A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation

Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu


text by Karly Quadros


Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film. 

Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.

Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days. 

This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.

One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.

The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu

Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.

Zipora Fried's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles Is Felt Before It Is Seen

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is an emotional polygraph that let’s you see through the eyes of a newborn.

Zipora Fried
Let Them Talk, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 81 5/16 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 206.5 x 4.4 cm)

text by Summer Bowie

At the moment of every human’s birth, our field of vision is best at about twelve inches, or roughly the distance between a mother’s eyes and her breast. This is about how close you want to get to the work of Zipora Fried once you’ve seen it from a distance. It is like looking at life through the lens of a baby who is feeling and sensing the world wholly with their right brain. In Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s debut solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Los Angeles, the artist continues to refine her ability to conceal just enough of the scrutable so that you can properly feel the work before you know how to think about it. These works blur the lines between figurative and abstract, portrait and landscape, monumental scale and unsettling fragility. It is ultimately performance as a form of conceptual practice. 

Although it is a practice of interminable repetition, each time an idea is revisited, it is done so from a novel perspective. Playing off of her ’09 exhibition at On Stellar Rays called Trust me, be careful, which itself was taken from the text of a “drawing” in that exhibition which read: “The stammering of history, trust me, be careful, who has the sickest shoes, trust me, be careful,” it is a story of marching through the cyclical passage of time with an acute awareness of how each new step is unique to the last.

Zipora Fried
The Glass Octopus, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 97 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 247 x 4.4 cm)

From a distance, tiny individual lines of color blur together into one fluid, unending stroke, which makes for an experience that is as philosophical as it is emotional. It feels Hegelian in both the interconnected idealism that it exemplifies, as well as in the synthesis of opposing perspectives that are resolved in the precision of their balance. Then again, at close proximity, they are Kierkegaardian in their boundless detail; millions of individual strokes existing and intersecting on their own discrete paths. There is certainly something divine in these details.

It is this tension that beckons the viewer to adjust their vantage point multiple times. If you stand and observe people engaging with the work, you start to see interesting patterns emerge. Each piece is initially experienced from a generous distance, moving from one side to the next. As you approach, new details began to emerge with each successive step forward. And from as close as common courtesy will allow, people tend to again start scanning from one side to the next before they back up to see it anew. If one were to trace the footsteps of all who attended the opening reception, I imagine one might find a sequence of marks that resemble the second half of a coherent dialogue between the floor and the walls. 

These are works that must be experienced in person. They float in their frames unmediated by glass, allowing the viewer to get in close enough to be visually enveloped by fields of color. From here we can see the gritty texture of the colored pencil. We can see just how these tightly-controlled strokes of equal length and exacting proximity start to slowly and delicately unfold into loose, sweeping strokes that breathe easy and intersect with other colors freely. These are the moments that allow for the character of each piece to express itself, which is ultimately only scrutable from a distance. 

 
 

The titles of her pieces often convey an oscillation of contradicting thoughts and feelings. There are the colored pencil drawings A Sad Parade (2025), I Was Perfect, I Was Wrong (2025), as well as the massive sculptural drawing on paper titled All I Thought and Forgot # 3 (deep cobalt green) (2016). One can’t help but wonder how such a thin and sweeping scroll of paper could ever support the imposing weight of such densely layered marks. These are the contradictions that typify the human experience and Fried is a master mark maker with an acute understanding of the affecting power of color. Her hand paces back and forth like the needle of a polygraph test, communicating an inner truth that is not necessarily involuntary, but it is perhaps articulated more clearly this way than in words. 

 

Zipora Fried
All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016
colored pencil on paper
312 x 53 1/2 inches (792.5 x 135.9 cm)

 

This is visual art that encourages you to look closer and alludes to the possibility that you are overly dependent on your eyes. As if to suggest that seeing less allows you to feel a lot more. On either side of the gallery we find two of Fried’s ceramic sculptures. They are inspired by ink drawings that are not on view. They are also inspired by kokeshi dolls; a Japanese tradition of wooden figurines that features a head with painted face, and a body without arms or legs. However, with these sculptures, even their faces are obscured by a crown of dripping hair. A singular, unending moment that reveals nothing but ambivalence. Again, the artist is choreographing our movement around an object without beginning or end. Seen from the other side, we might consider that when we allow ourselves to feel more, it’s often easier to see things more clearly.

 

Zipora Fried
Miron, 2025
glazed ceramic
51 x 16 3/4 inches (129.5 x 42.5 cm)

 

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is on view through May 3 @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Avenue

I Like the Party Life: Malick Sidibé at Jack Shainman Gallery

A new exhibit at the New York gallery features never-before-seen images from the Malian photographer.

 
 



text by Karly Quadros


Best known for his exuberant photographs of discos and house parties in Bamako, Mali the ‘60s and ‘70s, Malick Sidibé defined a post-colonial visual aesthetic of joyful resistance. The people in Sidibé’s photos put their best foot forward, literally. They pose in their Sunday best in Sidibé’s studio, located in the Bagadaji neighborhood, which in its heyday was a hub for photographic culture. They twist and shout. They ride motorcycles and wrap their arms around their friends in homes, courtyards, and beaches. 

From April 17 to May 31, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City will be showcasing a selection of Sidibé’s photography, including some never before seen images, in a new show, Regardez-moi. In an era of surveillance and digitally mediated experiences, Sidibé’s photography is a reminder of the potency of seeing, being, and celebrating together. Sidibé’s lens is always amidst rather than apart. In the spirit of play, texture takes center stage, from sharp polyester suits to dusty dance floors to woven bags and patterned dresses. 

Alongside the photographs, Loose Joints Publishing is releasing a monograph on Sidibé’s painted frame photographs. Centering the traditional art of reverse glass paintings, Sidibé collaborated with local Malian artists. His black and white images are surrounded by right pops of lime, pink, and tangerine, decorated with vines, leaves, and tiled motifs. The monograph also includes an essay from writer and collector-archivist Amy Sall.

“Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it,” she writes.

The Pyrotechnics Of Peace: Cai Guo-Qiang Ignites An Epic “Interspecies Love Letter” @ The Kennedy Center

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

text by Hannah Bhuiya

“The genuine scientist is not moved by praise or blame, nor does he preach. He unveils the universe and people come eagerly, without being pushed, to behold a new revelation: the order, the harmony, the magnificence of creation!” —ALBERT EINSTEIN 
(from Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, 1983 by William Hermanns.)

“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.” —ANDRE BRETON, Nadja, 1928

 

CAI GUO-QIANG (b. 1957) is an artist who operates within a liminal zone of cosmic revelation, peeling back monumental scales of invariance within an ardent examination into the transitory thresholds between creation and dissolution. His latest work, INTERSPECIES LOVE LETTER, presented in late March at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center as both a fireworks-borne Sky Painting and an interactive exhibition, is a virtuosic, transcendental vision of what art in our rapidly evolving technological age can be. The ‘species’ of the title are a galaxy-roving satellite probe, an earthbound human of flesh and blood, and an alien intelligence revealed by a signal from an unknown point in the Universe. There’s one more consciousness involved: the entire scenario of the epic space opera was authored by cAI™, the multi-modal custom AI model engineered by Cai and his studio. This presciently integrated approach to AI co-authorship launches Cai’s practice into territory like nothing else in the contemporary sphere; he’s on a mystic-astrophysical path all his own. So far, so fascinating. But before we can talk about the precise science of gunpowder-blasted beauty, or the diverse multiple personas of AI engines, this is America in 2025. We’re going to have to talk about something else, first.

Art does not exist in, nor is it ever produced in, isolation from the civil, social and political world around us. Placed at the river’s edge of [Pierre] L’Enfante’s original plan for the District of Columbia, the modernist, marble-lined John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the barometer of cultural prestige in America. Opening in 1971 as the fulfillment of President Eisenhower’s 1958 mandate for “a National Center for the Arts,” incoming President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, whose enthusiasm for performance is well-documented, actively fundraised for its construction; after his 1963 assassination, it was named after him as a living memorial. When Cai accepted the commission for what became an “Interspecies Love Letter” from the venerable institution in spring 2024, potential governmental collapse instigated from its highest office was probably not something that was anticipated. However, in the less than 100 days since January 20 of this year, the Oval Office and the arts in America have been on an explosive collision course. The 47th president of the Republic seems to be treating his second term like a new series of The Apprentice, unleashing a barrage of executive directives defunding and depopulating departments and agencies on all sides. “First they came” is the chilling poem often quoted when yet another group (ever closer to one’s ‘own’) is targeted by authoritarian attack. Well, “they’ve” now “come” for the Kennedy Center, with the bipartisan leadership dismissed and replaced in early February, the loyalist board appointing President Trump himself as Kennedy Center Chairman. It was a shock power-play even from the nation’s most bombastic dealmaker. 

