Shows & Exhibitions

After a month-long delay, an exhibition that provoked controversy in Santiago, Chile, opened at the capital’s Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum (MSSA) on October 8 with considerable alterations.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état that resulted in the assassination of the country’s then-president Salvador Allende. As part of its programming to commemorate the event, MSSA invited Cuban artist and Harvard lecturer Tania Bruguera to host a solo exhibition.
“Magnitud 11.9” (a reference to Allende’s assassination date) uses research conducted by the artist in Chile over the past year and archival material to explore democracy and its fragility.
The show’s announcement in August, however, prompted an immediate backlash from those on the country’s political left, including members of Allende’s family, who criticized the artist’s stance against Cuba’s communist government. Bruguera has long centered her artistic practice on critiquing the authoritarian policies of the Cuban state. She left Cuba in 2021 to join Harvard’s media and performance department.
The grandson of the former president, Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, wrote to MSSA demanding the exhibition’s cancellation, launched a petition calling for a “repudiation of the Tania Bruguera exhibition,” and a lengthy post on X, formerly Twitter, explaining his position.
“We consider Tania Bruguera’s exhibition a serious affront and lacking in intellectual honesty,” Allende wrote on X.  “The artist seeks to draw a parallel between the Chilean civil-military dictatorship of Pinochet with what she calls “the reality experienced by the people of Cuba”.
Other criticism arrived from a mayor of a Santiago commune, Daniel Jadue, and the political activist Víctor Hugo Robles, who wrote Bruguera was in Chile “promoting her counterrevolutionary work as an activist dressed as an artist paid by USA.”
In response, MSSA delayed the exhibition’s opening by a month, modified one of its key projects, and has now included the public criticism in the show.
MSSA’s director Claudia Zaldivar said that the exhibition had been approved by the museum’s administrators long in advance and told ArtNews that “this attempt at cancelling the show comes from a small group that considers Bruguera a dissident of the current Cuban government, transferring a local Cuban problem to Chile.”
“In this exhibition, we have tried to go beyond historical figures to review the institutional, legal and emotional instruments that can endanger democracy,” Bruguera said in a statement announcing the exhibition. “Memory, participation, injustice, corruption, and impunity are some of the topics discussed in the exhibition.”

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The prize was launched by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (ADIAF) in 2000. Since 2016, proposals by the four nominated artists have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou. While the exhibition was previously held on the museum’s first floor, this year the artists are showcased on the fourth floor next to the permanent collection (until January 12, 2024), in order to give the prize more visibility. Two of the artists, Bak and Selmani, have used the small space in between their respective rooms to present a joint research project about their proposals.

The winner of the 22nd edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize will be announced on October 16 and will be awarded €35,000. Each of the four artists received €10,000 towards the realization of their presentation.

Bertille Bak, Still Life (2023). Exhibition view: Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris.Co-production and courtesy: Bertille Bak, Galerie Xippas (Paris, Geneva, Punta del Este) and the Gallery Apart (Rome). © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.
Bertille Bak

For the prize, Bertille Bak has made a video installation that satirizes how masses of flowers are exported from the Global South to the North to satisfy voracious consumer demand.

Still Life (part 1: Winter) (2023) opens with the dismantling of a Christmas fairground and residents tossing Christmas trees out of their windows. The scene then switches to Mayan women in Colombia cutting roses in a greenhouse, in preparation for Valentine’s Day. Crates filled with the flowers are transported by cable car across mountains, down rural streets by rickshaw, and whizzed around warehouses. Gorgeous, brightly colored discs of roses, worn on the backs of silleteros women in Medellin, are spun down a cliff face, while airplanes soar through the sky in a heart formation. Towards the end of the piece, elderly French couples dance in an open-air festival, the discs decorating the stage. The video is the first part a quadriptych project.

“I always want to step aside from documentary-style statements and frontal denunciation and make the viewer reflect a posteriori,” Bak told Artnet News. “That’s why I invent a new language that’s perhaps more playful, to allude to a situation.”

Bak traveled to Colombia earlier this year to embark on her project. “Colombia is the second largest exporter of flowers worldwide after Holland,” she noted, “and the discrepancy between the country’s armed conflicts and all these flowers symbolizing fragility, love and romance interested me.”

As the granddaughter of Polish miners in the north of France, Bak focuses on injustices experienced by certain groups of people, sociopolitical and ethnological issues, and the absurdities of today’s world. An earlier film, Mineur Mineur (2022), about child miners in India, Madagascar, Bolivia, Thailand and Indonesia, is an indictment of child labor that references her family background.

Bak’s work has been exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Turin’s Merz Foundation and the Louvre Lens. She won the Mario Merz Prize in 2019 and will have a solo show at the Jeu de Paume photography centre in Paris next year. Bak is represented by Xippas (Paris, Geneva and Punta del Este, Uruguay) and the Gallery Apart (Rome).

Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023. Bouchra Khalili, The Constellations (2011).Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier, Adagp, Paris 2023. © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.

