Lost Narratives Are Excavated As A Form of Restitution in The Struggle of Memory @ PalaisPopulaire in Berlin

As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The artists in this exhibition are concerned with remembering, reconstructing, reimagining, and restoring. Part 1 of The Struggle of Memory focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting artworks that probe in different ways how the body absorbs, processes, stores, and recalls experiences. Part 2 explores how memories are inscribed, bringing together artworks that draw our attention to the traces of history in the natural and built environment while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past. The show, curated by Kerryn Greenberg, features work by Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, Samuel Fosso, Anawana Haloba, Mohamed Camara, Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Part 1 is on view through September 18th; part 2 is on view October 6th through March 11th at PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin.

Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath @ The New Museum in New York

Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid is debuting an entirely new body of work for her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Himid has long championed marginalized histories as a pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and ’90s. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and textile works critique the consequences of colonialism and question the invisibility of people of color in art and the media. While larger historical narratives are often the driving force behind her images and installations, the artist’s works beckon viewers to pay attention to the unmonumental details of daily life. Bright, graphic, and rich in color and symbolic referents, Himid’s images recall history paintings and eighteenth-century British satirical cartoons.

“Work from Underneath” is on view through October 6 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, NY. photographs courtesy of The New Museum

Simone Fattal: Works and Days @ the New York MOMA

Simone Fattal: Works and Days brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including ancient history, mythology, Sufi poetry, geopolitical conflicts, and landscape painting. Fattal’s work explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archaeology and excavation, constructing a world that has emerged from history and memory. Both timeless and specific, Fattal’s work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic.

Simone Fattal: Works and Days is on view through September 2 at MOMA 11 West 53 Street. photographs courtesy of MOMA

Lorna Simpson Presents "Darkening" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, Lorna Simpson’s Darkening finds the artist returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues. Darkening will be on view through 26 July at Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth