Crystal Skulls and Church Fires: Christelle Oyiri’s “Belief May Vary" @ Amant in New York

text by Arlo Kremen

Christelle Oyiri’s solo debut in the US is at Amant, where she continues her investigation of myth-making as an infinite process informed by the continuous need to repatch and adapt to new conditions. Much like her show in Berlin at CANK, Belief May Vary situates Hauntology of an OG (2025) at the heart of this show, but a multiplicity of other media spring from the walls—bas-relief, photography, and sculpture that serve to expand on Oyiri’s film and sharpen its focus.

Hauntology draws heavily on the Memphis Pyramid’s symbolic potential. Clarifying the object through its parallel in the Giza Pyramids, tombs of pharaohs, and monuments to death, faith, and earthly transcendence, the Memphis Pyramid carries a uniquely American interpolation of these associations. Once a sports stadium called the “Tomb of Doom,” it is now home to the largest Bass Pro Shop in the country, a capitalist tourist attraction that brings droves to Memphis to witness this postmodern World Wonder. Today, the Pyramid is a hotel, restaurant, and shopping center, but between 2002 and 2006, it served as a site of worship. The Church of God in Christ held holy convocations in the Pyramid, gathering thousands for their assemblies. Another congregation considered buying the Pyramid during a period of uncertainty and economic failure. Pastor Gary Faulkner, whose 5,000-member congregation filled three different locations for Sunday services, saw the economic drag the structure had on the city, so he offered a solution. He also planned to develop commercial outlets to support the building financially. This offer overlapped with the city’s deal with Bass Pro Shop, which eventually won out. If not, the Pyramid would most likely have been demolished.

Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
Hauntology of an OG (still), 2025
Courtesy of the artists; Amant, Brooklyn, NY; LAS Art Foundation, Berlin; and Pinault Collection, Paris

The Pyramid is undergirded by histories of capitalist spectacle, faith, and the looming threat of destruction, making Oyiri’s Egyptian comparison all the more prescient—how did faith get here? The Parisian filmmaker represents this history without judgment or any moral lashings, using local Memphis lo-fi visuals to probe the Pyramid on its own terms. In collaboration with Memphis poet and rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton and a sample from Princess Loko on her original synth-driven composition, the artist collapses the city’s past and present to unveil the failed futures that continue to mold how faith operates in Memphis.

Hauntology contends with, along with the Pyramid, the burning of Clayborn Temple, which horrifically occurred during her filming trip. Clayborn Temple was a home to a historical Black Presbyterian congregation and was heavily involved with the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike in 1968. The church had a similarly sizable involvement in the 1960s civil rights movement as a center for grassroots organizers. Clayborn Temple was a beacon of light for racial equality, an equality that never really occurred as originally intended, with economic devastation marking this majority Black city. Oyiri stills the frame of Clayborn Temple’s burning in CNC-milled polyurethane resin on a wall for Melting Temple (2026). She marks the front of the church and miraculously standing remains of the structure in gold acrylic, while the ongoing fire is left nearly absent; its plumes are signaled by a topographic texture, pushing into and away from the viewer’s space. Rather than propounding destruction, the artist uplifts architectural endurance amidst apocalypse.

Christelle Oyiri
Melting Temple, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist

Christelle Oyiri
REVELATION SYSTEM, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist and Gathering, London/Ibiza

REVELATION SYSTEM (2026) combined CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin to create a model of the Memphis Pyramid. Painted in gold to also mimic the Pyramids of Giza, the tip of the tetrahedron, buried in clear resin, is a skull. The myth goes as such: construction workers uncovered a metal box attached to the top of the pyramid, inside of which laid a crystal skull placed there by Isaac Tigrett to “ward off evil spirits.” The skull was displaced, and Tigrett forewarned that a curse would be cast on the new entertainment space. Several misfortunes befell the pyramid—sewage floods and facilities that fell below NBA standards, leading to substantial renovations that had little effect. The space was closed and practically abandoned for most of 2007 to 2015. REVELATION SYSTEM brings this folktale to the fore, situating it within a greater historical context of a snuffed-out future of racial freedom and prosperity that is particularly felt in a city like Memphis, which was a hub for much of the US’s grassroots civil rights activism.

Christelle Oyiri
ALL ABOUT MONEY — DJ SQUEEKY, 2025
Aluminum-charged polyurethane resin foam, aluminum, acrylic
Edition of 5 + 1AP
Courtesy of the artist, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Oyiri similarly positions two other myth systems as existing in the wake of the promises of the civil rights movement: rap and the Black Hebrew Israelites. On the far wall of the show, cassette-shaped plaques monumentalize foundational Memphis rappers 8Ball & MJG, Tommy Wright III, Three Six Mafia, and DJ Squeeky. These figures, along with those memorialized in Hauntology—Princess Loko, Gangsta Boo, Young Dolph, Lord Infamous, and Big Scarr—managed to create light from the immense darkness and subjugation at the root of America’s racial capitalism. The cassette was the earliest form of quick dissemination, spreading the words of these legendary sonic architects. In Clayton’s words, “music possesses souls.”

Christelle Oyiri
I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECASUE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES, 2026
Framed lenticular print
Courtesy of the artist

The Black Hebrew Israelites speak on the street while, presumably, the photographer tape-records them. I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECAUSE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES (2026) embodies the quality of the image’s lenticular print, adapting to its spectator’s movements with its three-dimensional illusion. Here, it seems as though Oyiri begs for different treatment of the Black Hebrew Israelites, as, like the other faith systems present in Belief May Vary: racial capitalism’s persistence is the site in which all of these beliefs can be sourced. Words of God do not come from a void; they can always be traced to a rupture, referring to the artist’s continued exploration of how faith and belief are rarely sourced purely from doctrine and are instead informed and sculpted by survival and endurance. Oyiri proposes a balanced consideration of belief as mutable and ever-evolving, often drawing on  social ruptures as a vehicle for faith’s transformations. To quote Clayton once more, “Not only roses but honeysuckle bushes too grow from concrete.”

Belief May Vary is on view through August 16th @ Amant 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn.

Otherwise Part VII: Conviviality, Artful Infrastructures, Itinerant Organizing & the Creative Commons

La Place

text by Perry Shimon

“…as long as the over-all structure of society does not favor the degradation of everyone into a compulsory voyeur.”

— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality


The previous essays in this collection have sought to examine a conventional contemporary understanding of art that primarily reflects the dominant dynamics of power and finance in the age from which it emerges. Yet the capacity of art, as an evolving and contested category, is not exhausted by the tenets of neoliberal realism. Within the capaciousness of the category, there exist models for the otherwise.

In this penultimate chapter, I want to highlight a number of cultural infrastructures, institutions, and practices that offer inspiring alternatives to the possessive individualism and ever-increasing financialization of both art and life. A precondition for participation in these architectures of artful conviviality, however, is a more equitable distribution of self-determined time, alongside the conditions of social safety and care required to sustain it. The struggle for a more artful and beautiful world is inextricably bound to human and more-than-human emancipation from the ecological and social ruination produced by the destructive logics of endless growth and concentrated accumulation under capitalism.

Santo Domingo plaza Oaxaca, by ryan doyle via Unsplash

IAGO

Francisco Toledo’s Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) remains an example particularly close to my heart of a small-scale, community-focused art space that is widely used and beloved. Founded in 1988 in an 18th-century building adjacent to the lively plaza in front of Santo Domingo Church, it was seeded by Toledo’s donation of tens of thousands of art books from his personal collection. These now form a public reference library beside a print studio, gallery, and bougainvillea-covered courtyard alive with birdsong and conviviality. I have many fond memories of reading there happily while listening to the quietly cheerful polyglot murmur, bird sounds, and diffuse sociality of the nearby plaza, with celebratory brass-band processions punctuating the rhythms of the day. Openings at IAGO are warm, gregarious, intergenerational affairs, free to all and accompanied by hearty food and music.

Eiko Ishibashi

Noise Research Union Residency

In 2008, Hamish Dunbar and Keiko Yamamoto opened Cafe Oto in a former paint factory in Dalston, East London. It has since become a beloved institution, both locally and internationally, with one of the most adventurous programs of music and performance anywhere, and it offers a space to artists experimenting beyond conventional tastes and established traditions. In the evenings, there are concerts, performances, screenings, lectures, symposia, and residencies, all realized in a large yet intimate room without a stage or backstage. By day, the venue functions almost as a community center, with a cafe, a modest menu, and thoughtfully curated selections of books and records for sale and reference. It sits on a quiet, leafy street with some outdoor seating and benefits from very little automobile traffic—a stark contrast to, and great respite from—the frenetic avenue just behind. I’ve had countless beautiful and inspiring evenings there, often arriving without even checking the calendar, collecting a fresh mint tea from the kind, artful, and friendly staff, and settling in for an extraordinary cultural evening. Afterward, the room hums with gratitude, conversation, and questions in a deeply convivial atmosphere.

Friche

At another scale, commensurate with the diverse and lively constituency of Marseille, La Friche de la Belle de Mai is a sprawling multi-venue cultural center built on the foundation of a former tobacco factory. It offers galleries, theaters, rooftop space for concerts, gardens, sports facilities, restaurants, cafes, a skatepark, a soccer pitch, a bookshop, artist studios, media production facilities, zones for street art, daycare services, farmers markets, and many other kinds of special events. The facilities also host the offices of some seventy or so cultural and nonprofit organizations. It is filled with joyful life, art, and conviviality, and offers programs and amenities that are inclusive and welcoming to everyone in Marseille.

Centquatre

In Paris, Centquatre—or 104—shares a similar spirit. Located in a former municipal funerary complex in the 19th arrondissement, it first became an informal gathering place for young people, often dancing, before eventually being built out (perhaps even a bit too much) into a vast cultural center with many amenities akin to those at Friche and a lively public program. Both venues provide free, hospitable spaces for sociality and art, without an overbearing commercial presence or the sociocidal imposition of automobiles. At the end of the twentieth century, Ivan Illich wrote in Tools for Conviviality: “The present world is divided into those who do not have enough and those who have more than enough, those who are pushed off the road by cars and those who drive them.” The automobile, and its domination of space at the expense of social and ecological life, remains a powerful example of anti-convivial technology, compounding the deeply uneven distribution of agential time and the impoverished conditions required for its meaningful use.

SESC Pompéia

Brazil’s popular, nonprofit, tax-supported SESC programs offer another shining example of cultural infrastructure worthy of wider emulation. With regional variations across more than five hundred locations in all twenty-seven Brazilian states—far beyond the scope of this précis—I will mention only the iconic SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, housed in a former steel drum factory reimagined by the great architect Lina Bo Bardi as a multipurpose “leisure center” containing libraries, workshops, exhibition spaces, theaters, sports facilities, eateries, and a swimming pool. It is composed of many zones of enjoyment and cultivation, and is enthusiastically used and appreciated.

Minna no Mori

Minna no Mori (Everyone’s Forest) Media Cosmos, a municipally led civic and cultural project in Gifu City, is housed in a stunning building by Toyo Ito. Its sweeping organic wooden lattice structures, suggestive of mycelial forms, cast a warm, diffuse light over an expansive library, workshops, galleries, and spaces for education and cultural exchange. The space is filled with members of the community from every generation: learning, playing, reading, and working within a structure that clearly expresses profound respect for the people and values that animate it. When I asked the reference librarian about an artist I was researching, she kindly asked me to return at the end of my visit, at which point she presented me with a brimming folder of carefully compiled resources and suggestions for further inquiry.

More generally, Japan has one of the most sophisticated and robust cultural infrastructures I have ever encountered, combining more and less technologically complex forms and methods. In most places I visited, there were visitor information centers where all manner of cultural guidance was made freely available in a variety of languages. Warm, patient, upbeat, and hospitable guides generously offered advice and recommendations. A4 sheets announced imminent cultural happenings through beautiful graphic design and thoughtful presentation displays. This practice was common in significant cultural institutions of many scales, which in turn displayed resonant announcements for one another, connecting organizations in a mycelial web of aesthetic and social affinities. Online, robust and widely used platforms such as Tokyo Art Beat carry this spirit into the digital sphere.

Throughout the country, there is substantial regional and municipal support for recurrent seasonal art festivals that both celebrate local cultures and invite meaningful dialogue from abroad. These initiatives feel less determined by the market and its influence on a distinctly neoliberal form of biennial-making, which is more prevalent in the West. Many local art festivals honor their histories and earnestly invite cultural exchange with artists from abroad in a way that feels distinctly more open, playful, and inviting of participation.

The Eagle

I also felt, perhaps on account of the strong Shinto current still running through Japanese life, a reenchantment of quotidian aesthetic experience, along with a respect for the more recent past. I felt this acutely in jazz and classical kissas, or listening cafes, where people sit comfortably and quietly in an unusual kind of social space simply to hear beautiful recorded music played on excellent sound systems. My favorite kissa in Tokyo offered a small library of art and anthropology books and journals, and served a modest menu of simple pasta dishes in a cozy Japandi-feeling basement beneath a commercial corridor in Yotsuya. There was something akin to sacredness, and certainly deep satisfaction, in this contemplative being-together. It is not unlike the onsen and sento cultures where I found solemn peace and respite, especially from our hyper-technologized present and its tools, which, as Illich put it, “must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality.” Spaces of respite and spaces of conviviality may well go hand in hand in providing models for how to be together outside the narrow, competitive, and antisocial relations of neoliberal exchange. Within Japan, and particularly in the countryside, I felt a sense of enchantment and gentle conviviality institutionalized in a way that feels profoundly absent from my life in Western metropoles. I was reminded of this daily by each, often simple, Shinto shrine encountered, inviting us into greater awareness of the quotidian and superabundant sacred.