Bouchra Khalili

A ‘constellation’ of works, the term being a central motif both visually and metaphorically for the artist, greets visitors in Bouchra Khalili’s installation. The Constellations (2011) consists of a large circle that frames a series of blue screenprints, each of which maps different migratory routes in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Opposite is a projection of The Tempest Society (2017), an ambitious film produced for Documenta 14 in Athens that is based on the theatrical experiences of the Al Assifa (Arabic for “tempest”) group, which emerged during the 1970s Arab workers’ movement in France. The film’s protagonists reflect on immigration through the historical and poetic link between theatre and the notion of citizenship in Ancient Greece. Two short films complete the ensemble.

“Although all these works belong to different periods, I sought to show the coherence of my practice that is deployed as if it’s one sole work made through multiple articulations,” Khalili said. “If one often finds circles in my exhibitions, it’s because this visual motif recalls a precise type of performance that is the most ancient form of theater in North Africa called ‘Halqa,’ which means both ‘circle’ and ‘assembly.’”

Born in 1975 in Casablanca, Khalili has exhibited widely, including at the Palais de Tokyo and Jeu de Paume in Paris, New York’s MoMA, the MFA Boston, and Barcelona’s MACBA. She participated in the Biennale of Sydney in 2012, the Venice Biennale in 2013, and the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and 2023. Khalili won this year’s Sharjah Biennial Prize for her mixed-media installation, The Circle. Her exhibition, “The Circle & The Tempest” is currently on view at Luma Arles. Khalili is represented by Mor Charpentier (Paris, Bogota) and by ADN Galeria (Barcelona).

Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Tarik Kiswanson, The Wait (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost.

Tarik Kiswanson

“I’m best known for sculpture, but here I wanted to make a cosmology of pieces in different media to explore all the subjects at the heart of my work—the question of being uprooted, transformation, metamorphosis, and migration,” Tarik Kiswanson said.

The artist’s presentation is metaphorical and abstract whilst intermingling personal and universal stories. Wedged into a passageway next to his room is a white, elongated ovoid sculpture with three boxes positioned vertically onto its side. “I was looking at grains that disperse in the wind and thinking about cocoons and the chrysalis,” said Kiswanson, whose parents immigrated from the Palestinian territories and eventually settled in Sweden in the 1980s. The work alludes to the diaspora and transformation that displaced people undergo.

Inside Kiswanson’s room is a larger cocoon sculpture, Nest (2021). The cocoon reappears in The Relief (R Gabriel, 1945), (2023), balanced precariously under a wardrobe made by French industrial designer René Gabriel for people whose homes had been bombed during World War II. The idea of reconstruction is also encapsulated in a sound piece about his mother’s first day in Sweden. Further works talk about transforming states in other ways. For instance, The Fall (2020) is a looped video showing a boy falling in slow motion off his school chair as if he’s floating.

“Initially, I treated this idea of transformation through the prism of immigration and my family’s history but, with time, I wanted to expand this question in a more universal way,” said Kiswanson, who cites Martinican writer Édouard Glissant among his influences. “Ambiguity is essential in my work; I always try to avoid literal things.”

In the last year, Kiswanson had solo shows at Sweden’s Bonniers Konsthall, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein. He has also exhibited at Carré d’art in Nîmes, Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and participated in the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, New York’s Performa 19 and the 2022 Biennale de Lyon. Kiswanson is represented by Carlier Gebauer (Berlin, Madrid) and Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg, Beirut).

Massinissa Selmani, Topography of latency (2023). Exhibition view, Prix Marcel Duchamp 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Paris; Selma Feriani Gallery, London/Tunis-Adagp, Paris 2023.
Massinissa Selmani

“I’m always looking for the lightest form, and drawing has that quality,” Massinissa Selmani said about the ‘drawn forms’ in his practice, which encompass drawing, animation, sculpture and murals.

This lightness is matched by the enigmatic and elliptical manner with which he deals with migration, borders, and conflict in his new installation for the prize. Titled Une parcelle d’horizon au milieu du jour (A plot on the horizon at midday), it features drawn shapes employed across multiple media. “Rather than talking about immigration in a frontal way with suffering bodies, I prefer to talk about the idea of the horizon in my project,” explained Selmani, whose starting point was Marc Guillaume’s philosophical book Puissance de l’ellipse (2023).

Several elements recur with absurd flourishes. A bird flies into a birdhouse on a security wall and out the other side before entering again, in a repetitive cycle. Clouds, which also escape human border controls, move freely across the sky. In other drawings featuring isolated architectural elements, a young man is searched by a policeman, a sniffer dog inspects a miniature boat, and a figure holds up his hands, as if against a wall.

Born in 1980 in Algiers, Selmani—now based in the French city of Tours—grew up during the Algerian Civil War and initially studied computer science. Fascinated by press photography, he contextualizes and reconstitutes isolated elements. His diverse sources of inspiration range from the Belgian Surrealists to the Algerian poet Jean Sénac.

