Herndon & Dryhurst's "Starmirror" @ KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Installation view of the exhibition Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst–Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2025

Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and Birmingham, England, respectively, artist duo Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst are two of the art world’s most outspoken figures for AI integration. Having attended Stanford while still being partly based in the Bay Area, Herndon’s continued application of AI models in her musical compositions and artwork remains unsurprising, as is her angle on this burgeoning technology. Partnering with Dryhurst, who has a history of advocating for internet decentralization and involvement in blockchain tech (think NFTs and social tokens), they have advanced discussions of AI through their music releases and installations since 2015. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art is the home for their current show, Starmirror. 

Inspired by the much-admired Benedictine abbess and polymath from the Rhineland, Hildegard von Bingen, the show trains its attention on synchronicities between AI and the abbess’s own vision of divine order, all while considering the new role of authorship, whose precarity has undergone much turmoil in current AI-related discourse. Starmirror ultimately vies to reconceptualize human-AI collaboration and production, imagining beneficial and innovative relationships between two entities that many find existentially at odds. 

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst with sub
Arboretum, 2025
SLA resin, PETG filament, steel nuts, bolts, and pine wood
Commissioned and produced by KW Institute for ContemporaryArt, Berlin and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

The first room hosts Arboretum (2025), a sculptural work  entirely concerned with Public Diffusion, an image model reared on publicly owned and Creative Commons Zero images, shaping a foundation model solely on ethically sourced images. Arboretum’s model uses no privately owned or sourced images in its training, a feature of nearly all AI image models. Its dataset is free to access, forming a democratized model without specific ownership.

The artists built PD40M, the largest public-domain dataset to date. Compiled from 40 million, it continues to grow through participation. The Starmirror app prompts viewers to add to the commonwealth of images already accessible to the public in an effort to resist the common perception that AI image models force viewers into a passive position. ‘Slop’ is the thrown-around term used to define the visual excrement of internet aesthetics that AI is famed for producing. Here, AI is posited as capable of producing something greater than lowest-common-denominator symbols. Instead of being the receiver of information, the human becomes the feeder, using AI to decode and visualize patterns within shared human activity. This model necessitates escaping the algorithm, going outside, and searching. If anyone remembers the screen zombies of the summer of 2016, the Starmirror app is a lot like Pokémon GO, except it is about seeing the world, not collecting clout in a digital landscape. It is AI between technology and the world.

It’s a challenge to see the good in AI. Coming from a political background far outside the tech bubble, conversations around AI and pattern recognition are primarily centered on ICE’s collaboration with Palantir. That, regardless of intention and dedication to constructing a public-supporting commons, this technology will be appropriated and abused by government agencies and private businesses. Data will be bought, sold, and used to incriminate the most vulnerable. Perhaps this is naive, that all this is claimed without key information and the knowledge to differentiate models, and that fear-mongering over AI is possibly dangerous for other reasons. All of this might be true; none of it might be. But, regardless of how one might feel about such hesitations or the positive excitement provoked by the idea of such a work, the images produced by Starmirror, as one might expect, are layers upon layers of endless pastiche. So why is this at the KW institute? Starmirror is not about art. It is not about the capacity and ability of the image but about making sense of a database. This is where Hildegard von Bingen enters.

At the heart of Arboretum is a layered model inspired by Bingen’s 1151 play Ordo Virtutum. Using neumes (symbols from early Western musical notation) as a base layer, with an overlay of AI scrawlings generated by a model from Algomus, a team of researchers specializing in music modeling, analysis, and creation with AI. Here, the model composes a polyphony to create infinite variations of Ordo Virtutum that seek to pay her tribute by extending her legacy. Of course, the infinite iteration of her work neither pays her tribute nor extends her legacy. Such an approach to the authorship of a woman who died nearly 900 years ago is bizarre, to say the least. The product feels more like a mockery and bastardization than respect. For a play concerning the salvation of the human soul, protecting the soul from the devil who taunts it with worldly pleasures, the construction of a robot Hildegard von Bingen, in a removal of her holy dedication and soul, does nothing other than turn her work into a representation of those very earthly desires with which the devil taunts. The artists appear to care little about the actual work of Hildegard von Bingen, but about how AI can change it, add to it, and what AI can do when her highly interpretable and semi-illegible notation system enters a database.

Installation view of the exhibition Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst–Starmirror at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2025

In the main hall, The Ladder (2025) continues the duo’s fascination with the German abbess, who envisioned ladders as hierarchies containing tiers with angels and virtues bridging Earth and the divine. In a convenient synchronicity, computer scientist and psychologist Geoffrey Hinton described machine learning systems’ latent space diagrams, which are based on the stacking of neural networks, from a more foundational bottom to an increasingly complex top, as “ladders of abstraction,” affirming the ladder as a dual referent. In the space around The Ladder, different sounds encroach, charging the hall with the divine. Some works are from The Call (2024–25), a research and development project and exhibition by Herndon, Dryhurst, and Serpentine Arts Technologies; others are from surviving medieval works, some by Hildegard von Bingen herself, but intermixed are AI interpretations of Hildegard’s work. In conjunction with the show, the artists invite the Starmirror ensemble, volunteers, and choirs to visit and  contribute their voices in call-and-response sessions to train an AI choir that is scheduled to debut in the summer of 2026 at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

Starmirror, perhaps more than an art exhibition, is a continuation of their experiment. The “art” of the shows is often secondary to figuring out how to coexist with, if not utilize, AI to serve people, not corporations—a highly respectable mission. But to take away a future in which AI might aid human creativity and art-making, at this moment, feels foolish. The show does not demonstrate the same level of care for the image or score as it does for the systems that produce them. So often, the show stressed the collaborative nature of their AI use. All of these folks come and share time, space, and their very bodies with each other and the AI choir they are building. The question that looms over the show: how is training an AI choir any more communal than the traditional choir? What is the difference in the aggregation of voices and beings other than the displacement and invisibility of the body?


Starmirror is on view through January 18, 2026 @ KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Complicated Patterns: Read an Interview of Ian Davis →

 

Ian Davis, Waiters, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim.

 

Connoisseurs of world order fill Ian Davis’s canvases, their picturesque and surreal stomping grounds an ode to both beauty and horror. The eeriness of his hyper-structured displays is overlaid by a rhythmic attitude and hip-hop influence. Davis’s landscapes keep a certain distance from the scenes they portray—the viewer is implicated at altitude, surveying a scene as you might an out-of-body experience. The entrapments of the modern day—wealth, power, surveillance—are articulated by a contemporary rendition of art history’s revered flâneurs. Starting with a blank canvas and a commitment to an idea, Davis’s process is completely inseparable from his final product, which are both uniquely his own. Read more.

Richard Linklater Offers a Sweet, if Tame, Ode to Jean-Luc Godard


text by Emma Grimes


Richard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is a sentimental love letter to the French New Wave—that brief postwar period in cinema when a group of young critics with nerve and conviction just about altered every rule about how movies could look and how we should think about them. In celebrating these filmmakers, Linklater offers a pleasant and affectionate reminder of their originality.

The film opens in 1959, as Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows makes its Cannes debut, and a restless Jean-Luc Godard, still a critic at Cahiers du Cinema, is itching to direct his first feature film. Cahiers is now known as the breeding ground for these insolent critics-turned-directors that punctured the French film establishment. As critic David Kehr wrote, it was the start of “film criticism as a contact sport.”

To Godard, his role as a filmmaker was a continuation of his role as critic. He didn’t see them as two separate pursuits; rather, his films were his criticism too, just imparted differently. And soon enough, he got his shot at making that film with a script from Truffaut, allegedly based on a real crime story pulled from the newspaper. The eventual result, Breathless, is restless, improvised, and spectacularly alive.

Linklater succinctly captures Godard’s taut vision and stubbornness as a director. A significant portion of the film takes place in Parisian bistros, where the cast and crew lounge around, waiting for their cue from Godard. Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) don’t rehearse their lines because there are no lines to rehearse in advance. Some days on set last just two hours. His peculiar and erratic filmmaking approach causes Seberg to doubt whether he has any overarching vision at all. She wants to call it quits at one point.

While some or all of these historical facts about the making of the movie may be familiar to cinephiles, it’s a pleasure to watch it all unfold on the big screen and in the hands of these actors. Guillaume Marbeck gives a brooding and very focused Godard, but Deutch steals the screen as Seberg. She is sharp, radiant, and elusive. You can immediately understand why Godard wanted to capture her unguarded, candid self.

And the rest of the Godard checklist, Linklater crosses off: his use of the handheld camera, on-location shooting, disregard for continuity editing, and his insistence on capturing spontaneity. The critic Armond White wrote in 2007 that half a century of familiarity with Breathless has bred “a certain kind of nonchalance” about the wildly original and trailblazing film. “The excitement of discovery is almost gone,” White writes, “meaning it’s time for rediscovery.”

Linklater succeeds at doing just that, allowing a modern audience to see it anew—to feel, perhaps for the first time, how pioneering and defiant these young filmmakers once were and how strange their perspective once seemed. We meet and spend a little time with other filmmakers, including Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and Robert Bresson.

But in rediscovering Godard and his cohort of iconoclasts, Linklater inevitably folds something once radical into a consumable product with duller edges. This paradox is inevitable for the project he’s after, that of sincerely celebrating the New Wave’s pioneering achievements. Nevertheless, it risks feeling like one of those “vintage” t-shirts sold online—retro and unique in spirit, but mass-produced in reality.

Still, none of this diminishes the pleasure of watching this film. I loved every minute. The wood-fire crackling of the film reel, the warmth and ebullience of Deutch’s embodiment of Seberg, the beautiful imitations of original shots from Breathless—it’s all undeniably, intensely pleasurable.

But to truly honor Godard would mean scandalizing us again, making something unruly instead of sweet and digestible. Nouvelle Vague isn’t any fresher than convenience store candy, but it does taste just as nice and is impossible to resist.

Read An Interview Of Jingyi Li On Craft, Culture And Feminism →

 
The hidden drawer tea spoon set

Jingyi Li. The Hidden Drawer-Tea Spoon, 2024. 16x26x2.5cm, Bobbin Lace, antique tea spoon case.

 

interview by Lola Titilayo

At the center of feminist practice, soft-spoken materials, and Asian heritage, Jingyi Li is defining contemporary artistry through storytelling. Drawing on her PhD in anthropology, she weaves research, memory, and cultural narrative into delicate, hand-crafted lace and other tactile materials, transforming everyday objects into installations that explore emotion, identity, and history. From intimate cutlery sets in The Hidden Drawer to larger immersive works like The Oyster Pail, Li’s work unlocks the expressive potential of unconventional materials, creating spaces where Asian women’s stories are told. Read more.

An Interview of Ari and Eitan Selinger on Their New Film 'On The End' →

“He must have had a really bizarre experience. He was sitting on his porch watching the movie of his life.”

 
 

interview by Poppy Baring

On The End, directed by Ari Selinger and scored by Eitan Selinger, tells the story of Tom Ferreira, a mechanic living in Montauk at the end of the glamorized Hamptons town. The film, which is heavily based on a true story and was made within feet of the home that inspired it, is a highly emotional chronicle of a contestable yet ultimately good-hearted man being bullied by property developers. The film not only reveals issues of greed and corruption, but it also tells the story of love and loss between Tom and fellow outcast Freckles. With local actors Tim Blake Nelson playing the former and Mireille Enos as the latter, a certain intimacy with the community lends the film a sense of sincerity. In this interview, Ari Selinger and his brother Eitan Selinger discuss their fraternal dynamic, their choices behind the score, and they reflect on the real Tom who inspired the film and passed shortly after it was made. Read More.

Dawn Williams Boyd Inverts America's Racial Narrative @ Fort Gansevoort

Dawn Williams Boyd
Abduction, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
45 x 67.5 inches

text by Hank Manning

In FEAR at Fort Gansevoort, Dawn Williams Boyd inverts American history, imagining a parallel universe where Black oppressors imported white slaves and have maintained an economy predicated on race-based exploitation for centuries. Her cloth paintings, made with textiles imported from Africa, all closely resemble canonical American ephemera, including historical photographs and advertisements. Maintaining this color-inverting framework, the gallery, for its third solo exhibition with Boyd, has painted its typically white walls black. 

The exhibition quickly succeeds in making us hyperaware of our racial biases. The scenes depicted—enslaved people chained together on ships, hooded horsemen celebrating lynchings, peaceful protestors attacked by police and civilians—are so ingrained in our memories that we instinctively assign roles before noticing Boyd has reversed them. Even knowing the artist’s intent, standing before these explicit works, our minds still resist the uncanny world she constructs. 

 

Dawn Williams Boyd
Brainwashed, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
66 x 43.5 inches

 

In addition to these violent scenes, Boyd highlights the psychological violence that racism perpetuates in relation to the commercialization of cultural tropes. In a piece titled Brainwashed, a young Black girl, holding a black bar of soap, asks a white slave, “Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with Fairy Soap?” We are directly confronted with the immediate qualities we assign to the colors black and white, as well as how these perceptions affect one’s feelings of self-worth, particularly when learned at a young age.

Dawn Williams Boyd
Cultural Appropriation, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
47 x 58 inches

More than 150 years after the de jure end of slavery in America, economic and social inequalities persist. In keeping with this reality, Boyd’s textile works generally proceed chronologically through history, but they offer no hint of progress toward integration or equality; the racial divide remains unambiguous. She further underscores the role of seemingly benevolent industries, like entertainment and medicine, in perpetuating racial inequality. We see white subjects forced into society’s most exploited roles, from dancing in banana skirts in service of the hegemonic class (at a Prohibition era nightclub in Harlem), to being the subjects of gruesome gynecological research (imitating the work of Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology” who performed studies on enslaved Black women). In the real world, Black patients disproportionately lack access to the advances their exploitation made possible.

Dawn Williams Boyd
The Lost Cause Mythos, 2025
Assorted fabrics and cotton embroidery floss
56 x 70.5 inches

In The Lost Cause Mythos, a reframed Gone With the Wind features a white mammy serving a Black Scarlett O’Hara. Boyd addresses the power of art in shaping and reinforcing societal myths, however, she refuses to entertain the “happy slave” stereotype, instead portraying a despondent attendant. White characters lose their individuality; in settings from the beginning of the slave trade to the present day, men and women sport identical short blond hair and appear either nearly nude or in plain white garments. This homogenization dehumanizes them, treating them as props devoid of personality. Their Black counterparts, by contrast, have diverse hairstyles and elaborate clothing in a variety of colors, with red—here a symbol of power—especially prevalent.

Today, the US federal government and many state governments are attacking DEI initiatives, legal protections secured by the Civil Rights movement, and the honest teaching of American history, denigrating attempts to right historical wrongs as “reverse racism.” Boyd’s stark work puts these unsubstantiated claims into perspective. It asserts the degree to which most Americans underestimate the ongoing legacy of systemic racism and emphasizes the role of emotion in our material world. We see fear in the eyes of everyone, from those experiencing the horrors below deck on slave ships to a fragile ruling class who feels existentially entitled to their privilege and is terrified of losing it. 

Dawn Williams Boyd: FEAR is on view through January 24 at Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York

AI Epistemicide

 

Can you show me AI’s soul? prompt ChatGPT 2025

 

text by Perry Shimon

The wholesale expropriation of human energies on the internet under the guise of “Artificial Intelligence” signals one of the most significant enclosures in human history, as well as a radical restructuring of how knowledge is produced and accessed. In his 2014 Epistemologies of the South, sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers the concept of epistemicide to describe the annihilation of systems of knowledge and their supporting cultures. Another kind of epistemicide is currently underway today because a small group of profit-motivated private companies—mostly based in Silicon Valley and with global ambitions—have expropriated the collectively produced knowledge commons available on the internet (with all its questionable content) and created an epistemic regime that operates opaquely, producing the illusion of intelligence while habituating—even addicting—its users to its protocols with sophisticated psychological manipulation and design.

It is inconceivable to imagine a version of corporate AI that prioritizes anything besides the maximization and concentration of profits at the expense of its users, the environment, and the social good. Time and again the algorithmic-like functioning, laws, and fiduciary duties of capitalism have proven this outcome. This is especially true in Silicon Valley, where a handful of companies control nearly the entirety of the internet, making fortunes from our now-impoverished experiences of inquiry and sociality—and becoming ever more transactional, cunning, costly, and pathological.

We are witnessing, under the banner of “AI,” the capitulation of entire traditions of education and knowledge production, surrendering themselves to this new regime. Within the usual “move fast break things” velocities of internet capitalism it’s impossible to keep up with the rate people who are adopting these new technologies and schools that are restructuring themselves to accommodate them. The early figures are staggering and point towards a further acceleration of attentional and analytic incapacitation. 

Artificial intelligence functions by finding patterns in massive amounts of data and then predicting similar chains of words based on repetition in the dataset. This, of course, reproduces biases and effectively makes the question of “truth” a question of statistical probability. This also suggests a susceptibility to the manipulation of truth with the production of affirmative or operational data, amounting to the most repetitive insistence of data-fied knowledge winning the game of truth.

Image courtesy of Growtika, Unsplash

It should go without saying that machines stringing together probabilistic chains of language does not equate to wisdom or knowledge in any meaningful sense. It stands to reason that without people doing the intellectual work of adding to—and often overturning—conventional thinking, these models will simply deteriorate into a warm, static dribble of historical ignorance largely bound to the narrow historical window and contemporaneous data in which it was conceived. Any emerging contribution to our knowledge commons will have to compete in arenas of attention and repetition to become statistically significant as an analytically incapacitated public increasingly relies on regurgitated probabilities. 

It seems inevitable that Silicon Valley—the same industry that has devalued nearly every other form of creative and intellectual production—will not fairly remunerate those responsible for producing the data which it appropriates into its epistemic regime. It is also crucial to point out how many forms of knowledge do not make themselves available to binary, computational logic—the outgrowth of the same regime responsible for the epistemicide acknowledged by de Sousa Santos.

Within military applications, the camouflage of “AI” allows a level of impunity, for example, in the targeted killing of civilians in operations carried out by states using these automated technologies. Israel’s “Lavender” and “Daddy’s Home” are two horrifying recent examples of how AI can be used for indiscriminate murder in larger political projects—in this case, the genocide in Palestine. So-called AI is also being used by formations of power around the world to automate and optimize many kinds of lesser disciplinary and punitive relations on vulnerable populations, including predictive policing, traffic enforcement, bail decisions, public benefits, and the targeting of political activists.

The excessive focus on AI is a form of misdirection that serves to distract the general public from the near-total monopoly capitalism of the current internet. It produces a new imaginative frontier, filled with scary monsters and geopolitical urgencies that shift focus away from the small cabal of monopolists who control our collective knowledge and means of using it—often in collusion with oppressive and violent states. Most of the terms of the debate—the stakes, framing, fears, and so on—are produced by the same industry that profits from them. This is a strategy to limit and steer the conversation while enrolling new users, generating hype, raising capital, soliciting government subsidies, evading regulation, and generally increasing their control. The Silicon Valley model is one of wild speculation, driven by utterly deceitful rhetorical claims, massive environmental costs, and the end goal of monopolization and endless growth.

This is not an inevitability and the time to act otherwise is now. There are existing models, both on and offline, that offer a clear path forward: Wikipedia and the library are as good as any. Wikipedia is a massive nonprofit, collectively-produced form of knowledge commons which everyone benefits from. Without the burden of a profit incentive, it continues to help the world better understand itself within a system of transparency and accountability. The library is our oldest and most sustained example of a socialist good for all, and much of the internet should be reconfigured in its image. Search, social platforms, mapping, and, to some extent, the minor technological affordances of generative and predictive LLMs should all be reimagined as nonprofit utilities for the collective benefit of the entire world, as we remediate our social and ecological conditions.

Criterion Collection and Dover Street Market launch Holiday Curation In Los Angeles and New York

This holiday season, Criterion steps out from the living room and into the city, partnering with Dover Street Market to transform film history into a tactile, immersive experience. For two days only, December 13–14, dedicated installation spaces at DSM New York and DSM Los Angeles will host a carefully curated selection from the Criterion Collection—inviting visitors to browse, discover, and linger among some of cinema’s most enduring works.

At the heart of the program is a reverence for authorship and atmosphere. Collector sets spanning the radical tenderness of Agnès Varda, the baroque spectacle of Fellini, the aching romanticism of Wong Kar Wai, and the existential weight of Bergman anchor the offering, alongside Criterion milestones and cult-defining epics like Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films. Single editions punctuate the selection with sharp contrasts: the icy ritualism of Eyes Wide Shut, the restless rebellion of Breathless, the intimate spectacle of Grey Gardens, and the cultural urgency of Do the Right Thing.