It has been profoundly depressing to witness the early promise of the internet largely captured by insidious monopolistic corporations developing increasingly predatory, addictive, and antisocial practices for extracting profit and attention. Yet, in response, and much like the public library system before it, there exists a strong creative commons countermovement demonstrating an entirely different mode of organizing cultural production and life. Its protagonists operate at many scales: from the expansive and global Wikipedia, with its incalculable number of contributors and contributions to the knowledge commons, to more intimate organizations such as the Public Domain Review, dedicated to presenting curated selections of public-domain materials and generously contextualizing them for artists and researchers. Sound-sharing communities like Freesound and image-sharing communities like Unsplash have created vast audio and visual commons through which people can share, create, and collaborate, illustrating our better capacities for mutual aid. Beyond even the creative commons movement are shadow libraries such as Memory of the World, Libgen, and UbuWeb, which explicitly common and curate copyrighted materials considered of social and cultural value.

freesound.org

The questions of copyright and possessive individualism are complex, and I understand, to a degree, those positions advocating the fair remuneration of artists within neoliberal conditions. Unfortunately, however, I fear this line of thinking ultimately reinforces capitalist logics, narrows the range of beneficiaries, and fails to account for the collaborative and ecological contributors involved in anything that can meaningfully be called a work of art. Rather than devising ever-more-complicated technological and energy-intensive systems for administering artistic private property, it would be simpler and more socially beneficial to provide something like a universal or guaranteed income alongside a broad commoning of creative media and the redistribution of self-determined time needed for artful collaboration and exchange. The commoning of creativity I am describing already exists in impoverished form for most people making and sharing things today—writing, pictures, music, and so on—before the vast majority of value is extracted by a handful of monopolistic firms. How to enact a transition away from neoliberal realism within a geopolitical context of multipolar colonial power formations remains an open and urgent question, one illuminated by the precedents, axioms, and spirit of the models mentioned here.

Artists and organizers living under structurally disadvantaged conditions within the ruins of capitalism, and still seeking meaningful forms of gathering, have long experimented with alternative practices of sociality, art-making, and the sharing of knowledge. In a context poor in convivial cultural infrastructure, a few notable examples come to mind.

It was through my friend Gareth Evans that I became part of the London Walking Collective, a perambulatory, convivial, and welcoming gathering of friends and friends of friends, who meet to wander a given, often urban, environment with a playful Situationist spirit, together co-authoring a social essay unfolding through time and space. Sometimes a historian accompanies the walk to provide context, other times, a theoretical cosmologist reads Rumi above a buried river in the so-called Queen’s Wood. These hearty and edifying perambulations typically end in a public space of sociality, a pub or restaurant, where everyone is welcome, and laughter carries the group joyfully into the evening. Gareth, an inveterate and largely unaffiliated organizer of cultural events around London, often concludes the gatherings he facilitates with an open invitation to continue elsewhere nearby. This simple act of hospitality in cultural facilitation is among the most generous practices of conviviality I know.

Place Settings “Ascension” Photos by Noah Collier

Place Settings “Experiments in Space"

Los Angeles’ Place Settings, founded by Laura Nelson and Anya Ventura, makes use of Hollywood sets and other nontraditional locations to organize thoughtfully conceived, place-focused lectures on subjects ranging from shorelines to supply chains to lithium mines. Emerging from interests in third spaces, alternative pedagogies, and the undercommons, the project invites us to consider how impoverished architectures might be détourned or reimagined so that we may gather meaningfully and exchange knowledge under conditions of duress.

Each summer solstice in Oakland, California, within a stunning columbarium and mausoleum reimagined by Julia Morgan in a former transit center beside Olmsted’s Mountain View Cemetery, a day-long performance of new, classical, and experimental music takes place. Nearly a hundred musicians fill the labyrinthine architecture and gardens with porous sound. It is a joyful event I look forward to each year, skillfully conceived and organized by Sarah Cahill, featuring a beautiful ensemble of diverse musicians that score an experience encountered differently by every fortunate participant: a superabundance of sonorous conviviality resonating generously until the sun sets on the longest day of the year.


Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.

Otherwise VII: Coming Soon

Otherwise Part VI: The Totalizing Grid and the Music to Come

Антон Дмитриев / ehmitrich

text by Perry Shimon

The grid, in short, is a medium that operationalizes deixis. It allows us to link deictic procedures with chains of symbolic operations that have effects in the real. Hence the grid is not only part of a history of representation, or of a history of procedures facilitating the efficient manipulation of data, but also of “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made into subjects.”

- Bernhard Siegert

Music has no subject. It is neither the manifestation of an idea nor the illustration of a phenomenon. There is no musical heuristic. Music proves nothing. It refers to no dialectic of order and chaos, reveals no secret harmony of things, it does not render perceptible the mystery of mathematical relationships or the secret song of Nature. Nor does it call to God, nor does it corrupt the youth. It does far more than this.

- François J. Bonnet 

The grid has long functioned as a top-down cultural technology for organizing space and subjects. Orthogonal planning emerged in the Indus Valley around 2500 BC, with cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa laid out along straight streets, and standardized architecture intersecting at right angles. In ancient Egypt, around 1895 BC, under the reign of King Senusret II, Kahun (or Lahun) a city was built in a similar fashion—tellingly—to house temporary laborers enlisted to construct a tributary pyramid. Similar spatial ordering appeared in early Chinese imperial planning, with examples like Chang’an in the Tang dynasty, where the city’s rectilinear layout was bound up with cosmological ideas of political authority and cosmic harmony. In Mesoamerica, around 100 BCE, Teotihuacan emerged as a gridded city covering more than twenty square kilometers, with standardized living compounds and monumental axial avenues.

Watercolor by Jean-Claude Golvin

Excavations at Mohenjo-daro in 1924

While much about the social relations of these cultures remains speculative, these projects developed in ways that imply a tendency to organize space and bodies into governable units. They appear as coordinated, external attempts to control contingent and autonomous movements and agencies—or a system of rule that operationalizes deixis, in the words of Bernhard Siegert.

In the classical Mediterranean, the grid became an explicit instrument of imperial administration. Greek planners like Hippodamus of Miletus promoted orthogonal city plans that divided urban space into regular blocks, reenforcing ideals of order, productivity, and civic organization. The Romans extended this logic across their empire through surveying techniques that divided conquered land into standardized parcels for settlement and taxation. Cities like Timgad exemplify this approach with a rigid intersection of axes that imposed a legible structure on territory, allowing the imperial state to efficiently administer property and movement.

Timgad By Hamza-sia

During the early modern period European colonial powers applied the grid to remake landscapes across the Americas. Spanish colonial planning codes such as the Laws of the Indies mandated orthogonal town layouts centered on a plaza, replicating administrative order across distant territories. In North America, the grid reached an unprecedented scale with the Land Ordinance of 1785, which divided vast areas of land into square townships and mile-wide sections. Through this survey system, the continent was transformed into a vast cadastral grid, enabling land commodification, agricultural settlement, and speculative real estate markets.

Nelson Loverin’s version of the “Polish System” or “centograph” in Loverin’s Chart of Time (1882). via Public Domain Review

Western music theory as well developed a grid-like ordering. The emergence of equal temperament, associated with figures like Johann Sebastian Bach and his paragonal Well-Tempered Clavier, divided the octave into twelve evenly spaced intervals. This tuning system smoothed over the irregularities of natural harmonic relationships so that instruments could modulate freely between keys. While often celebrated for enabling harmonic flexibility, equal temperament strictly determined a form of acoustic standardization: the continuous spectrum of pitch discretized into a fixed grid of twelve tones per octave. Like the cadastral grid imposed on land, the tonal grid turns sonic space into a uniform field of interchangeable units.

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier

A similar process occurs in the organization of musical time. Western rhythmic notation, especially from the Renaissance onward, increasingly emphasized metrical regularity—bars, beats, and subdivisions that partition time into predictable intervals. The musical measure becomes analogous to a parcel of land within the larger temporal survey of a composition. Once time is divided this way, it becomes possible to coordinate large ensembles, synchronize performance, and eventually mechanize “musical” reproduction.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this logic further intensified with the rise of electronic production tools. Digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and Logic Pro present music explicitly as a rectangular grid of time and pitch. Beats are subdivided into quantized increments and notes are snapped into place along vertical timelines. Quantization algorithms automatically correct deviations from the grid, pulling performances toward mathematically precise timing. The interface makes visible a conception of so-called music that is treated as a field of discrete coordinates where events can be standardized, reproduced, and transacted.

Ableton view

This digital grid is another reflection of the same epistemology governing contemporary spatial infrastructures. Just as planetary sensing systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) discretize the Earth into coordinates, digital music production discretizes sound into samples, beats, and MIDI events. The result is a sonic environment in which musical gestures become data points within a computational framework. Rhythm becomes a timing grid; pitch becomes a numbered scale, and each “musical” event becomes parcellated and recombinable information.

Seen from this perspective, the history of Western music can be understood as a gradual intensification of quantization and emplacement on the grid—the translation of continuous sonic phenomena into standardized units. The same cultural impulse that divides landscapes into parcels and cities into orthogonal streets also divides sound into notes, measures, and beats. In both cases, the grid becomes the cultural infrastructure in which the world is discretized and datafied, so as to be owned, manipulated, and controlled.

Siegert presciently pointed out in the beginning of the 21st century that: 

The fusion of matrix grid and GPS has ensured the global presence of the operationalized deixis first conceived of in connection with the grid-and-register-shaped settlements of South America. Indeed, what better way to describe some of the basic aspects of our media culture than to point to the mutual translatability of cartographic grid, topographic grid, planning grid, and imaging grid? Linked with the convertibility of these diverse grids and with corresponding scaling techniques, grids—a formidable cultural technique—have become the basis of a mediatization of space from which hardly anything can escape. 

NASA

The becoming-totalizing grid now surveyed by satellites and security cameras, in concert with the rectilinear self-surveilling smartphones now requisite for planetary citizenship renders everything and everyone on the planet susceptible to the spatial logics and social determination of the powers administrating them. 

Cultural production today is nearly completely rendered within the logics of the grid, from the material form our cultural artifacts take to the institutions that house them, the server farms that store and disseminate our art, and the proliferating screens that reproduce them. Music, and specifically electronic music, provides a particularly clear illustration of these governing logics. The automobile factory with its increasingly automated modes of production was the historical backdrop from which techno emerged in the northern United States, with artists articulating the sonic and subjective fracturing experienced by the dissolution of both job security and artisan skills. Automatically looped musical samples featuring human voices and instruments reduced to mechanically-produced recurrences performed this sociotechnological transition. The increasing totality and smooth functioning of automation coarticulated itself coextensively with the gradual diminution of earlier human elements and melodies (traditions and rituals) and tends towards a kind of fully mechanical and quantized techno, snapped to a disciplining grid and endlessly cycling through highs and lows, as characteristic of both contemporary techno and capitalism.  

Aleksandr Popov

The interpellated subject of this neoliberal music typically spins around alone, arms flailing, in a tight and narrow choreography of repetitive gestures, often taking pharmacological drugs to induce spikes of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other endorphin-like chemicals—that is, if they’re not simply standing and staring, subordinated, in front of the DJ with their phone recording. The power of these dynamics are not lost on preexisting power structures and strange syncretic blends have been emerging through these periods of transition. In late 2025, outside the 14th century St. Elisabeth Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia, a rave was organized as an evangelizing event and celebration of an archbishop’s birthday with a DJ priest and video blessing from Pope Leo XIV. The widely shared video on social media featured an elaborate laser light show spectacle to a rapt and roused crowd. In China today, both schools and factories have begun playing intense techno music to energize the students and laborers, while underground rave scenes are gaining in popularity for young employees who often work the “996” work week (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week). The idea of dancing alone to high BPM techno after a 996 work week seems to me to be yet another illustration of the internalization of the hegemonic values of power articulating themselves aesthetically in their time. 

 
 

One might look at a DJ priest as a syncretic emergence of different forms of power and values, and just as easily look at critically acclaimed contemporary musicians to arrive at similar conclusions. Four Tet, Jamie xx, A.G. Cook, and Jacques Greene offer notable examples that contour these developments in power and music. Descending from traditions of well-tempered recurrent sonic architectures thoroughly emplaced on the grid, their music illustrates with extraordinary virtuosity a distinct spirit of neoliberalism, with its acceleration, volatility, dopaminergic calibration, and smooth quantized transactability. Their musical production is, of course, immediately at home on the grid, samples widely, incorporates diverse musical elements into its tumultuous cycles, and like much Christian music, tends towards a conjuring of transcendence and ecstasy.

 
 

Four Tet’s recent Only Human (MPH Remix) neatly scores this essay’s thesis, engridding what appears to be a chorus of one singing anxiously, before totally parcellating and recombining it into an exuberant posthuman hocketing of the hyperventilating remnants of alienated breath. Jamie xx’s recent remix of Robyn’s Dopamine is like a veritable dopamine releasing agent, and you can feel your brain flooding with chemicals at the drop. The lyrics are a looping “I know this is dopamine, but it feels so good to me.” A.G. Cook and his live performance are a baroque accelerationist hyperpop spectacle of light and chopped sound producing rapturous effects in his ecstatic audiences. Jacques Greene’s Believe opens squarely on the grid, with mechanical bleeps invoking a life-support machine, and builds through breathless chopped and looped vocal segments that intensify—booming until they bust—and then begin again, until they are seamlessly mixed into the next like articulation.  