Selmani received a special mention from the jury at the Venice Biennale in 2015. His work has also been exhibited at the Dakar Biennale in 2014, the Biennale de Lyon in 2015, Sharjah Biennial in 2017 and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022. He has had solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours, and he won the SAM Art Projects Prize in 2016. He is represented by Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris), Selma Feriani (Tunis, London), and Jane Lombard Gallery (New-York).

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In a clever curatorial twist, there is a knockout show-within-a-show in “Herstory,” the compelling six-decade survey of the feminist icon Judy Chicago which opened at the New Museum in New York today. Amid floors devoted solely to Chicago’s work, one section, entitled “The City of Ladies,” places her works in dialogue with those of other women artists from across the centuries, from Hilma af Klint to Frida Kahlo.
This curatorial vignette is worth the price of admission in and of itself and underscores larger tendencies in the artist’s practice. Chicago’s hard-to-quantify oeuvre is defined by her broad buckshot scope (and laser-sharp aim)—she is the chameleonic embodiment of a group show. Colored smoke, fireworks, airbrushed car hoods, sculpture, needlepoint, performance, photography, ceramics—the list of mediums she’s mastered goes on and on.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
All of these facets are on display in the 84-year-old artist’s victory lap of an exhibition. “Herstory” opens today and runs until January 14, 2024. Encompassing four floors, the exhibition is a study of magnitude that veers from serene to devastating. Goddess sculptures and optimistic 1960s candy-colored abstractions segue into brutal meditations on the Holocaust and extinction. Meanwhile, “The City of Ladies” occupies the museum’s fourth floor. Chicago was on hand at Tuesday’s evening preview event and appeared just as enthralled by the works around her as the other attendees.
The artist at the opening dinner for New Museum’s “Judy Chicago: Herstory.” Photo: BFA, courtesy of Dior.
“My work draws on the historical work, the herstory, that has been assembled in ‘The City of Ladies,’” Chicago said, refined in a double-breasted black suit and white turtleneck, her hair a purple and fuchsia mélange. “Five hundred years of women’s cultural production has been assembled. This is the background against which I have worked, and without it, people would not have been able to comprehend my work,” she said. Throughout her career, Chicago has been as much of a proselytizer and teacher as an artist, always at the ready to celebrate the women who inspired her and came before her.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Grabbing my arm, Chicago drew me across the deep magenta floral carpet and through the crowd. “Come here!” she said, motioning to a wall monitor. “Here is a video of the history of goddess imagery,” she explained. “It tells the story of what my goddesses draw on. There’s a room downstairs that has ‘The Birth Project’ in it. Come here.” We walk to another portion of the gallery. “This is a wall about images of motherhood and birth,” Chicago said. “Nobody, even I didn’t know there was a tradition of women making work on these subjects. This spans centuries!”
She pauses and continues, “It is not only women artists who have been erased but subjects that the mainstream art world has not considered important, like birth and motherhood. My work draws on all this work. That’s what’s important about ‘The City of Ladies.’” Among the 90 artists in this section are marquee names like Leonora Carrington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Klint, and Frida Kahlo. But there is a wealth of striking art from artists whom we should know, offering an enrapturing syllabus of women who deserve a rightful place in the canon.
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
One example is an unforgettable gouache of quiet majesty by artist Charlotte Salomon—it’s a self-portrait, painted in 1940 during her exile in France while pregnant at 26 (she would die in 1943 at Auschwitz). “It’s the most powerful thing that!” Chicago said. “There’s so much heartbreaking stuff. It was damaged and The New Museum had to conserve it. That is a very significant metaphor for the degree to which women’s work historically has not been cared for, not been honored, and not been put together so you can see her story.”
Judy Chicago, Evening Fan (1971). Courtesy of the artist. Collection Jay Franke and David Herro, Miami Beach, FL
On the second-floor gallery, I found a particularly resonant series of photographs. In the images, women are shown holding canisters, from which billowing colored smoke pours forth into nature’s expanse. They’re beautiful from a graphic point of view, but Chicago explains the inherent subtextual protest, “You have to realize I did those in the 70s. At that time, the Buddhist monks were burning themselves in protest for the Vietnam War. They reference a terrible custom in India where widows are pushed onto the funeral pyre so the families won’t have to support them because their husbands died. My work grows out of history.”
Judy Chicago, Rainbow Pickett (1965/2021). Courtesy of the artist, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Wafting above “The City of Ladies” section are enormous brocade-lined tapestries embroidered with cursive queries like “Would God Be Female?” and “What if Women Ruled the World?” Text is a vital part of Chicago’s practice. When asked if she’s just as much of a writer as she is an artist she deflects. “Doesn’t Ed Ruscha have text?” she responded and impatiently dismissed this subject. Chicago originally produced these gilded banners for Dior’s summer 2020 haute couture show (the house’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri is also fond of sloganeering and explicit feminist messaging).
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
The banners have since become an iconic component of Chicago’s body of work. “The project has developed a life of its own,” Chicago said, “It’s reached out across a number of countries with people all over wanting to have a chance to answer the questions that are posed on the banners, which I guess speaks a lot to the longing for change.”
“Judy Chicago: Herstory,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
The banners aren’t as well-known as her 1979 benchmark The Dinner Party, which is permanently displayed in its own gallery at the Brooklyn Museum (the New Museum has the drawings and studies for the plates on display, however, and they’re a revelation). Speaking of dinner parties, Dior hosted a post-preview 230-person celebratory meal down the street at the Bowery Hotel’s rooftop restaurant. After the first course, Chicago rose and delivered a moving speech.
Judy Chicago, Rainbow Shabbat (1992). Fabrication by Bob Gomez, glass painting by Dorothy Maddy. Courtesy of  Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