The films and merchandise will remain available throughout December, extending the invitation to revisit, rewatch, and reframe the season through the language of film.

Diesel’s SS26 Collection Is Leading the Way in Democratizing Fashion

 
 

text by Alper Kurtul

Rather than presenting a collection this season, Diesel launched a game. . Milan’s streets, clubs, bars, hotels, galleries, and even its hidden corners were transformed into a giant egg hunt, turning the city into a living fashion map. Fifty-five looks appeared inside transparent capsules waiting to be found, with the first five people to discover them all receiving full Diesel looks before Christmas. 

Inside the transparent capsules, the clothes confront the city without fear. One of the looks features a pastel-printed top paired with a skirt made from soft, furry textures, cut into oval openings that reveal the hips with a mischievous wink. The long floral skirt that completes the silhouette suggests a memory of domestic comfort., Yet the futuristic enclosure and the glowing circular platform beneath the model’s feet transform that memory into a performance. This tension between intimacy and spectacle is pure Diesel. It is softness that dares to provoke.

 
 

Another look turns fragility into armor. A cloud-like explosion of fiber surrounds the shoulders and chest, as if the model had grown wings. The muted velvet skirt and floral tights extend the body like vines reaching for streetlights. A small handle bag hangs from her wrist like a treasured secret. The gaze is direct and unshaken. Diesel understands that beauty has teeth and that elegance can be a weapon.

SS26 proudly carries this attitude. Denim on denim is back in full form. The courage of the 2000s and the freedom of the 1970s meet in the same silhouettes. Bleached effects and visible seams bring the fabric’s raw essence to the surface. Distressed satin denim pulls you in with a single touch. Grey skirts, hair clips clipped into bags, leather cuffs, and metallic footwear celebrate experimentation as identity.

Accessories become characters in this story. Bags sit at a midpoint between sculpture and utility, and some are treated almost like wearable secrets with compact shapes that ask the viewer to come closer. Silver shoes and buckled heels ground the looks in a crisp present tense while futuristic jewelry sits high on the collarbone like talismans from a world where fashion and survival share the same language. Every piece is a reminder that attitude requires an object to anchor itself in the real. Diesel offers those anchors with confidence and mischief.

Jumpsuits appear as if psychedelic animal skins were taken apart and rebuilt again. Knit pieces wrap the body while refusing every expected rule. Punk-like defiance blends with pop-like shine in a single movement. Diesel chooses to redefine luxury rather than hide beneath its shadow. Fashion is a participatory act. That is why the collection is not restricted. It is shareable. People are hunting for these looks, because fashion is finally for everyone.

timo fahler’s TERMINAL CLASSIC Meditates on Personal Upheaval & Collective Uncertainty @ Sebastian Gladstone Gallery

 

timo fahler, SKYBEARER, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 62" H x 42" W x 4" D

 

text by Caia Cupolo

timo fahler’s TERMINAL CLASSIC is a series of eight sculptural wall works that combine images from ancient Maya culture with symbols of America power, meditating on memory, the weight of ancestry, personal upheaval and collective uncertainty. Its title refers to the period between 250-900 CE, when many of the great Maya city-states in the southern lowlands experienced a socio-political collapse and abandonment that is often referred to as the Maya Collapse. Created while the artist was moving from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, these works mark a major life change as his family expanded and emigrated.

fahler’s “SKYBEARER” in stained glass is set behind rusting window bars. This is one of the four deities responsible for holding up the sky, separating it from Earth, and making mortal life possible. His incarceration might explain what has gone so terribly wrong with the cosmic order.

In “IDYLLIC, IDEALIC, IDEA LICK, I’D EEL LICK, I DEAL ICK,” the White House is presented “like a stage prop or an empty shell, holding only the idea of something.” It serves as a potent symbol of the crumbling face of American capitalism, particularly in juxtaposition with “FLAG,” which is seen directly ahead when you enter the gallery. This buckling discarded bedspring that sat in the artist’s studio for months revealed itself as an American flag when fahler discovered that it was composed of thirteen rows. It was the very last piece he created before leaving Los Angeles.

 

timo fahler, flag, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 73" H x 50" w x 8" D

 

Because fahler is of mixed heritage, his work often touches on what it feels like to be caught between his Mexican and American cultures. This inner conflict is further articulated by the delicate friction between fragile, colorful glass held by rough, industrial materials, like rusted steel fences, metal bed springs, and rebar. This skillful balance of strength and fragility gives the work an almost animist sense of emotional stability.

When the light hits the stained glass, it casts vivid, colorful shadows on the wall, creating an ethereal extension to the work that is constantly transforming as the day passes. In effect, these shadows act as a performative counterpart to works that are initially perceived as purely visual. Within the changing environment, the integrity of the work and the narrative it portrays persist.

TERMINAL CLASSIC is on view through December 13 @ Sebastian Gladstone Gallery 36 White Street, New York

Beverly Buchanan in Berlin: "Beverly Buchanan. Weathering" @ Haus am Waldsee

text by Arlo Kremen


Standing a block away from the last stop of the U3 at Krumme Lanke, Haus am Waldsee, a beautiful residence turned art museum, sits by the Zehlendorf quarter’s local lake, or Waldsee. Haus am Waldsee is the only property on the lake where all visitors are free to access the water, a facet of the institution deeply in line with the ethos of the late Beverly Buchanan’s work. For her “shack” works, Buchanan regularly trespassed onto the grounds of these structures of Southern American vernacular architecture for photos and inspiration, coming face to face with many upset, disgruntled, and irritated homeowners, but also new friends. In this regular practice, she met Ms. Mary Lou Fulcron, a woman who had built her house and lived alone. In an excerpt of the artist’s writing, Buchanan shares how she helped carry logs for Ms. Fulcron, and her challenge of ingratiating herself with an isolated black woman in Georgia, a challenge that had become a regular exercise for the artist. From her brief diary entry pinned up in the show, Ms. Fulcron meant a lot to Buchanan. A woman of endurance, who, when hospitalized, escaped back to her house on foot, ten miles away, scared something would happen to her home.

These are the stories Buchanan saw in every shack she came across, with many of these structures being somewhat-restyled slave cabins. She saw power, endurance, and survival in each and every one. When speaking to curators, Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers told another story of Buchanan entering a home at night without a roof. All she wrote about was how clear the stars were. She never came to a home with judgment, critique, or patronizing worry; she came to these homes as if they were art objects—monuments to those who live and have lived in them.

Beverly Buchanan
Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) [with legend], 1989
Print on paper
10 x 23 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

Ima-Abasi Okon made two accompanying works to the show. The first involved lockboxes outside the premises that take visitors to the lake and onto the private property around the museum. In these lockboxes are lube and organic materials. Lube is a substance to bring an object into a space where it does not belong. With its sexual connotations, the interaction between foreign object and intruded upon space can be procreative and pleasurable, referring to Buchanan’s trespassings and their paramount role in her practice. The other works Okon made were wall paintings covering every inch of wall with pollen. Titled Sex (2025), the walls are streaked yellow, bringing the materiality and smell of the outside inside. Here, Okon submits the walls to environmental degradation, a frequent technique of her more labor-intensive sculptural works. With a title like Sex, Okon also propounds this feature of her work as similarly pleasurable and procreative. 