These Christian and liberal traditions of music have their critical practitioners who, with varying degrees of consciousness, interrogate and deconstruct these cultural techniques. Many jazz musicians of their day, like Elvin Jones or Milford Graves, seemed almost at war with the grid, playing in a fugitive relation to the imposing structures on life and art. It remains an open question how much this playing ahead of or behind the beat (the grid), and even beyond it, escapes the logics that determine its negation. I heard Fred Moten give a lecture in which he suggested the virtuosic drummer is a frantic attempt to reconstitute a lost polyrhythmic sociality after the deracinating horrors of the Middle Passage.  

Today, artists like Burial and Oneohtrix Point Never seem to be operating in a similar embedded antagonistic tradition, knowingly provoking and deconstructing these orthogonal conventions and genealogies. Listening to Burial’s “Archangel” is like wandering the ruins of grid-based domination, getting lost in a graveyard, desperately trying to find one trustworthy person in the deterioration of sociality under capitalism, praying in the apocalypse, and then not transcending it. Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Lost But Never Alone (Forced Smile Edit)-Amazon Original” of 2020 is a pandemic-era dirge of impossible-to-locate nostalgia at the end of history, a sonic rendering of the deep anomie and a reactionary turn to what was never there, or at least its highly dubious, glitching and unstable, metastasizing and mutating simulcra. Love in the Time of Lexapro, the strained limits of the standard “I Only Have Eyes for You”, and “Sticky Drama” (as well as A.G. Cook’s remix of the same) offers apopalyptic deconstructions rendering the incommensurability of modern affects and postmodern hyperspace.  

Hatis Noit video stills from Angelus Novus

The hypercultural artists of a post-internet age are upon us as well. While the twentieth century certainly had its many pleasurable syncretic modernisms, artists like Hatis Noit hailing from the remote Shiretoko in Hokkaido and now based in London, draw from a self-taught, largely YouTube-enabled exploration of Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, operatic styles, Christian devotional music, Gagaku Japanese classical, and avant pop. She committed to music at sixteen while staying at a women’s temple in Nepal where she encountered a monk singing Buddhist chants alone. Her video for “Angelus Novus” shows a melting and shifting form, a kind of superfluid deictic subject, morphing and straining inside and against a becoming-virtual Euclidean space, while toggling divergent, diasporic musical styles and asemic whispering.  

On social media, a new kind of hypercultural curator is emerging, piecing together and often scoring compilations of loosely authored, produced and distributed fragments of visual culture. There are echoes of ethnomusicology, though largely without the kind of rigorous analysis and historical situation the discipline is known for. There is a spectrum of contextualization ranging from musical and visual assemblist accounts like Dust-to-Digital which offers some light contextual information in their extraordinary and poetic round-ups of largely self-and-spectator-published musical ephemera; accounts like The Breeding Castle who revel in a hallucinatory hypercultural pastiche of libidinally-charged, often AI-generated, visual-musical production; as well as accounts like Error 404 who share a captivatingly curated variety of free-floating musical representations, which ostensibly promotes their own DJ practice and label. These unfolding histories of culture and power play out on the social media “grid” where echoes of anthropology, privatization, and extraction are ever present.   

In his thoughtful clearing of a space for the “music to come” François J Bonnet offers:

The music to come can never be a space for performance or for the demonstration of prowess. The virtuosity of this or that musician, the mastery of a conductor, the extraordinary vocal abilities of a singer, bravura pieces and extraordinary performances of reputedly ‘difficult’ works—these are the distinctive elements that contribute to the dramatization and glorification of music. There is a strong tendency toward the supplementation of music with superlative elements, from the authoritarian figure of the conductor to the near deification of the superstar. These elements are peripheral to music, but they constitute a connective tissue that is so present, so powerful, that it even ends up affecting the music itself. Prowess, glorification, and hubris have become components of the musical vocabulary. The unavoidable consequence of this hybridization of music and vainglory is to shift the stakes of music toward stakes of power, either through the exercise of power itself or through its representation, which is itself always already a process of power.


Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.

The Hollywood, Star-Making Machine On View @ MoMA

 

Otto Dyar. Carole Lombard, c. 1933. Gelatin silver print, 13 7/8 × 10 1/2″ (35.2 × 26.7 cm)

 

text by Emma Grimes

MoMA’s Face Value exhibition, showcasing 20th-century celebrity press images, is a compelling exploration into the celebrity star-making system. The show includes more than 200 photographs, spanning 1921 to 1996, including discarded studio images of stars such as Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe. The pictures sprawl across two floors, submerging you in an atmosphere that feels reminiscent of walking around a movie studio in LA.

In one sequence of four images from 1933, Jean Harlow applies her makeup in front of the camera. She sits at a glass table, adorned with beauty trinkets, in a silk robe trimmed with fur sleeves. At first she gazes at her reflection in a hand-held mirror, then she applies her eyebrow pencil while looking into the camera, then her lipstick, and finally she breaks out into a laugh as she combs her hair. It’s the star performing a private moment, inviting the viewer into what appears to be her unguarded, real self. 

In his 1979 pioneering book about the constructed public image, Stars, film scholar and theorist Richard Dyer wrote about the mass desire to feel that we “know” celebrities as they “truly” are. We want to see the person at home in their Sunday morning pajamas as much as the impeccable, polished one on stage. Face Value’s appeal is in watching how this illusion is assembled. The photos of Harlow are glaringly artificial: studio lighting and design alongside her rehearsed spontaneity, yet knowing this doesn’t extinguish the felt sense of having been granted access to her private self.

Looking at some of these photographs that perform authenticity, it’s hard not to think of a few contemporary celebrities and pop stars who have mastered this art. They share just enough images to feel you’ve been given “access” to their inner world, whether they’re paparazzi photos leaving dinner or “no-makeup” selfies posted on social media. They know that success, especially the monetary kind, requires an attached audience devoted to your every move. To see Jean Harlow apply her makeup is to see a layer that’s supposed to be hidden, and devotion requires intimacy, even if it’s artificial.

Step back a few feet and allow your eyes to drift across all of the images, until their names and individual faces fall away. The stars flatten into one figure. She or he is likely posing in a studio with its bright lighting, wearing a glamorous dress or suit. The sheer quantity of these images, and their repetitive formula, challenges the comforting idea that fame is the natural consequence of an innate, magical essence. The pattern of posturing, lighting, and styling work conjunctively to construct each person’s allure. Taken together, these photographs are a telling portrait of the powerful machine that built them.

Installation view of Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from June 28, 2025, through June 21, 2026. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

With the emotional manipulation inherent in the construction of these identities brought to the foreground, we can see how they’re designed to shape our perception of who is exceptional and worthy of devotion. They also tell us, more indiscreetly, to buy a ticket. The economic impact of movie stars is also a central subject of Dyer’s Stars. Studios, banks, and investors rely on the star as capital. In 1933, Paramount was in an economically precarious situation until the unexpected success of films like She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel starring Mae West stabilized the company. Deanna Durbin had a similar impact for Universal in 1937. Behind just about every great Hollywood producer, was a captivating woman who rescued him in a moment of fatal distress.

The exhibit moves closer to the present moment, including screen tests and images from Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Diana Ross, and Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey poses with the silhouette of Michael Jackson, promoting her special interview with him. In the original caption that contextualized the image, Winfrey’s name is underlined in red ink. Her name is a brand, and circulation of that brand is everything. The more it’s repeated, the more value it accrues.

Nearby, a wall of athletes extends the show out into a new territory. The football and baseball players are posed with an equal amount of deliberation as the actors, highlighting how the star-making machine stretches across the board. It might be easier to believe you’re a fan of a quarterback or baseball pitcher because they possess a unique, physical talent. And while they do possess talent (of a more measurable kind than actors), their equally constructed images call our attention once again to the way our attachments and sympathies are directed by a system working behind the scenes. As with the Hollywood stars, these feelings of adoration are the driving factor behind their earning potential.

 

Jackie Robinson, c. 1950. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8″ (25.4 × 20.3 cm)

 

But knowing this doesn’t smother desire. Standing in front of a photograph of Barbara Stanwyck, I felt my long-lasting admiration for her. And though I had been contemplating all of the ways in which these images before me were manufactured to sell me something, I wanted nothing else but to go home and stream The Lady Eve.

Helene Schjerfbeck’s Long-Awaited Debut Arrives @ The Met

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
The Tapestry (1914-1916)
Oil on canvas
35 1/4 × 36 1/4 in. (89.5 × 92 cm)
Photo: Per Myrehed

 


text by Emma Grimes


The ongoing Seeing Silence exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers an impressive exploration of one of the 20th century’s greatest, and long-overlooked, Modernist painters, Helene Schjerfbeck. The sprawling show gathers more than fifty works by the Finnish artist, spanning from 1880 to 1945, just a year before her death at the age of 83. It marks an astonishing debut—Schjerfbeck’s work has never before been examined so thoroughly by a major US museum. While she has long been admired by Nordic countries, her oeuvre has only recently begun to draw broader international recognition.

Schjerfbeck was born in 1862 to an affluent family in Helsinki. Bedridden for weeks as a toddler following a tumble down the stairs, her father encouraged the four-year-old to begin drawing. While details of her childhood are limited, her biographers have largely characterized it as “lonely and bleak.” By eleven years old, she was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School—her exceptional talent earned her free tuition—and quickly advanced through the coursework. Schjerfbeck, who was itching to visit Paris, was finally awarded government funds in 1880 to travel abroad.

Seeing Silence begins right after this period. The alluring portrait, Youth (1882), depicts a nude young man from the waist up. His pale skin emanates with the simple faultlessness of youth, while his muscular contour is painted with an equal measure of softness and precision. Behind the figure is a golden background, and Schjerfbeck’s restrained palette has the effect of intensifying each color. Every tone feels concentrated, as if the pigment had been distilled to its purest form. 

An early self-portrait from the decade demonstrates a similarly controlled and forceful use of color. Schjerfbeck gazes past the canvas as strands of yellow hair spill over her forehead. Her hair nearly dissolves into the dark, golden-brown background, making her pale face, pink cheeks, and grey-blue eyes appear like a spotlight on a stage. And though her facial features are sweet and delicate, they never conceal a deep-rooted solemnity.

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait (1884-1885)
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 × 16 1/8 in. (50 × 41 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Henri Tuomi

 

By far the most intriguing work from this decade is The Door (1884), which depicts a flat, black door inside an unidentifiable room. Schjerfbeck painted this scene from a chapel in Brittany, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the scene. Strokes of light glint from beneath the dark doorway, and a nearby archway disappears into the wall. At twenty-two years old, her technical prowess had already been proven. What else was there to do but flirt with form and representation?

In the following gallery, the paintings leap forward in time. One of the many figure paintings on view, Maria (1906), depicts a woman turned away from the viewer, absorbed with a book in her lap. A bright splash of luminous blue paint represents her dress. The edges of her head appear lightly illuminated, as though catching rays from a distant light source. Yet even though light appears to fall across her face, there’s no implied world beyond the canvas. This painting, like many of Schjerfbeck’s works, refuses to allude to anything outside its own boundaries.

Schjerfbeck’s sitters are purified of excess, eliminating nearly all specificity. A stroke of grey suggests her elbow. A round-ish shape of paint represents her dress. Schjerfbeck offers the barest details while still maintaining the recognizable structure of a figure. But this painting contains a curious exception among her oeuvre. In the upper right corner, the artist has painted the sitter’s name: “MARIA”. For an artist so committed to ambiguity, it’s an oddly specific gesture.

The third gallery contains several of Schjerfbeck’s still lifes and landscapes, and it offers perhaps the most compelling opportunity to observe the evolution of her aesthetic. In her 1892 work Blue Anemones in a Chip Basket, delicate purple flowers rest in a finely rendered wooden basket. The blossoms are soft, lifelike, and precise. Compare these flowers with the apples Schjerfbeck would paint fifty-two years later in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944).

 

Helene Schjerfbeck
Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944)
Oil on canvas
14 3/16 × 19 11/16 in. (36 × 50 cm)
Photo: Rauno Träskelin / Didrichsen Art Museum

 

In this later painting (painted at 82 years old), the apples appear less like the recognizable fruit and more like a sequence of rounded, brightly colored forms. Oblong shapes in mint green, raspberry pink, yellow, and black represent the fruit. Beneath them lies a horizontal block of layered color—splotches of lavender, blue, and green that blend and overlap. The artwork’s museum label says that the blackened apples are likely symbols of Europe, painted amid the devastation of World War II. Yet this was also, interestingly, painted two years before her death. And seen alongside the self-portraits from this same period, one might wonder whether the rotting apple functions as another kind of self-image.

The final gallery gathers multiple of these self-portraits across Schjerfbeck’s life, and it’s an extraordinary room to walk through. One moves chronologically through the space, beginning with the bright-eyed, naturalistic images and ending with stark, skeletal depictions that recall the disquieting distortion of Munch’s The Scream. Any resemblance to an elderly woman is coincidental. She doesn’t seem interested anymore in painting the face that gazes back in the mirror, but is profiling decay. Her eyes are empty holes; her mouth is in a perpetual, gaping “O”. They rattle and disturb.

 
 

The exhibit seems to invite viewers to read these works as windows into Schjerfbeck’s self-perception and relationship with mortality, which is undeniably an instinctive and compelling way to approach them. Yet framed primarily as psychological documents, one might miss the ways in which these works present a culmination of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong investigation into form. In this final gallery, her face becomes just another object of fascination for her artistic endeavor. What if these self-portraits aren’t simply treated as autobiographical confessions, but are also viewed as the logical endpoint for Schjerfbeck’s perpetual formal exploration of the medium?