“When I was a little girl, I was raised by a father at a time when fathers did not really participate in parenting,” she told the rapt audience. “My father taught me that I had an obligation to work for change, towards a better world, and to make a contribution. As anybody who’s followed my career knows, I’ve had a pretty rough struggle…… I put my faith in art history. And, as it turns out, I might have been right. However, there is still a lot to do before there is real institutional change and the paradigm shift we need if we’re going to survive as a human race.”
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The discovery of Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Army may rank as China’s grandest archaeological achievement of the 20th century, but the ruins at Sanxingdui stake a claim as its most beguiling.
The bronze statues, jade swords, and elephant tusks unearthed in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan continue to confound archaeologists, so stylistically distinct are they from anything previously encountered.
The nature of the two discoveries and their impact on the historical record are remarkably similar. Both were uncovered by unwitting farmers digging a well. Both provided evidence of cultures that had previously been considered more myth than fact.
Unlike in Xi’an, however, where excavations on Qin’s third century burial mounds remain largely on hold due to preservation concerns, the archaeological work at Sanxingdui has continued at pace and with the generous backing of the Chinese state.
Grand mythical creature, 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
The fruits of these ongoing excavations form the backbone of “Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan,” a sprawling exhibition newly opened at the Hong Kong Palace Museum (through January 8, 2024). As the show name suggests, around half of the 120 gold, jade, and bronze artifacts have been found in the past three years. Most have never been exhibited outside of Sichuan.
Although the first Sanxingdui discoveries came in the 1920s, it wasn’t until the late ‘80s that major archaeological work began in a series of pits on the outskirts of Chengdu. The artifacts, which date as far back as far as 4,500 years, are aesthetically distinct from contemporary civilizations: bronze masks with broad, bulging eyes, twisting tree-like sculptures with idling birds, and towering statues depicting slender figures with hooked noses.
Many such artifacts are on display in Hong Kong. There are bronze and gold masks carved with sharply defined cheekbones and brows, stands for bronze trees affixed with kneeling figurines, sculptures that seemingly fuse together tiger and dragon figures, and bronze vessels that more closely echo those of the later Shang dynasty.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
The exhibition in Hong Kong was timed to coincide with China’s National Day on October 1 and, accordingly, arrives with a political bent; as the museum’s director Louis Ng said in a statement, there’s “the aim of the deepening understanding of the formation and development of the 5,000-year Chinese civilization.” Among its revelations is the banishing of the notion of Sichuan as a cultural backwater. Instead, it evidences a thriving and complex civilization that flourished far from the Yellow River valley. Sanxingdui complicates Chinese history—and wonderfully so.
“Gazing at Sanxingdui: New Archaeological Discoveries in Sichuan” is on view through January 8, 2024, at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. See images of the show below.
Human head with gold mask 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Mask with protruding pupils, 1300 –1100 BCE, bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Kneeling figure with twisted head, 1300 – 1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Zun Vessel, 1300–1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Dragon-shaped object, 1300–1100 BCE, Bronze. Image: courtesy Sanxingdui Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Exhibition view from Hong Kong Palace Museum. Image: courtesy Hong Kong Palace Museum.
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A new group exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography showcases the work of three photographers produced during far-flung residencies. One journeyed to the islands of Guadeloupe, another to the borderlands of France, and the other to New Orleans. Each distinctly disparate project receives its own section, but the show has an overall cohesion. Although all three artists used different methodology and approaches, a throughline resounds; in his own way each was gracefully, soulfully reflecting the human condition and spirit.
“Immersion” is on view until January 8, 2024, and documents Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan’s sojourns. “I think all of us are intuitive in terms of the way that we work,” Halpern said. “I was trying to respond to the feeling of the place.” Overall, the experience is a celebration of resilience, but it can also unflinchingly explore some hard truths.
Vasantha Yogananthan, Untitled from “Mystery Street,” (2022). © Vasantha Yogananthan
Yoganthanan delivered colorful childhood Louisiana reveries. Halpern reflected on the reverberations of the colonial period and the slave trade in Guadeloupe. Meeks’s somber and oddly beautiful, mostly black-and-white series delves into immigrant crossings (made during his own personal crossroads). He captures displacement and human desperation in landscapes and still lifes without portraying people. Some of his images are so abstract they look like the surface of the moon.
One of Meeks’s abstract takes on landscapes in an Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Image: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
Meeks explained, “As photographers, as much as we read the world, I think we’re also projecting. I was always projecting my own state of mind.”
Immersion is also the name of the French-American Photography Commission that sponsored the residencies created by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and presented in collaboration with ICP and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. At the heart of the project is unbridled creativity. “It’s very open,” said Laurent Pejoux, the director of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès at last week’s busy vernissage. “They’re totally free to choose the subject. We don’t want to impose the project to the photographer. La liberté is an important notion in France. That’s why we support projects like this where the liberty was total.”
Halpern recreated a defaced bust of Christopher Columbus in this installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Photo: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
Each of the photographers also included a sculptural element to their project. Halpern recreated a defaced bust of Christopher Columbus and included flickering video screens depicting an invasion of cruise-ship tourists, Yogananthan gathered his images into an elegant, large-scale 3-D assemblage, while Meeks powerfully punctuated his section with rusted barbed wire and makeshift campfire grills sourced from the borderlands’ camps. We caught up with each on the evening of the opening for a brief walkthrough.