A common misconception of Buchanan’s oeuvre is that she is an outsider artist. However, the artist had been exhibited at A.I.R. gallery alongside contemporary and friend Ana Mendieta and started out as an abstract expressionist under the tutelage of Norman Lewis. Buchanan was trained as an insider. Her works are of the trends of her time, land art, conceptual art, and post-minimalism, but her works have a D.I.Y. inflection to them. Her shacks, alongside her other wooden construction pieces, are undeniably in conversation with the folk art of the South. According to Buchanan, she always “made things,” never really understanding her creations as art objects until later. She began her professional life in medicine, studying parasitology at Columbia University, which brought her to New York, where she eventually connected with the Art Students’ League. 

Beverly Buchanan,
Lamar County, GA, 2003
Oil pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

The artist suffered from several chronic illnesses, having stacks of medical bills to pay at any given time. To pay these bills, Buchanan sold many of her works for the exact prices of different bills, spreading her work across a plethora of private owners in and outside of Macon and Athens, Georgia. Hilke and Remmers, doing research in the state to prepare for this show, ventured into many homes only to find different Buchanan works on unassuming walls and tables. All of her flower works exhibited in the show came from these homes. The flowers were put together by Okon, offering a contrasting side to the artist, who, in adjoining rooms, has her still sculptural works. One such room includes her monumental frustula, cement sculptures whose molds she made from bricks and found materials like milk cartons. The frustula works, while many being of different cement mixtures, all have a timeless, enduring quality—shaped by time. The flowers, on the other hand, are electric. Quick, loose-colored scrawlings across paper build up a shape that could be called anything but still lives. Her shack pastels have an identical effect. Often exhibited with the shack sculptures, the curators made the decision to show the pastels on the second floor, overlooking the sculpture garden. By separating pastels from sculptures, both mediums could stand autonomously, the curators prevent the unfortunate hierarchy that tends to favor the shack sculptures as the more prominent representations.

Beverly Buchanan
Untitled, 1978—1980
Print on glossy paper
20 x 25 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering took a very gentle, nuanced approach to the wide-ranging work of Beverly Buchanan, permitting her work to breathe and soak up the space as individual works and as series, while simultaneously forwarding the artist’s massive archive. Buchanan had a rigorous documentation process—photos, writings, poems, and drawings—spread by the stairwell on the second floor, situating her ephemera as a prime feature of her practice. Her archiving instinct became of sizable importance to her Marsh Ruins (1981). For this land piece on the coast of Georgia, Buchanan built a memorial to the enslaved people who, once landed on American soil, raced to the water and drowned as an act of return to their homes. Funded by the Guggenheim grant, Buchanan worked with a few other laborers to make tabby stones that blend into the swamp landscape, becoming nearly unrecognizable as human-made objects. Shown as a slideshow, the recording covers the correspondence between the artist and the Guggenheim, the work proceeds through the day-by-day photographic coverage with supplementary captions taken by the artist to prove the project was completed. Although not necessarily Marsh Ruins, the work shown is an artwork in its own right, turning bureaucratic processes into a creative act. Beverly Buchanan. Weathering showcases a nuanced approach to Buchanan’s work, all while giving visitors a glimpse into her mind to reveal a singular person who stretched her art into every corner of her life.


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering is on view through February 1st @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

New York In The Eighties: A Blueprint For The Present

 
An image of Keith Haring on the New York Subway in the 1980s

Tseng Kwong Chi
Keith Haring in New York City Subway Car, 1981/2019
Gelatin silver print
20 × 30 inches

 

text by Lola Titilayo

Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties reveals a decade shaped by cultural pressure points – economic insecurity, constitutional backlash, a public health catastrophe, and the debate over who gets to be seen, feeling uncannily familiar in today’s world. The show frames the decade as a blueprint for understanding the problems artists face today, battling with institutions, identity, and the power of image in everyday life.

After the financial crisis of the 1970s, New York entered a decade marked by raw, unpredictable talent, with artists who were defiantly bent on redefining what art could be. Rising artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, and Christopher Wool began reshaping contemporary art, challenging expectations, and expanding the bounds of artistic expression. The ’80s ushered in a new era, in which experimentation and radical expression were the gravitational center of the scene.

Entire neighborhoods downtown were still gritty, industrial, and half-abandoned, which allowed artists to claim lofts and storefronts as studios, galleries, and performance spaces. The lack of structure made the city fertile ground for artists to experiment, and community was paramount in bringing ideas together. From the economic crisis recovery to the rise of AIDS, art became a way to claim space, identity, and voice often in ways that were provocative and deeply personal to the artist.

An image of the 'What Me Worry' piece by Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (What me worry?), 1987
Photographic silkscreen on vinyl
107 7⁄8 × 127 15⁄16 inches

One of the defining threads was a turn toward confrontational, socially charged art. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (What Me Worry?) exemplifies this impulse. Using her signature combination of bold, declarative text layered over ironic phrases and imagery, Kruger exposes the gap between the carefree façade promoted by mass culture and the complicated reality underneath.

The phrase “What me worry?” places the viewer inside that first-person statement, while challenging them to question the role that  privilege plays in determining the content and degree of our worries. In doing so, the work pushes the viewer to step outside the passive acceptance of cultural norms and to recognize how language and imagery shape our emotional responses.

A Guerrilla Girls piece on women one person exhibitions in New York

Guerrilla Girls
How Many Women Had One-Person Exhibitions at NYC Museums Last Year?, 1985
Off-set print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches

On the recurring theme of confrontational art, Guerrilla Girls calls out discrimination in the art world. These bold posters were designed to draw viewers’ attention to the main issue for women in the art industry: the lack of representation in major institutions and solo exhibitions within a global art capital. True to their approach, the Guerrilla Girls maintain anonymity using gorilla masks as a way to shift the attention from the individual to the collective message.

Works such as untitled(fred) by Kenny Scharf, embody the decade’s chaotic energy with the use of clashing patterns, complementary colors, and cartoonish, improvised expressions.

'the advantaged of being a woman artist' piece by Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls
The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
Print on paper
Sheet: 17 × 22 inches

In Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Gravestone, the three-door installation represents the architecture of a monument to life, death, and what lies beyond. Created just a year before his death, the rigid doors form passages to Basquiat’s life and memories. His untitled (Mary Boone) features a rough painting of a crown, with “mary boone” written underneath. A fitting inclusion for the curator, as she marks her triumphant return to the New York art world.  