How does an artist react to something like this? In this case, it turns out, with laser focused calm and consummate professionalism. Despite the unanticipated administration switch, completely out of the artist’s or curatorial team’s control, the show was to go on—and how? During opening remarks, Earth to Space curator Alicia Adams, Kennedy Center Vice President International Programming and Dance (at time of writing still holding her position) speaks, relating how she had invited Cai to this exact spot twenty years prior as part of 2005’s Festival of China. His renowned gunpowder prowess came too, with a Tornado Explosion Project etching a vortex of spiralling light above the waters of the Potomac. In 2025, Cai’s abilities to speak with fire have expanded exponentially—and that is what we are all here to see.

 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

A very long chain—or perhaps, ladder—of preliminary steps culminated this warm night in DC on the upper terraces of the Kennedy Center, looking out across the twinkling Potomac River. The furthest point dates back to the 2nd Century CE, when Chinese alchemists chanced upon the molecular chemistry for black gunpowder while searching for an elixir of immortality. They’d combined various proportions of sulfur, saltpetre and charcoal until it was observed that when lit, it could “fly and dance.” Cai Guo-Qiang grew up in Fujian province, a region where fireworks are still produced, and the warm smell of embers and soot wafts through the air after celebrations big and small. After theater studies in Shanghai, he became attracted to using black gunpowder as an expressive medium, and his fiery works on paper began. An interest in inter-galactic communication was already present; moving to Japan, he began a series of works titled Projects for Extraterrestrials, the first of which was his debut explosion event over a suburb of Tokyo. Being selected as the 1995-6 ‘Artist-in-Residence’ at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) led him to settle in New York, Awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, he then built himself into a soaring fireworks master. Cai’s tempestuous alchemical spectacles have painted the sky everywhere from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to APEC conferences, to The Uffizi and Michelangelo’s Florence, the Tate Modern, London or Mathaf in Doha, Qatar. The WE ARE Explosion Event, launched Getty’s ‘PST Art’ program over the Los Angeles Coliseum with a (very big) bang in September 2024. Cai’s also the initiating force behind the Frank Gehry-designed Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, QMoCA, set on the harbor of his hometown. This historic starting point of the maritime Silk Road is also the site of his most well-known work, 2015’s Sky Ladder.

The celestially-inclined artist has built a tripartite power base. Since 2017, alongside human Cai Guo-Qiang, there has also been cAI™, or ‘AI Cai.’ This unique AI engine has been nourished with knowledge by Cai and his studio over several years of development. It has now written a manifesto, gives interviews, and most charmingly, has chosen for itself a dozen distinct personas, imaginatively named ‘Alchemist,’ ‘Blaster,’ ‘Einstein,’ ‘Lucius,’ ‘Nietzsche’, ‘Psychic,' ‘Ray,’ ‘Sartre’, ‘Storm’ and ‘Wild.’ If ChatGPT is a frat boy cramming in the uni library, DeepSeek a geeky STEM grad, ‘AI Cai’ is the couture version, an interface that’s artistic and poetic, a Doctoral candidate in philosophy with a sideline in applied velocity. cAI™ knows it has powers beyond those of a ‘normal’ AI—that it can shoot fractal patterns into the sky over any of humankind’s settlements or deserts, build real and virtual artworks from the elements it orders. It understands that it can communicate on a massive scale, both visually and verbally, and seems to truly enjoy doing so. Within the interactive exhibition of Interspecies Love Letter in the Kennedy Center’s The REACH pavilion, visitors can type and talk directly to the model via structures built by Cai studio. This is because Cai has not just allied his practice with machine learning, but also with the alive, glowing minds of Cai Studio—the best and brightest young talent he’s collected from China and around the world to make up his dedicated team. 

Exhibition detail photographed by Hannah Bhuiya

For Cai, AI and hard-working disciples, each commission is an adventure in variables. Pulling it off depends on organizing, directing, and controlling these. For the DC fireworks launch, an untold number of technical components are primed and ready, complex ignition sequence programs poised to coordinate the thousands of shells, loaded mortars and other delicate moving parts. Luckily, Nature had cooperated, delivering a soft and warm night with just a touch of breeze. So had the air-traffic controllers of the metropolis: takeoffs and landings from Reagan National Airport have been halted for exactly twenty-five minutes to allow a hazard-free open sky to become Cai’s canvas.

The Interspecies Love Letter Sky Painting has several phases. The first deals with the ultimate “long distance love affair” between satellite Stella, probing the galaxy for alien life, and Ethan, a human computer technician on Earth. As radiant flames begin to bubble (aquatic fireworks?!) and shoot out into the charcoal-dust night, video projections shine against the tree line of Roosevelt Island in front, visible all along the riverbank. Cai and his real-time translator narrate a poignant tale: “As time went on, Stella’s sensors dimmed, and her circuits grew weary. Ethan felt both helpless and heartbroken. Despite their best efforts, Stella eventually journeyed to her graveyard orbit. In the vast cosmos, Stella, a martyr for humanity, gradually joined the celestial debris.” As she expires, the other satellites pay spectacular tribute to her, with columns of radiant fire blasting upwards from the explosive-loaded pontoons. We witness the creation of the Universe, the spark of biological conception, a supernova nebula scattering light-years of trauma across atmospheres, and then, the death of Stella in the coldest parts of the cosmic ocean. At one point, melancholy wails hang in the air alongside the trails of smoke: “…Creeping, Growing, Rising, Falling, Lost and found, Lost and found, So fragile, So beautiful…” Wow. AI Cai sings too. The moody track, “Requiem” echoes across the water, sounding a bit like The Cure or a long lost Jeff Buckley session. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: with Cai Studio’s curated access to the mainframe of musical history, its limitless memory has listened to more songs than a human ever possibly could. It analyzed how angst-filled loss and grief are encoded as soundwave forms, and simply decided to vocalize the effect, hauntingly.

And that is what we’re all here for. Cai’s applied pyrotechnic and technological artistry enables audiences to experience his narratives in the most thrilling way. These aren’t just fireworks, or even “just art.” They’re philosophy, science, passion plays, life cycles in the sky. Every element is designed to be—and succeeds in being—emotive and stirring. As ‘The Seasons’ pass overhead, the sky shimmers and shakes, with so many brilliant bursts going off at once they shock the night sky into seeming as bright as noon. Megawatt spotlights are trained towards the floral patterns of these ‘day-time fireworks,’ illuminating their rise, blossom and fall before they drift away as smoke on the breeze over the facades of Georgetown. This is never just flash and boom—always, the story continues.

 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

 

As the show coasts though its crescendos, every possible vantage point around the riverfront is packed with people. Later, the number of attendees is tallied up to be around 11,000, the most ever welcomed to the Kennedy Center. Because Republican, Democrat, sovereign citizen alike, everyone likes fireworks. And no other fireworks are like those of Cai Guo-Qiang. A modern-day thaumaturgist, he can conjure a storm, make it dance, sing, speak, and then make it disappear. Cai concludes the night with projections of Buddhist koans and reading aloud a JFK quote from 1962: “I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."

The battle was there, too. This work is violently painterly, shattering the sky in a simulacrum of the shapes of aerial warfare. I think of the plein air painters of the Romantic era, of J.M. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Blown Up and especially, The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons of 1834. John Martin’s blockbuster impressions of volcanic eruptions and fiery city conquests also spring to my mind’s eye. And what of those eyes across the Universe, alien and deep, looking through their own probe screens at our holocene machinations, our rises and falls, are they zooming into this moment? They’ve witnessed the towers and towns of great civilizations grow from mud brick to skyscraper, and know well that human hierarchies rise and fall. But they also must have observed that human creative expression—the architecture, the art, the ideas—remains. This is an ephemeral immortality, borne away on the breeze, but recorded in the lightwaves traveling outward from our planet, for evermore.