In this sense, her face is an equally privileged subject as the rotting apples in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) or the figure reading in Maria. The mirror is another surface upon which she can continue her inquiry into form. These late self-portraits aren’t only universal meditations on aging and death, but they are the conclusions to a brilliant, life-long investigation of reduction, and here they meet their most radical—and terminal—point.

Seeing Silence is on view through April 5 at The Met, New York.

Sterling Ruby’s Atropa Explores the Duality of Life @ Sprüth Magers New York

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Hidden away on the second floor of an old Upper East Side building, Sterling Ruby’s Atropa explores the duality of life through unconventional artistic methods. Named after the nightshade genus, more commonly known as deadly nightshade, Atropa also references Atropos, a Greek Fate and the eldest daughter of Zeus and Themis. She is the goddess who cuts the thread of life, allowing her to decide the time and manner of a mortal’s death.

After climbing up an old, rickety staircase, we enter what appears to be an empty apartment flat. The sleek white walls and dark brown hardwood floors dominate the space until they are met by tiny, intricate black lines within pale wood frames, arranged along the walls. 

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

These graphite and pen-on-paper drawings seem to shift and move, their lines twisting fluidly like a worm wiggling to life. Though they were made just last year, these pieces trace back to a series that Ruby began working on thirty years ago. Each of them is drawn with instinctive human gestures rather than the controlled mark-making characteristic of a traditional representational practice. 

All eight drawings are also named after a flower – from Henbane in the nightshade family to Bleeding Hearts in the poppy family to Morning Glory in the convolvulaceae family – many of which are highly poisonous plants. 

The artworks, each with a dark void near the center of the penwork, seem to represent the endless dangers that accompany the natural world, yet the black, scrawled lines from the void seem to reach beyond the page, yearning to reconnect with the land of the living. The pieces showcase the true paradox nature embodies: the destructive venoms of a flower alongside its medicinal properties, the beauty humans create alongside the destructive instincts that surface daily. 

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Settled between the drawings are six bronzed flowers, some resting upon dark brown mantels, others stationed on white podiums, and one even large enough to stand on its own: a lone slouched sunflower waiting for the sun to rise. 

All of these flowers, which are the exhibition’s sole sculptural component, are made in Ruby’s studio after being cut, dried, and cast. The burnout process fully incinerates the flower, leaving behind only a bronze mold of what it once was. These sculptures each reveal the flowers in various states of blooming and decay, underscoring once again the bewitching parallels of life. 

It’s only then that you turn around and spot a small square opening leading into a second room, just now realizing that Ruby’s exhibit is separated into two parts. The second section clearly contrasts with the first space; the endless whites, blacks, and browns are now replaced with vibrant splashes of blue, purple, and green. 

This compact rectangular room is filled with watercolor collages. Hanging on the wall to the right are three black-and-white photographs of overgrown trees whose branches split off in every direction. One of the images, SPLITTING, remains as simple as that, whereas the two others are engulfed in a spray of green lines that design a checkered pattern. On the adjacent wall hang two very similar works, yet instead of black-and-white photographs of trees, it’s a flat landscape. Painted above the curvy hills are clouds of purples, pinks, and blues, creating a stunning winter sunset. 

Across from this scene, beige and aqua take over, as two final collages hang next to a wood and bronze sculpture. The sculpture, Vestige, appears to be a curved sword or feather thrust into a stone. The handle, a light burl wood, slowly morphs into an aqua blade. The collages, Hippies and Kissing Hippies, apply large black watercolor stains on a beige background to create human faces, both crowned with wreaths of leaves and flowers. 

Whereas Ruby’s first room encapsulates the natural decay of an environment, this room embodies an exuberance of life. Atropa collocates mortality within two separate encounters, balancing the pleasant beauties and agonizing inevitables that life has to offer.

Atropa is on view through March 28 @ Sprüth Magers 22 E 80 Street, New York

Spectrum of Desire Challenges the Narrative of Our Current Culture War @ The Met

 

Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis
South Netherlandish
late 14th or early 15th century

 

text by Hank Manning

The Met Cloisters, a replica of a medieval castle atop a hill in Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood, has collected more than fifty items from Western Europe, produced between the 13th and 15th centuries, to reanalyze them through modern queer theory. The collection—including statues, manuscripts, jewelry, and household items—reveals that, although the church wielded immense power during this period—and with this came restrictive laws on sex and marriage—gender fluidity, androgyny, and same-sex relations were neither hidden nor uniformly stigmatized in art. 

 

Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
German
1300-1320

 

Much of Spectrum of Desire’s art considers the complex ways in which artists have interpreted Jesus Christ’s gender and relationships. Christians’ relationship with Jesus is paramount, and artists often framed this in erotic terms. Nuns forsake romantic relations on Earth and instead devote themselves spiritually to Jesus. This takes on another dimension in the frequent portrayal of Jesus as a handsome baby. Men, too, form special relationships with the prophet, such as Saint John the Evangelist, depicted in a 14th-century German statue in which the two men pose like a married couple, with right hands joined and Jesus’s left hand hugging John’s shoulder. (In another piece, the Virgin Mary appears in a similar union with her cousin Elizabeth.) Artists considered the fluidity of Jesus’s gender. After all, why should an image of God, creator of all people, conform to only one gender? His wound on the crucifix often resembles a vulva; his suffering is compared to birthing pangs, and the entire experience is said to be the birth of a religion. 

Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba
Upper Rhenish
circa 1490–1500

Artists of the time held broad perspectives on gender fluidity, even though they did not have anything approximating this modern term. At least thirty Christian saints changed their gender appearance, most from female to male. Considering how frequently God is depicted as a man, as well as the universal specter of patriarchy, it is not surprising that some considered it advantageous, maybe even a move closer to God, to become more masculine. Saint Wilgefortis begged God to make her less attractive, and God granted her request by giving her a beard. Saint Theodora of Alexandria became Theodore merely by changing her clothing and stated identity. Others believed that behavior, rather than appearance, determines gender. In Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon explains that girls intrinsically catch apples in the laps of their dresses. 

In other cases, androgyny was encouraged. Thomas Aquinas argued that angels do not assume bodies and thus transcend traditional gender categories. To become more angelic, therefore, men could make their gender more ambiguous. Some theologians, including Saint Augustine, considered chastity more virtuous even than sex within a marriage. To encourage this, some men endured castration, becoming eunuchs who then developed more feminine features. The 1533 Book of Hours illustrates the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, a tale from the New Testament. 

 

Plate with Wife Beating Husband
Netherlandish
circa 1480

 

Gender role reversals were sometimes a source of humor or a warning of female power. Saint Jerome’s peers swapped his robes for a blue dress to publicly humiliate him. A copper water pitcher depicts a confident Phyllis on a confused Aristotle, grabbing his hair and sitting on his back as he crawls on all fours. A similar depiction on a Belgian plate shows a wife beating her husband’s exposed backside with a broom. 

Base for a Statuette
South Netherlandish
1470–80

To be sure, much European medieval art portrayed sex as a dangerous temptation. A French health guide from the 1440s shows a fully clothed couple in missionary position and warns that too much sex causes weak kidneys and bad breath. A South Netherlandish statue, from around 1470, posits that the original sin came from same-sex attraction: it shows Eve in the Garden of Eden lured by an anthropomorphized female snake named Lilith. Courtly art sometimes associated eroticism with humiliation and cruelty. In the fable of Febilla and Virgil, drawn on a 14th-century French ivory tablet, both suffer. After Febilla publicly mocks Virgil’s advances, the poet—here also a sorcerer—extinguishes all the fires in the city—except for a candle stuck up the genitals of Febilla, who must then allow the entire populace to rekindle their flames through her. Even with positive connotations, love and pain often went hand in hand in the medieval imagination, as in a depiction of Jesus as Cupid, slinging a “javelin of love” at devotees. 

Walking through the exhibition, it is readily clear that gender fluidity is neither a new invention nor inherently antithetical to Christianity. 700 years ago, although artists did not categorize their subjects as they do today, opinions on sex and gender were nonetheless varied and complex. While some today argue that gender re-assignment and fluidity are affronts to God’s will, many historic Christian saints saw these as ways to become closer to God. Philosophers and artists, whether aligned with the church or otherwise, presented equally wide-ranging perspectives on our relationships with our own identities, each other, and the divine. 

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages is on view through March 29 at the Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, New York 

Read An Interview of Curator & Amsterdam City Council Candidate Zippora Elders →

 
 

Zippora Elders Tahalele has been designated Director of the Nederlands Fotomuseum effective mid-April, as she is running for Amsterdam’s city council elections, and election day is today, March 18. Currently number 14 on GroenLinks’ list of candidates, a party she joined as a young adult, Elders intends to step up for art and culture in the city and beyond. Her platform is built on inspiring people to use their imagination in every aspect of life, which mirrors her curatorial approach as well. In her most recent exhibition Make Some Noise - Desire. Stage. Change at van Abbe Museum, Elders invites the audience to listen to and sense what moves them (emotionally, physically, socially) in a world full of fractured infrastructures. It does so by presenting work that offers deeply personal methods to amplify voices beyond oneself in an effort to ignite change. Elders was motivated to actively take on that charge at home in Amsterdam after having witnessed and fought cancellation, in addition to the exclusion of programming and dissenting perspectives in Berlin while in her role as head of the curatorial department and outreach at Gropius Bau. Read more.

Hocketing the Apocalypse: LA Art Week 2026

Amanda Ross-Ho at Frieze

text and images by Perry Shimon

‘Not Frieze’ LA exclaims, as in the international powerhouse art fair that provokes the broad ecosystem response we’re now calling Los Angeles Art Week. There are 8 fairs this year, of which I will see half, and an incalculable range of offerings calibrated to the influx of international art energies.

The main draw appears to be the lively and decorated Los Angeles crowds, which clearly preoccupy the guests more than the wall art. The fairs, with their high-key lighting, tiers of exclusivity, and long rambling promenades, are an easy win for LA audiences who turn out en masse for the spectacle and remind us—with a high calculus of automobile logistics—how poorly suited Los Angeles is to easy and spontaneous social gathering.

Frieze

Earlier this millennium, waves of displaced and precarious artists decamped from NYC and moved to Los Angeles in search of softer climates and more affordable, larger workspaces. There was a momentary feeling of discovery and excitement that quickly gave way to the predictable surge in real estate prices and attendant gentrification patterns. I wonder today where the center of cultural gravity exists in North America—less for market figures, and more for artist scenes and spaces—and it remains an open question for me. I let myself be carried away by the week, and then beyond, and sit here now with my phone open, doing a kind of mnemonic forensics to reconstitute a vaguely coherent narration of the unfolding events.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Yunji Park

Carlye Packer Gallery

Felix, the bungalowed poolside alternative art fair extended across several floors of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, opened the proceedings and set an easy pace of socializing, art grazing, and scene clocking. Weaving in and out of modernist suites, I encountered notable presentations from Allesandro Teoldi with Marinaro Gallery and Erin Morris with EUROPA, beautiful and uncomplicated things producing pleasant feelings.

Julia Stoschek Collection at the Variety Arts Building

In the evening I went to what would be my first of three visits to the Julia Stoschek pop-up, who appeared to have fled the Berlin winter with a canonical collection of video art and installed what I heard billed as the largest such exhibition in US history, in the curious and dilapidated Variety Arts Building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The building has a fascinating history, initially constructed in the 1920s in a Renaissance Revival style to host the first women’s club in Los Angeles, with a grand auditorium for hosting performances and lectures, a library, galleries, and a banquet hall.

Buster Keaton

Cyprien Gaillard

Variety Arts Building

Anne Imhof

The knowledgeable docent at the entrance was offering historical overviews to the impromptu groups of guests gathered at the gratis popcorn counter. She informed us that after its life as a women’s club, the building became a vaudeville theater, underground punk club, rave spot, and then was bought by Justin Bieber’s megachurch, who brought it up to code and sold it during the pandemic. Fact-checking this oral history, I encountered the wonderful bigorangelandmarks.blogspot.com by local visual historian Floyd B. Bariscale, who documents historic buildings in LA, and encountered a lively comments section with contributions like:

Anonymous said...

MY NAME IS LONNIE HICKS. DURING THE YEAR 1980 I PROMOTED A VERY SUCCESSFUL DISCO IN THE BALLROOM ON THE FOURTH FLOOR ON THURSDAY NIGHTS ONLY. FOR TEN MONTHS I HOSTED PARTIES WITH SOME OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN BLACK HOLLYWOOD .I TRIED VERY HARD TO ATTRACT A MIXED CROWD BUT IT NEVER SEEMED TO WORK OUT .SO WE WERE LABELED A BLACK CLUB. AT THAT TIME SEATING LEGAL ATTENDANCE IN THE ROOF GARDEN WAS 686 PEOPLE. MANY NIGHTS OUR ATTENDANCE EXCEEDED THAT FIGURE . THE ROOF GARDEN, IN MY OPINION IS ONE OF THE GREATEST BALLROOMS IN THE CITY. I FELL IN LOVE WITH IT FROM THE FIRST MOMENT I LAID EYES ON IT.I INTRODUCED MANY PEOPLE TO THE VENUE AND I USED ALMOST ALL THE BUILDING AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER ; FROM THE THEATER, TO TIN PAN ALLEY, AND OF OFCOURSE " THE FABULOUS ROOF GARDEN". I WOULD LOVE ANOTHER SHOT AT PROMOTING THE ENTIRE BUILDING . I CAN BE REACHED FOR COMMENT OR INPUT ABOUT THE VARIETY ARTS CENTER AT 813-539-1965 OR AT TAMPASELESCT.COM

December 27, 2016 at 11:36 AM

LONNIE HICKS said...

