Moffat Takadiwa
*Zuva/Sun*, 2024
toothbrushes, computer keys, bottle caps and nail cable clips
68 7/8 x 61 x 3 1/8 in 175 x 155 x 8 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim

text by Janelle Zara

“How’s the fair this year?” an Uber driver asked me during Art Basel Miami Beach last week. Although, this edition was less sensational than others, I told him every year can be described in more or less the same way: out of a couple thousand works, maybe a couple hundred are good, and a few dozen might be great—the trick is just knowing how to find them.

Think of an art fair like a high-end shopping mall. The anchor tenants are major blue-chip galleries—David Zwirner, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, etc…—that offer brand name works at luxury prices while feeling increasingly mass produced. The Anish Kapoor disc for example, sold at Gagosian, Lisson, Kukje, Regen Projects and more, was the “it” bag of artworks for many years, being instantly recognizable, ubiquitous, and available in many colorways. These days that’s Alicja Kwade’s rock-and-chair sculptures like Binding Finding (2024) in Pace’s booth: offered in different variations of heights, rocks and styles of chair, this body of work is meant to evoke the weight and texture of nature in contrast with the quotidian and manmade. Having seen some version of them at every edition of Art Basel this year, I find something unconvincing in their finishes; mostly they feel like a product line manufactured specifically for art fairs. Another art fair staple is the Kusama pumpkin, available in bronze at David Zwirner or stainless steel at Victoria Miro. There’s also Jenny Holzer’s silkscreen paintings of redacted government documents coated in gold leaf, including irregular (2024) in Sprüth Magers’ booth. Formally inert and made of fine materials, they’re everything you want in quiet luxury.

The blue-chip galleries also carry vintage treasures, like David Hammons Rock Head (2000) in White Cube’s booth, part of a body of work where the artist arranged the sweepings from a Harlem barbershop floor on an actual stone. This one in particular evinces a barber’s precision, where neat parallel incisions gesture toward cornrows. If you’re specifically seeking vintage, a whole corner of the fair specializes in the secondary market; you can always find a few Picassos at Helly Nahmad or Acquavella. If you’re seeking trends at lower price points, middle-tier gallery offerings can range from high quality dupes to fast fashion copies. Let’s say Joan Mitchell or even Oscar Murillo are out of your budget: this year I saw plenty of derivative scribbly abstraction that was pretty much indistinguishable from one canvas to the next.

For the less commercial, more challenging, conceptual, one-of-a-kind stuff, the indie boutiques are in the curated sections around the edges. The fair’s Survey sector is for historical presentations, like Parisian gallery Eric Mouchet’s booth of South African artist Kendall Geers’ works from before 2000. Each piece resonates with either explicit or implicit violence, where an example of the former is Suburbia (1999), first seen in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11. The grid of photographs of apartheid-era Johannesburg walls threatening potential intruders with barbed wire, electric fences, and armed security signage. Bible Belt (1988) carries an implicit violence, but maybe the good kind; the sculpture features a holy book bound by a leather strap in a way that evokes S&M. Next door in the Daegu- and Seoul-based gallery Wooson’s booth was a solo presentation of Choi Byung-so, whose subversions were decidedly more subtle. Taking pencil and ballpoint pen to newsprint, the South Korean artist developed a practice of drawing as many lines as his material could physically bear, producing illegible, blackened pages sliced into rhythmic patterns. I was particularly mesmerized by Portia Munson’s Bound Angels (2021), shown by PPOW in the Meridians sector of large-scale works. It was a table covered in lamps with uncovered bulbs among angelic figurines methodically tied in white string; a little on-the-nose in its symbolism—the artist describes the piece in terms of the social bondage of womanhood—but beautiful and luminous in a way that attracted viewers like moths to a flame.

JORDAN NASSAR
*Song of the Flowers*, 2022
Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton
130 x 245 x 3 in.
330.2 x 622.3 x 8 cm.
© Jordan Nassar 2024. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Photo by Mel Taing.

Trending this year were textile works, and some of them were good. The not good ones used the medium as a literal and uninspired translation of a painting or photograph, rather than exploring fiber’s formal potential or really anything beyond baseline technique. These include Erin M. Riley at PPOW and Sanford Biggers at David Castillo. The good ones leaned into the qualities that distinguish fiber from other materials, like Do Ho Suh’s Myselves, 2013, a Nude Descending a Staircase-style self portrait drawn in tangled and layered threads at STPI. Jordan Nassar’s landscapes of traditional Palestinian embroidery were shown by both Anat Ebgi and James Cohan. Not advancing the craft in any particular way, they were decidedly decorative but undeniably, even profoundly beautiful. My favorite weaving actually wasn’t made of textile at all; in Nicodim’s booth, Moffat Takadiwa’s wall-mounted assemblage Big Brother Africa, 2024, was made of toothbrushes and computer keys. Under the artist’s direction these materials somehow change their physical properties; hard, discarded plastics become fibrous tendrils or glossy porcelain. Every time I see Takadiwa’s work, I utter my highest compliment: “Now that’s a fucking artist.”

text by Janelle Zara

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