Vaginal Davis’s Magnificent Product Chronicles Five Decades of Her Playful Defiance @ MoMA PS1

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Magnificent Product marks Vaginal Davis’s first major US institutional show, presenting art from her early Los Angeles projects to her more recent Berlin-based creations. Organized thematically instead of chronologically, the works take viewers on a journey filled with vivid colors, humor, and emotion.

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

The exhibition begins in a light mint-green room titled Naked on my Ozgod: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat. This square room features green sheer curtains along every wall, with hundreds of photos from Davis’s early Los Angeles years covering the walls behind the fabric. Visitors are invited to slowly peel away the fabric from the wall to get an intimate view into Davis’s personal life before seducing them into the next room. This section is inspired by one of her first art exhibitions, originally held at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles. 

In the next space, HAG, Davis reconstructs her old Sunset Boulevard apartment in Los Angeles, the site where she produced many iconic zines, such as Shrimp, Yes, Ms. Davis, and Sucker. The dimly lit room glows pink and includes a walk-in box in the center. Inside, its walls display drawings and figurines of a woman’s head, possibly self-portraits. The slanted floor creates a warped, unbalanced environment that meshes reality with fantasy, just like the work it supports. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another engaging room in Davis’s collection is HOFPFISTEREI, where visitors are encouraged to interact with her artwork. A table and four chairs occupy the room’s center, surrounded by piles of Davis’s zines, writings, and creations. A photocopier stands nearby for visitors to print out copies to take home. 

Davis also utilizes a screening room, which resembles the Cinerama Dome movie theater that operated on Sunset Boulevard from 1963 until 2021. Here you can watch low-fi videos she created during the 1980s, showcasing her range of personas as an artist, queer activist, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and more. These recordings, much like the earlier photos, give visitors a detailed and in-depth view into Davis’s life; they’re a testament to how interconnected her art is with her identity. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another striking installment is from her Wicked Pavilion collection, displaying a reimagined version of Davis’s teenage bedroom. However, instead of her in the rotating bed, a large phallic sculpture sits in the space. The room is completely pink, from the walls to the rug to the curtains. A miniature desk sits in the right corner, topped with two lamps, a pile of jewelry, and an array of colored nail polish, hinting that Davis’s has relished dressing up as the showstopper she is since her youth. 

Along the ceiling, dozens of images are hung from a clothesline. These photos are of Davis’s muses, such as actor Michael Pitt or actress Isabella Rossellini. While visitors take a look around the bedroom, they listen to a mix of the song, “A Love Like Ours,” from the 1944 film Two Girls and a Sailor, interviews that Davis herself conducted for LA Weekly in 1996, and a voice message from Davis’s own secret admirer, creating a fully-immersive experience.   

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Across all of these works, Davis’s playfulness and defiance shine through. Magnificent Product is a living experience that can be overwhelming at times, yet each room offers a sense of freedom. Davis commands her viewers’ attention—and she intends it that way. 

Magnificent Product is on view through  March 2 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Doc Fortnight 2025: Breaking Reality, One Frame at a Time

At MoMA, Memory and Desire Collide in a Cinematic Exploration of the Real and the Imagined.

 

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday. 2025. USA. Directed by Isaiah Davis. Courtesy the filmmaker

 

text by Eva Megannety

Doc Fortnight isn’t just an exhibition—it’s a provocation. MoMA’s annual nonfiction showcase has long been a space where documentary defies its own rules, and 2025 is no exception. This year’s lineup fractures, distorts, and reimagines the boundaries of nonfiction, blending memory, identity, desire, and upheaval into something more elusive—more intimate—more true. From legendary filmmakers like Errol Morris and Stanley Nelson to bold newcomers rewriting the language of documentary, these films dissolve fact and fiction, turning the camera into an accomplice, an intruder, an unreliable narrator. Among the exhibition’s most daring offerings is Doc Fortnight Shorts 4: Memory and Desire, a selection of films that probe the slipperiness of recollection and longing, proving once again that at Doc Fortnight, truth is never simple.

Prelude (2025, USA, dir. Jen DeNike)

Memory is a fragile thing, a collage of images and emotions that flicker and fade—except when celluloid steps in to hold it still. Prelude is a quiet, aching elegy where letters, family photographs, and the misty Scottish countryside form a bridge between past and present. DeNike crafts a dreamscape of longing as a daughter tries to reconcile her mother’s slipping mind with the secret history of a love that once burned bright. It’s an act of cinematic grace, a requiem for the things that time refuses to keep.

Blue (2024, Romania/Portugal/Hungary/Belgium, dir. Ana Vîjdea)

Some families suffocate with love. Some let it spill out in bursts of anxiety and control. In Blue, Ana Vîjdea delivers an unflinching portrait of Rodica, a Romanian mother scraping by in Belgium, desperate to keep her children close. Shot in tightly framed interiors that feel like walls closing in, the film pulses with the kind of intimacy that verges on claustrophobia. Love here is not soft; it’s a grip that doesn’t loosen, an embrace that lingers just a little too long. Vîjdea, ever the documentarian of human fragility, finds the tension between devotion and possession, between wanting to hold on and knowing you must let go.

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday (2025, USA, dir. Isaiah Davis)

Isaiah Davis has never been one to shy away from the body—its textures, its violence, its aesthetic possibilities. His latest work, Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday, is less a film than a living, breathing installation, a visceral meditation on Black masculinity that pulls from sculpture, music, and the language of fetish. Leather, metal, horrorcore, and the yearning croon of Boyz II Men collide in this dissection of identity, power, and nostalgia. It’s raw, provocative, and formally daring—a theatrical reworking of Davis’ own past installations that reminds us how history, both personal and cultural, is always being remade.

Freak (2024, USA, dir. Claire Barnett)

Some films look like they shouldn’t exist—like you’ve stumbled onto something you were never meant to see. Freak feels that illicit. Shot in jittery, voyeuristic camcorder footage that trembles with tension, Barnett’s film pulls us into the obsessive push-and-pull of young love, where devotion looks an awful lot like self-destruction. It’s raw, nervy, and unsettling, stripping intimacy down to something almost holy—if holiness could be found in jealousy, insecurity, and a love so intense it borders on madness.

School of the Dead (2025, USA, dir. Hannah Gross)

“We need a dead(wo)man to begin.” Helene Cixous’ words haunt School of the Dead, Hannah Gross’ spectral, elliptical debut. A film about absence, inheritance, and the ghosts that shape us, it plays like a séance conducted through cinema—casting Sierra Pettengill as both subject and specter, searching for something in the vast, ancient landscapes of Alberta. History, personal and prehistoric, folds in on itself: the voices of lost mothers, forgotten texts, and the echoes of Clarice Lispector all bleed into this hypnotic, shape-shifting hybrid. Gross makes grief tangible, a thing you can almost reach out and touch before it vanishes into the frame.

If Doc Fortnight 2025 proves anything, it’s that nonfiction cinema is no longer bound by objectivity—or even reality. The festival’s most striking moments weren’t just about documenting the world as it is, but about reshaping it through memory, desire, and the slippery nature of truth. Films like Prelude and School of the Dead blurred the line between personal history and poetic reconstruction, while Freak and Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday pushed intimacy and identity to their rawest extremes.

The hybrid and avant-garde works showcased here reject the notion that documentary must simply “capture.” Instead, they challenge—contorting time, bending form, and questioning whose stories get told and how. This isn’t just a shift in style; it’s a radical redefinition of storytelling itself, one where fiction and nonfiction are no longer opposing forces but inseparable collaborators.

Leaving the exhibition, I found myself reconsidering what it means to document something. Is truth what we see, what we remember, or what we choose to believe? Doc Fortnight 2025 suggests it might be all of the above, and that’s precisely what makes this era of nonfiction cinema so thrilling.

Simone Fattal: Works and Days @ the New York MOMA

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

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