HI, LONNIE HICKS AGAIN. I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT JAZZ GREAT AL JARREAU RECORDED A SONG ABOUT THE ROOF GARDEN BALLROOM TITLED, OF COURSE, "THE ROOF GARDEN .IT WAS RELEASED ON THE WARNER BROS. LABEL IN 1980 .BECAUSE THE ROOF GARDEN WAS DESIGNED BACK IN THE TWENTIES TO BE A BALLROOM DURING THE TIME IT WAS AS A DISCO IT WAS TOTALLY THE CLASSIEST ONE IN TOWN; WITH A CAPACITY MOST CLUBS COULDN'T COME NEAR.BOY, THOSE WERE THE DAYS !!!

December 28, 2016 at 9:47 AM

Our erudite popcorn docent was of the opinion this building should be converted into a long-term cultural center, and I agreed—keeping its rough-and-ready charm and availing itself to rotational curators doing seasonal evening programs of mixed-media art. And why not? How much tax money goes to subsidize sports arenas and Western imperialism instead?

Stoschek's collection contours the curious canon of ‘video art’, an imperfect category of moving-image art put into crisis—or at least into history—with the rise of mass visual culture in the age of smartphones and social media. If video art emerges no less as a space of visual experimentation outside the formal codes of Hollywood and corporate media than as a way to designate certain works of moving image as scarce and rarified, it all seems to be awash in the disorienting deluge of moving-image production that overwhelms the present. I couldn’t help wondering how this arbitrary and idiosyncratic canon of video art would be remembered at the cusp of a visual revolution.

Arthur Jafa

Robert Boyd

The forty-some-odd works on view across five floors were hard to neatly characterize—though violence, sex, and power were distinct leitmotifs. Robert Boyd’s four-channel Xanadu displayed a frenetic MTV-era montage of political icons, fundamentalist movements, doomsday cults, and escalating war over a pop score in the basement of the building, with an orbiting disco ball. A kind of Christian apopalyptic millenarianism that would be encountered again in Bruce Conner’s preceding Three Screen Ray on view at the Marciano Art Foundation, as well as in the infinite scroll of social media with its dizzying jump cuts of sex, violence, and pop music.

Bruce Conner at the Marciano Art Foundation

I encountered the sublime violence of Conner’s video works, monumentally installed and scored by Terry Riley, as a lilliputian war of American imperialism unfolded on my phone in streaming images, and I couldn’t wrest my eyes away—even driving down Sunset Blvd with its building-sized billboards advertising war films and luxury brands with deified and cosmetically sculpted celebrities. I began to feel as though art criticism has nothing to offer; nothing to elaborate on the unambiguous violence and horror of this country with its imperial realist aesthetic regime: coterminously streaming Al Jazeera and the US Dept. of War’s IG feeds as Tesla Cybertrucks surround me in front of Crypto.com Arena.

Outside of Frieze, on a manicured soccer pitch, a performance artist named Amanda Ross-Ho spent the duration of the fair rolling a giant inflatable earth, in an interpretive gesture I couldn’t help associating with planetary technocracy, geoengineering, and a global class of art elites for whom the world is theirs to play with recklessly like a children’s toy. Inside the fair was an incredible pageant of Los Angeles characters and a credible roster of collectible art.

At Marian Goodman, recently departed, Tacita Dean presented a collection of delicate chalk works, exquisitely beautiful and fragile drawings gathering chalk in gossamer gradations, collecting like weather and constellations, filigreed with fugitive fragments of poetry, salutations.

Nearby Wolfgang Tillmans shared his signature horizontalist, mood-board style of image-making neatly installed around the airy expanse of Regen Projects in Hollywood. A short looping video work in a back gallery, scored by Tillmans, circumnavigated a flowering wild carrot plant that seemed to contain the cosmos and announced the early Los Angeles spring: a teeming biodiversity region undeterred by automotive and anthropocentric impositions.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans

After all these small—and not-so-small—commercial offerings I ventured to LACMA to see some more historically rigorous and contextualized presentations. Walking past the open tar pits I came upon the sweeping modernist Geffen Galleries, still under construction, and traversing Wilshire with its grand curvilinear California modernist gestures. I spent some time with the Deep Cuts exhibition drawn from their impressive collection of block prints from around the world, and shows on Impressionism and Buddhist art, offering unexpected resonances and juxtapositions like a series of beatific Bodhisattvas perched in front of a symmetrical row of palms and Michael Heizer’s 340-ton granite megalith Levitated Mass. 

Edvard Munch

Modigliani

Detail of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi 15th century Tibet

Kuwase Hasui

When making his 2000 debut Amores Perros, Alejandro G. Iñárritu left over a million feet of film on the cutting room floor. From this rejectamenta was assembled SUEÑO PERRO, a kinetic, smoke-filled cavern of multiple projections and cinematic machinery. The film assumes a quantum superposition as variations collapse in the ambulatory viewers, bathed and implicated in the recombining images. Its dually sculptural character: light extending materially through the haze and towering 35mm projectors like ouroboroi of flickering film, recursive and contingent.

A few blocks down along Wilshire were a trio of exhibitions housed in vacant properties owned by the same developer: a former Sizzler, an office building, and a 99¢ store—a kind of holy trinity of dystopian late-stage capitalism. The programming largely cleaved to each of the buildings' designated purposes. The Sizzler offered the kind of art popular in alternative art fairs: fast, unattractive, relatively inexpensive, and designed to produce simple palate-stimulating responses in its consumers. The office building offered a series of talks, panels, readings, PowerPoints, and other post-industrial forms of labor, slightly queered, Angelenosized, and performed in the drab and dispiriting cubicle and particle-board environs—picture attractive actors reading repulsive Paul McCarthy essays while guests sit uncomfortably in Great Recession-era office furniture. The 99¢ store offered a kind of anarchic, everyone’s-welcome free-for-all experience for maladapted objects and subjects, chaotic piles of capitalism’s overproduction and metabolic excretion.

I visited the Huntington for an early spring sakura and to see the beautiful tripartite Edmund de Waal exhibition 8 Directions of the Wind—after a line from a Bei Dao poem—rendering poetic stories of migration, diaspora, and exile with porcelain, poetry, marble, and burned oak. The installations and assembled libraries were interspersed across the flourishing springtime gardens and reflected quietly on quotidian ceramic practices inside the opulent architectures. Waal, descending from an aristocratic and oligarchical Jewish family persecuted by the Nazis, exhibiting the work in the sprawling pleasure grounds of a North American robber baron, produced an unusual setting for the reception of works informed by simple vernacular ceramic practices, or mingei; an uneasy migration between classes and cultural contexts that nonetheless rewarded close attention with the subtlety and poetry the works occasioned.

The impulse to escape into art as a palliative runs strong in horrifying times, and one finds little solace in the sun-soaked, hell-tinted, hypermediated LA art scene. Many conversations over the week centered on the elaborate social mechanisms of exclusion and affiliation that determine the social hierarchies governing the value of art in its institutional and financial inflections. These social rituals, in need of a dispassionate ethnography, eventuate in very idiosyncratic collections like the Stoschek and the all-night rituals of bacchanalian raves so popular with the same set. A student of both ancient Greece and the contemporary art world might notice the continuities between the mystery cults and the art world’s esoteric and largely inscrutable incantations, hedonistic dinners, and ecstatic late-night revelry.

At the former Masonic temple housing the Marciano Art Foundation, I attended a talk with the artist Una Szeemann, daughter of the late, storied Swiss super-curator Harald Szeemann, that centered on a collection of objects left with the estate when the Getty took his papers. Szeemann, a fascinating harbinger of an art world to come, was known for his indefatigable and idiosyncratic sprawling exhibitions anticipating our current vogue for superseding star curators and spectacularly scaled biennials. Una had curated a selection of minor objects, some taken from makeshift altars around her father’s southern Swiss Fabbrica Rosa estate, and presented them alongside thoughtful reflections from artists, curators, and anthropologists in a beautiful new library space generously featuring a browsable collection and modular furniture that rearranges to accommodate their public program. It had a kind of animist valence and invited speculation and meaning-making around these agential and talismanic objects.

Arriving at the Getty I encountered a descendant of Benjamin Franklin working at the gift shop and engaged in a rangey conversation about how the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty miserly installed pay phones in his home and about her practice of buying groceries for her colleagues’ undocumented relations who were afraid to leave the house on account of ICE raids. She was reading a book on the predominantly Black Sugar Hill neighborhood razed in the ’60s to install the I-10 freeway and went on to trace this kind of American racism back to George Washington, who, I learned from her, would rotate his slaves between Philadelphia and Virginia to avoid laws in the North granting them freedom after six consecutive months. I proceeded to a rather Manichaean-sounding special exhibition called Virtue and Vice: Allegory in European Drawing and found a suite of familiar and enduring ethical preoccupations. Describing the show later to a friend, I suggested they could have included a middle gallery—the size of the rest of the world.

Oh! If Only He Were Faithful to Me, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1770-75

Sitting in the Irwin Garden outside, I reflected on Jonathan Crary’s recently republished essay Robert Irwin and the Condition of Twilight, collected in the excellent Tricks of the Light, offering:

All of us within present-day technological culture inhabit a shifting mix of new and old perceptual modalities, of hybrid zones composed of Euclidean space and dimensionless experiences of electronic networks that often appear to be seamlessly connected. Thus even amid the fluctuating and unstable character of Irwin's work is a human subject who is still at least partially anchored within the enduring remnants of a Newtonian universe, even if these surviving components have been rendered contingent and spectral.

If the essay is astute in marking a shift into an increasingly indistinct virtual-experiential mode of seeing—if not being—and its attendant social parcellation, we are perhaps arriving at a time when these realms are no longer seen as dual and the visual takes on an agential role as it surveils and acts upon us, with increasing degrees of determinative automation.

Blinn and Lambert

At a new gallery in Chinatown, North Loop West, I saw a beautiful exhibition, another instance in a burgeoning—or perhaps continuing—Light and Space revival, from an artist collective Blinn and Lambert who darkened the gallery with large canvases covering the windows, with shapely apertures filtering warm light into the welcome cool calm of the gallery with the shifting sun. 35mm projectors set at 8:20-second (the time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun) and 60-minute intervals respectively threw cameraless pictures of light onto the walls creating a restorative and contemplative respite from the blazing sun and art-world velocities outside.

Meara O’Reilly and vocal ensemble

Solarc

Gathering a gift at the excellent Skylight Books, I chanced on a painful conversation between Maggie Nelson and Darcey Steinke about their respective surgery memoirs. I joined a new friend at the well-programmed 2220 Arts + Archives space for an evening of hocketing, or a staccato call-and-response vocal musical style popular in medieval Europe, central African vocal traditions, as well as corners of contemporary pop music, with LA composer Meara O’Reilly and her distinctly (and adorably) East Los Angeles-feeling vocal ensemble. The music felt fitting for an age of binary computational logic and stuttered along charismatically toward a higher-resolution but distinctly atomized kind of being-together somehow commensurate with our times. The following night we reconvened for the First Friday Flute Club gathering at the artisanal brewing new-music venue Solarc in Eagle Rock and enjoyed the company of a diverse cross-section of enthusiastic flutists sharing instruments, melodies, and fermented drinks.

Driving back to the Bay Area, the center of gravity for these new global technocratic shifts, I climbed the windswept arid pass, bracing my tiny 20th-century convertible against the Santa Anas, pushing it through the endless variable monocultures: grapes, cotton, citrus, almonds, houses. The absolute horror and putrefaction of the cow slaughter fields. A domestic dog split open on the side of the highway from a high-velocity impact with one of the innumerable trucks dwarfing me with their containers of terrible decisions and menacing spinning wheel-spikes.

A Psychic Language: Louise Bourgeois's "Gathering Wool" @ Hauser & Wirth

Louise Bourgeois
Gathering Wool
1990
Metal, wood, and mixed media
243.8 x 396.2 x 457.2 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

text by Arlo Kremen

The story goes something like this: Bourgeois was born in Paris to parents who operated a tapestry business. As young Louise grew up, her father met and began an affair with another woman, Sadie Gordon Smith. In 1922, eleven-year-old Bourgeois would find that Smith would move in with her father and mother as her governess. The affair continued, and young Louise’s mother would remain silent about the matter. Mrs. Bourgeois, as young Louise’s mother, would lose her role in the house, that of the moral instructor, replaced by her younger counterpart, relegating Mrs. Bourgeois to that of a worker in the house. Young Louise felt betrayed by her father. In fact, she felt betrayed by her mother too, betrayed by her mother’s abandoning her in her meekness.

In 1982, Bourgeois was the first woman to have a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In press for this exhibition, Bourgeois spoke publicly for the first time about the trauma of childhood as a well of inspiration, sparking the reading of this early narrative into all corners of her extensive oeuvre. Gathering Wool at Hauser & Wirth continues this reading, bringing sculptures, reliefs, and works on paper, some of which have never seen the light of day, into the psychoanalytic dimensions associated with the artist. Interested in Bourgeois’s relationship to abstraction, the show focuses on her later works. Shown in juxtaposition with early works, Gathering Wool aims to demystify the evolution of her symbolically charged visual lexicon.

The titular work, Gathering Wool (1990), finds its title from an expression concerned with freedom from active, conscious thought. To ‘gather wool’ is to daydream and ruminate, caring for a form of thinking that is intuitive and fleeting. Spherical, wooden sculptures, seven in number, sit in a small circle. Behind, a four-panel metal divider haunts the collections of forms. In an interplay between light and dark, organic and industrial, and curved and linear, the precious sumptuousness of these works, shown vulnerable through the cuts and splits of wood, is underscored through juxtaposition. Bourgeois cherished the ‘gathering wool’ in her creative output, shoring up traces of her unconscious and sublimating her mysterious mental artifacts into her work.

