking the helm of the biennale this year offered an extra layer of meaning to Kim, who was born and raised in the city. During her research to prepare for the show, she dived deep into the local histories of her hometown, covering how the city was built and how it has evolved since local elections resumed in 1991, after democracy was fully installed in South Korea in 1987.
“This gives me a chance to take a good look at my city, what it means to me as an individual, and as an art practitioner from here,” noted the curator. “Busan, as a port city, is a starting point for this exhibition. From here, we look for the connection, a common ground for discussion with artists from different parts of the world.”
Art Beyond Seoul
It was indeed refreshing to visit the Busan Biennale following a week of frenzy surrounding Frieze Seoul, launched in partnership with Korea’s long-running homegrown fair Kiaf Seoul. All the glamorous parties, openings, and multimillion-dollar sales had undoubtedly made Seoul an exciting place to be, but the tranquility of Busan was where one could let art sink in.
Such tranquility may or may not have been welcomed by the organizers, however, since the opening of this year’s biennale fell on the same date as the opening of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf, and many trips to Busan were postponed or canceled due to the typhoon.
The biennale was founded in 1999, and as the host of one of South Korea’s most notable international art exhibitions, the city of Busan has been playing a tremendous role in not just the organization but also the narrative of the show. The support was rounded out by this year’s curatorial advisors, Christine Tohme, Philippe Pirotte, and Yuk Hui.
One of the works by Oh U-Am (b. 1938) on show at Busan Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
This year’s biennial features 64 artists and art collectives, born from the 1930s to 1990s, from 26 countries, with 46 (or 63 percent) of them based outside of South Korea.
The show spans four different locations that carry specific meanings to the city’s transformation. The Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (MOCA Busan), which has been a main exhibition venue since the museum’s inception in 2018, is located on Eulsukdo Island, which was once Asia’s largest habitat for migratory birds, but the environment was severely damaged because of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. Pier 1 of Busan Port, which was completed in 1912, was the transportation hub during Japan’s invasion of China and the Korean War, but was excluded from the city’s current North Port redevelopment project. And the other two locations, Yeongdo and Choryang, played significant roles during the Korean War, since both were homes to refugees.
According to artistic director Kim, exhibition locations—as well as the artists—were selected to address the exhibition’s four thematic focuses: “Migration,” “Women and Women Laborers,” “Ecosystem of the City,” and “Technological Change and Locality.”
“There were some personal factors when I decided to look at Busan through the lens of these four focuses,” Kim noted. “Many people, for example, have already forgotten how the population of Busan was made of migration. A lot of mixed recipes can be found in the local food culture. The city is mountainous but it was quickly occupied by migrants and houses were built along the hilly landscape.”
Although the majority of featured artists were based abroad, Kim hoped that by having Busan as a point of departure in the exhibition and in her discussion with artists, would allow a “more relevant identity of Busan under a larger context to be rebuilt.”
Song Minjung, Custom (2022), on show at Choryang, a new venue of Busan Biennale 2022. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Four Themes in One
Despite the biennial’s four distinctive focuses, there are no separations or any obvious boundaries drawn among the works. Rather, they are all laid out in a lyrical and sometimes poetic way, as if they were in dialogue with each other, telling stories that are related across time and space. Different images are juxtaposed alongside each other, addressing more than one focus at the same time.
Indeed, these four focuses should not be isolated from each other. The memorable exhibition at MOCA Busan’s basement level space, for example, is a thoughtfully curated journey that begins with rarely seen paintings from the 1990s to 2000s by the Korean artist Oh U-Am (b. 1938). He was orphaned during the Korean War and painted the seemingly childlike yet somber images out of his childhood memories of the country’s liberation from Japanese imperial rule, and people’s suffering in the aftermath of the Korean War.
This is followed by a journey through works that attempt to revive the memories of a forgotten past. Danish artist Pia Rönicke (b. 1974) tells the story of Le Klint, a woman who made the famous pleated lamp shades in installation set In Without a Name (2004–07), but never received the credit for it. (Rönicke has another brilliant work, In Future Horizon, that tells the history of military conflicts in the region through the stories of plants showing on the museum’s first floor.)
Korean-Dutch Sara Sejin Chang (b. 1977) recounts the painful history of transnational and transracial adoption of Korean children, who were sold and transported to other countries—with Busan serving as an epicenter of child traffickers in the 1970s and 80s—in the film installation Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020).
French artist Laure Prouvost (b. 1978) reminds us of our watery origins from a mother’s womb in her 2022 video work Four For See Beauty, which is accessed through a mysterious tunnel of palm trees made with leaves from Jeju Island.
The basement level exhibition concluded at South Korean artist Kim Jooyoung’s (b. 1948) Way-abyss (1994), a notable work hanging on the wall that was essentially a pathway for lost souls made by footsteps in black ink left on a white cotton cloth. The piece is an apt representation of her practice, revolving around the themes of departure and stemmed from her growing up during the division of the Korean peninsula. A similar theme is explored in her stunning recent work The Archeology of Pier 1: Wave Becomes Light. Becomes Wind. Becomes the Way. Becomes History (2022), on show at Pier 1 of Busan Port.
Kim Jooyoung, The Archeology of Pier 1: Wave Becomes Light. Becomes Wind. Becomes the Way. Becomes History (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale.
Off the Beaten Track
Of the four locations, the abandoned house up on the hill of Choryang that was turned into a temporary exhibition space is a must-go experience for adventurous art lovers. The Busan-born South Korean artist Song Minjung’s (b. 1985) transformed the site into quirky show. (It is also fortunate that the typhoon did not seem to have caused a great deal of damage to the two-storey building.) Her work Custom follows a mysterious story told via various video clips shown on different smartphones, as if the fictional characters are video-calling each other.
The exhibition location, from which visitors can enjoy a great view of the city, was an experiment as it was new to the biennale, and Song’s work explored the uneasy dynamics of the relationship between Korea and Japan inherited from a problematic historical past.
The relationship between Korea and Japan was given a more positive note by the Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, who invented a new beverage called “Doburokgeolli,” which was designated the official alcoholic drink of this year’s Busan Biennale. Free bottles of the mysterious dark beverage, held in a fridge housed in a hut in Yeongdo, were the outcome of an experiment. They were made with Japan’s technique of brewing Doburoku sake with the malt of Geumjeongsanseong Makgeolli, a traditional alcohol from Busan.
The artists argue that the two alcoholic drinks share a lot of similarities, including a crackdown on home-brewing by their respective countries’ governments. The creation of this new hybrid drink is meat to carry a symbolic meaning of how the relationship between these two cultural powerhouses of east Asia could move forward from their troubled history.
A new alcoholic beverage fusing Korean and Japanese traditional brewing techniques, invented by Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, the “official” drink of the 2022 Busan Bieannle. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Like the work by Chim↑Pom, artistic director Kim has a lot of hope for the future, particularly for her hometown.
“Busan deserves more attention, not just in Korea but also internationally,” Kim said. “Most of the global attention centers around Seoul, but Busan is getting better, and becoming a city that inspires artists.”
The Busan Biennale 2022 runs until November 6. A series of public programs and screenings of moving image works at the Yeongdo Outdoor Cinema can be found here.
How it looked originally: Mire Lee, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale.
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