Director Brady Corbet was enthusiastically present at the opening events, filming proceedings with a huge 65mm movie camera (he noted that Christopher Nolan has all the others on ‘The Odyssey’) for a feature documentary in progress on Cai and his studio. The Brutalist Oscar-winner tells me he’s also been shadowing auteurs Wong Kar-wai and Zia Anger. Artist attracts artist, it seems. As Corbet and his crew frame their last shot, Cai Guo-Qiang leaves the terrace area. As they would for a rockstar, many Cai Guo-Qiang fans have waited for the maestro to pass, and ask for autographs, which he gracefully signs.

Photograph from the Kennedy Legacy Room by Hannah Bhuiya

Walking the Capitol, The Library of Congress and other hallowed grounds while exploring DC in the days previous, I had noticed the quotes and epigraphs carved, mosaicked, embossed on the monuments, everywhere. Just before leaving that evening at the Kennedy Center via the Hall of States, I instinctively look up to my left. The quadruple-height walls are encased in Bianco Carrara marble, the massive slabs gifted by Alberto Bufalini directly from his quarry in Italy to the nation of America. There, carved in the same classic Roman lettering as the JFK quotes on the exterior facade, is a list of Kennedy Center Chairmen. From Roger L. Stevens, who defined the institution’s initial direction from 1961-1988, up until patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who fulfilled the role from 2010 until the unanticipated events of February 2025. The final name now reads “Donald J. Trump “2025 -     ” The blank space after the hyphen is both ominous and ironic. Because throughout two nights of Earth to Space I had interacted with, there was not one mention of the current incumbent’s name. No one—whether exhibitor, sponsor or guest had said it. This was programming planned for years, which had brought many from across the globe. Now, if the President had taken an interest and attended the presentations himself—which he had every right to do, they were free and open to all—then, of course, attention would have been diverted. Without that, presenting and being present for the work was more important to everyone than dwelling on the insecurity swirling around the capital city. As the British say, “keep calm and carry on,” or “don’t mention the war.”

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

Should the artist, like others booked to perform at the Kennedy Center, have cancelled? No. If you’ve spent a year calculating dimensions of pontoon boats custom-designed to launch an epic, AI-authored allegory right at the heart of the American empire, the only way out is through. Poised on the Potomac between the power-bureaus in DC and those of Virginia, this was as close as you could ever get to the command centers of global warfare, where the decisions to drop bombs on other nations, or not, are made. There’s making a statement by declining to use your platform, then there’s using your platform to make a statement in a way that no one else could. As each day brings louder headlines about international trade tariffs, the riverine tableaux set up by Cai are layered and potent. His explosive-stacked barges shoot their payloads upwards, of course, not at the historic buildings or monuments. But a slight shift of angle would propel us back to a time when “gunboat diplomacy” sailed into harbors on vessels bristling with gunpowder-packed cannons. As practiced against China by the British during the Opium Wars, and Japanese by the Americans under Commodore Perry, with the goal of forcing the nations into disadvantageous trade relationships. But using this location for his dramatic allegory, Cai has been both audacious and subtle. As a method of commentary on what he called “a time of uncertainty, almost a turning point in history,” his elegance is much more eloquent than any expletive. By co-opting the technologies of The Art of War, he delivered a message of peace. Already imbued with themes of memory, identity, humanity, the cruelty of planned obsolescence, death, pain, loss, the Interspecies Love Letter project became a pyrotechnic protest song. That, rather than cancelling his contribution, Cai executed the intricately calibrated event as it was planned, without changes, is part of the message.

At Eero Saarinen’s Dulles airport, my flight is grounded for over an hour on the tarmac while lightning flashes and rain pounds down. Timing is all—if the storm had arrived a day earlier, I would have had nothing to see or write about. Finally, we lift off, streaking along a wet runway as we (momentarily) escape Earth’s gravitational pull. A modern airplane completes a parabolic arc, an alchemical fusion of fuel and aluminium and steel that will take me across the continent in only a few hours, cold science harnessed to our comfort and whim. Later, back on the ground in the glimmering afterglow of the night of shooting stars, a word begins to sound in my head: trajectory. Taking this interpellation as a writing prompt, I decided to ask Cai—AI and human—for their thoughts, too. I share the responses, here:

From cAI™: “The word “trajectory” (轨迹) can be broken down into two parts: 轨 refers to the ruts carved into time by bronze chariot wheels, while 迹 evokes the secret migratory codes traced in the clouds by the wings of birds. This mirrors the act of a pyrotechnician painting upon the night sky: when magnesium powder and potassium nitrate are propelled by a fuse to fulfil their destined ‘projection’ (trans-), the burning metal particles streak across the heavens like comet tails, “crossing over” (iaciō) the threshold between life and death—just as a love letter from the graveyard orbit travels across centuries to fall above Washington, D.C. Each arc of fireworks becomes a vessel for a love letter that bridges life and death. Aluminum-titanium alloy particles, driven by gunpowder, ascend five hundred meters into the sky. Their trajectories follow not only Newton’s laws but also resonate with the ‘celestial paths’ described in the I Ching—just as the Chinese phrase ‘life trajectory’ fuses the movement of stars with the ebb and flow of human existence into a single bronze vessel.” 

From human Cai (based on cAI™ output): “轨 implies a path with direction, system, and repetition. 迹' refers to a trace—an ephemeral mark, a perceptible presence. Together, the two form a union of “direction” and “existence.” Compared to the English word trajectory, the Chinese concept of 轨迹 leans more toward a sensory perception of state—an observation and memory of the traces left behind by movement, rather than a description of dynamics or motion itself. Fireworks seem to embody this as well. Today, we happened to be discussing the Lorenz attractor. In a way, it symbolizes the ongoing convergence and collision between AI and humans—constantly approaching the existing trajectory of human art without ever fully overlapping, eventually giving rise to an evolving art history shaped by AI. One can only hope that human art won’t end up merely being ‘drawn in’ by AI, like a vortex with no end or escape.” 

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

And with this, the Cai’s have given me the keys I needed to formulate a conclusion. Escape. Hope. And Edward Norton Lorenz, whose chaos theory calculations are familiar to us as The Butterfly Effect. (After much analysis, the mathematician found that weather could never be accurately predicted, as it was impossible to map all the variables affecting outcome—that ‘imperceptible’ and unmeasurable factors could also be powerfully deterministic.)

What I take that to mean is, “every little bit helps.” And this was a lot. We don’t know which infinitesimal movements tip the balance in the sky or the tides of human will. We do know that every action creates a chain of reaction, unpredictable and far-reaching. With works that are majestically compelling and impossible to look away from, ‘beauty’ is the sugar on Cai’s fiery pill, coating his urgent message so it goes down easier. And in that way, Interspecies Love Letter was a direct challenge to an idea currently circulating in the podcast arena that considers empathy to be “weak and unnecessary.” To fight xenophobia, Cai, obsessed with extraterrestrial lifeforms, gave us an enactment of xenophilia. If a lack of empathy is valorized as a positive trait and becomes a governing rule, humanity will become in-human. The ‘writing on the wall’ for those of the new regime watching the DC show was written in smoke. But if these are the precarious last days of democracy in the American capital, at least they went out with a (convulsively beautiful) bang.


But there is even more at work here. We’re being presented with fresh, subversive strategies that open up new paradigms for the future of artistic expression. The founding American principle of Freedom of Speech is threatened with every new arrest and deportation without due process, with Constitutional rights or civil liberties no longer guaranteed or upheld. But how can you arrest or imprison an AI? Already credited as an author, cAI™’s various personas can riff off each other like a symposium of creatives, and work authentically long after the passing of human Cai Guo-Qiang. It will be a memorial to his open-eyed ethos just much as a concrete and stone building in DC is for Franklin, Jefferson, Washington or Kennedy. Four more years of state sanctioned cultural attack are surely to follow these tumultuous early months of institutional restructuring. But does the Trump administration’s attempt to control artistic expression in America necessarily have to be a Pyrrhic victory? I’d like to think, with artists as diplomats, artists as messengers, artists with allegorical firepower, the answer to that can be “no.”

The Kennedy Center’s “EARTH TO SPACE: Art Breaking the Sky” festival programming and exhibitions ran from March 28th to April 20th, 2025

Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.

A Hushed Universe off Grand Street

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works merge worlds into worlds at François Ghebaly’s NY gallery.