Louise Bourgeois
Twosome
1991
Painted steel, electric light, and motor
190.5 x 193 x 1244.6 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Gathering Wool does not begin the show; that honor is belongs to Twosome (1991). A mechanical sculpture where a smaller cylinder routinely leaves and re-enters a container only slightly larger. This work continues Bourgeois’s preoccupation with child psychology, particularly psychoanalysis. Here, the viewer seems to witness the point at which a child enters the symbolic stage; however, the presence of a male-charged form is entirely absent. The title, Twosome, and the continual entering and exiting of the mother-form allude to the constant back-and-forth in the identification of the daughter to her mother. In a displacement of the father, the figure who, for Lacan, initiates the division of child from mother, the abandonment of the mother seems to have thrust Bourgeois into the symbolic stage instead. A video projection in the same gallery seems to concur, where Actress Suzan Cooper sings “She Abandoned Me,” a track that accompanied Bourgeois’s 1978 performance A Fashion Show of Body Parts.

The show makes note of Bourgeois’s interest in protruding forms. Untitled (With Hand) (1989) has a child’s arm shooting out of a sphere that was sculpted out of the raw pink marble on which it rests. Mamelles (1991) spits water from the bronze breasts fixed to the wall. The aforementioned Gathering Wool offers fertile material for mushrooms to sprout from the wood spheres. Twosome, as well, engages in an act of protrusion in its cycle of exiting and entering. In a slightly different gesture, Le Défi II (1992) bounces light off and through its glass vessels, resulting in a soft illumination across the work. In all of these works, there is a borderless quality. Pre-established divisions between container and contained, raw and mediated, one form and another form, and conscious and unconscious all undergo complication at the artist’s behest. In her treatment of abstraction as often a source of figuration and of forms of representation more broadly, Bourgeois elucidates her pathologically encoded visual language, affirming her status as one of America’s most prolific artists.

Louise Bourgeois’s Gathering Wool is on view through April 18 @ Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York City.

Marguerite Humeau’s Scintille Is A Cave of Relational Ontologies @ White Cube New York

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Spread across two floors, Marguerite Humeau’s Scintille is a call to lean into systems of mutual aid in times of darkness and uncertainty. Derived from the Latin word scintilla, meaning a spark or small flash of fire, this body of work is inspired by a cave in West Papua that the artist visited, as well as by John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which the author attempts to define complex emotions that challenge the English language. Within these two floors, Humeau has created sculptures that make guests feel like they have not only traveled to a cave’s ecosystem but also as if they are a living and breathing part of the fluid exhibition’s environment.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Upon entering, you are immediately immersed in a cave-like domain, where sleek brown floors, low lighting and a ceiling filled with what appear to be leaves create an unfamiliar yet peaceful ambiance. Two large sculptures act as sentinels to the cavern. Standing at twelve feet tall, these stalagmite structures are made from a repeated layering of sediment that loom over the rest of the gallery with a presence that is both menacing and comforting. Softament, also known as, The Guardian of Mineral Memory, and the larger of the two sculptures has an ombre that transmutes from black to a dark brown to a burnt orange to a yellow, almost as if the setting sun is reflecting off the tower. At the top is a line of circular stones that gradually increase in size and in their metallic reflection, they reenact the water that slowly drips off these structures in real life.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Likewise, Stillenary, also known as, The Guardian of the Emergence, has water droplets rising up into the air. However, this thinner stalagmite incorporates a color range of blacks, whites, and greys, and attached to the structure is a light blue feathered cape with a range of holes in it, almost as if this guardian is a wounded hero.

Standing in the center of the gallery is Centurience, a short and stout stalagmite covered in splatters of dark blues, whites, greys, and blacks. However, on top of this youthful guardian is a blown and cast glass formation that appears like two white flowers with various sharp glass icicles stretching out. Centurience, a beautiful weapon, proves that avoiding extinction doesn’t come with size, but with patience.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Humeau’s second floor is dedicated to the classic cave animal: the bat. Along the walls hang seven color-shifting cast glass sculptures, each given a name for the role that it plays within the colony: The Echolocation Maintainer, The Guardian of the Night Roost, The Retriever of the Fallen Pup, The Provider Beyond Bloodlines, The Dancing Bat, The Guardian of the Solution Pocket, and The Grape Transformation.

Each of these sculptures resembles a bat in motion. One dances through the air, redistributing warmth to the rest of the colony, another launches itself towards the ground to save a newcomer’s life, and another stands guard while the others sleep. They each exhibit self-sacrificing behaviors in an effort to care for the colony as a whole.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Along the walls of the upstairs exhibit hang six more pigment and charcoal drawings. These illustrations are devoted to the living organisms that live within caves. Of them, Translucidency outlines the bodies of four flatworms slowly crawling their way through their underground habitation. The pink hue of the drawing presents all the tiny and linear organs that transparently shine through their body; The very darkness of their environment eliminates the need to hide one’s inner self.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Humeau’s Scintille breaks down the barriers of the outside world’s individuality by highlighting the relational ontologies that exist in the world’s darkest corners, where Earth’s formations and living organisms exchange and encounter one another in a pitch-black harmony.

Read an Interview of Grimanesa Amorós on Her Light Installations @ Walt Disney Concert Hall and Printemps in Manhattan's Financial District →

Image courtesy of Sutton and Grimanesa Amorós Studio.

interview by Mia Milosevic

Influenced by the extreme terrain of Peru—its vast deserts where light refracts off the sand and temperatures plunge at night, and its rough Pacific coastline where ocean foam catches and fragments the sun—Grimanesa Amorós has built a practice around light as living material. For Amorós, darkness is imbued with light waiting to be released. Her two current works mark a significant moment in that practice. 

Radiance, a monumental installation within Walt Disney Concert Hall, was created in collaboration with the LA Philharmonic to coincide with its production of Prometheus—directed by composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet—which transformed the hall into an immersive landscape from January 9–11. Perfect Timing, Printemps’ first-ever commission of a light artist, opened January 19, 2026 at One Wall Street and runs through the end of March, engaging passersby in a meditation on presence amid Manhattan’s Financial District. Read more.

From Shaker Celibacy to Circus Unicorns: Read an Interview of Jodi Wille on the Utopian Ideals & Sex Practices of the Occult →

The Source Family 
Source Family women posing for Ya Ho Wa 13 album promotion 
1974 
35mm still/ digital file 
Special Research Collections, UC Santa Barbara Library 
Courtesy of Isis Aquarian Source Family Archives 

For over two decades, filmmaker and curator Jodi Wille has acted as a primary cartographer for the American underground. Known for her empathetic deep dives into intentional communities—most notably in her documentary The Source Family—Wille’s work consistently bypasses the “kooky cult” headlines to find the sincere human yearning beneath the robes and rituals.

Her latest endeavor moves from the screen to the gallery floor with Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes. Invited by the Museum of Sex, Wille has curated an expansive exhibition that bridges 300 years of history through 300 rare artifacts. From the celibacy of the Shakers to the “complex marriage” of the Oneida Community and the Neopagan experiments of the 1970s, the show reframes these groups not as failed experiments, but as vital “think tanks” for human freedom. Read more.

Creative Director Brodie Kaman's 'One Thousand Scars Ago' is the Quiet Accumulation of Ephemera Undergirding His Most Familiar Visual Identities

In celebration of the release of ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO, available now for preorder, Australian-born graphic designer and creative director Brodie Kaman will be hosting book launches in Paris (March 1), London (March 5), and Berlin (March 8).

Spanning the years 2016 to 2020, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is a raw and unfiltered archive of Kaman’s non-commercial work. It brings together fragments, photographs, scans, and private visual material produced alongside, and often in tension with, his high-profile career in music and culture. Across 332 pages, the book assembles a body of work that exists outside briefs, clients, or commercial outcomes, operating instead as a record of lived experience, observation, and experimentation.

The book unfolds in two distinct movements. The first half presents an assemblage of found material, notebook pages, scanned ephemera, and visual experiments, fragments of a private studio practice that never sought public form. The second half shifts into a direct photographic register: iPhone images made in real time, capturing people, places, bodies, accidents, humor, damage, tenderness, and decay. Together, these sections form a continuous visual field in which the everyday, the abject, and the intimate collapse into one another.

Kaman’s reputation has largely been shaped through his work for some of the most visible figures in contemporary music and culture, including Lady Gaga, Don Toliver, FKA twigs, Nine Inch Nails, Mark Ronson, and Miley Cyrus, where his visual language is often understood through spectacle, branding, and cultural reach. ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO presents the inverse, a private, unresolved, and frequently uncomfortable visual record that reveals how that same language is forged through failure, obsession, repetition, and risk.

The book’s foreword situates the work not as confession but as evidence of friction between a body and the world, of marks left by time, and of the ways images accumulate into structure. What emerges is neither diary nor document, but something closer to a living system of scars, headlines, snapshots, gestures, and debris organizing themselves into form.

Published by Year Zero, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is both a significant artist book and a rare insight into the unseen foundation beneath a highly visible creative career. RSVP to attend the inaugural launch after party in Paris.

Brodie Kaman
ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO
Published by Year Zero
softcover, 336 pages
Edition of 300 

La Simulación En La Lucha Por La Vida: Mexico City Art Week 2026

text and images by Perry Shimon

Over the ten years or so that I’ve been coming to Mexico City art week, it seems to have grown beyond what one can reasonably expect to see and make sense of. In the earlier editions, it felt as though there was a generous and loosely choreographed range of offerings that most guests largely experienced, and this provided a common frame that gave the proceedings a shared feeling of intimacy. The last several editions, however, have begun to produce that major-biennial feeling of anxious FOMO as events and invitations proliferate throughout the frenetic week. This feels a bit sad to me, as I used to regard my seasonal visits to Mexico as a balm to the usual anxious feelings related to trying to do too many things. I suppose this is largely a me problem—if a problem at all—and what I would like to offer in the following essay are some modest and affectionate reflections from a becoming-more-familiar tourist.

I arrived early enough to get settled in and have a limpia and a leisurely breakfast at the Zócalo. I love this limpia, or cleansing ritual, with all the sights and smells of the Indigenous healers beside the partially excavated Aztec ruins of the Templo Mayor, in the shadow of the grandiose Gothic Baroque Catholic church in the Plaza de la Constitución, on what was formerly known as Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco. The burning of rosemary, blaring conches, shimmering feathers—all a testament to an enduring Indigenous presence and culture. This beautiful ceremony activates the entire sensorium, plunging the participant into a sensual presence of deep attention, breath, and touch, while chimes and bellows dissolve you into a vibrational individuated state. Warm, herbaceous smoke fills the lungs, and cool, fragrant branches invigorate the body. I like to do this ritual upon arrival, just before departing, and sometimes after the ZsONAMACO preview.

PEANA Gallery

Patricia Conde Gallery

Material Monday, part of the generous extracurricular program organized by the Material fair, offered a coordinated set of bus routes around portions of the gallery circuit. It was a rather ambitious schedule, pretty much incommensurate with the slow social unfolding of each opening, and we made it to maybe half of the stops. A backdrop of largely forgettable paintings and libidinally charged, often BDSM-inflected objects and installations set the stage for the young and vibrant scene of international art crowds. A North American gallerist friend worried aloud about getting stopped at customs with some carry-on paintings that may not have been properly declared and informed me that last year the customs agents had Androids and slap-on-the-wrist fines, whereas this year it was iPhones, Apple Watches, Google Image searches, and an extra punitive zero.

I never quite got settled into yet another proliferating, ill-sized, generic Airbnb with IKEA-showroom furniture, faux-aged wall art, gratuitous Ganesh figurines, pallid lighting, cheap blunt knives, Amazon Basics plates, and an alphanumeric series of codes, lockboxes, and passwords. There’s a haze of pollution, undrinkable water, and structurally immiserated urban poor and rough sleepers, mostly left out of the otherwise extremely Instagrammable frame of the parts of Mexico City that art tourists, expats, remote workers, and hip affluent Mexicans have largely claimed—not necessarily in that order.

Inner Stage at Escuela del Ballet Folklórico

MASA Galería

There’s a kind of jouissance in playing spot-the-art-tourist, often found standing around in an ill-fitting, overly constructed, and colorful costume, looking transfixedly into their phone near some Michelin-rated eatery and largely oblivious to anything else happening around them. If sheer volume is any indication, someone at Michelin has fallen in love with Mexico City—or maybe someone from Mexico City has landed a senior position at Michelin—or someone has started bootlegging the Michelin signs. Whatever the case may be, you can’t go a block in Roma or Condesa without seeing a constellation of Michelin honorifics.

Enrique López Llamas at Salón ACME

The now oft-repeated synopsis holds mostly true: Maco is a tedious convention center filled with conservative art; Salón Acme is the most beautiful space and the most fun setting; and Material features the kind of art most resonant with the kinds of people who make these kinds of aesthetic judgments. This year, on account of Netflix buying out Material’s usual home on Reforma for an Immersive Stranger Things Experience, the fair moved to a soundstage in an adjacent neighborhood that responded with a smattering of anti-gentrification graffiti around the venue and entrance. Gentrification politics notwithstanding, the new location offered a welcome outdoor courtyard for convivial gathering between salon visits.