Vasantha Yogananthan
“Mystery Street”
Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Image: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
New Orleans is a subtle character in your series. The images don’t scream that locale. There’s no crawfish clichés here.
I wanted to approach the city as a fictional space. I like that the pictures are very fragmentary. They don’t really show the landscape. For someone who knows New Orleans, maybe you feel the city—the colors, the light, the atmosphere. The project is about childhood. It can be from any place or anywhere in the world.
What was your process?
I picked the summertime to go because school was over and the children would be free all day long. There was a lot of boredom, as the days are longer. At first I was thinking that the project would be about playing. And then I got more interested about what happens before and after game time—these moments where the children are together it seems at first that nothing is happening, but maybe this is where everything is happening. After weeks being immersed with one group of kids, it almost felt dystopian, where the adults have left and the children are running the city and they’re free to do whatever they’d like to do. I really like that idea, of them owning the space.
Vasantha Yogananthan, Untitled from “Mystery Street” (2022). © Vasantha Yogananthan.
One image that is very striking is the child with the hula hoops on the stairs. 
Yeah, this picture was shot in a summer camp. For five weeks I would go there in the morning and stay all day long. Most days, nothing worth photographing would happen. One has to be very patient in observing kids. At some point, if you’re patient enough, and if you’re kind, and if you care, something is going to happen. Henri Cartier-Bresson coined ‘the decisive moment,’ meaning, ‘Hey, I was there, like, at the exact right time, right place, and I clicked a picture that kind of summarized what the place is about.’ My feeling was the opposite, because I was there for five weeks in the summer camp and made maybe five good pictures happen. Meaning that most of the time, nothing happens. The photographer, by just being there—and most of the time not taking any pictures—is taking in a lot of information.

Gregory Halpern
“Let The Sun Beheaded Be”
Gregory Halpern, Untitled from “Let the Sun Beheaded Be” (2019). © Gregory Halpern
What drew you to the island in the first place?
As a 10-year-old, I went on a vacation to Guadeloupe. What I remembered was the total isolation from the place itself as a tourist. I’m fascinated by the idea of not doing that with this project and thinking about how this is a place of both tourism but also extreme pain, in terms of its history and its relationship to colonialism and the slave trade. I did a lot of research. I thought people would be very resistant to me as a white American, but they were incredibly welcoming. I talked about the thing that isn’t talked about. Tourists come here and don’t interact with the local culture. When the elephant in the room gets addressed, then people are very happy to talk to you as an outsider. People were like, ‘Oh, that’s so interesting that you want to talk about the actual culture and history and what it’s like to be here, not just as a tourist.’ In 1815, Napoleon abolished slavery, but then reneged on it, and in 1848 it was officially undone.
Can you tell me about the video component?
Tourists will come off of these cruise boats and they basically flood the main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, for like, three hours. They basically go and they photograph the locals who are selling vegetables and fruits, and then they get back on the boat. And to me it was like this guy, he’s photographing this woman. He’s sneaking up because she doesn’t want her photo taken. She’s holding up a bowl to protect her face. For me, it’s all about politics and battle and colonialism. And it’s also kind of about me, like a self-portrait, because I’m basically a tourist and outsider.

Raymond Meeks
“The Inhabitants”
Raymond Meeks, Untitled from “The Inhabitants” (2022). © Raymond Meeks
This was a very complex journey for you.
Calais is the center of the refugee crisis in Europe. By the time I arrived, I found myself in a state of displacement. All of my stuff was going into storage, and a relationship of ten years had ended and I didn’t have a home. So going to France kind of put me in a state of searching and of longing and wanting to create a sense of place, some sense of home. I think it put me on a level of searching for discovery and empathy and a compassion for what that experience is. I was in southern France for three months; I was in northern France for three months. So it’s just trying to imagine these borderlands. I’m making pictures and then I’m bringing them back and I’m crafting a story. I’m trying to understand what the work is trying to convey, what the work wants to be, what it wants to speak of.
Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Photo: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
There’s such brutalist imagery, like the cement with rebar poking through. It’s a rough landscape, but also beautiful. Nature seems to prevail. A lot of these structures look ancient. This work is about refugees, but none are depicted.
I had planned on doing portraits. I volunteered with an organization called Care4Calais that provided basic needs to refugees who were holding in Calais. And by doing so I became friends with quite a few of them. At that point I realized I didn’t want to do portraits. Because as I was interacting with them I realized I’m looking at them as a subject, not engaging with them as a human being. And I’m missing out on so much by thinking about what a picture of them might bring to my project. And that just felt exploitative to me. So I decided just to be present and to sort of try to carry the essence of their stories with me as I make pictures.
The installation of your show is so beautiful, from the excavation elements of found objects to the framing and how some photos are broken into grid-like quadrants.
With the sponsorship of Hermès, I had ultimate possibilities. I could have large silver gelatin prints made and the best framing, which would be a dream. Like, all this was a possibility for me. But that possibility also created a lot of confusion. I realized I don’t need to buy anything. Coming from this experience where, where human beings are just trying to make do with the things that are left behind, that they find, that are handed down to them—I just thought, like, I don’t want to consume more things. The constraint was that I will make use of what I have, I will make use of the wood, I will make everything myself. It became part of petitioning or prayer or like a meditation—and also just being deeply engaged in the creative process.
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London’s Design Museum has been granted special access to Mattel’s Barbie archives in California for a new exhibition scheduled to open at the institution in July 2024. The announcement follows in the wake of “Barbiemania” inspired by this summer’s blockbuster Barbie movie.
While the Barbie doll is one of the most recognizable toys in the world, the pleasure of playing with Barbie is making use of her extensive accessories collection that includes iconic outfits, hot pink convertibles and of course Dreamhouses. That’s why the this exhibition will explore the story of Barbie through a design lens that encompasses fashion, architecture, furniture and even vehicle design.
“We look forward next year to displaying a whole range of eye-catching objects, some familiar but many never seen before, to showcase the evolution of design across the decades of Barbie’s world,” said Tim Marlow, director and CEO of the Design Museum.
According to the Design Museum, the exhibition has been three years in the making and coincides with the 65th anniversary of the creation of the Barbie brand. Curated by Danielle Thom, the show will map the Barbie legacy that started when Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler invented Barbie for her daughter, Barbara, in 1959.
The doll has long been a cultural touchstone, there has been a surge of interest in the toy in the aftermath of Greta Gerwig’s hit film, Barbie, which led to a “pink wave” in pop culture when it was released in theaters this summer.
Artists such as the duo Drift have embraced “Barbiemania” as inspiration for new work. In July, Drift melted down one of the dolls and deconstructed her into an abstract sculpture. Meanwhile, the artist Stuart Semple has released Pinkie – The Barbiest Pink, a new pigment created to protest Mattel’s trademark of “Barbie Pink.”
Additionally, the National Toy Hall of Fame announced last month that Ken, Barbie’s companion, is one of 12 finalists for induction in the hall.
“[T]his may have been the year of Barbie at the box office, but perhaps Ken will share some of the spotlight by getting inducted into the hall?”  Christopher Bensch, vice president for collections at the Strong Museum, said in a news release. “Only time will tell!”
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Though London boasts a world-class offering of exhibitions year-round, its museums put their best foot forward each autumn as the capital is overrun by art lovers during Frieze week. It seems to be the season of solo shows, with a mix of rising stars and members of the old guard stepping into the spotlight.
Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy (until January 1, 2024), which is, shockingly, the museum’s first solo dedicated to a woman artist, has already been the talk of the town for some weeks now. Another long-awaited show is Philip Guston at Tate Modern (October 5—February 25, 2024), which was controversially postponed to buy the curators more time to contextualize sensitive content addressing fraught race relations in the U.S. during the 1960s.
Elsewhere, Tate Britain is dedicated a retrospective to Sarah Lucas. Also much anticipated will be painter Nicole Eisenman’s show at Whitechapel (until January 14, 2024), on tour from the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, which offers contemporary spins on art historical classics.
Below, our European team have picked out five shows that they have penciled into their calendars.

Claudette Johnson: “Presence“The Courtauld GallerySeptember 29, 2023—January 14, 2024
Claudette Johnson, Standing Figure with African Masks (2018). Tate, London. © Claudette Johnson. Photo: Tate.
Johnson’s first solo at a major public gallery in London marks a significant moment for one of the founding members of the Black British Arts Movement, which emerged in the 1980s as part of the BLK Art Group. This exhibition raises important questions about the role of Black artists within the British art establishment. The artist’s journey, as well as the broader narrative of the art world, is poignantly symbolized by a career overview in the distinguished and historically exclusive halls of the Courtauld Gallery.
Johnson’s monumental and evocative drawings, featuring friends, family, and herself, play with pose, gaze, color, and scale, creating a soft yet profoundly impactful effect. She aspires to “tell a different story about our presence in this country,” she said.
—Naomi Rea

Trevor Yeung: “Soft ground“GasworksSeptember 28, 2023—December 18, 2023
Trevor Yeung, “Soft ground” research image, London, 2022–23. Courtesy the artist.

“This is not an exhibition to be experienced during the opening,” Trevor Yeung said at the opening of “Soft ground” at the non-profit Gasworks in London’s Vauxhall. Indeed, the usual chatter and banter at crowded gallery openings are not the best fit for this particular show, the Hong Kong rising star’s first solo show in the U.K.
Rather than calling this an exhibition, “Soft ground” is perhaps more appropriately seen as one immersive work that requires the audience’s full attention and engages all of their senses to experience it fully. Inspired by the artist’s research on London’s gay cruising areas during his residency at Delfina Foundation, the experience of exploring this dimly lit gallery space is an artistic exploration of the social and emotional complexities of this hidden cultural phenomenon. In the dark, you may encounter a familiar scent that reminds you of a former lover, a sound resembling something you might have heard, and the sight of a large tree trunk, like the notorious one in Hampstead Heath known as an embodiment of sexual desires. As one of the finalists of the Sigg Prize this year and the representative of Hong Kong at next year’s Venice Biennale, Yeung has crafted a poignant work to savor.

—Vivienne Chow

Frank Walter: “Artist, Gardener, Radical“Garden MuseumOctober 4, 2023—February 25, 2024
Frank Walter, Man Climbing a Coconut Palm and View of Red Canoe and Boat in Harbour (undated). Courtesy Frank Walter Family and Kenneth M. Milton Fine Art.
Anyone in need of a break from London’s grey skies will discover that the vibrant landscapes of Antiguan artist Frank Walter possess an almost transportive power. This new retrospective at the relatively unsung Garden Museum features over 100 paintings and sculptures, most of which were created later in Walter’s life when he had withdrawn to a remote studio, dedicating his time to creative endeavors until his passing in 2009.
The museum utilizes these richly evocative works as a lens through which to explore the artist’s environmental and social activism. In addition to his prolific artistic output, Walter made history as the first Black man to manage a sugar plantation in Antigua. He was also a dedicated writer of political manifestos advocating for progressive policies, such as police training and support for small farms and fisheries.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred

Hiroshi SugimotoHayward GalleryOctober 11, 2023—January 7, 2024
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields 225 (2009). Photo: Sugimoto Studio.
Though the Japanese artist and architect recently made headlines for adding his 69-feet-tall “Point of Infinity” to the San Francisco skyline, he is best known for his photography. These striking, predominantly black-and-white works were produced over half a century using methods inspired by the very earliest 19th-century techniques and have been brought together for a new show at the Hayward Gallery. Among the subjects captured by Sugimoto are eerily lifelike wax figurines, modernist architecture, lightning, old-school cinemas, seascapes, and the eternally serene aura of the Buddha statues affixed to a 12th-century temple in Kyoto.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred

El Anatsui’s Hyundai CommissionTate ModernOctober 10, 2023—April 14, 2024
El Anatsui in the studio. Photo: Ofoe Amegavie
Of all the things happening during Frieze week, the annual Hyundai commission at the Tate Modern is kept mostly under wraps until its grand unveiling during the busiest week in the October art world. Naturally, we are excited to check it out. Finding a way to intelligently fill the industrially scaled Turbine Hall is an artistic feat, though Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui—who was recently interviewed on Artnet News—should be more than capable of executing a powerful takeover. Known for gigantic and shimmering artworks crafted from recycled materials that envelop walls or spill across gallery floors, these triumphantly sized pieces are typically delivered to museums without instructions. Anatsui seeks full creative collaboration with his hosts, leaving it up to them to decide how to install them.
—Kate Brown

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On Saturday morning at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a healthy throng gathered as is usual in front of the post-Impressionist master’s famous Sunflowers. A decent measure of shoulder-bumping was needed to catch a glimpse of The Potato Eaters. But the biggest crowd at the world-famous museum, by far, was the one that had formed an orderly queue outside the gift shop before 10.30 a.m.
This behaviour was, if nothing else, a marked improvement on what was seen in viral video footage of the frenzy on opening day of the institution’s much-hyped “Pokémon x Van Gogh Museum” exhibition. The collaboration was announced earlier this month with the kind of high-budget trailer Nintendo would use to launch a new video game.
You might have seen the footage of museum visitors picking clean the gift shop of its Pokémon merchandise in a manner reminiscent of a Black Friday Walmart stampede. Shoppers were clamoring for a number of limited edition t-shirts, postcards, tote bags and teddy bears mashing up the beloved pocket monsters with the famous Dutch painter’s works. What you might have missed, however, is that “Pokémon x Van Gogh Museum”—the show serving as the propulsion mechanism for all this hype—is tiny.
“Pokémon at the Van Gogh Museum” the Van Gogh Museum. Photo courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
I did not have a measuring tape handy, but it’s likely that Pokémon takes up far more real estate in the gift shop than its exhibit takes up floor space in the gallery itself.
Running until January, the exhibit amounts to six paintings adhered to a temporary wall in the foyer of the museum’s first floor. Each follow the same formula, inserting Pokémon from the eponymous cartoon, card and video game sensation, into the paintings of Vincent van Gogh.
While it is the commercial element of this partnership that has so far caught the most attention, it would be unfair to dismiss the fruits of the exhibit out of hand. This was not entirely produced by some marketing machine. Artists have put their name to the works on view.
Naoyo Kimura, who has been an illustrator for the Pokémon Trading Card Game since 2001, composed a Pikachu inspired by Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with Grey Felt Hat. Sowsow (styled sowsow), Pokémon card illustrator since 2018, is responsible for Eevee taking Van Gogh’s place in the straw hat, but more notably, the appearance of Snorlax on the bed in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. The results are charming and certainly worth a chuckle, though no critic would ever claim that this is intended as a serious reinterpretation of Van Gogh’s work.
Sowsow, Munchlax & Snorlax inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1888). Courtesy of the Pokémon Company International, ©2023 Pokémon/ Nintendo/Creatures/Game Freak.
So, why is the Van Gogh Museum learning into all of this? Van Gogh rarely painted animals, especially not in the kind of close focus on display here.
Instead, the museum found—or shoe-horned—its justification for the display within Van Gogh’s own correspondence. A quote, taken from a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, is emblazoned above the works and reads: “We wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful.” The display goes on to note that Van Gogh was himself a collector of Japanese prints, and was likely inspired by Japanese art.
It’s not the most tenuous connection, but neither is it an especially high-minded point on which to hinge such a venture. Perhaps for this reason it feels like these six paintings offer little analysis of Van Gogh’s own work, little thought as to where any overlap in style might lie, and a little too obvious a focus on the marketing slam dunk that is giving Pikachu a little hat. Indeed, it seems possible that the idea arose because Van Gogh painted sunflowers, and there is a Pokémon—named Sunflora—who is literally a sunflower.
Tomokazu Komiya, Sunflora inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889). Courtesy of the Pokémon Company International, ©2023 Pokémon/ Nintendo/Creatures/Game Freak.
The pocket-sized exhibition is also rather jarring in the context of the rest of the museum. As you travel upwards through the permanent collection, you’ll soon be reading the details of the troubled painter’s death via a self-inflicted gunshot wound and the deterioration of Theo Van Gogh’s health in the aftermath of his beloved brother’s demise. If you are a fully grown adult with the mind to comprehend such things, it’s hard to think of the how and where and why Pokémon fit into this narrative.
Will the exhibit increase the Van Gogh Museum’s reach, and global appreciation of his work? It’s possible. It’s possible that by engaging with the rest of the museum through the Pokémon workbook that children might develop a nascent appreciation of Van Gogh’s work, though it would be misleading to suggest that children are anything but a small minority of those who have forked over the $21 admission fee.
But whatever the artistic or narrative merit of inserting Pokémon into the work of Van Gogh, the presumably commercial motivation for the collaboration has borne immediate fruit.
Photo by Carl Kinsella.
Days after opening, punters remain gathered at the bottom of the museum’s exit steps, proffering fistfuls of cash to those prepared to part with their trading cards bearing the visage of a post-impressionist Pikachu in a little felt hat (which visitors can claim by filling out an activity booklet clearly designed for small children). Someone tried to buy mine for €50 (I instinctively said no and later questioned my judgement).
Ebay is now flooded with the cards, with some selling for as much as $2,439. By erecting this small temporary wall in the lobby of their first floor, the Van Gogh Museum has provided the brushstrokes for a scalper’s very own Starry Night.
Those who remember the advent of the trading card game in the late nineties and early aughts will remember the seemingly-childlike aspiration that the cards would be worth a fortune some day. Today, Pokémon materials have been known to fetch enormous prices at auction. An unopened first-edition set of 11 Pokémon booster packs, originally priced at around $10 per pack in 1999, sold for $408,000 at Heritage Auctions in 2021.
Meanwhile, the highest price ever fetched for a Van Gogh painting at auction stands at $117 million, achieved in 2022 and very likely a decided mark up on what was originally paid for the work. With that in mind, it’s hard not to see the true reason why the remix of the two cultural phenomena has so readily captured the public imagination.
While the art itself leaves much to be desired, the exhibit succeeds in tilling the common ground so important to both Pokémon and the art world at large: the creation of rarity, and the mechanisms to convert that rarity into cold hard cash.
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