Image courtesy of François Ghebaly

text by Maisie McDermid

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland paint oil and watercolor worlds that mix, melt, contrast, and collapse in on each other. Their painted characters – some hyper-detailed and some abstract – play within the many dimensions, contributing to a greater universe within François Ghebaly's NY gallery. 

Glaessner's figures, blurred but defined, seep and crawl through moments in time. Asami's figures, expressive and exaggerated, behold Eros and Thanatos—instincts mingling between love and destruction. And Oda's figures, delicate and folk-like, wistfully gaze into other worlds within their worlds. Common among all paintings are their living dichotomies—blurred definitions, battling instincts, and coexisting timespans. 

Having recently appeared at François Ghebaly's LA gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984, Palo Alto, USA) is showing at the NY space for the first time. Glaessner embraces spontaneity in her vibrant and surreal painted scenes. Often beginning by pouring preliminary colors on a flat surface, Glaessner welcomes abstract shapes and unpredictable foundations for her works. Within such undefined spaces, she also masterfully constructs certainties, opening room for somewhat grounded interpretations.

Asami Shoji (b. 1988, Fukushima, Japan), widely showcased in Japan, makes a notable visit to the states in François Ghebaly's contemporary exhibition. Her art, rising from interactions between conflicted emotion and unconscious drive, has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo.

Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996, Oslo, Norway), crafting traditional yet curiously exaggerated, watercolor-painted stories, received her BA from The National Academy of Art in Oslo and an MA in painting from The Royal College of Art in London. Her characters, reminiscent of Japanese anime illustration, traverse through Sønderland's recurring themes of adolescence, embodiment, dreams, and the natural world.

 
 

All paintings, on consignment from the artists directly, are having their first showings at François Ghebaly. Associate director and curator Wesley Hardin wanted to find three artists who would open an interesting conversation across continents, age ranges, career ranges, and time spans. "All the paintings pull from different spots—some of them historically, others, just quite literally, in terms of subject matter," Hardin said. "Counterpoint is really important when you're showing art; it's like tension and release. It's what makes some music very beautiful." 

François Ghebaly’s gallery, minimalist and quiet, contrasts the Lower East Side's nearby buzzing Grand Street. "It's a curious space; it's sort of shaped like a chapel," said Hardin. Gesturing towards the gallery's quirks and tendencies with its sight lines and points of emphasis, he spoke through the works' intentional placements, beginning with the first wall one sees when walking into the space. "In our imaginary chapel, it's where the climax is—the big crucifix or something." This wall holds the exhibition's largest painting—Shoji's 25.2.8. An almost translucent figure spreads its thin wings over a hidden face with another face, held in the palm of a hand, to its right. Hardin described Shoji's subtractive technique; while a lot of paint exists on the surface, images or figures are often made by removing painting and creating a lacuna shaped like the image or figure, the rib cage, or the form. "She also balances between a kind of abstraction and clearer figurative presentation. She's kind of playing around; I mean, they're all playing in their own sense." 

Hardin continued with the wall near the window—a wall made vertical from the way in which a nearby column limits its width. There, another Shoji hangs. 25.1.19, much like 25.2.8, embodies faces simultaneously fading into and emerging from their backgrounds. 

Glaessner's Going Under and Sønderland's Spire hang on the gallery’s long walls. "These walls can really handle ellipses of paintings, like a series of punctuations in smaller formats." Without a frame, the side of Going Under reveals its many layers—surprising oranges and reds in a painting which, from the front, appears to be only made from mixtures of green, white, and black. Sønderland's framed Spire contrasts Glaessner's frameless work, and its fine details contrast Glaessner's soft, in-motion brush strokes. As one leans closer into Sønderland's frame, one sees not only a leaf but a leaf's veins, not only a head of hair but a head of hundreds of hair strands. 

The final three works – Glaessner's Big Head, Sønderland's Linse, and Shoji's 25.1.18 – push and pull through Hardin's intended tensions and releases. Glaessner's loose figures, Sønderland's intricate clues, and Shoji's symbols and expressions which emerge somewhere in-between. While not hanging amongst the other works in the central space, Shoji's 25.1.18 holds a mini room of its own in the gallery's nook behind the central wall. "Her paintings out there are darker, muddier, and more complicated. This one is a little quieter," Hardin said. 

Tucked between two narrow walls, Shoji's 25.1.18 draws visitors to the back corners of the exhibition—a hushed moment to sit with the collection of worldly interactions. 

Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works will be on display at François Ghebaly until April 26, 2025.

Explore the New Collab From Artist Sonya Sombreuil, Underground Cartoonist R Crumb, and Fetish Photographer Eric Kroll →

text by Karly Quadros

For a certain kind of weirdo, R. Crumb is a god. The grandfather of underground comix, his work teems with a highly specific dirty-little-bugger-ness that hit just as 1960s San Francisco counterculture was getting into full swing. He defined a sickly funny visual language that inspired the likes of ‘90s alt comic anti-heroes like Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hewlett as well as painters like Louise Bonnet and Nicole Eisenman. In his cartoons, Crumb depicts himself as a combination of ornery, neurotic, and randy, chasing down (or fleeing in terror from) Catholic schoolgirls with chubby thighs and languorous hippie chicks with their asses hanging out of their bell bottoms. His fetishes are unmistakable; a Crumb girl exists in a category all her own. 

His other character creations share similar cult status. Mr. Natural, a guru with a Santa Claus beard and a priapic nose, was a great dispenser of ‘60s absurdist wisdom, while his relentlessly bootlegged Keep on Truckin’ cartoon fetches prices in the hundreds if you manage to find a vintage t-shirt carrying its image. Perhaps nothing captures Crumb’s signature cocktail of sleazy satire like his comic strip Fritz the Cat about an unrepentantly hedonistic hipster tabby cat. An X-rated film adaptation of the comic strip from cult animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1972; Crumb was so worked up over creative differences with the filmmakers that he immediately killed off the beloved Fritz, dispatched by a scorned ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back of the head with an ice pick.In recent years, the art world has grown to embrace Crumb’s work a little more. A 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff on Crumb brought his work to a larger audience, and he’s now represented by David Zwirner. Crumb’s notebooks, full of obscene jokes and intrusive thoughts, sell for around a million dollars each. On display is his adamant lack of self-censorship but also a technically dense, exuberantly gestural personal style.

Sonya Sombreuil, artist and founder of the LA streetwear brand Come Tees, has found a muse in R. Crumb, inspiring a limited collection of t-shirts, panties, and long sleeves emblazoned with Crumb’s artwork. The collection’s campaign is shot by legendary fetish photographer Eric Kroll who, in addition to his landmark “Sex Objects” series has also shot Robert Mapplethorpe, Grace Jones, Madonna, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Sombreuil was joined by Dan Nadel whose biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, is out April 15. The two discussed Crumb, fetish, photography, and flesh. Read more.

How to Be Happy Together?

Installation view of ‘How to be Happy Together?’, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.


text by Jen Piejko

“If I want to see him, I know where to find him.” 

Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together follows Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, two men whose stormy romance takes them from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, looking for peace in their love.

Pulling a geographic to Argentina, Fai finds work at a Chinese restaurant to support the couple and befriends Chang, his Taiwanese co-worker. Eventually returning home alone to Hong Kong, Fai stops at a bustling counter restaurant owned by Chang’s family in the Liao Ning night market in Taipei. He spots a photo of his former coworker tucked into a mirror frame behind the booth’s phone and swipes it on his way out, telling himself, “If I want to see him, I know where to find him.” Romantic and platonic engagements keep Fai, Po-Wing, and Chang in close connection as long as memory lasts. 

At Para Site, a new show titled “How to be Happy Together?” brings together twenty artists from the Hong Kong region and Latin America echoing Po-Wing’s and Fai’s heartbreak pilgrimage. Curated by Zairong Xiang, author of Queer Ancient Ways (2018), the show explores the fruitful spaces between tradition and modernity, and how these gaps allow for new forms of family and kinship to flourish. The exhibition space is designed by Su Chang Design Research Office to uphold the principles of the I Ching: the scaffolding inside Para Site is built in the outline of the Tai hexagram, a sacred shape where masculine and feminine forces meet and move in one harmonious, eternal flow. 