A piece by Jean Michael Basquiat, three doors

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Gravestone, 1987
Acrylic and oil on wooden panels
5415⁄16 × 687⁄8 × 221⁄16 inches

Keith Haring, along with artists such as González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, and Niki de Saint Phalle confronted society with its role in the AIDS epidemic. On a formal level, Haring experimented with diverse surfaces such as ceramic vases and chalkboards, adapting his signature dancing figures to new textures while preserving the joyful energy of his line work. Jeff Koons, by contrast, embraced materials like stainless steel, transforming everyday objects into highly-polished, hyper-reflective icons of consumer culture. Together, these artists pushed material boundaries using unexpected textures to reimagine the relationship between art, objects, and cultural norms.

A vase by Keith Haring

Keith Haring
Untitled (Gold Vase), 1981
Felt-tip pen and enamel on fiberglass vase
40 × 25 × 25 inches

Downtown/Uptown New York in the Eighties is on view through December 13 at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York

Clearings, Cosmos and Underground Rivers: Labubu at Highgate

text by Perry Shimon

Over the span of two days, the two most important—and certainly most online—people in my life told me about Labubu. They sketched out the general contours of this social and economic phenomenon, the latest craze in children’s collectibles, seemingly growing ever more complex alongside the development of capitalism. We did a cursory review online. One meme caught my attention: someone had photographed a Labubu on Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery. 

This darkly brilliant intervention invoked what Marx described as “commodity fetishism” and the difference between “use value” and “exchange value.” If we accept that Labubu has even a modicum of inherent pleasure or comfort, this would be considered its use value; the exchange value lies in the exorbitant prices and resale markets it commands. Commodity fetishism is the hype that occludes the material and labor conditions that produce Labubu, in this case, workers in Dongguan factories where China Labor Watch has chronicled endemic overtime hours, low base wages, non-compliance with contracts, and unsafe conditions involving toxic chemicals. In some cases, Dongguan workers endure 70–100 hours per week, are cheated out of overtime pay, and are housed in overcrowded dormitories.

These small, moderately cute, and largely demonic-looking commodity fetishes embody the speculative character of financial capitalism. Collectors buy a Labubu at a dubious cost, often not even knowing exactly what they’re getting, or “blind boxing,” as it is marketed. The value of each fetish is arbitrarily determined by an artificial scarcity. Then the figures trade on secondary speculative markets, potentially generating profits. Labubu is an education in financialization for children.

A few nights earlier, I saw an acquaintance at a birthday gathering at Close-Up, a beloved east London independent cinema—a theoretical cosmologist, professor, and conceptual artist called Reza. We shared a long, convivial conversation about art, friendship, and the cosmos, and he invited me for a walk in Queen’s Wood near Highgate.

On the overground ride up to see Reza, I asked ChatGPT to elaborate Labubu for me, prompting Marxian, postmodern, and psychoanalytic readings, as well as inquiring what Sianne Ngai might have to say based on her theorization of the aesthetic dimensions of post-Fordist capitalism—and in particular her fascinating work on the cute and the gimmick. When we met at the station near his home, I gave Reza a short, AI-augmented primer and suggested we check on the Labubu status at Marx’s grave. He warmly agreed, though with what felt like minor reservation—that I later learned was the £10 fee to enter the cemetery where Marx is buried: perhaps one of the greatest perversities one could conceive.

On our walk over, Reza recounted his affectionate conversation with a transit worker at the tube station and lamented the walls that now enclosed the common grounds and cemeteries he had happily wandered in his youth. When we arrived, I informed the gentleman at the ticket counter that I was a journalist who worked for a Los Angeles-based art magazine and was here to do a story about the Labubus accumulating on Marx’s grave. “And this is my friend Reza, who’s a theoretical cosmologist,” I added.

“Um… this is above my pay grade…” the ticket seller replied, picking up a radio: “I have a journalist from an art magazine in Los Angeleese, here with a…”

“Theoretical cosmologist,” I repeated.

“…and they would like to go see if there are…”

“Any more Labubus on Marx’s grave.”

After a long pause came a slightly garbled “Well, carry on then…” and we continued along, laughing together, until we reached the small gathering around Marx’s final resting place.

There were no Labubus to be seen, though there was one raggedy Beanie Baby, quite a few flowers, and several letters. I added a Gilchester bun—a favorite sourdough roll from the beloved E5 bakery—as a kind of ofrenda. We stayed for a bit, took some pictures, and Reza suggested we continue up to the park next door, where he offered a free and relatively unobscured vista on the same spot. Minutes later, standing behind the fence and looking back on the milling pilgrims, we expressed our sadness for these dark times. We sat in the park café and shared a cold bottle of water, marveling at a red-haired child playing in the verdant grass, floating butterflies, and gently windswept trees. Over the course of our conversation Reza quoted Rumi and contoured the limits of quantum mechanics. I asked about the ludic quality of math in Babylonia and how we’ve become so ruinously obsessed with the quantifiable.

Queen’s Wood is a 21-hectare ancient woodland where stately oaks and beech canopy holly, hazel, hornbeam, and hawthorn, and are home to breeding pairs of passerines like the endangered song thrush, long praised for its melodious call. Reza walked me to a clearing in the woods and on to the mouth of the subterranean Moselle River, one of several tributaries buried in the name of progress. We quietly reflected on these fascinating spaces of revealing and concealment. Reza shared that he had taken our mutual friends here for an installment of their London Walking Collective’s peregrinations. When we passed the clearing again on the way back, it was filled with children at play, their happy song in the peaceful wood. Reza had me over for a delicious vegetarian mezze. We ate in the garden with his wife, laughing about Labubus and recounting our day.

This World Which Is Made Of Our Love For Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

—Rumi
(The Essential Rumi, trans. C. Barks)

Bugonia Marks A Cosmic Return for Yorgos Lanthimos

IMDb

text by Alper Kurtul

Fresh off his Golden Lion win in Venice with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Lido two years later with Bugonia, a film that brings his unmistakable dark wit to a story shaped by escalating suspense and keeps its audience on edge for two relentless hours. The project follows Kinds of Kindness, a triptych released last year that recalled the scrappy inventiveness of his early low-budget films and featured Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons in three sharply drawn roles. The pair now leads Bugonia, turning their on-screen chemistry into yet another chapter of their ongoing collaboration with Lanthimos. Stone and the director first teamed up on The Favourite, and Bugonia marks their fifth project together. The partnership has already earned her two Oscar nominations and the Poor Things win, along with a long list of other awards. Yet, the fact that Lanthimos has not made a major English-language film without her in the last five years creates an odd feeling of dependence for both artists. A similar tension surrounds Plemons. After winning Best Actor at Cannes for his work in Kinds of Kindness, he returns in a role that, on paper, looked uncannily like a continuation of that film’s universe. When Bugonia was first announced, many wondered whether the project risked becoming an unofficial fourth chapter for both actors and whether they might be repeating themselves.

Despite all of these early concerns, both Stone and Plemons rise to the challenge with remarkable command. Their performances demand intense physicality and emotional whiplash, and they navigate these extremes with precision. Bugonia also marks a shift behind the camera. For the first time in years, Lanthimos steps away from his usual writing partners. The screenplay is not penned by Tony McNamara, who crafted the acidic dialogue of The Favourite and Poor Things, nor by Efthimis Filippou, who shaped the bone-dry strangeness of Dogtooth, The Lobster, and Kinds of Kindness. Instead, the script belongs to Will Tracy, who collaborates with Lanthimos for the first time after his work on Succession and The Menu. What distinguishes Bugonia most clearly from the rest of the director’s filmography is the fact that it is his first remake.

Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Bugonia is a strikingly faithful reimagining of the 2003 South Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet. Tracy adapts the original work of Jang Joon-hwan into a suburban American hostage thriller without losing the unhinged spirit of the source. The story follows Teddy, played by Plemons, a man whose mental stability is tenuous at best. Together with his cousin Don, played by Aidan Delbis, he kidnaps Michelle, the CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Auxolith, played by Stone. Teddy blames the company for the illness of his comatose mother, portrayed by Alicia Silverstone, and becomes convinced that Michelle is secretly an extraterrestrial. The film unfolds around his desperate attempt to force a confession. It opens with a wildly funny abduction sequence that leans fully into physical comedy before dropping into a far darker register once the interrogation begins. The tonal shift is sharp but purposeful, and the film settles into an atmosphere reminiscent of the alien paranoia cinema of the 1970s, blending absurdity with the rhythms of a police procedural.

Bugonia arrives in a year when the horror and thriller genres have surged with films like Sinners, Weapons, and Together signaling a cinematic landscape hungry for provocation. Lanthimos’s film fits neatly into this environment, although it remains uncertain whether it will satisfy fans who have come to expect the feverish surrealism of his past work. Visually, the director leaves behind his signature fisheye lenses and stylized framing in favor of a more conventional aesthetic. The choice feels linked to the nature of the remake and to his decision to keep the structure of the original largely intact, aside from transforming the genders of two central characters. This fidelity pulls Bugonia slightly away from the flamboyant extremity associated with his name. Yet the presence of his long-standing collaborators preserves the film’s authorship. Jerskin Fendrix, whose music for Poor Things earned an Oscar nomination, returns with a score that hums with unease. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography mirrors the story’s jittery energy, and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, who has edited nearly all of Lanthimos’s major works, brings his familiar rhythmic discipline to the project.

IMDb

Following the success of The Substance, it has become clear that festival circuits are increasingly drawn to films that flirt with body horror and other boundary-stretching genres. Audiences, too, seem eager for bold cinematic experiences. In this climate, it is no surprise that Lanthimos would take on a project with significant commercial potential while still indulging his taste for tonal risk. Bugonia ultimately delivers an entertaining experience. Its clever structural feints and its somewhat anthological-feeling finale offer unexpected pleasures without alienating viewers. Even so, the film carries a faint sense of déjà vu. After a decade of English-language work that expanded his international reach, Lanthimos seems to be arriving at a crossroads. Bugonia is engaging, inventive, and unmistakably his, yet it subtly hints at the possibility that he has started circling familiar terrain. It remains a film that few will resent, but it also invites questions about where the director will go next.

Salone del Mobile.Milano Enters Into Three-Year Partnership With Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong

Salone del Mobile.Milano’s new three-year partnership with Art Basel feels like a turning point for both the design world and the art market. With its debut during the VIP preview of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Salone introduced a quietly luxurious Collectors Lounge designed by Lissoni & Partners and filled with pieces from many of Italy’s most respected makers—names like Poltrona Frau, Molteni&C, Foscarini, Arper, and others. The intention is clear: Italian design isn’t content to orbit the art world anymore. It wants a seat at the center of the conversation.

For decades, Salone has been rooted in Milan, anchoring what is essentially the world’s most important design week. It has always been a destination for architects, buyers, and the broader design community. But the landscape has shifted. Collectors now think about furniture and lighting the way they think about art—objects that reflect taste, identity, and, increasingly, long-term value. At the same time, the art market itself has expanded into territory once reserved for architecture and design. By stepping into Art Basel’s ecosystem, Salone is acknowledging this blurred terrain and aiming to shape it rather than react to it.

Maria Porro, the president of Salone del Mobile.Milano, described the partnership as both timely and strategic. “Our role, today more than ever, is to anticipate the changes shaping the international market and to create the conditions for Italian companies to engage with new worlds, where art, design and cultural investments all come together,” she said. She makes the case that this isn’t simply about visibility but about placing design where it belongs. “Bringing Italian design into the heart of its Collectors Lounges means not only amplifying the international visibility of our companies, but enhancing the culture of design as a competitive asset.”

The Lounge in Miami is less a showroom than a carefully staged environment—soft lighting, sculptural seating, and that particular sense of calm that Italian design does so well. For the companies involved, it’s an opportunity to be in front of an audience that matters: collectors, museum patrons, developers, and cultural players who influence how taste moves globally. For those visiting, it reframes design pieces not as decorative afterthoughts but as part of the cultural landscape Art Basel has spent decades cultivating.

What’s clear is that this move is about more than one fair. By embedding itself in the Basel circuit, including the Hong Kong edition, Salone is positioning Italian design as something closer to cultural currency—objects that sit comfortably alongside contemporary art and share its language of prestige and intention.

There are challenges in crossing over so boldly, of course. The art world can be demanding; design risks becoming overly polished or drifting too far from its roots in craft and utility. Still, under Porro’s leadership, the direction feels deliberate. She has emphasized that the goal isn’t simply to place furniture in a room but to bring the “culture of design” into dialogue with a global audience.

If the partnership succeeds, it could reshape how design is collected, discussed, and valued—and, in the process, give Italian craftsmanship an even bigger role in shaping the spaces where culture is experienced today.

Autre Magazine Hosts An Intimate Dinner Celebrating Women In Arts and Motorsports At The Miami Beach EDITION During Art Week

Last night in Miami, on the occasion of Art Week, Autre Magazine, in collaboration with Driven Artists Racing Team, hosted an intimate dinner celebrating women in art and motorsports. The evening honored racecar driver Zoe Barry, who graces the magazine’s FW25 “Work In Progress” cover, and highlighted the dynamic intersection of creative expression and high-performance racing. Supported by CADDIS, the gathering brought together cultural luminaries—including musician and artist Kid Cudi, George Clinton, Crystal Waters, Olivier Picasso, Jeffrey Deitch, Tony Shafrazi, Spring McManus, and more—who dined family-style under the stars at The Miami Beach EDITION’s Matador Terrace. The evening celebrated artistry, innovation, and the bold spirit of women leading in both the arts and motorsports.

Surrealism's Provenance: "Networks of Surrealism" @ Neue Nationalgalerie

André Masson
Massaker “Massacre,” 1931
Oil on canvas
120 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

text by Arlo Kremen


Tucked behind the cafe and gift shop of the Neue Nationalgalerie sits a modest L-shaped gallery space. Enough room to fit a medium-sized show, one would not expect it to be used to host the Surrealists’ international cohort, who could very well fill the entire museum with their verbose oeuvre. As such, Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism has a specific aim, a narrowing agent succinct enough as to make the gallery space feel appropriately expansive to cover the community of artists with twenty-six works. The show homes in on provenance, tracking each displayed painting sourced from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection.

In 2023, around 100 artworks from the Pietzsch Collection received careful attention from researchers seeking to uncover each work’s origin and the succession of owners. The goal was to ascertain whether Nazi persecution played a factor in the shifting of ownership. During the Nazi occupation in France, the Surrealists and their interlocutors had to make a decision: flee into exile, remain as a part of the resistance, or go into hiding. This collection began in the 1970s and ended in the 2000s, acquiring works from galleries, dealers, and auction houses globally. The couple’s 2010 donation to the State of Berlin made this show and its research possible.

 
 

The show maps the provenance timeline of each displayed work, bringing historical narratives into the foreground. Biographical exhibitions can be a challenge. In a slightly different educational gesture than the anti-intellectualism plaguing museum plaques, where artists’ personal details take priority over the work itself, the work of art here still takes a secondary position to information. Art represents a story and thus loses its autonomy. The work is no longer important because it is art; the work is important for the history it represents. This approach attempts to give the gallery-goer a painless point of entry into art and meaning-making at large, but it never fails to come across as patronizing and distrustful of the audience’s intellect, assigning identity and history as prime tools for interpretation rather than the age-old skill of looking.

Many works benefited from the exhibition’s pursuit of historical narrative, unveiling colorful details of the Circle’s interpersonal affairs. The first painting of the show, Miró’s “The Arrow Piercing Smoke,” had originally been owned by the man it was dedicated to, Serge Lifar. The Ukrainian-French dancer and choreographer was a member of the notorious “Ballets Russes” and had worked closely with Max Ernst in costume and stage design. Appointed a year before and holding on to his directorship of the Ballet wing of the Paris Opera during Nazi Occupation, he was removed briefly for Nazi collaboration once the German occupying force retreated from France. “The Arrow Piercing Smoke” was held by Lifar for about thirty-six years before the painting’s acquisition by Paul Pétridès, where, at some point in the mid-1960s, it made the same leap across the Atlantic that Miró made to New York City nearly twenty years prior, eventually settling into the home of Alexander and Louisa Calder. While not necessarily about the art, the information supplementing the work poses it more as an object used to better understand the inner workings, members, associates, and the political landscape of the Surrealist diaspora.

Joan Miró
The Arrow Piercing Smoke, 1926
Oil on canvas
40 x 56 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

The show has quite a few Ernst paintings given its relatively small size. And this is by no means a critique—he was not only one of the most central figures of the movement but also was interned at Les Milles, the concentration camp that would inspire his escape to the US with Peggy Guggenheim during his second arrest. His life is tinged with the effects of Nazi occupation, the driving narratological force of the show, but this fact led to a reliance on indirect ties to Nazism on the part of his displayed work. Kurt Siegelmann had many works alongside Ernst at the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme. He also held on to Ernst’s Garden Airplane Trap. Due to Siegelmann’s Judaism, he brought the painting with him to the US to avoid Nazi persecution. Another exhibited Ernst painting belonged to a different Jewish artist, Tristan Tzara, to whom Ernst gifted his painting Two Nude Girls, which remained in Tzara’s possession until his death in 1963, following his move to Marseille and his involvement in the French Resistance. Another displayed Ernst painting, Gala, Max and Paul, is a far cry from Garden Airplane Trap and Two Nude Girls, whose provenance is inseparable from Nazi persecution. Gala, Max, and Paul tells the story of Ernst’s ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Éluard. Despite being wonderfully scandalous biographical details, its inclusion in this show feels askew. A dramatic tone shift towards the playful fits poorly among so many artistic artifacts whose histories speak to evading Nazi destruction. Such an inclusion possibly hints, if read ungenerously, as wall filler or, more likely, an incomplete concept. 

To exhibit a show where wall texts are more important than the paintings themselves is undoubtedly bizarre, a strangeness that permeated the gallery. Walking through the show, it felt out of place in an art museum like the Neue Nationalgalerie—possibly resonating more with a public archive or history museum than with an art institution. To study color and form felt antithetical to the curators’ mission, and yet, the format of an art show prevents combing through extensive texts, as the form necessitates the primacy of artworks. Networks of Surrealism was between an art exhibition and a historical exhibition, and in an attempt to straddle both, was left with two feet in the air.


Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism is on view through March 1 @ Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, Berlin

Read An Interview of Author Tea Hačić-Vlahović on Her Latest Novel 'Give Me Danger' →

The structure of the natural and manufactured world may be a nodal web of endless coequal expansion, but if enough people accept a longitudinal hierarchy as their shared reality, mass hysteria ensues, and a social ladder becomes solid enough to climb. Such has been the case since the dawn of human imperialism, and ever since, those of us who can see the undressed emperor have always easily picked one another out in the crowd. I picked journalist and author Tea Hačić-Vlahović out from this crowd the first time I read her work. So, too, did Giancarlo DiTrapano, the late and legendary editor/publisher of Tyrant Books. A beloved champion of young and daring writers, DiTrapano resuscitated an indie lit scene that had been idling on life support for nearly a generation. He saw the hidden potential in writers like Hačić-Vlahović, whose unpolished prose needed just the right amount of elbow grease to elevate their natural patina. It was only a month before he passed in March of 2021 when Tea texted to tell me that he was planning to publish her second novel, A Cigarette Lit Backwards, and that she had incorporated a small anecdote I had shared with her a year earlier. Her third and most recent novel, Give Me Danger, builds on this lived reality, only in this fictionalized version, her lead character Val’s first novel is a lowbrow bestseller, and her dreams of gaining clout in the indie lit scene are dashed by the news of her would-be publisher’s demise. Val struggles to wade through the gatekeeping social climbers who constitute his outer entourage so that she can simply pay her respects, and her experiences navigating the pomp and circumstance of those who consider themselves the cultural elite are a left-of-center mirror reflecting under an alternating strobe of moody and halogen lighting. Read more.

Transience by Ryan Molnar and Natalia Farnaus

photography by Ryan Molnar
styling by Natalia Farnaus
model Marie Kippe
makeup by Paloma Brytscha
hair by Masayuki Yuasa

shirt, dress, shorts, tights, shoes VALENTINO

shirt, dress VALENTINO

black longsleeve STYLIST’S OWN
black top with fur trimmings ABLONDI
brown skirt REPARTO
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

high-neck top, jacket, leggings & boots LOUIS VUITTON

shirt, belt, skirt JULIE KEGELS
shoes AEYDE

blouse LOUIS VUITTON
skirt JADE CROPPER
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

blouse LOUIS VUITTON
skirt JADE CROPPER
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

Autre Magazine Presents Performa Biennial's Grand Finale with Mother Daughter Holy Spirit In New York

Last weekend, Autre magazine presented the grand finale closing event for the 20th anniversary of the Performa Biennial, co-hosted with trans rights fundraiser Mother Daughter Holy Spirit. A highlight of the evening was a special and rare performance from house legend Crystal Waters who performed her iconic track, “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” A very special thanks to Staud for the support. photographs by Oliver Kupper