Material

Angela Maasalu at Tütar Gallery

Romeo Gomez Lopez

Sophie Jung at Copperfield

Tim Brawner at Management

While the deracinated, standardized, and financially motivated confines of an art fair hardly offer the context to meaningfully present and situate artists and their work, the pieces on view in this edition—and more generally among a generation of artists today—seem to illustrate some widely shared tendencies in a moment of post-industrial capitalism in the Global North. Broadly speaking, I would offer a sense of alienation from both production and meaning: deskilling, appropriation, and insular, memetic self-referentiality. I got the sense there was a kind of semiotic slippage or drift, vectorized in niche corners and chambers of the internet, devirtualizing in the gallery and congealing into ambivalent fragments of semiotic disintegration. This is, of course, not without moments of beauty, curiosity, humor, irony, and so on. I also found myself wondering whether the promise of relational aesthetics—with its de-fetishization of the art object and return to the ritual object or practice that reinstates social exchange—has somehow not been delivered in Mexico City art week. Several gallerist friends jokingly confessed they don’t mind losing money, really, because of how much they enjoy coming down and hanging out.

Taverna

Salón Acme

Salón Acme has gotten many things right, and its now overbearing success—with overflowing crowds and lines around the block—is perhaps a sign that the lessons learned there could be more broadly emulated and publicly supported. The grand, crumbling Porfirian architecture and courtyard, featuring a large open call of emerging artists, always offer thrills and diverse social energies across a range of convivial and aesthetic zones: restaurants and cafés, verandas and vistas for people-watching, libraries and bookshops, rooftop dancing, and art installed on nearly every surface in between. It invites the question: why don’t we have many more spaces like this, with this level of public programming? Why don’t municipalities support more projects like this? France offers some possible models, with venues like Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille and 104 in Paris.

Tania Pérez Córdova at Travesia Cuatro

Graciela Iturbide at Fomento Cultural Banamex

Around the fairs, the Mexico City art ecosystem is on full display, offering a superabundance of institutional programming, satellites, events, artist-organized shows, performances, and historic architectures. Each addition seems to unearth and activate some overlooked or underexposed modernist architecture with art installations or contemporary design objects. This edition, I went to the Pedregal neighborhood to see the Casa Alonso Rebaque home designed by Félix Candela. Last year, I went to a performance at a Barragán estate inaugurated as a cultural institute, and the year before enjoyed beautiful tours of the Juan O’Gorman–designed home and studio of Nancarrow and the home and collection of Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

I arrived early at the new crown jewel of Chapultepec Park, LagoAlgo, to see an exhibition by the London-based collective Troika, who converted the picturesque gallery into bands of RGB-tinted conceptual explorations of machine seeing and increasingly automated, algorithmically determined futures. Stills of eco-disaster captured on CCTV monitors—the collective noted there are 500 million of such cameras globally and growing—were meticulously painted at pixel resolution, while trembling plants sprouted from piles of silicon and salt around the gallery. A large monitor intersected the space with a CGI-rendered KUKA robot twirling a mane of virtual hair balletically atop a green-screened timelapse of climatological fluctuation. A haunting choral score stretched a lightly remixed line from a Rumi poem—“a drop in the ocean, the ocean in a drop”—into different permutations. Eva and Seb, two-thirds of Troika, shared that they were interested in the way certain animals, like dolphins and wolves, compress meaning into concentrated semiotic calls delivered across great time and space, and we considered what relation this might have to our packaged transmission of data through the internet. The conversation took a fascinating turn into the crystalline structures of modernity and a longue durée technological history of orthogonal logic. I believe Seb at one point suggested a kind of conspiracy of flint rocks, silicon, salt, and even mathematics in dominating the organic world—which, actually, makes a lot of sense to me. I found Troika’s work compelling for showing the similarities between art and science, as they are both largely lens-based partial epistemologies often co-engaged with metaphysical and ontological considerations and decidedly committed to our technological moment of massive planetary sensing: a moment that empirically demonstrates the severity of our polycrises, yet can only seem to find ways to profit from them, while the energetic costs of mounting planetary surveillance reinforce a downward ecological spiral.

Walking out of the gallery back into the grand architecture of the museum café and looking out onto a terraformed lake—what was once a natural lake—alongside a private tour of Northern collectors and art administrators that prompted my friend to mutter “Mar-a-LagoAlgo,” was a somewhat grim, if tastefully tisane-palliated, reminder of how unevenly these climatological experiences will be distributed in our unfolding future.

José Eduardo Barajas’s La Blanda Patria

I went downtown to see the large group show Columna Rota (Broken Column), curated by Francisco Berzunza around the theme of rejection, borrowing its title from Frida Kahlo’s 1944 self-portrait with an Ionic column in place of her spine, made during a period of surgery undertaken to overcome a debilitating physical injury. It was a bold curatorial gambit to foreground feelings of inadequacy in framing a rangy exhibition of some 150 loosely related international works. Many of the individual pieces overcame the curatorial determination on their own terms and complexity, and I found myself thinking over the coming days about the role of the curator in an art world of increasing bureaucracy and professionalization, and the restructuring of value toward those who control the vectors of circulation. I also found myself wondering what more structural concerns might be established and staked to link the disparate works on view.

Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two Donkeys

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Pray, Bless Us with Rice and Curry, Our Great Moon

Approaching the show, I felt small soap bubbles popping on my skin and learned they were made by Teresa Margolles using a solution employed to wash the dead in Oaxaca. We encounter José Eduardo Barajas’s La Blanda Patria, a mural installed in the ceiling before the start of the exhibition, and are then treated to a broad survey of works, with highlights including Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two Donkeys and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Pray, Bless Us with Rice and Curry, Our Great Moon—two works suggesting a more-than-human conception of rejection and overcoming. The show ended with a small comet study by José María Tranquilino Francisco de Jesús Velasco Gómez Obregón—or Velasco, as he is commonly known—whose work was contemporaneously enjoying a beautifully conceived retrospective at the nearby Kaluz Museum, housed in a restored and transformed viceregal hospice.

The Garden of Velasco at the Kaluz Museum draws from a collection compiled and acquired from the artist’s great-granddaughter and includes over 2,500 previously unseen paintings, notebooks, sketches, letters, manuscripts, books, and objects. The exhibition assembled from the archive is extraordinary in both selection and museography, and contours a brilliant polymath artist alive to his time in a critical, contemplative, self-reflexive, and ecological register. His journals, palette, and early experiments with photography provide beautiful insights. Taken in aggregate, the work rigorously engages a fraught modernist romantic regime emerging with its many internal conflicts and paradoxes, alongside enduring legacies of the construction, subordination, and instrumentalization of Nature.

UNAM’s MUAC galleries, ever a discursive force in the Latin American art context, offered a suite of compelling presentations, including an exhibition on Mexican collectives invited to the 10th Paris Young Artist Biennial in 1977 to show their aestheticized political work—perhaps a timely revisiting of this history in light of the recent documenta’s focus on the collective form—as well as the contradictions and tensions that emerge from exhibiting embedded, politically oriented collective practices within the European biennial format and the larger neoliberal context.

Los grupos y otras

Alongside Los grupos y otras, there were presentations of Marta Palau’s earthen textile, wooden, and ceramic works, and a large site-specific installation by Delcy Morelos, titled Womb Space, submerging the viewer in a chamber of fragrant earth. As surprising and pleasant as it was to encounter, I couldn’t help thinking of Jainism and how it might regard this work. Their sophistication of ecological awareness and ethics is so refined that they won’t harvest and eat allium vegetables so as not to disturb the microorganisms and surrounding insect life. It also evoked for me a kind of extractivism difficult to reconcile with the maternal invocations, and made me wonder about the labor and ecology of this presentation, as well as our implication in various forms of extractivism—for the purpose of making beautiful art installations, or mining the rare earth minerals needed for me to write and share this review.

Marta Palau

Delcy Morelos

The telluric theme ran through the Tamayo Museum, newly helmed by Andrea Torreblanca, who curated the gorgeous Archaic Futures exhibition in the downstairs galleries. The framing was both light and grand in its invocations of universals, archetypes, and cosmos, assembling, with high modernist elegance, a suite of recurrent natural motifs and sumptuous abstraction. In the airy atrium, now dedicated to relational art, appreciative visitors rested in a lattice of sweeping, undulating hammocks—a thoughtful and welcome reprieve from the art week’s velocities.

Archaic Futures

An artful highlight of the week, in the somewhat ironically named Arte Abierto space in a posh mall in Pedregal, was the painstaking, fragile, and menacing Temporal Advantage installation by Mauro Giaconi: a life-size ship made almost entirely from paper, graphite, and silicon, installed in a rooftop white-cube gallery. The impressive and beautiful work, compiled from thousands of sheets of paper—each skillfully rendered in graphite to evoke patinated metal—constructs a stalled, precarious, and ominous vessel filled with secrets, questions, and paradoxes. Upstairs, growing on the deck, was a garden made from machete blades; downstairs, a kind of galley kitchen with steaming pots resembling bomb equipment. One hidden real tin can sat on a shelf of paper ones, containing instructions for how to make a secret chamber in the base of a can to smuggle correspondence. A single book placed on the floor beneath a paper bunk bed was titled: La simulación en la lucha por la vida. 

Casa Wabi and Kurimanzutto offered case studies in beautiful architecture squandered on the presentation of overvalued individual artists. Meanwhile, the cheeky Purimanzutto popped up in a historic gay club and offered a lighthearted exercise in the radical subversion and reappropriation of a rigorously oppressive—if not contiguously gay—variation of Christianity, with campy, queered iconography and crucified Jesus disco balls adorning crowds of working-class local youth singing and dancing along to reggaeton anthems.

Guadalajara90210—whose 2019 Pabellón de las Escaleras 100-artist group show in an open-roofed building under construction in the Santa María neighborhood remains one of my greatest memories of Mexico City art weeks past—presented a sprawling forty-some-artist group show in their new space, alongside a solo presentation and a concentrated version of their last exhibition in a smaller gallery, combining small sculptures formerly stretched around the circumference of the gallery onto three shelves of densely wonderful works. Their plural, playful, social, and distinctly Mexican modernist approach to exhibition-making has made them beloved scene-makers in the flourishing Mexico City and Guadalajara milieus.

Joshua Merchan Rodriguez

Some of my favorite artistic interventions occurred at the infrastructural level. The dedicated public bus lanes that speed past gridlocked individual automobile traffic are a marvel of relational aesthetics. Parque México is a near-perfect and democratic achievement of social art that should be reproduced as widely as there are neighborhoods. Sitting in the central plaza, where every generation lingers and plays, and wandering the meandering paths filled with more-than-human life, I feel a sense of hope and contours of the otherwise.

Sunday dance group in the plaza

On my final night, I found my way to a deconsecrated church where the brilliant visual ethnomusicologist Vincent Moon had installed himself, with the help of local event producers Love Academy, for a twelve-hour durational live performance and mix of his thousands of music films produced around the world with ritual and devotional musicians. His approach felt shamanic and reverential, and I was moved to tears lying barefoot on the lushly carpeted and cushioned floor with an intergenerational audience enthralled by the sonorous beauty of our world’s diverse cultures and art forms. After the performance, Vincent stayed around, giving hugs and answering questions about his practice and equipment. He shared his humble thanks to the artists he has met and tenderly portrayed, and noted that all of his films are available for free for anyone to watch on his website.

The next morning, a final limpia and a return, fortified with beauty and ritual, to a dark and depraved, terrorizing Trumpian North America.

Hard to Read: An Interview of Barbara T. Smith, Fiona Duncan & Mara McCarthy →

Over the past seven decades, Barbara T. Smith’s transformative practice has charted the evolution of feminist movements, performance art, radical action, self-liberation, time-based media, and collective organizing. In a similar spirit, Fiona Duncan launched the literary social practice Hard To Read in 2016, and she is now presenting a special edition within Julia Stoschek Foundation’s audiovisual poem What A Wonderful World. This program spans multiple floors and features a rare recreation of a 1970s performance by Smith. Joined by Mara McCarthy—founder of The Box Gallery, representative of Barbara’s estate, and daughter of legendary artist Paul McCarthy—Smith and Duncan discuss the intersections of their practices, the lineage of feminist performance, and the enduring power of radical artistic experimentation. Read more.

Read Our Interview Of Julia Stoschek and Curator Udo Kittelmann On The Occasion Of What A Wonderful World In Los Angeles →

Set across all floors of the raw remains of the historic Variety Arts Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, a haunting, confrontational, and revelatory history of moving images flickers in the darkness. Presented by Julia Stoschek and her preeminent Berlin-based foundation for time-based media, this is not an exhibition, nor a retrospective, nor a white-walled museum journey through chronological time. Described as an audiovisual poem, What A Wonderful World—edited (not curated) by Udo Kittelmann—moves from early cinematic experiments and silent film to contemporary video works by artists working today. The breadth of visual storytelling is astonishing. We sit down with Julia Stoschek and Udo Kittelmann to discuss their landmark paean to cinema itself. Click here to read more.

A Play of Balance and Form, Arthur Simms's Caged Bottle Triggers Engines of Memory @ KARMA New York

 
 

text by Arlo Kremen

Arriving in New York City in 1968 at the age of seven, Saint Andrew, Jamaica-born Arthur Simms’ assemblages draw on the legacies of Duchamp and Rauschenberg. His new solo exhibition, Caged Bottle, at Karma New York shows works spanning nearly four decades from his studio on Staten Island. His sculptural works are made from found objects, often bound together by rope or wire. Rocks, bottles, toys, furniture, street signs, feathers, bones, and so many other discarded objects are manipulated by Simms into new forms. The binding of disparate objects together unifies them—a transformation of the many into a singular, fused work. Bug in the Cars (2024) is made from three toy cars, a roller skate, wire, and a bug, all stacked one atop another. The wire, wrapped around the glass encasing a bug carcass, cascades down to entwine two toy cars and the roller skate. A pink yarn webs the exterior of the sculptures into a fixed state, wrapped around the wheels of the roller skate, preventing movement. The third toy car, however, is quite literally disconnected. Free from the binding of wire and yarn, this car remains caged, likely able to move in the small space its cell affords, yet still a part of the overall sculptural figure—bound and unbound, unified and disunified, fixed and unfixed.