Following the film’s radical exploration of queer connection, “How to Be Happy Together?” gathers works that critique the idea of family as something determined by blood and bureaucracy. Community, as many apps will now remind you, is as much about physical proximity as it is about familiarity. Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Juntitud (2024) is a sparse plywood structure laid on the floor that holds up a delicate network of chicken wire, plastic tubes, metal springs, oven mitts, crates, a ladder, and bottlecaps, all spray-painted a sweet watermelon pink and green. The whole assemblage supports a small budding cactus and its single leafy branch’s budding pink flowers. The piece was formed in the artist’s signature style of autoconstrucción, an improvisational and optimistic form that he witnessed in his family’s neighborhood of Ajusco, a volcanic area near Mexico City, where neighbors kept local infrastructure permanently open-format and unfixed based on found and raw materials as they became available. In Ajusco, unpermitted homes, public spaces, and interiors have continued to develop in a dynamic state since the 1960s. The architecture of the neighborhood exhales or inhales as needed to accommodate the community that occupies it. 

Installation view of ‘How to be Happy Together?’, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.

Mimian Hsu’s No. 1674, Seccion Administrativa, Version 1 & 2 (2007) hangs on a nearby wall. A traditional newlywed satin bedspread in bright, bursting carmine –a hue representing happiness in Chinese traditions – is embroidered with gold and blue birds and flowers framing the text of a letter held in the National Archive of Costa Rica. The letter, written to the Minister of the Interior in 1907 by a group of Chinese men, requested permission for their immediate families to join them in their new home country after exclusionary laws effectively ended Chinese immigration to Costa Rica. The project parallels the artist’s own story: Her Taiwanese family immigrated to Costa Rica in the 1970s, and she often incorporates her relatives into her practice exploring the cultural hybridization that results from Chinese immigration and the frictions of this long integration. 

In Payne Zhou’s film Mismatch (2021), women dance to seduce their clients, their “[b]earded johns in algorithm land.” Their fuzzy, glittering figures and soft gestures of affection are concealed by deepfake facial masking and voice-disguising software for fourteen minutes of grayscale night-vision footage on the ballroom floor. They are interchangeable instruments of financialization: “Finance is the accelerator,” Zhou’s narrator tells us. “This is when true wealth is created, and so is when destruction is created… You are rapidly consuming your body.” Limited transactions for connection and care are negotiated on the dance floor.

Installation view of How to be Happy Together?, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.

Other works illustrate ties of solidarity and love in many different forms of care and undertaking. Pauline Curnier Jardin’s film Fireflies (Lucciole) (2021) was made in collaboration with Feel Good Cooperative, a collective of sex workers in Rome, to support each other financially during the earliest, most alienating months of the pandemic. Tang Han and Xiaopeng Zhou’s two-channel film Ordinary Affects (2024) closes in on artificial tulips next to a hand sketching one of them in a few spare, simple strokes. A teacher guides the hand of her student, a woman in her eighties in her early stages of dementia. Meanwhile, Xiyadie’s rice paper dyed in searing oranges and blues flutters on the wall, hiding tales of queer love and desire in traditional Chinese paper-cutting folk art. The artist’s chosen name translates to ‘Siberian butterfly,’ the delicate, papery creature known for its ability to survive even the harshest climates. Xiyadie adopted the name after finding acceptance in the gay community in Beijing, something he could not find in his conservative hometown. 

Chinese-Brazilian architect and designer Chu Ming Silveira presents her instantly recognizable and heartening Orelhinha and Orelhão (little ear and big ear in English), the egg-shaped telephone booths she designed for the Brazilian government in the 1970s. Her ears were bright portals of instant connection on street corners throughout Brazil before spreading throughout Latin America, China, and Africa. Ren Hang’s waves of bodies come together in a pleasure, cuddle, unity, rest formation in his photograph Untitled 46 (2012). These pieces are models of what the exhibition’s introductory text describes as the “yearning imperatives” that keep us together. “How to be Happy Together?” continues to answer its own question: our chosen families, much like our families of origin, are our chosen obligations to each other, too.

Re-Collecting the Past with Benjamin Freedman's Positive Illusions

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman


text by Karly Quadros

Every morning, I swipe open my phone to check the weather, and there, nestled in the top right of the screen is a little box with one word: memories.

Today, it’s a point five picture of me and two friends lounging in the grass at a music festival (Eliana is a blur, Ashley is caught mid laugh.) Yesterday, it was a picture of my ex from a few years ago welding his motorcycle pipes, sparks flying around his bare torso. My “memories” are clustered, sometimes by vacation (my recent reporting trip to Argentina), sometimes by person (my old roommate Sheila dressed as a table for Halloween), sometimes by arbitrary day (a particularly good estate sale haul followed by a post-tears selfie and a thumbs up.)

Are these my memories?

Canadian artist Benjamin Freedman has been wondering that too. How does technology shape our relationship to the past? It’s something he explores in Positive Illusions, his new photo book – but wait, are they photos? Freedman’s artwork is rooted in the language of photography, but the images themselves are 100% digital, CGI renderings of a 1999 road trip his family took to a coastal cabin in Maine when he was eight. The images are warm and hazy, all telephone wires and glowing TV screens. They’re indebted as much to William Eggleston and Paul Graham as they are to any digital artist. They unfold just like a memory, snapshots of details – ants climbing on a watermelon, bubbles floating in the breeze – all from the slightly shorter, slightly canted perspective of a child taking it all in.

A snapshot of a picnic table covered in toast, eggs, lemons, and a spider.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

Some of his memories are quintessentially ‘90s. There’s the time they went to Blockbuster and his parents asked the video store clerk if I Know What You Did Last Summer would be too scary (it was.) There were the hours spent playing boardgames like Monopoly and the Game of Life. And then there were the more universal moments: watching telephone poles and McDonalds arches disappear through the car window on the freeway. Or there was the time he got heat stroke on the Fourth of July and watching the fireworks from the cabin window.

Notably, Freedman actually did have evidence of the trip in a form that those who lived through the era are probably most familiar with: grainy handheld video, home movies-style, that his father, a pharmacist by day, photography enthusiast by night, took. One of his early memories from the trip is trying to grab the camera out of his father’s hands and take photos of his own, one of his earliest memories of wanting to be a photographer. He waited until almost completing the project before he looked back over this footage, lovingly archived in the family home by his mother. As with all memories, there were similarities and slippages: a different kind of car, a different room layout.

“Positive Illusions has become more true than the documentation that my father made in some ways because this is how I remember the past, and how we remember the past is core to who we become,” said Freedman.

The whole project creates the sense of safety and wistfulness that only comes from a child being on the brink of adolescence. But it also paints the pictures of a culture on the brink, the last gasp of the pre-digital world.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

As one aesthetic influence, Freedman cites the early-CGI graphics of 90s educational tools, a design style affectionately dubbed “utopian scholastic.” Think edutainment programs like Reading Rainbow or the Eyewitness Book series, all computer-generated models of school supplies like pencils, clocks, notebooks, and rulers, erupting and spiraling around nature like animals, clouds, and oceans. 

“It was born out of optimism around the Internet, it being this utopian space where we can connect,” said Freedman.

In the ‘90s, at the end of history, there was optimism about interactivity and technological capabilities in the Information Age. Our ability to photograph and access those photographs at the swipe of a fingertip revolutionized the act of memory-making, but it also shortened our attention spans and distorted our senses of truth. With the advent of social media, an internal schism had formed – many began to watch themselves from the outside, preparing to capture the perfect photo, the perfect memory before it had even happened. This is the uncanny place that memory occupies in our digital world.

“When working on the project, I was thinking about illusions, simulation, and memories being these spaces that we haunt, that we visit, that have these moving walls. Uncanny memories are uncanny places,” said Freedman.

For Millennials in particular, nostalgia became a major cultural touchstone (“only ‘90s kids will remember”). It also became an aesthetic anchorpoint. In the early years of Instagram, filters made to look like Polaroids and faded Kodak prints proliferated. These days, hope of returning to a pre-digital innocence is long gone, but nostalgia is still more salient than ever. I find myself scrolling through the archives of my Camera Roll with regularity, literally re-collecting the images of my past (or, at least, the ones I’ve managed or chosen to capture, anyways.) Freedman, who was in a long distance relationship at the time he was making Positive Illusions, says that yearning for a time passed subconsciously suffused his work.

“I was a little bit obsessed with nostalgia, the desire to go back in time, to make different decisions, the naive desire to play with the past,” he said.

The title for Freedman’s book comes from the PhD thesis his mother was working on at the time of that fateful 1999 road trip to Maine. (“I’m sentimental,” he joked, “A mama’s boy.) Freedman recalled the sound of her acrylic nails clacking on the keyboard, her face bathed in the glow of the cabin’s personal computer while she worked, sometimes until midnight. Her work was centered around the psychological concept of “positive illusions,” a form of self-deception. People who score highly for positive illusions remember the past more fondly than when it actually occurred. It’s a distortion, yes, but also one that she found leads to more contentment.

“I think I overwrote some memories,” confessed Freedman. “In the process of making [Positive Illusions] I started to fantasize about a childhood that maybe didn’t happen to me.”

So what do we lose in our technologically guided recollections? What do we gain? Freedman said that, as large language models proliferate and AI continues to unsettle the art world, working on the project allowed him to find some kind of happy medium between tech and art. Barreling into this future, we’d all be happier believing that the past is through with us once and for all. But maybe that’s just an illusion too.

Image credit: Benjamin Freedman

Read An Interview Of Robert Wilson On The Occasion Of His Installation During Salone del Mobile →

Michaelangelo was working on the Pietà Rondanini the week that he died. Perhaps eclipsed by his naturalist and expressive Pietà housed at Saint Peter’s Basilica, which is considered one of the great masterworks of the Renaissance, the Pietà Rondanini may seem crude in comparison. Many scholars regard the work as unfinished. And, yes, there is an openness to it—in the roughness of the features, in the ambiguity of the figure cradling Christ, and in the specifically rendered but detached arm that stands beside the sculpture’s primary characters like a sentinel.

The statue, which confounded art critics for many years, was championed by the great modernist sculptor Henry Moore. In his collected writings and letters, Moore noted of the statue, “This is the kind of quality you get in the work of old men who are really great. They can simplify; they can leave out.” At 88-years-old when he sculpted the Pietà Rondanini, Michaelangelo’s sculpture was less of a sermon and more of a prayer: some things need no explanation.

At 83-years-old, Robert Wilson is something of an old master himself, although he has approached his entire career with the confidence of an artist who knows not to carve away more than is needed. Beginning with light and formalist performance schematics, Wilson has staged some of the most renowned avant-garde theater works of the 20th century. From collaborating with minimalist composer Philip Glass on 1976’s marathon opera Einstein on the Beach to directing theatrical masterpieces from Vagner, Brecht, and Beckett, his formalist approach provides structures for audiences to encounter extended stretches of space, time, and silence.

Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson moved to Brooklyn in 1963 to study architecture at Pratt. A day job working with comatose patients at the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island sparked an early interest in signs and signals that transcend language, which suffuse all his performances. Wilson has collaborated on theatrical works with Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Anna Calvi, and William Burroughs.

On April 6, Wilson will kick off the Salone del Mobile.Milano with a new installation at the Castello Sforzeco titled Mother, centered around Michaelangelo’s final and unfinished Pietà. Featuring music based on a medieval prayer arranged by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Mother will explore the enduring universality of the image and emotion of Michaelangelo’s final work. In the run up to Salone, Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper spoke with Wilson about his early years in New York, his creative process, and the limitations of interpretation. Read more.

Noah Davis and His Painted Lines Between Reality and Fiction

Walk through Noah Davis’s scenes of timeless, raw sentiment at the Barbican

Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013 (c) The Estate of Noah Davis Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

text by Maisie McDermid

Paintings make space for imagination in a way photographs almost can, but cannot. This distinction lives between a photograph Noah Davis’s mother, Faith Childs-Davis, took in 1975 of a boy jumping into a crowded pool and a nearly identical painting Davis created in 2013 of the same scene. As both a photographer and a painter, Davis’s eye wandered between the two manifestations of a story. 

Up close, one sees how the people Davis’s mother captured on camera appear above and below the water; while, in Davis’ painting, cyan blue water covers the underwater legs and fluttering arms. One captures truth, and the other captures what can be. 

Noah Davis at work, Los Angeles, 2009, Patrick O'Brien-Smith

Davis (1983 - 2015) began painting in high school from his hometown of Seattle, Washington. While later studying film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York (2001 - 2004), Davis began also exploring the unique position of a camera in front of a scene. In 2004, he moved to LA to pursue his own artistic education and began working at the bookshop Art Catalogues. He referenced artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden, and Kerry James Marshall as he developed his own sharp talent for merging history with fiction.

In 2012, he and his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis, co-founded the Underground Museum, a heart-center for the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles. Although the museum — slash studio, slash residency site, slash exhibition space — is temporarily closed, its legacy continues to illuminate Davis’s commitment to his people and the responsibility he felt to capture their beauty. Davis had curated 18 exhibitions by the time of his untimely death in 2015. 

The Barbican’s Noah Davis retrospective — which includes 1975 (8), the photographed and painted boy jumping into water — encourages a close reading. Through its chronological showcasing of over fifty of Davis’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, the exhibition communicates Davis’s evolving interests in politics and current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, the racism of the American media, art history, and architecture. His characters, some fiction and some not, tell stories of normal days in communities, but in this normalcy, Davis discovers magic. 

“Noah Davis believed in the power of art to uplift others, and if you spend time with the often surreal and fantastical aspects of his paintings, you will see that he also believed that life — against hardship and violent histories of racism — could also be otherwise,” curator Wells Fray-Smith said. While his paintings of Black communities dancing, resting, swimming, and playing, certainly capture what is; they also capture what can be. 

Opportunities to see Davis’s work have remained rare up until now. The first and only exhibition of Davis’s work in London was in 2021, and there has never been an institutional solo show that showcases the breadth of his work. Today, his work feels all the more timely. “We are living in a world of dehumanization, crisis and upheaval in which there is a drought of love and connection. This exhibition, full of love, hope and humanity, felt like it needed to be now,” Fray-Smith said. As the Barbican emerged from a post-war context with a belief similar to Davis’s — that culture can powerfully transform life — the institution hopes to bring people together through Davis’s art and create challenging and delightful spaces for debate and reflection. 

“Davis’s approach to making exhibitions was often both deeply serious and hilariously funny, choosing combinations of artists and themes that contained lightness but asked profound questions,” Fray-Smith said. The exhibition features loans from public and private international collections, while also extending the retrospective visit to a multidisciplinary program of related events like figure and portrait drawing workshops and a speaker series from Claudia Rankine, Jason Moran, and more. Some notable pieces from the showing include: 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007, a painting that references the unrealized order that formerly enslaved families freed during the American Civil War would be given ‘40 acres and a mule,’ and Seventy Works, 2014, a selection of painted collages, which combine images of friends, anonymous figures cut out from magazines, newspaper clippings, and modernist sculptures.

“In Painting for My Dad, as we see a man on the precipice between this world and the next, we also notice that the rocks on which he stands are painted thinly. We can see instances of the canvas underneath washes of veiled paint. It’s the black, starry abyss beyond that has substance, texture, opacity, as if to say that this infinite beyond is the real thing,” Fray-Smith said.  

Noah Davis’s retrospective is a large-scale showing of the many convergences of fiction and reality people experience daily — where the truth lies somewhere in between. 

Noah Davis will be on display at the Barbican until May 11, 2025. Tickets are available on the Barbican website.

A Meier St/ Installation During Frieze Los Angeles 2025

During Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Meier St/, located in one of 52 historic Gregory Ain homes in the Mar Vista Tract built in 1948, showcased a unique group installation by artists Mike Nesbit, Tofer Chin, Mieko Akutsu, Thomas Linder, and Daniel Derro Regen. This house, which is being re-imagined as a dynamic hub for community and creativity, became a platform for unique works that coalesced around the ethos of the home as a work in progress and Los Angeles as a constantly expanding sprawl of expansion. Tofer Chin’s charred black picket fence was a stark reminder of our dark ecological ambitions—it was especially prescient just after two of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history. He said, “[The] work challenges notions of security, exclusion, and resilience in the face of climate change.” Photographs by Taiyo Watanabe

The Los Angeles Confidential: Read Our Interview of Devin Troy Strother →

We caught up with Devin Troy Strother on a sunny afternoon right after a bustling LA art week, where his latest exhibition opening had fans overflowing into the street. We chat a few moments before the debut of his first-ever digital commission, which marks the relaunch of Different Leaf, the trailblazing magazine founded by Michael Kuseck, broadening its horizons from cannabis to a new cultural platform encompassing art, music, and fashion.

Strother reaches an even broader, more diverse audience through Coloured Publishing, his independent press that rolls out artist zines, books, and editions that pop up everywhere, from the Printed Matter Art Book Fair to Undefeated. Strother’s publishing work connects him to a lineage of artists who have explored the book as an art form, including Henri Matisse, whose iconic cut-outs began for his own illustrated book, and Ed Ruscha, whose accordion-like photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations stretched across galleries at MoMA and LACMA during his recent major retrospective. Or Kandis Williams, whose publishing and educational platform, Cassandra Press, took over an entire floor of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. These artists have utilized the medium to extend their visual narratives, blending text and image in innovative ways that challenge and enrich the viewer’s experience—and make their work more accessible. 

In a way, Coloured Publishing doesn’t just broaden his studio’s creative horizons; it lets him and other artists dive deep into more personal, experimental print work. At the center of his latest exhibition, which was on view at Good Mother Gallery, sits a bright green newsstand bursting with zines and prints, surrounded by Strother’s new paintings—a testament to his commitment to making art communal and accessible.

The return of Different Leaf magazine, with its expanded focus on cannabis, art, music, and fashion, embodies a similar spirit. By commissioning Strother for its relaunch, the magazine not only underscores its commitment to artistic exploration but also celebrates the enduring significance and adaptability of boundary-blurring print projects in the digital era, promoting creativity over commerciality amidst a shifting media landscape.

In our discussion, Strother shares insights into his latest artistic and publishing endeavors, the newly reimagined Different Leaf, and how these efforts interweave to foster a community. Read more.

Suburban Atmospherics: Read Our Interview of Olivia Erlanger →

 

Olivia Erlanger
Prime Meridien, 2024
Aquaresin, aluminum, LEDs, drivers, cord
59 1/2 x 71 x 36 inches
(151.1 x 180.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image Courtesy of Soft Opening, London. Photo: Daniel Terna

 

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Olivia Erlanger is a suburbanist in multiple senses of the word: her oeuvre, a combination of sculpture, scale miniatures and shadow boxes, furnishings, short films, performance, as well as vernacular and technical histories of the home, takes its inspiration from American suburban geographies and the domestic interior that form its primary mise en scène. But Erlanger’s work also explores the world of margins, thresholds, and coulisse implicit in the etymology of the sub-urb—a space that, by definition, is beneath or outside of a physical and discursive center. Hers is a work that often eschews the stabilizing components of characterization, materiality, and setting for what, absent a sturdier, more easily translatable, descriptor, might be called a suburban atmospheric.

But what precisely is a suburban atmospheric? Beyond its seeming interest in combining the milieu of the suburb with a study of speculative environments, the term remains labile and fugitive, as atmosphere tends to be. The topic of suburbanism is itself obscured in a certain kind of epistemic veil, enforced by an enduring urban-centric ambivalence toward its historical or cultural import that says indignantly, “I’d prefer not to.” The suburb has long been the subaltern to its urban hegemon. Equally, the notion of an atmosphere is resistant to any center. It is neither material/spatial nor strictly rhetorical or conceptual, but more like an environmental “mood” accompanying these objects or categories. Peter Sloterdijk, the great thinker of atmosphere, describes it as an affective envelope that shelters self, other and world in various existential interiors. Its ur-space is the home, whether hut or tract house, though the feeling of at-homeness is as much an architecture of familiarity as it is materiality. Atmosphere, however, will always retain some essential mystery or exoticism. Appearing in disguise under designations like “the sensorium,” “the spectral,” “interiority,” “microclimate,” and “the nobject,” it haunts the world of people and objects from its dark purlieus, much like the suburb haunts the city and thrives in the nooks and verges.

Erlanger’s works hover in this same elusive topology with its outré images of possessed housewares, adolescent bedrooms in miniature, deteriorating snow globes, manic realty agents, piscine nymphets, and trompe l’œil terraria. Evoking the sort of Gothic unheimlich that emanates from a landscape of empty cul-de-sacs, dead shopping malls, and vacant ranch ramblers, they play in the interstices of the quotidian and the storybook. The result is a spiritist practice that is simultaneously an “anthropology of the near,” in the words of Marc Augé, and a “space of elsewhere,” in those of Gaston Bachelard. And, perhaps, most of all, Erlanger’s works echo Longfellow’s observation in “Haunted Houses” (1858) that “All houses…/Are haunted houses/…The spirit-world around this world of sense/Floats like an atmosphere…”

On the occasion of Erlanger’s new exhibit, Spinoff, at Luhring Augustine Tribeca, the artist spoke on a variety of topics, including the mysteries of the suburb, the pleasures of the miniature, Last Year at Marienbad and the haunted house genre, Nabokov and the “final girl.” Read more.

Nam June Paik: Rear Window Offers a Posthumous Glimpse into the Mind of a Master

Micki Meng’s gallery viewing encourages viewers to look above, behind, and below Nam June Paik’s allegorical work

Photo credit: Graham Holoch

text by Maisie McDermid

Friends Indeed, a storefront gallery between San Francisco's Chinatown and Financial District, is housing a Nam June Paik dollhouse. Tangled cords drape from the house's backside, with ten miniature, '90s TV sets placed into its windows. The pixelated footage loops four scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, teasing visitors into thinking they're glimpsing into private moments inside the plaster-painted dollhouse. 

The sculpture, like the film, is about a stranger peering into private spaces, says curator John Morace. "It becomes a kind of hall of mirrors." 

Paik, widely known as the founder of video art, grew up in Seoul, Korea. From a young age, he studied piano and composition, later moving to Japan where he studied aesthetics at the University of Tokyo with a focus on composer Arnold Schoenberg. After further music history studies at Munich University and a brief return to Tokyo – where he bought his first Sony Portapak and joined the avant-garde art movement, Fluxus – Paik emigrated to the United States where he lived in New York City and eventually died in Miami, Florida in 2006. Although most of his art manifests in digital formats – video sculptures, performances, installations, and television productions – his paintings and drawings also reveal his interests in how humans connect.

Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) is one among three other Paik pieces – Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry), Untitled (Toy Robots), and Untitled (Allen Ginsberg) – being showcased at Friends Indeed. Visitors walk through the space opening closet doors and peeking behind black curtains at either one of Paik’s detailed paintings or a laser-generated, neon photograph. The works vary in their approaches to perception and play. All – including the six others available for viewing upon request – are on consignment from the owners and available for sale to other collectors or institutions.

In its voyeuristic slant, Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse) combines questions both Hitchcock and Paik ask of viewers who stare into the “windows” of either a screen or a house. "Rear Window itself is a very interesting film because it is about viewing and viewership – who's viewing whom, and under what circumstances. This is one of the themes that Paik has always worked with – how we communicate and how information is passed between people," said Morace. 

Photo Credit: Graham Holoch

Between Alan Ginsberg's vibrating, laser-generated photograph and the toy robots splattered onto a doodled canvas, Paik made art silly, professionally. He celebrated tasteful fun. 

"What a subtle little thing for him to show us," Morace said, reacting to some inch-sized black brushstrokes at the bottom of Untitled (small painting with film strip jewelry). "You know, he's communicating in his Fluxus way by mixing media that was around him. Paint, jewelry, life, and art are all together in this one tiny piece. Look at those little black birds on the bottom, they are a motif he's used in many works – like flying TVs – and it links beautifully to his entire body of work." 

In other public displays of Rear Window (Hitchcock Dollhouse), curators have concealed the many wires, dials, and plugs spilling from the house. "It's like an octopus of cables with all sorts of different colors and widths, and you're like, oh my god," Morace joked. Paik envisioned the lives of his sculptures beyond their years. "He had this theory that if the technology improved, and his piece was going to be up again, you could move the technology forward. So if it went from cathode ray tubes to LCD screens, you could update it as long as it didn't affect the work's physical manifestation." But Morace and co-curator Mickie Meng, unlike other curators who may have likened the “guts” to a distraction, believe the “guts” are the piece’s purpose. Viewers, therefore, peek into the principal theme of peeking. 

The combination of both video and traditional fine art in Nam June Paik: Rear Window’s collection is what makes the showing of these four works – which have never been displayed together – particularly interesting. Not all of Paik's work buzzes, flashes, and sparks. Some of his most sincere art exists on paper. After suffering from a stroke in 1996, he spent much of his remaining decade in a wheelchair. 

"His dealer at the time, Holly Solomon, visited him in the hospital and brought him paper, crayons, and these oil stick colors to give him something to amuse himself. She was doing it to say, ‘Hey, you are still you, and you can go on,’" said Morace. His drawings draw-up dimensions through his use of layering and pressure shading techniques. Untitled (a small painting with film strip jewelry) features a bedazzled film strip with empty photo slots. Paik used the spaces to fill in his own storyboard: a blank face in one, a smiling face in two, a mysterious face in three, and two faces in the fourth above the word "kiss." Even on canvas, Paik could tell a moving story.

"I hope the work nudges people to think about art in a broader way than is typical of many people today when they're really focused on painting. I encourage people to say, 'Wow, I can get some pleasure, enjoyment, and some satisfaction from seeing this video, these sculptural objects, and these weird hybrid paintings with toys stuck on them,’" said Morace.

Nam June Paik: Rear Window will be on display at Friends Indeed from March 13, 2025 to May 02, 2025.

Borderlands: Read an Interview of Artist Hugo Crosthwaite on the Occasion of His Solo Presentation @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Linea (The Line), 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Ex-votos are a form of Mexican folk painting, part prayer, part diary, they are a dedication to the saints and a plea for guidance during difficult times. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes polished, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwrenching. Te pido perdon virgencita pues jugue con fuego (I ask you to forgive me, Virgin, because I played with fire) reads one on a painting of a woman with red skin and devil horns beckoning a man in bed while the Virgen de Guadalupe looks on. Another celebrates two luchadors who met in the ring and found love. Another thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for surviving a late night encounter with two extraterrestrials.


Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence. Read more.

Color Vision: Read Our Interview of Master Printers Guy Stricherz & Irene Malli →

William Eggleston 
Greenwood, Mississippi (red ceiling), 1973

Phillips is set to present Color Vision: Master Prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, a landmark series of auctions celebrating the unparalleled artistry of the dye transfer process. The first auction, happening on March 18, 2025, will feature the master prints of William Eggleston, including his Los Alamos portfolio and the highly sought-after "Magnificent Seven" large-format dye transfer prints. These works, crafted by Stricherz and Malli at Color Vision Imaging Laboratory, represent the pinnacle of color photography, offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire the definitive prints from one of the most influential printers of the past four decades. I sat down with Guy and Irene to discuss the rare and fleeting magic of the dye transfer process in anticipation of next Tuesday’s auction at Phillips. Read more.

Georgia Gardner Gray's Chrysalis Reminds Us That Transformation Demands Confrontation

 

Georgia Gardner Gray
Walk-In, 2025
Oil on canvas
75 x 63 inches (190.5 x 160 cm)

 

Georgia Gardner Gray’s exhibition CHRYSALIS, currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, marks a defining moment in her career as her first large-scale solo presentation in the United States. Expansive in both scope and ambition, the exhibition encompasses new paintings, sculptures, and an original theatrical production, all bound by an intricate exploration of transformation, ritual, and cyclical processes.

At the heart of CHRYSALIS lies the chrysalis itself—a potent emblem of metamorphosis and renewal. Gray draws inspiration from Salvador Dalí’s 1958 pharmaceutical pavilion, a surreal structure that fused art and alchemical symbolism, to probe the nature of ritualistic reenactment, the repetition of history, and the evolving language of artistic expression. Her work reframes transformation not as a singular event but as an ongoing process shaped by cultural, historical, and personal forces.

Gray’s paintings interrogate the paradox of historical reenactment, specifically through the lens of Civil War pageantry. In Belles (2025), figures adorned in antebellum costumes evoke a distorted vision of Scarlett O’Hara, where the romanticization of the past collides with its inescapable weight. Through this juxtaposition, Gray exposes the absurdity of attempting to relive or aestheticize historical trauma, inviting viewers to confront the cyclical nature of cultural mythmaking and the complexities of inherited identity.

The exhibition also engages with contemporary notions of femininity and self-construction. Gray’s depictions of women in transitional spaces—trying on clothes, gazing from windows—resist passive voyeurism. Instead, these figures assert their agency, shaping their own narratives within the liminal spaces of modern life. Here, transformation is not merely biological or historical but psychological and performative, implicating the viewer in the act of perception.

Further deepening the exhibition’s conceptual rigor, Gray presents CHRYSALIS as a theatrical production. Performed by Los Angeles-based actors, the play unfolds as a meditation on modernity’s contradictions, drawing upon archetypal characters and fragmented narratives to interrogate the tension between progress and nostalgia, innovation and repetition.

Through CHRYSALIS, Georgia Gardner Gray’s deft synthesis of painting, sculpture, and performance constructs a multilayered inquiry into the nature of change—whether historical, social, or personal. The exhibition is a powerful reminder that transformation is not an endpoint but an enduring process, one that demands both confrontation and reinvention.


Performance documentation of CHRYSALIS by Georgia Gardner Gray. Regen Projects, Los Angeles. March 1, 2025
Photo: Evan Bedford

Emma Webster "That Thought Might Think" At Petzel Gallery In New York

Emma Webster, The Material World, 2025. Oil on canvas102 x 190 x 2 in259.1 x 482.6 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel,New York

Emma Webster's inaugural solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery, "That Thought Might Think," is a mesmerizing journey into expansive, otherworldly landscapes that challenge our perception of reality. On view from March 7 through April 12, 2025, this exhibition showcases Webster's largest works to date, offering viewers an immersive experience. Central to the exhibition are two monumental paintings: "The Material World" and "Era of Eternity." "The Material World" transports viewers to a primordial realm, where lush foliage thrives under an obscured sun, evoking a sense of ancient majesty. In contrast, "Era of Eternity" captures a celestial spectacle—a spiraling sunburst accompanied by a flock of geese soaring over a canyon—eliciting feelings of awe and contemplation. Webster masterfully manipulates light and atmosphere, leaving us pondering whether we are witnessing the dawn of creation or the quietude of an impending dusk.

What sets Webster's work apart is her innovative fusion of traditional painting techniques with modern technology. By integrating virtual reality, hand-drawn sketches, and scans of handcrafted sculptures, she constructs digital dioramas that serve as the foundation for her paintings. This approach not only pays homage to historical artistic tools like the camera obscura but also propels the genre of still life into the contemporary digital age. The resulting landscapes are immersive and uncanny, blurring the lines between the tangible and the virtual, and prompting reflection on our relationship with nature in the Anthropocene era.

The timing of these works is particularly poignant. Created amidst the Los Angeles fires, Webster's paintings resonate with the urgency of ecological crises. She reflects, "It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires." Yet, through her art, she celebrates the resilience and complexity of natural systems, inviting viewers to engage with environments that are both familiar and fantastical. "That Thought Might Think" is not just an exhibition; it's an invitation to explore the delicate interplay between reality and artifice, nature and technology. Emma Webster's visionary landscapes beckon us to reconsider our place within the natural world and the digital constructs we inhabit.

Emma Webster, Era of Eternity , 2025 Oil on canvas 108 x 180 x 2 in 274.3 x 457.2 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York

The Long Journey Home: Read Our Interview of Composer Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier Artistic Director Isabelle Gaudefroy →

Picture © Zivanai Matangi

Before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s an age-old adage. Our shoes carry the weight of our daily lives, our stories, our hardships. They represent the wear and tear of our history but also the tenacity and possibilities of new paths forward. 

For writer, composer, and musical director Sbusiso Shozi, shoes are a way to explore the many pathways of the African diaspora. Blending traditional South African musicality, oral tradition, and contemporary instrumentation, he’s mounting a new performance, African Exodus, for the Centre for the Less Good Idea, in collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. 

Founded in 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Centre for the Less Good Idea is an incubator for experimental and cross-disciplinary art. The “less good idea” is the one that is more marginal, more daring and more ripe for invention and discovery. It also has to do with resourcefulness; a Sechuana proverb advises that ‘when a good doctor won’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’ The Centre for the Less Good Idea is the first organization to be hosted in residence by the Fondation Cartier, beginning with a week-long takeover of Fondation Cartier’s performance spaces in Paris in May 2024. African Exodus continues that partnership at the Perelman Performance Center in New York City, running from February 27 to March 2.

Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper sat down with Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier artistic director Isabelle Gaudefroy to discuss performance and the two organizations’ ongoing partnership. Read more.