 
 

Simms’ use of yarn in Bugs in the Cars is relatively spare compared to his wrapping of rope in Sexual Tension (1992) and Spanish Town (2003). Both works are so densely bound with rope that their internal content becomes unclear from even a moderate distance. Whether it be the exact forms of wooden blocks in Spanish Town or whatever dark matter sits in the heart of Sexual Tension, a distinct separation occurs at the level of exteriority and interiority. The rope acts as a skin, concealing the beating organs it encases. Nearly spiritual, Sexual Tension, the earliest work in the show, although not relative to any human form, feels, in some sense, ghostly. A bodied quality sits hidden within an interior, inaccessible to onlookers, and can be directly encountered only through its shroud of hemp, while only the presence of an interior object is intimated.

Simms continues his interest in the spiritual in his works inspired by Congolese Nkisi (vessels for spirits or medicinal substances to resolve disputes, enforce justice, heal, or harm enemies). It is possible to argue that perhaps when creating Sexual Tension, Simms was already thinking of Nkisi, sculptures that are at times seen wrapped in rope, but his inspiration becomes more clearly articulated in The Knife and the Hammer, Fear of Aggression (1994). Mimicking the Nkisi in his puncturing the work with nails and knives, he activates the spirit within this totemic figure. The work is exhibited here for the first time but was assembled while working at the Brooklyn Museum as an art handler in the early 1990s, when Simms became fascinated with Nkisi and Central African throwing knives. The work, in its vertical orientation, features a slab of wood perpendicular to the floor, appearing nearly cross-like. In his bridging together of Christianity and Congolese spirituality, he reckons with art history. Art objects are manifested in the show as being inseparable from cultural modes of metaphysical belief. 

Just as much as his work might be about spirit, Simms pays quite a bit of attention to form. In his exhibited paintings, Simms propounds the strength of the line. With a collection of works from 2025 whose titles begin with “Search for form” followed by a number indicating their order, Simms demarcates exactly what is at stake in these works: the power of a line to define a form. He uses lines to create forms, to separate blocks of color, and to provide forms with loose details. These works apply lines identical to his Retablos from 2015 that continue his interest in spirituality. Two of the three retablos in the show, Retablo 5, Staten Island, and Retablo 1, Lois Dodd, are, unlike his searches for form, representative of something (Staten Island and Lois Dodd, respectively). He used the same techniques of line as used in 2015 as he did a decade later, studying the distillation of forms to lines and color, in a manner quite similar to Arthur Dove, and in the case of Lois Dodd, Marius de Zayas’s absolute caricatures. A throughline could be drawn from his acrylic paintings on wood and aluminum to his sculptural practice in his continued interest in rope and wire, linear forms. Simms explores the potential of the line as a sculptural gesture, something that can, of course, be used to bind and attach, but also the line as something that can conceal, mystify, and define interiors and exteriors, as is the case with Sexual Tension. He thinks of the line’s bulk—when wrapped repeatedly over itself, the line becomes its own form rather than a tool to define a form. 

Simms’ lines, particularly his ropes, are also soaked in memory. Being made of hemp, the use of rope betrays its presence before laying eyes on the works, with its pungent scent. Simms has spoken in interviews about his childhood memories remaining in smell and sound; thus, the olfactory dimension of the material triggers engines of memory. Many of his memories are related to the music he heard as a child, describing music as a process of layering and the coalescence and accumulation of sounds into a single work. As such, the binding feature of his linear forms refers back to his childhood.

 

Arthur Simms
The Knife and the Hammer, Fear of Aggression, 1994
Rope, glue, hammers, wood, knives, blades, wire, metal, screws, stones, monetary note, nails, cobblestone, and pencil
107 1/4 x 35 x 15 in.
© Arthur Simms. Courtesy the artist and Karma

 

In the exhibition’s titular work, Caged Bottle (2006), Simms tests the strength of the line in the most literal sense imaginable. Using both rope and wire, Caged Bottle is a balancing act between a deconstructed toy bike wrapped in rope and a recycling bin-like structure made from wires and a bike wheel. Glass bottles and an assortment of other objects fill the interiors of the two sides, providing a distribution of weight that allows Caged Bottle to balance its wheels on a small platform without tipping and crashing, which would result in the unfixed glass bottle in a birdcage tumbling off and shattering. This work is all about precarity. But in using the linear forms of wire and rope to hold it all together, the halves can balance each other, preventing the destruction of the caged bottle. In this display of Simms’ work, presenting his paintings and sculptures together for the first time, alongside his interest in art history, the spiritual, the cultural, and memory, the artist’s formalist attitudes are made clear, positioning him as a unique artist undeniably worthy of this spike in recognition after so many years flying under the radar.

Arthur Simms’ Caged Bottle is on view through February 14 @ Karma, 22 E 2nd Street, New York City.

Arthur Simms
Caged Bottle, 2006
Rope, wood, glue, bicycles, metal, bottles, and wire
50 x 62 x 36 in.
© Arthur Simms. Courtesy the artist and Karma

Kurt Kauper’s Portraits of Men Are Both Archetype & Simulation @ Ortuzar in New York

Installation images: Installation views, Kurt Kauper: Housekeeping, Ortuzar, New York, January 15 – February 28, 2026

text by Emma Grimes

Kurt Kauper’s current exhibition, Housekeeping, at Ortuzar Gallery presents just over a dozen new paintings. His earlier work often references classic portrait conventions and borrows from recognizable stereotypes (such as film stars and athletes), and in Housekeeping, the subjects remain identifiable while resisting easy legibility.

Kauper steers in a slightly different direction here, presenting a few still lifes and scenes set in unusual circumstances. In Fantasy #1, a nude man floats horizontally beside what appears to be a bus stop and parking lot. The lower half of the man’s body merges into a cloud, and no other part of the canvas acknowledges that strangeness.

 

Kurt Kauper
Fantasy #1, 2019
Oil on Birch Panel
45 x 58 inches (114.3 x 147.3 cm)

 

In the same room, a pair of still lifes are painted on round canvases, recalling Renaissance tondos, a format that was usually used for devotional, Biblical scenes. Objects Carefully Organized in front of the Curtains, on the Credenza contains a yellow pyramid, a grey vase with flowers, a comb sitting inside a water glass, and a precise cut of salmon on a blue plate. Nearby, in another tondo, a window-cleaning bottle is posed on a marble countertop before satin green curtains.

The following room is primarily devoted to Kauper’s Watching Men series. Though Kauper has been known for painting nude bodies (mainly men, some women), here he narrows the focus on male faces caught in their intimate rituals: combing hair, brushing teeth, shaving. Each man is depicted in portrait, gazing out past the right edge of the canvas towards an implied mirror.

 

Kurt Kauper
Objects Carefully Organized in front of the Curtains, on the Credenza, 2025
Oil on Dibond
28 x 25 inches (71.1 x 63.5 cm)

 
 

Kurt Kauper
Watching Men #10, 2024
Oil on Dibond
12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

 
 

Kurt Kauper
Watching Men #11, 2024
Oil on Dibond
12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

 

In Watching Men #10, a young man holds a razor to his neck, gaze fixed on the reflection outside the bounds of the canvas. He wears a yellow v-neck sweater layered over a white button-down, and a red tie tucked loosely underneath. He looks like he could wander into a 1950s romantic comedy and no one would know the difference.

His skin, however, is strangely glossy. It’s too smooth even, like the head of a plastic doll. The hyper-polished details direct attention towards the surface of the canvas and away from the content. His brushwork creates a sense of uncanniness, which in turn distances the viewer and the painting.

Kauper has been explicit about his dislike of explanatory or interpretative language being applied to his work, expressing interest in what he calls “the possibility of the non-linguistic.” In a lecture, he cited Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Technique” by way of explaining his view of art’s purpose. Shklovsky argues that art exists to “estrange” (ostranenie) the familiar. By doing so, he thought art could interrupt our daily habits and “recover the sensation of life.” Kauper’s paintings seek to operate within this logic.

There are half a dozen paintings in the Watching Men series, each face similarly generic and neutral in expression. Their identities are interchangeable, and this anonymity, coupled with the overpolished surfaces, helps stimulate that feeling of estrangement.

In Watching Men #15 and Watching Men #11, for example, both of the men have their hands extended above their heads, in the midst of fixing their hair. In Watching Men #14, a middle-aged, bald man brushes his teeth. Even in these scenes where one might expect a sense of movement, the paintings feel utterly immobile, hardened into place.

These are the faces of the kind of man that has been (and still is, really) defined as the default, but Kauper here presents them as copies of copies. They are simultaneously the archetype and a simulation. And their masculinity doesn’t emerge as a natural state, but instead as something rehearsed and repeated through particular details: poses, clothing, hairstyles.

These depictions of masculinity point to both the idealized image we have of it and the copies of the image—an incessant rehearsal of a role that was arguably always more fiction than fact. But even here, his work still resists total legibility. The details—a red tie, gelled hair, floral wallpaper—carry obvious cultural significance on their own, yet their familiarity does not result in a cohesive, stable understanding. It only produces opacity. In Kauper’s paintings, you can recognize everything and conclude next to nothing.


Housekeeping is on view through February 28 at Ortuzar, 5 White Street, New York.

Doug Aitken's "UNDER THE SUN" @ Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre

text by Arlo Kremen

In the third year since the birth of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), the embryonic institution offers its space to realize filmmaker and artist Doug Aitken’s Indian debut. Under the Sun occupies three gallery spaces, disseminating the tripartite show equally among each floor. Considering the historic temporal division of past, present, and future, Aitken applies design, craft, and technology as a means to consider the ways in which the human condition has shifted as a result of technological innovation.

Past, the overarching title of the collection of works that make up this floor, is perhaps the most site-specific of any other floor. A collection of boats sit static aground, where instead of a frictive collision, they merge into one another into a Frankensteined structure. Rocks and pebbles flood the gallery’s floor, with the larger stones collected at the feet of those figures stretching their legs in a circular formation away from the derelict vessels. Sculpted out of reclaimed and raw Gujarat wood of variegated tones, human bodies emerge proportionally defined from pixel-like cubes of wood. Aitken’s use of machine milling and handiwork in the carving of these untitled and unidentifiable figures traces the development of ancient Indian wood carving into the modern age.

The walls hang textile works made by artisans across India who use embroidery and weaving techniques to imagine a selection of Indian rivers, as depicted in digital topographies, as being emblematic of meaning-suggestive hand signs. The works are dynamic, mixing blues with pinks and oranges in a bright clash. And by no mistake, the exhausting handcraft work required to make these works, each titled after the represented river, turns to the hand as the age-old mediator between idea and object, particular to the aforementioned rich history of Indian craft and design. To accomplish these works, Aitken’s studio collaborated with dozens of Indian artisans at Milaaya Embroidery House, bringing these generational techniques into the foray.

The second level, Present, turns to video work, projecting Aitken’s NEW ERA installation into a dark empty space of walls and mirrors. Centered on the history of the mobile phone and its inventor, Martin Cooper. By flitting between narratives of technological development and questions of humanity and personal identity, Aitken’s rightful juxtapositions of these two strains of thought define much of what it feels like to be alive in this current techne. The room is organized around three channels of video with mirrored panels. The mirrors open up the space with nearly endless halls of projections, leaving the viewer floating in an infinite space. Images of phones, roads, the ocean, telephone towers, and Martin Cooper's face and body move on and off the walls in a dance between past, present, and the yet-to-come future. Cooper’s voiceover stresses the existential importance of the cell phone, reminiscing on the site in which he made the very first public cell phone call on 6th Avenue in New York City, 1973. He reminisces, “I was lucky enough to make the very first public cell phone call in the world.” Bridging space from New York to Mumbai, Aitken stresses the global consequences of this act, bridging the two cities into the same technological globalist narrative.

Doug Aitken
NEW ERA, 2018
Video installation with three channels of video
Three projections, freestanding room, PVC projection screens, mirrors

Future features LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS, commissioned, like Past, for this show. Suspended above a wooden floor, hundreds of vertical LED tubes shape an orb of light. Pushing in and out, visitors are invited to lie down under the orb to focus on feeling the shifting swells of light from above while soaking in a drone composition working in conjunction with the convulsing sphere. This orb is universal, denying spatial and temporal restrictions. Atom, primordial specimen, pagan deity, AI creation, and planet—LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS offers a hypnotic grounding into, ironically, the present, where the present can be felt as the site in which the future is imagined and sculpted.

Doug Aitken
LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS, 2025
Installation view at NMACC
Courtesy of the artist
Photograph by Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home

The light reacts to sound in real time, changing its form depending on its surrounding environment. As such, the immediate reactive quality of the work necessitates its location in the present. The work’s relation to the future is merely implied, or perhaps its visual allusions to past conceptions of what the future might look like. LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS feels quite of the present, using current technologies and trends, appearing rather similar to those artworks that care less for ideas and more for experiences, so often observed on Instagram explore pages. Although Aitken's installations pre-date, and likely inspired, this trend of experience-based art works, the mass commercial proliferation of these works might warrant a pivot in the use of spectacle in this fashion. For a work so concerned with the mixing of life forms into a single pulsing entity, it would be unfortunate for its spectacle to distract from the deeply meditative ask of the work: what makes something alive and how might the encroachment of digital landscapes onto reality shift these perceptions?

Doug Aitken’s UNDER THE SUN on view through February 22nd @ Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai.